Truth Engine

by James Axler

  When the rain of tiny rocks ceased, he popped his head up over the side of the desk and began assessing his targets systematically. Kane counted eight strangers in an eye blink, all of them dressed in dirty cowls that covered their heads like a monk’s habit. They were hurrying through the room, striking out at the last few Cerberus personnel who opposed them as they smashed the remaining computer terminals, using clubs or just their fists. Even as Kane watched, the blond-haired comms op, Beth Delaney, was knocked to the floor by a savage, backhanded slap from one of the strangers. She toppled over with a loud crack of breaking bones.

  Through the chaos, Kane spotted his colleague Domi leaping for cover, her agile, alabaster form flying through the air like some crazed jack-in-the-box.

  “Domi, what’s going on?” he demanded.

  Ten feet ahead of him, the albino girl looked down the aisle, pinpointing Kane by his voice. A true child of the Outlands, she was a strange-looking individual, barely five feet tall with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair. Her tiny frame was more like a teenage girl’s than a woman’s, her small, pert breasts pushing against her maroon crop top. Besides the top, Domi had on a pair of abbreviated shorts pulled high at the hip and leaving the full length of her dazzling white legs exposed. As was her habit, she was barefoot. The albino woman’s weird, crimson eyes flashed as they met Kane’s down the length of the computer aisle. “Took your sweet time getting here, Kane,” she shouted. “We’re under attack! They took Lakesh.”

  “Dammit!” Kane spit.

  Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, known to his friends as Lakesh, was Domi’s lover, and the founder of the Cerberus operation. A fabled physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh was a freezie—which was to say, he had been born over two hundred years ago, in the twentieth century, bringing his incredible knowledge of the mat-trans system, along with a sense of freedom almost forgotten by humankind, here to the twenty-third century. Lakesh had helped establish the Cerberus operation, and had been there with Kane at the start. While their relationship had not always been one of absolute trust, Kane respected the man and knew they needed to have him in command. Moreover, Lakesh’s exceptional knowledge could prove to be a weapon in enemy hands. Leaving him hostage to the machinations of these mysterious interlopers could very well prove the end of the Cerberus facility as Kane knew it.

  He became aware of other gunshots behind him, and he turned to see Grant vaulting over a nearby desk and meeting one of the hooded strangers with both feet, knocking the creep backward.

  “We were out in the field,” Kane explained. “No one alerted us to—”

  Domi cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “There was no time,” she explained. “These weirdos seemed to come from nowhere. Screwed with the power, screwed with our comms.”

  “How did they get in?” Kane asked, mystified. The mountaintop redoubt was well protected from intruders, so a force the size Domi’s words implied should not have been able to waltz in easily.

  She glared back at him, a snarl appearing on her alabaster lips. “What am I, the answer girl?”

  “Hold that thought,” Kane instructed as he spotted one of the strange robed figures scrambling toward him from the other side of the desk. Kane leaped from cover, blasting off a stream of shots at the approaching intruder, felling him. The stranger toppled as the bullets struck, crashing over a desk before landing in a heap. A little way along, Kane saw Domi reappear from her own hiding spot and snap off three quick shots at another of their foes, while behind them both, Brigid Baptiste was putting up her own defense with her TP-9 semiautomatic.

  “Any idea who they are?” Kane asked.

  “No, no and no,” Domi snapped, as if guessing his next questions. Then she did the strangest thing—leaped over the desk before her, the Detonics Combat Master spitting fire at her target even as he fell.

  “He’s down,” Kane called as he ran to join her, leaping over the fallen body of a Cerberus tech. “No need to expose yourself.”

  “No, Kane, you not know,” Domi explained, slipping into her strange, clipped Outlander patois as she glared at him over her shoulder.

  But he did. In that moment, he saw the man Domi had felled in a volley of bullets get up, and brush himself off as if her shots had meant nothing. Instantly, a feeling of dread gripping him, Kane turned to see his own foe—the one he had shot and presumably killed—struggle back up off the desk, return to a standing position, the spent bullets dropping from his robe like snowflakes.

