Sorrow Space

by James Axler

  * * *

  A DISEASED HAND REACHED FOR Brigid Baptiste as she tottered along the rain-slick ledge, and she felt herself skip a step, recover and keep going. There was no turning back now, not when she had come this far. The Magistrate who had grabbed for her pulled himself up onto the same ledge that Brigid was using.

  Brigid didn’t hesitate. She swiveled her torso as she continued to run on the precarious ledge, raising the shotgun in her right hand and sending a booming shot through the spitting rain.

  Final bullet.

  The 12-gauge round streaked from the Mossberg’s thirty-three-inch barrel, burning through the air in an explosive boom of propellant. Poised behind Brigid on the ledge, Magistrate Sweet took the shotgun burst full in the face, his protective helmet disintegrating with the impact as the bullet drilled through his skull and out the far side in a shower of withered brains.

  * * *

  IN LIFE, MAGISTRATE SWEET had not been a Magistrate at all. He had been a protestor at a rally against the experiments that Baron Trevelyan’s science division had conducted, worried about the damage that could be seen in the weather patterns, the undeniable fact that they had not seen the sun through the clouds in almost two months. Trevelyan’s people had corrupted the weather by then and, though the protestors didn’t realize it, Trevelyan was using the rain as a weapon, adding chemicals to it that could turn a man’s mind.

  The man now known as Magistrate Sweet had been captured at that rally, cuffed and driven to the Mag Hall of Justice in the back of a secure truck, its windows crisscrossed with a strengthened grille. He had not been known as Sweet then, that name had come later, after the baron had finished with him. The name was taken from a compass point—Southwest. The baron named all of his regen Mags after the nodes of the compass; he had once explained it was purely out of boredom, because human names meant so little. The names were reused as Magistrates died, just as in the old days of the villes. The only difference was that the supply of fresh Magistrates was endless now, made up of whatever citizens the baron and his bully boys chose to enlist.

  Magistrates had taken Sweet to the Sector House, kicking and cursing as he was slung in a cell. He had been left there for three days and two nights, with nothing more than water to sustain him. He had not had a single visitor; no one from the protest had come. Nor had he seen another prisoner or a Magistrate. What happened here—a new jug of water, cleaning of the evidence of his bodily functions—happened while Sweet was asleep.

  Finally, when he had begun to wonder if he was going to die in that cell, Sweet received a visit from Baron Trevelyan. The baron was angelic in his appearance; his pale skin almost seemed to glow as he stood before the cell’s bars with his entourage of scientists and Magistrates for protection. He had stared at Sweet a long time, as the protestor cowered before him, hunched over against himself where his empty stomach clawed at his will. He had been studied for almost ten minutes, the baron simply watching him in silence. Finally, Baron Trevelyan had spoken, his voice high with a nasal quality. “He will suffice.”

  Then the cell had been opened and Sweet had been walked out, taken down a corridor to a medical bay where he was checked over and fed. Sweet was not fed in the normal manner, however—they placed a tube directly in his stomach and pumped specific nutrients there to sustain and strengthen his body. The doctor explained this was being done prior to his enlistment in the Magistrates, where he would serve as one of the new breed.

  Sweet had spat out a curse at that, naming the doctor’s mother for a whore. He would never serve the baron, never be a Magistrate. Once the Mags had protected the people, ensuring that the world never reverted back to the horror of the Deathlands. But in the past decade, Baron Trevelyan had been turning them into something more attuned to his vision. They were “the enemy”; Sweet knew this for a fact.

  Dr. Langdon had simply shaken his head, tsking between his pursed lips. “The Magistrates are the future,” he said. “Our beloved baron will take us to new heights, new glories. And you are to be his first salvo, to make the first gains in the future world.”

  Sweet had had no idea what that meant, and in his delirium he had not the wherewithal to fight back, either verbally or physically. “Kill...thing,” he had muttered, drifting into unconsciousness.

  Langdon had offered an ironic smile at the words. They were so very appropriate, after all.

