by James Axler
The Mags didn't stop shooting until bolts snapped open loudly on empty chambers. The bodies lay where the steel-jacketed fusillade had battered them, crumpled in bullet-slashed heaps. The sandy soil soaked up their blood like a sponge, turning the ground around them into crimson-stained sludge.
Turner, Ranee and Quantrell looked expectantly toward Pollard, awaiting further orders. Pollard impas-sively surveyed the three men, then jabbed a finger toward Ranee. "You. You're the chosen man."
"Yes, sir." Ranee's Sin Eater sprang from the forearm holster into his hand. He stepped forward, moving among the bodies, pointing the handblaster down and squeezing off a single round into every head.
The Magistrate selected to fire final head shots was always known as "the chosen man." Pollard had always considered the practice a waste of ammo, but it was part of some old, murky military tradition.
He strode away through the settlement. He saw a few goats in a wood-railed pen but no beasts of burden. There were freestanding racks with smoked fish and strips of seaweed stretched over the crossbars and a few heaps of clam shells, but little else in the way of foodstuffs. It was apparent Port Morninglight lived almost entirely on the bounty provided by the ocean.
Pollard paused to inspect a longbow lying on the ground. It was beautifully crafted, made of smooth, red-lacquered wood. Like their clothing, the weapon appeared too beautifully made to have been fashioned by the people of Port Morninglight. There was an elegance, an artistry to it, and he had seen none of that among the possessions of the residents. Nor did the wood look like any he had seen on the day-long march from Redoubt Charlie to the settlement.
Pollard had led his men down tree-dotted hillsides, then across a wind-scoured wilderness of ridges, spines of stone, dry riverbeds, fields of tumbled rock and acres of scrub brush. To refer to the confusing route as merely rugged was being more than imprecise; it was an outright lie. Several times he became disoriented, but he didn't allow his Mags to see him surreptitiously checking the map.
The men were already disoriented from arriving in Redoubt Charlie in groups of five. Except for Pollard, none of them had ever heard of a mat-trans unit before, much less stepped into one. The mat-trans gateways—jump chambers—were in hidden redoubts, underground fortresses scattered across the nuke-ravaged face of North America.
Pollard knew very little about the gateways, only what he had learned from his former superior officer, Salvo. He understood they could transport a man in a flicker of microseconds from place to place, but how this miracle was accomplished was beyond him, even if he stretched his imagination to its limits.
Over a year ago, such a mind-breaking concept was the last thing he had ever expected to encounter when he pursued a group of insurrectionists into Mesa Verde Canyon. Later, Salvo had tersely explained mat the matter-transfer units transported both organic and inorganic material from point A to a point Z without the traveler stirring so much as a toe. As a menacing codicil to the explanation, Salvo added that the devices were the deepest, most ruthlessly safeguarded secrets of the unified baronies. If Pollard so much as hinted to anyone he knew they even existed, much less the fundamentals of their operation, his life span could be measured in minutes.
However, Pollard never bought into Salvo's version of how the insurrectionists knew of the device. He didn't ask questions, certainly not the wrong ones. He was content to be an active player in what was privately referred to as "Salvo's Vendetta."
He knew full well that had he stumbled upon a gateway without the knowledge of anyone other than Salvo, a swift execution was all he could look forward to in the way of career advancement.
Instead, he had been promoted—strictly through attrition, true enough—but he was now division commander and therefore privy to certain secrets. When briefed on the assignment by Griffin, the new Mag Division administrator, he was apprised of more than mission parameters. Those were fairly straightforward.
Since Griffin knew that the long-vanished Salvo had provided Pollard with a thumbnail history of the mat-trans units, he dispensed with supplying him with more information. Pollard easily recalled what Salvo had told him over a year ago—how the gateways were part of Project Cerberus, which was one of many research projects connected to the Totality Concept.
Over two centuries ago, before the sky darkened with massive quantities of pulverized rubble propelled into the atmosphere by hundreds of simultaneous atomic explosions, the Totality Concept was an ultra-top-secret scientific undertaking whose different research branches were housed in hidden redoubts. The official designations of the redoubts had been based on the old international radio code, as in "Charlie" representing the letter C.