  “What are they—armored or undead?” Kane asked as he drilled the figure again with 9 mm bullets. “’Cause I have had my fill of undead for one day.”

  “Not undead,” Domi told him. “But dead inside. Nothing hurts them.”

  Kane spun as another shower of stones hurtled toward him, and he saw now that their enemies were using simple slingshots to launch the projectiles at exceptional speed. It was almost as if the stones themselves could gather speed as they cut through the air. Sharp edges slapped at the protective weave of the shadow suit Kane wore beneath his torn denim jacket as he held his arm up to protect his face. The stones ripped his sleeve, sending pale blue threads flying like seeds blown from a dandelion. Kane pulled the remains away, tossing them aside. When he drew his arm back, he saw that the superstrong fiber of the shadow suit beneath it was torn, and needle-thin streaks of blood ran through it where his bare skin had been exposed. The weave of his suit was akin to armor, so whatever these people were throwing was exceptionally tough.

  Kane ran at the hooded stranger who had just thrown the wad of stones at him, vaulting over a desk and bringing his Sin Eater to bear on the woman as she reloaded her catapult from a small pouch tied to her belt. He snapped off another shot as she placed the ammunition in the sling she held poised, and her own shot went wide.

  Across the room, Grant was involved in his own scrap with one of the intruders, shoving the hooded man’s fist aside before blasting him in the face with his Sin Eater. His opponent collapsed, a plume of dark smoke pouring from beneath his hood.

  “You hit them close enough,” Grant announced, “and they’ll go down.” He didn’t need to shout. Instead, he had automatically engaged the hidden subdermal Commtact unit that was connected to his mastoid bone.

  Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. Grant, Kane and the other members of the Cerberus field teams had Commtacts surgically embedded beneath their skin, a relatively minor operation that allowed them to keep in real-time contact in any given situation.

  Kane picked up on Grant’s advice, jumping over the nearest desk as another volley of stones whizzed across the room at him. He was on the slingshot bearer in an instant, high kicking the guy in the face. It felt like kicking a wall, and Kane staggered back with a grunt.

  The man stared at him, eyes burning from beneath his hood. “This is the future,” he stated, his voice eerily calm. “Submit.”

  Kane thrust his right fist forward, slamming it up into the stranger’s gut. “Sorry, that ain’t going to work for me, buckaroo,” he growled as he unleashed a burst of bullets into him.

  The man keeled over as the blast took him, dropping to the floor like a discarded bag of compost even as the woman Kane had just shot clambered to a standing position behind him.

  “Point-blank them,” Kane instructed, looking about him to catch the attention of the other Cerberus personnel in the room. “It’s the best way.”

  Then he was back facing the woman who had tossed stones at him just a half minute before,
the one he’d thought he had dispatched. Kane whipped the Sin Eater up, driving it toward her face, but she moved fast in the flickering overhead lights, slapping the muzzle of the blaster aside even as Kane squeezed the trigger.

  His shots went wide and she drove a powerful fist at his jaw, connecting with such force that his ears rang. When Kane looked up, the woman’s hood had dropped back and he saw her face for the first time. She was older than he had expected, with lined skin and crow’s feet around her eyes—probably in her late forties or early fifties. There was a blister dead center on her forehead, and Kane found his attention drawn to its ugliness for a distracting instant.

  The woman grabbed a small lamp off the nearest desk, its cable sparking as she wrenched it from the socket and swung it at Kane’s head. He regained his composure just in time, using the muzzle of his Sin Eater to deflect the projectile. Then he drove the pistol forward and blasted a stream of bullets into the woman’s throat and upward, peppering her face. He did not like doing this, but there was something eerily wrong with these interlopers, who acted with such single-mindedness that they seemed to be automatons.