  Sweet had only woken once more. He had been in agony; something was being wrenched from his insides. He looked down and saw that his guts were open, the flesh pinned back by great metal nails. The nails shone red where they had been daubed with his own blood.

  Baron Trevelyan peered at him, a superior smile on his smug face. “No, you’re right—kill him,” he had instructed. “It will be easier to complete.”

  Sweet had been about to respond when something cold slapped against the left side of his skull, followed by another a moment later to the right. He heard a buzz, felt the jolt as electricity was passed through his head. Then nothing.

  Dead, Sweet had been reawoken in a regen suit, the adapted uniform of the new Magistrates. He functioned without breath, operated without question. He existed to serve his baron, without need for sleep or sustenance. Even as his body decayed he continued to serve the barony, hunting and killing those he had once protested beside. The executions meant nothing to him; he had no emotional attachment to the world around him anymore. The regen suit kept his body moving, and Baron Trevelyan filled his mind with instructions, a life lived by rules and counterrules.

  Sweet died a second time serving his baron, the way he had “lived” for the past two years. Brigid’s shotgun blasted in his face, shattering the visor of his helmet, driving shards of safety plastic through his eyes and into his wasted brain stem as particles of brain and bone were sown into the rain. He had died right this time, serving his baron. Magistrate Sweet felt no pride in this, however, no joy. He simply served, and when he stopped serving he merely stopped. A death guided by rules and counterrules.

  * * *

  BRIGID SWUNG HER LITHE body through the gap in the wall, scarcely breaking step as she moved from the narrow ledge to the mat-trans control room. Even in darkness, it looked just as she had left it a few hours before—dust lining the control panels, the battered row of metal lockers running up one wall, the insect-eye armaglass concealing the mat-trans itself.

  Brigid took a moment to reload her shotgun, breaking the weapon open and pulling the spare cache of bullets from her pants pocket. Outside, through the missing chunk of wall, Brigid could hear the rain getting heavier, caroming from the skies in thick sheets. It hit the walls and the hard surfaces of the streets with a death rattle, drilling against them relentlessly.

  It felt like the end of the world.

  Chapter 29

  In the Cerberus redoubt, the door to the mat-trans opened and four dark-clad figures stepped from the swirling teleportation mists. Undoubtedly masculine, the four figures wore padded suits of jet-black with a metallic thread running through it that caught the orange warning lights of the ops room. The metal weave made a netting pattern where it ran through the protective garments, its lines flowing with each step the strangers took in deadly unison. The one-piece garments were accompanied by heavy boots into which the legs of the pants were tucked and sealed. Masks covered their faces entirely, enwrapping them in a black shroud, like rubber pressing tightly against their features.

  “Stay where you are,” Edwards ordered, raising his Sin Eater pistol in an unwavering two-handed grip. “Not another step.”

  Beside him, the sec team did likewise, training their own weapons on the intruders.

  The black-clad figures continued their advance, each step placed in clockwork formation with a thud.

  Behind the deathlike figures, the armaglass of the mat-trans was crackling with cold, a layer of ice running across its sur
face, outside and in. Domi could feel it from where she stood over to Edwards’s left, ten feet back from the nearest plate of glass. The cold seemed to emanate from the mysterious intruders, too, a cold so intense it felt more like an emotion than a temperature. The intruders stank, too, a musklike burning mixed with damp. Domi knew exactly what it was: the smell of stagnation.

  At his desk, Farrell was transfixed by the incursion, watching openmouthed as these new figures stepped from the mat-trans into his world. Lakesh grabbed his shoulder, shaking the man.

  “Snap out of it,” Lakesh commanded. “Let’s go—go.”

  Behind Lakesh, Reba DeFore had already anticipated his instruction, scooting back from the mat-trans terminal and scurrying to the far wall where the Mercator map glowed with lights. A moment later, Lakesh and Farrell weaved through the desks to join her.

  “What are they?” Farrell asked breathlessly.

  “They’re trouble, Mr. Farrell,” Lakesh told him. “Nothing but trouble.”

  The wraithlike intruders continued their entry into the operations room, raising their right arms with practiced precision as Edwards ordered them once more to halt. Each of them moved at the same moment, like some dance troupe from hell.