During the mission briefing, Griffin supplied him with a string of numbers, confusing jumbles of digits he was to enter into the jump chamber's keypad controls. Destination-lock coordinates, Griffin called them. After handing Pollard a strip of paper bearing the numeric codes, he commanded him to memorize them, then destroy the paper.
For the two days preceding the jump from the mat-trans unit hidden on A Level of Cobaltville's Administrative Monolith, Pollard had tried his best to commit the digits to memory, but ultimately he failed. He had already participated in several failed missions, so he was too afraid to inform Griffin he was unable to accomplish such a simple task.
The three digits and procedures to open and close the sec door in Redoubt Charlie were easy to remember, but the coordinates of where the prisoners were to be sent refused to be impressed into his mind. Therefore, he impressed them into his flesh. Using indelible ink, Pollard wrote them on the inside of his left wrist.
An alarmed shout dragged Pollard's attention back to the present. He whirled, visored eyes tracking across the village, squinting to see through the drifting veils of smoke. He heard the characteristic stutter of a Sin Eater set on triburst, the reports sounding like staccato whipcracks.
He spotted a man standing on the crest of a dune on the far side of the village, waving his arms in a strange rhythmic manner. He held a pair of long-handled, flat, paddlelike objects in his hands. Pollard barely glimpsed the complex symbols inscribed on the surfaces before a storm of 9 mm rounds stitched a series of dark holes across his back.
The man's arm movements became spasmodic, and his entire body convulsed under the multiple impacts. He fell heavily, toppling face first to the sand.
Pollard watched as a Mag struggled up the slope of the dune. He wasn't sure which man it was until his helmet comm-link hissed with static and Franco's breathless voice said, "Chilled him, sir."
"So I see," Pollard growled. "What are those things he was waving around?"
Pollard saw Franco pluck one of the objects from the dead man's hand. His voice, sounding slightly troubled, said, "They're like fans, sir."
"Fans?" Pollard echoed derisively. "He wasn't waving them because he got overheated."
"No, sir." Franco turned, looking out toward the sea. His ebony-encased body suddenly stiffened. "I think you should take a look at this."
"What is it?" Pollard demanded, not wanting to scale the sand dune.
"I'm really not sure, sir," Franco admitted.
Uttering a grunt of disgust, Pollard stamped across the village, breathing shallowly through his splayed nostrils so as not to inhale too much of the astringent smoke. He lumbered up the dune, his boots slogging through the loose sand. Twice he nearly fell. By the time he reached the crest, he was panting, sweat sliding down his bulldog-jowled face.
The man Franco had backshot lay spread-eagled, his face buried in the sand. Blood streamed from his bullet-holed torso, puddling darkly around him. Pollard paid him no attention. Instead, he followed Franco's gaze, toward the open ocean.
A collection of small one-masted sailboats was beached upon the shore, among nets and fishing tackle. The heaving waves swept over jagged rock formations. The limitless blue expanse of the Cific evoked a spark of awe within him. The largest body of water he h
ad ever seen was a lake, and its opposite shore was easily visible.
The ocean looked as vast as the sky, with foaming whitecaps instead of clouds. For an instant he couldn't help but wonder what lay on the other side of it. Pollard knew the tiny black specks barely visible on the horizon were barren islets known as the Western Isles, pieces of California that had not completely submerged.
Franco pointed in a southwesterly direction. "See it, sir?"
Pollard narrowed his eyes. "See what?"
"That fog bank."
Pollard stared hard, and finally spied a yellowish vaporous smudge far down the shoreline, about three-quarters of a mile away. He started to demand profanely why Franco had summoned him to look at a fog bank, when he realized the weather wasn't right for fog to form. Nor did the mist really look or behave like fog. It billowed against the wind, some scraps twisting away, but appearing very thick at the water-line—or just above it.
In a tense voice, Franco said, "For a second, I thought I saw something inside of it"
Shading his eyes with his hands, Pollard glimpsed a dark, indistinct shape within the heart of the cloud. For a microsecond, the sun glinted brightly from a reflective metallic surface. Then it was gone, obscured by the vapor.