  Somewhere behind Kane, Brigid Baptiste had found herself trapped between two of the slingshot-wielding strangers. As the one to her left flung a handful of tiny stones at her face, she dropped to her knees, feeling them pull at her hair as she managed to duck just in time. The stones struck the other attacker like buckshot, knocking him to the floor. Then Brigid kicked out, striking the first man behind the ankle and bringing him to the ground. As he fell, Brigid whipped up her semiautomatic, blasting a stuttering burst of bullets into his torso.

  Behind her, a third assailant had grabbed something from one of the debris-strewed desks, and she turned just in time to see him throw it at her head. It was a two-inch-high, circular object—a magnetic desk tidy designed to hold paper clips and drawing pins while they weren’t being used. Brigid reared back as the thing hurtled toward her, cried out as it struck her just beneath her left eye.

  She fell backward, and for a moment her vision swam. She ignored that, bringing up the TP-9 and peppering her attacker with bullets as he charged at her. The man fell forward, his long robes wrapping around his legs as he tumbled. Brigid leaped over his fallen body, hurrying across the room even as another of the strangers lunged for her from his position on the floor.

  Ahead of the titian-haired former archivist, another of the strange hooded figures had plucked a slingshot from his robe, and he leveled it at Brigid, preparing to shoot more grit at her. Suddenly, there was a blur of movement as Grant thrust his elbow into the interloper’s back, jabbing at his kidney. Grant snarled in pain as he connected, but the hooded stranger fell, crashing into a wall.

  “Either they’re wearing armor,” Grant theorized as Brigid joined him at the next aisle of desks, “or they aren’t human.”

  “They’re certainly strong,” she agreed. “Could they be some new form of Nephilim?”

  “Shit knows,” Grant spit. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Nearby, Kane was looking around the room, with Domi at his side. Among them, the foursome had at last managed to dispatch all eight of the invaders.

  Farrell lay in a pool of blood on the floor, his gold hoop earring glistening crimson. Part of the Cerberus team, Farrell sported a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee. Right now, his face was bruised and bloodied, and his eyes were closed.

  “Farrell?” Kane demanded. “You okay?”

  His teammate groaned, and Kane checked him more closely. He had a nasty cut at the back of his head where he had been coldcocked, but the wound appeared to have stopped pouring blood.

  “You’ll be okay,” Kane announced, since his Magistrate training extended to basic medical knowledge. Farrell wasn’t listening; he was at best semiconscious.

  Across the aisle, Brigid and Grant did a similar check on the prone form of Beth Delaney. There was an ugly slash across her face, but she seemed otherwise okay.

  “We have to find Lakesh,” Domi insisted, hurrying toward the doors beneath the Mercator map, which covered an entire wall of the ops center. Somehow, the streams of light that usually snaked across the map had all been replaced with an eerie red glow.

  Kane glanced about him. There were several other Cerberus people in the room, and he had a nasty feeling that at least two of them weren’t breathing. But Domi was right. They needed to keep moving, to worry about the living first. If Lakesh was still here somewhere, and still alive, then it looked as if it was up to Kane’s makeshift army to save him.

  The foursome hurried through the doors, emerging into the redoubt’s central corridor. The hallway appeared to be carved through the rock of the mountain, its high ceiling held in place by a network of thick metal girders.

  Nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting out there now, on the other side of the door.

  KANE OPENED HIS EYES, his breath coming with a suddenness that seemed to snap him out of his reverie. He was sitting on the floor of the cavern that had become his cell, his back pressed against the coolness of the rock wall, and for a moment he wondered just what it was that had shocked him so.

  Then he heard it again.

  There was a noise off to his left, coming from the wall itself. He strained, trying to make out what the sound was. It seemed to be some kind of scraping or grinding, as if two great rocks were being forced together.

  A few months back, Kane had been involved in an escapade that had featured a subterrene, a kind of boring machine that could cut tunnels through rock. Although it was muffled, the noise he heard now reminded him of the subterrene’s underground approach.