  In front of the cracking walls of the mat-trans, Edwards began barking orders to his security team, instructing them to select their targets as the intruders ignored his final warnings. As he spoke, weapons appeared in the strangers’ raised hands, materializing from the holsters strapped to their inner arms. They looked like Sin Eaters to Edwards, but the tooling was more elaborate, ammo feeds expanding on the weapons’ sides like a stag’s horns.

  After that, the whole room descended into anarchy as the intruders began their extermination of life on Earth.

  * * *

  BRIGID BAPTISTE STOOD IN the unlit hospital room, trying to calm her breathing. There were still at least thirty Magistrates out there, she guessed, working their way up the side of the hospital on their fixed lines. This respite could only last half a minute at most, barely enough time to clack the barrel of the Mossberg closed on the reloads. She turned to the hole in the outside wall, propped herself over the edge and began picking out targets. They were hard to see in the darkness and the rain, their black uniforms the ideal camouflage for the night. But Brigid watched for their movements, saw the way their beetlelike silhouettes skittered against the solid planes of the hospital walls.

  Her shotgun boomed, swatting the first of the Magistrates from the wall. The man was just starting to fall when Brigid fired again, loosing another blast at his nearest ally, sending both Mags spinning to the street.

  Screaming shots pierced the air as the Magistrates returned fire, realizing that they were under attack. Brigid did not stop. She swung her weapon toward the next Mag as he reached for the broken wall, blasting the vile bastard in the face, his head exploding in a melange of protective helmet, skull and brains.

  Her teeth gritted, Brigid turned the shotgun around, blasting the next, the next and the next.

  Reload. Fire again and again. Keep them back; keep them away. Reload again. Fire. Reload again.

  Brigid kept to the grim pattern, the rain-slick lip of the holed wall the only protection she had against the screaming discharge from the Magistrates’ guns.

  * * *

  KANE CHARGED TOWARD THE throbbing dimensional gateway, weaving past the reanimated Magistrates as they grasped for him, their nightmarish, screaming bullets zipping all around the vast room above the Hall of Justice. Somewhere behind him, he knew, Grant was struggling to hold his own against at least a dozen Mags, his hands still cuffed together behind his back. He would have to take care of himself for just a minute more.

  For an instant, Kane saw that other face before him, the face of Helena Vaughn, her dead eyes rolled up into their sockets. He hadn’t killed her, he reminded himself. Kane willed the image away, using it to feed his anger and his determination. This was no time to let misplaced guilt get the better of him.

  Realizing where Kane was running, the black-clad Magistrates formed a cordon before the glowing hoop of metal, their ranks closing like the midnight wings of a crow. Kane’s pace didn’t slow. He drove himself at the nearest Magistrate, just one more obstacle to saving the world. The dead man had a ring of blisters marring his lips, a webbed crack across his visor. Kane kicked out, delivering a snap-kick to the man’s chest, shunting him back.

  But the next Magistrate was already taking his colleague’s place, bringing up his Soul Eater pistol to blast Kane in the face. Kane ducked as the Mag’s bullet chambered, then he punched with a left-right combo as the man fired. The Mag’s bullet exited the muzzle of his pistol with a tortured howl, scooting over Kane’s head and embedding itself in the chest of one of his own colleagues. The Magistrate, meanwhile, fell to Kane’s one-two attack, collapsing to the floor with an awful clicking in his throat.

  Thirty feet away, Grant was tussling with Magistrates, too, using a series of kicks and head butts to keep them at bay as a mass of the dark-robed figures tried to overpower him. Baron Trevelyan was lying at Grant’s feet, clutching his bloody nose, and his face looked paler than ever.

  Two of the reanimated Magistrates came rushing at Grant from different directions. Grant eyed them both, instinctively timing their approaches in his head.

  The first came at him with an outthrust fist. Grant moved his body into the blow, effectively blocking it with his chest before it could gain enough momentum to hurt him, turning it into a weak jab. He shrugged the blow off, powering forward to strike the startled Mag with the crown of his lowered head.