Hefting the paddle-shaped object he had taken from the dead man, Franco declared anxiously, "Sir, I think this slagger was using these to signal…like the old semaphore code."
Lowering his hands, Pollard quickly studied the paddle in Franco's hand, noting how it did indeed resemble an oversize hand fan. The symbol inscribed on it was utterly unfamiliar, like a sunburst containing three geometric shapes. Although he had no way of knowing, it seemed Oriental in design. He didn't like the cold chill that suddenly crept up the base of his spine.
Franco tapped the sigil on the paddle. "I think this mark is called an ideograph. It means something."
Pollard did not respond, waiting for the younger man to say why it was significant.
"The fog may be a smoke screen generated by a ship," Franco continued. "He was either warning them off or calling for help with these."
Neither possibility made Pollard's chill go away. Although the Intel section hadn't indicated that the ville of Snakefish possessed anything like a navy, there was no reason why its own Magistrates couldn't use boats to patrol the coast. Cobaltville and its surrounding territories were landlocked, and so the notion that another barony might employ seagoing craft had never occurred to him. Still, for a reason he could not name or understand, he knew if a boat lurked within the smear of fog, it had not been dispatched by Baron Snakefish.
He felt a jolt of near panic, a sudden mad desire to put as much distance between the sea and his prisoners as possible. At the same time, he fancied he could feel the numbers he had written on his wrist burning his skin.
Swiftly, Pollard opened the all-channel frequency on the helmet comm-link, barking, "Every one of you bastards prepare to move out. We're triple-timing it. Standard deployment of personnel and firepower."
He snapped the orders as he clumsily climbed down the dune. None of the men protested that they hadn't finished policing the area, and Pollard wouldn't have listened to them if they had. The artistry of the bows, the hand fans and the fog bank all slid together in his mind to create a mystery that, if not frightening, posed a threat to the success of his mission. He feared failing Baron Cobalt far more than whatever menace might be rising from the sea.
Pollard raised his voice in a roar, knowing it was unnecessary and knowing he concussed the eardrums of the entire Mag force. "You stupe bastards! I said, Start moving!"
Chapter 2
"Stop moving," Grant whispered, raising the knife to shoulder level.
Domi's eyes narrowed to slits, her snow-white lashes veiling the bloodred irises. "I'm not moving," she snapped fiercely, her shoulders trembling. "I'm shivering."
Grant grunted. "Stop it, or you're dead."
"It sees you," Kane said softly.
"With all those fucking eyes," retorted Grant, his characteristic lionlike roar of a voice muted to a rumble, "how could it not?"
Domi nipped at her full underlip. "I can feel it climbing," she murmured breathlessly.
The creature's six legs secured grips in the tough fabric of her khaki shirt and crept slowly up her back, its sickle-shaped pincers opening and closing reflex-ively.
Grant slid the titanium-jacketed point of his combat knife closer, but the mass of compound eyes constituting the bug's head rolled in his direction. He checked his movement, muttering, "Lakesh told us to expect mutie snakes, not mutie insects."
"It looks like a mutagenically altered relation to a scorpion, and scorpions are arachnids, not insects," Brigid Baptiste noted.
Domi stopped short of snorting in exasperation, but said lowly, "It's still a big fuckin' bug with a big fuckin' stinger."
The black monster clinging to Domi's shirt did hold the general contours of a scorpion, with a black, shiny carapace, long foreclaws and stinger-tipped tail that curled and quivered over its segmented back. But the resemblance ended there. Nearly eight inches long, with a cluster of eyes atop its streamlined body, the scorpion-thing seemed to study the fourteen-inch blade in Grant's hand, silently assessing its severity as a threat. The manner in which it rolled its many eyes in all directions was very disquieting.
"I don't think you can sneak up on it," Kane said quietly.
The curved tail stretched out to half the length of the creature's body and made a couple of forward darts, as if in warning. A drop of amber venom formed on the barbed point of the stinger. Grant carefully withdrew the knife from the bug's range of vision. After a watchful second, the scorpion began climbing again.