  He got up from the floor, easing himself further into the darkness, as far away from that scraping sound as he could get. He was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he was trapped here in an eight-by-six cell, and if something was coming through that wall, he had no realistic way to avoid it.

  Chapter 4

  Grant was ready when the hidden door slid open. There, framed by the light that spilled into his cavelike cell, stood a man carrying a tray of food. The meals were bland and simple, a pitiful scoop of some kind of watery gruel or porridge, with barely any taste, each portion little more than a mouthful. Grant had been slipping in and out of consciousness for an indeterminate time, but they had left the food for him. He had forced himself to choke it down as he tried to recover his ebbing strength. When they last came, just a few hours earlier, to clear the trays, Grant had feigned sleep, listening for the sounds of movement and pinpointing the hidden door’s location in the rock wall.

  Now, as the door opened and the person he thought of as his captor entered, Grant pounced from the shadows like a jungle cat. His meaty paw raced through the air, deflecting the plastic tray of food even as he drove his shoulder at the man’s rib cage with a low follow-through. The tray clattered aside, smacking against one of the solid rock walls even as the man in the doorway was knocked backward, losing his footing in a graceless tangle of limbs. As he fell backward, Grant dropped with him, driving a savage punch into his captor’s jaw. His fist connected with a loud crack, and the man’s head bopped backward, his skull knocking against the rocky floor.

  Poised over his captor, Grant drew back his arm for another blow, watching as the man’s eyes lost focus and his head rolled from side to side. He was a young man, probably still in his teens, dressed in a simple robe, with a dusting of bristle on his chin where he was encouraging a tidy growth of beard. For a moment, the youth’s head seemed to sway, then his eyes focused on Grant’s and the alarm in them was clear. As the youth opened his mouth, Grant struck him in the face, slapping his head back into the hard flooring once again, striking with the force of a hammer blow. With a pained grunt, the man stopped struggling and slipped into the warm embrace of unconsciousness.

  Swiftly, Grant patted down the now-still form. He himself had been stripped of his weapons along with his Kevlar-weave coat when he had been placed in this strange, cavelike cell,
just the straps of the wrist holster still in place around his right arm where his Sin Eater handgun had once rested. He had been left in his boots and shadow suit, the latter torn along both arms and his left leg, its armor-like weave damaged but still durable. There was a bump on the back of his head, too, a swelling just below the crown where he had taken a hard knock.

  The unconscious body lay motionless as Grant patted the youth down. He held no obvious weapons, just a little pouch tied simply to his waist on a cord. Grant opened it and peered at its contents in the orange-hued light that spilled in from the corridor. The pouch contained a handful of stones, most so small they were little more than grains of sand. Grant had seen these people use the stones as weapons, throwing them from their hands or via little slingshots, but he could locate no slingshot on the guard’s person.

  Grant remained there for a moment longer, resting his weight on his foe’s body as he looked warily around him. He peeked outside the cell, and saw that he appeared to be in a dim tunnel carved out of the same rocks as his cell. The ceiling was low, and it arched to a peak in an asymmetrical way, the rough walls scaling down to form a narrow width that could just barely accommodate two men walking abreast. To his left, the tunnel ended abruptly in a wall, while it continued on down to his right, the walls apparently solid, with no signs of any other caves. That didn’t mean spit, Grant knew—he had observed the way they opened the door to his own cell. It was like some kind of flowing rock that slotted perfectly over the entry to the cave, masking its presence with remarkably precise engineering.

  The tunnel was lit indifferently by indented patches on the wall that flickered like burning embers. Keeping his movements appreciably silent, Grant rose on tiptoe to examine the nearest of these glowing indentations. The patch appeared to be a clear stone with a sliver of magma burning at its core. Its appearance reminded him of a child’s marble, the way a streak of paint is held in place within the glass.