  The second Magistrate had two nightstick batons in his rotted hands, and he wielded them like a flag waver. Grant knew that if either of them hit they could result in a fracture. As the Mag approached, Grant leaped high, kicking out with his left leg and clipping the Magistrate under his chin with a clack of breaking teeth. The dead Mag was knocked off his feet, tumbling backward into one of his colleagues.

  But as Grant recovered his footing, he almost barrelled into the cowering form of Roger Burton, who lay crouching amid the action. Tears were streaming down the man’s face; he was sobbing uncontrollably. The metal ribs of the skull hose shuddered with each sob, glaring as they caught the reflection of the sparking dimensional gateway.

  Grant did not stop to think about it; he simply reacted, lashing out with his foot, driving his boot into Burton’s hose attachment. The hose rang with a clang of metal as Grant’s boot connected, and Burton was sent tumbling to the floor. The hose snapped at its base, where the metal ring met with the portable dialysis-type machine that Burton had been forced to carry around with him like a sick badge of honor. The display lights flared, liquid churning behind the clear panel of the feed unit. Grant kicked out again, making sure this time that the hose broke off. His kick sent the glowing box skittering across the room into an approaching Magistrate, wrong-footing him as he tried too late to avoid it.

  Roger Burton looked up at Grant with querulous eyes, the tears dancing on his cheeks. The feeder hose swung at the back of his skull dripping fluid, no longer connected to anything.

  “No more guilt,” Grant told him. “Get up and start living your life.”

  Somewhere behind him, Grant could hear the angry voice of Baron Trevelyan barking orders.

  “Execute him,” Trevelyan screamed. “Serve your baron, Magistrates.”

  Grant backed away as a horde of Mags turned toward him and Burton. He was rapidly running out of places to run.

  At the hoop-shaped gateway, four more figures stepped through the breach into a parallel world.

  * * *

  FINALLY, THE HOSPITAL walls were clear. Once they had seen the futility of their position, the Magistrates had retreated. Brigid turned back to the darkened room, wiping sweat from her eyes. Her hair was soaking wet, rain and sweat mingling,
pouring in streaks down the sides of her porcelain face. Her bright emerald eyes flickered around the room, reorienting herself after the bloodbath she had caused outside the hospital. She had not enjoyed killing Magistrates, even dead ones like these. Worse yet, she had seen many of them pick themselves up after being blasted, recovering from falls and wounds that would kill a living man.

  Brigid checked the breech of the shotgun as she strode to the mat-trans, confirming it was empty. Her pockets were empty, too—whatever ammo she had grabbed from Pellerito’s factory was spent.

  She put the shotgun down as she reached the mat-trans console, leaning it against the waist-high pillar that stood before the chamber’s doors. The pillar was black in the darkness, as if standing to attention, while the doors to the mat-trans chamber were still open.

  Brigid ran her hand over the flat glass screen, bringing it to life with her touch.

  “Hell-o, operator,” she mocked in a quiet voice as the podium’s display lit up, a series of grid references appearing on its glass surface.

  She tapped at the keys, running her fingers over the fingernail-like implements through which the machine could be liaised. She felt the hackles at the back of her neck rising with the touch, as if with a static charge.

  The podium screen ran red on black, information marching across the screen like an army trudging to war. Brigid typed in a simple command: “Display power source location.”

  The screen flashed for a moment before bringing up a schematic of the mat-trans with an area at its base highlighted. Brigid eyed the mat-trans in the darkness, searching for the access panel that was displayed on the blueprint. She wished she had more light, but all there was came from this control podium a few feet in front of the transportation chamber itself. Exposed copper piping glinted in the dull illumination where the floor had been holed like Swiss cheese, capturing the light of the display.

  There.

  Brigid scurried forward, sinking to her knees before the armaglass wall of the mat-trans. There was a tiny seam at the base of the unit, where the vents worked to pump gas from the transitions. It was barely discernible in the darkness. Brigid ran her fingers along it until she found the catch, plucking it toward her until the access hatch dropped open. The whole thing was just sixteen inches square, with the door opening onto a set-back unit with a glowing light off center.