The four people—and one mutie bug—crouched in a clearing amid an expanse of shoulder-high scrub brush. All around was a semiarid landscape, not quite a desert but not a particularly hospitable place, either. Here and there a solitary tree rose to break the monotony of the tableland. Now and then a rare stream cut a shallow dell across the terrain. The night before, they had made camp in such a dell. They could have pushed on, but all of them were tired after descending the rocky, arduous path from Redoubt Charlie.
Kane's eyes flicked toward the distant mountain slope, absently noting the miles-long scar of a two-century-old earth slip. He could see no trace of the entrance to the installation tucked beneath the lip of the peak above.
For a reason she had not explained, Domi had spread out her bedroll some distance from the rest of them. When she awakened, she found she was sharing her accommodations with an uninvited bunk mate.
Her urgent whisper drew Kane's attention back to her. "Do something before it lays eggs in my ear!"
Domi barely topped five feet in height, and she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her slender build was insolently curved, with generous hips, long slim legs and perky breasts.
A mop of ragged, close-cropped bone-white hair framed her pearly, hollow-cheeked face. Despite her albinism and burning red eyes, she was weirdly beautiful, particularly with her complexion, the color and texture of a polished pearl. Raised in the Outlands, she displayed the free style and outspoken rough manner acquired in the scramble for existence far from the relative luxury of the villes.
Grant backed away before straightening to his full height of six feet four inches. His face was locked in a stony mask as Domi scowled at him. The two peo-pie were a study in complete contrasts, not just physically but emotionally. Grant was broad shouldered and barrel-chested, and his high forehead was topped by short, gray-sprinkled hair. A down-sweeping mustache showed ebony against the dark brown of his face. He wore a black, high-collared coverall made of a Kevlar weave.
He hefted his knife uncertainly. "I'm open to suggestions."
To Domi, Brigid said soothingly, "Just sit tight. As long as it doesn't feel threatened, it won't sting you."
She tossed her loose tumbles of thick, wavy red-gold hair off her shoulders
, affecting not to notice the dour, dubious glance Grant cast in her direction. Brigid's big, slightly slanted emerald eyes fixed on the scorpion-thing as it reached out tentatively with a foreclaw to touch the collar of Domi's shirt. Tall, long-legged with a willowy, athletic build, Brigid did not allow the apprehension mounting within her to show on her smoothly contoured face.
Kane eyed the position of the early-morning sun and said lowly, "We can't wait all day for the damn thing to make up its mind."
An inch over six feet, Kane was not as tall or as broad as Grant, but every line of his long-limbed body was hard and stripped of excess flesh. Most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, lending his physique a marked resemblance to a wolf. His longish dark hair held sun-touched highlights, and his high-planed face was deeply tanned. A thin, hairline scar showed white on his left cheek. His narrowed eyes were faded to a pale gray-blue, the color of the high sky at sunset. He wore a black coverall identical to Grant's.
Domi stiffened as she felt the pincer questing softly at her nape. She drew in a sharp breath between her teeth. The bug stopped as it tried to determine the nature of the new substance. Carefully, she reached down to pick up a fist-sized rock. In a steel-edged tone, Domi announced,' 'If nobody's going to do anything, I will."
"And if it stings you?" Grant challenged.
Domi hesitated, then gestured slightly toward the flat, metal-sheathed case lying at the edge of the campsite. "We got plenty medicine in that."
Under stress, her abbreviated mode of Outland speech became more pronounced.
"We don't know how virulent the venom is," Bri-gid pointed out. "Whether it's a blood or neuro-toxin."
All anybody knew about the mutie scorpions was that their poison was hundreds of times more potent than that of their forebears, enabling them to kill almost anything that walked, crawled or swam. Domi let the rock drop from her hand, and she squeezed her eyes shut in fear. She did her best to minimize the shudder that racked her slight frame. The stinger at the end of the scorpion's tail rotated in a semicircle, as if it were connected to a ball-and-socket joint.