Truth Engine

by James Axler

  KANE HAD BEEN STANDING against the solid wall of the redoubt’s main corridor, Grant just a few feet behind him.

  “That’s our stone god, all right,” Grant muttered as they watched Ullikummis stride back into the redoubt through the open door, the pillars of rock sealing the great door beyond.

  Kane’s body yearned for action; he could feel the tension rippling through him. They had both been in a tense combat situation not five minutes before, with adrenaline pumping. Now Kane felt a wave of weariness run through him. He needed action, needed to keep going; this stop-start approach was the way that errors arose.

  Kane turned, sending the Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket. “Back up,” he said to Grant, “and we’ll use the emergency stairs to get to the armory.”

  Grant didn’t argue. The big man simply turned and paced back down the tunnel on silent feet. As they got farther from the activity, he ducked around the corner of a service corridor and pushed at the door that led to the stairs.

  The stairwell was lit in dull red emergency lighting that drew in the edges of the stairs along thin, reflective strips. Grant turned to his partner as they hurried down the steps. “You got to figure they already know we’re here, Kane,” he said, keeping his voice low.

  Kane cocked his head in silent query as he followed the big man.

  “We’ve gone through eight of their number in the ops room,” Grant rationalized. “They’ll know they’re missing.”

  “This is an assault force,” Kane reasoned, taking the stairs two at a time and grabbing the railing. “They’ll expect some losses. Domi was hidden away in the vents when we got here—they must be expecting more resistance than just one albino girl.”

  “Which means if they follow protocol they’ll go through the redoubt with a mop-up squad pretty soon,” Grant growled.

  “Magistrate protocol,” Kane reminded him. “And these sure as fuck aren’t Magistrates.”

  “So what the hell are they?” Grant rumbled as he came to a stop before the door to the lower level.

  Kane pushed a hand through his hair as he thought, trying to piece it all together. This wasn’t something that had happened in the past few hours, he knew. It was something that had been building for months. Indeed, it had been building for centuries; what they were looking at now—the hooded warriors, or altered humans—was the culmination of some millennia-old feud between their Annunaki enemies. Ever since Ullikummis had arrived and set his claim on the Earth as his private battleground, this whole attack had been coming.

  Grant pulled the heavy fire door open just a crack and peered out into the corridor beyond. The overhead lighting winked on and off erratically as Grant scanned the area. There was water pooled along one wall where a fire hose had been yanked from its housings, but other than that the corridor seemed pretty much empty. He turned back to Kane for a second, brushing his finger to his nose in the one percent salute, their personal acknowledgment that the odds were stacked heavily against them.

  Then he led the way into the flickering shadows of the corridor, with Kane following a wary distance behind, checking over his shoulder to ensure they were not being followed. A few moments later, Grant had reached the security doors of the redoubt’s armory. The doors were sealed and Grant tapped in the entry code on the keypad as Kane caught up to him. Together, they heard the click as the doors unlocked. But they didn’t open. Grant placed his palm against the flat surface of the left door and shoved.

  “Jammed,” he growled, turning to Kane with a querulous look. “Something’s messed up the mechanism. We could probably bust in…. Make a bit of noise, though.”

  Kane considered this for a few seconds, glancing down the length of the corridor to check again that no one had followed them. “It’s not the noise, it’s the time it will take.”

  Then Kane engaged his Commtact. “Baptiste?” he said quietly into the hidden receiver. “How long before you guys get back?”

  For a moment there was no response, then Brigid’s familiar tones came through over both their receiver units, sounding breathless as it was piped directly through their mastoid bones. “Ran into a bit of…trouble,” she exclaimed. “Might be…a few minutes.”

  Kane could hear the determined struggle in Brigid’s voice. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  TWO FLOORS ABOVE, Brigid and Domi were dodging a hail of stones as they hurried through the laboratory area. All about them, glass containers were shattering, their contents spilling across the room as the stones struck them.

  “Nothing we can’t handle, Kane,” Brigid replied over the Commtact, even as she struggled to outrun a swarm of stones that raced through the air toward her. She slid across a cluttered desk as one of the hooded intruders lobbed a flat pebble at her, the stone skimming across the neighboring desk as it hurtled toward her. A second later, she dropped over the far side, her red hair sweeping above her like a candle flame before she disappeared behind the desk. She watched as the stone clattered onward, smashing into the far wall, where its fearsome momentum was finally spent.

  Kane’s voice came to her again over the Commtact. “What’s going on up there?” he asked, the concern clear in his tone.

  “Found us a few more playmates,” Brigid explained, reloading her TP-9 as she crouched behind the desk. “Hooded types, nothing new.”

  “Damn, it’s an infestation,” she heard Kane snarl before he broke radio contact.

  Brigid was inclined to agree. They couldn’t seem to move twenty feet without meeting another bunch of the hooded intruders.

  Brigid shoved the ammunition clip home and glanced up over the edge of the desk, even as Domi drilled another of the hooded strangers in the face with a bullet from her Combat Master. The man fell, dropping a handful of stones as he crashed to the floor.

  Then Domi ducked down behind a workstation beside Brigid, holding her hand over her head as a glass beaker exploded above them both. “I count two more,” she said, her voice anxious.

  “Me, too,” Brigid said, and she glanced over to the doorway that led to a separate research room. Shadows flickered across the open doorway as figures moved beyond. “Maybe more—look.”

  Domi followed where Brigid indicated, saw something move in the next room. “What’s in there?” she asked. “You know?” Domi wasn’t an intellectual and didn’t frequent the research area except when she was accompanying Lakesh, Brigid knew.

  “It’s a self-contained research area,” Brigid explained. “Small, built for separate projects like…shit!”

  Brigid was on her feet, hurrying across the room once more, even as a clutch of flying stones rattled against the walls.

  Domi leaped up, about to follow her companion, when a stone smashed into the computer terminal at her back. The albino woman jumped aside, rolling out of its way as the monitor fell from the desk with the impact. “Brigid!” she called.

  “Cover me,” her teammate shouted back, not bothering to turn as she timed her run around another stone whipping past her.

  Domi propped herself up on the floor, keeping low as she pumped shot after shot at the two savage intruders. She might not be able to drop them, but she sure as hell could slow them down.

  “ULLIKUMMIS CAME BACK to Earth to kill his father,” Kane recalled as he and Grant stood in the lower corridor of the Cerberus redoubt.

  “Overlord Enlil,” Grant clarified bitterly, striking his fist against the sealed door of the armory. “Remind me why we’d stand in the way of that.”

  “The Annunaki have always used the tools around them to wage their wars,” Kane said. “Sure, they’ll get their claws dirty for the endgame, but these pseudogods like to play all the pieces before that happens.”

  Grant looked up from the door impatiently as the strip lights flickered overhead.

  “The pieces being us,” Kane clarified. “Humans.”

  “And the stone tossers?” Grant queried.

  “Somehow, Ullikummis has drafted hi
s army from the human stock here on Earth,” Kane said. “Those were people once. Normal people, with normal lives. You remember the farmers out in Saskatchewan?”

  Grant nodded, recalling the strange stone construction called Tenth City by its founder, Ullikummis.

  “They acted like they were possessed,” Kane said. “They did their master’s bidding, killed each other and themselves at his whim.”

  “I thought we established that that was the architecture,” Grant said, “making them do shit they didn’t want to. A’sigil’—isn’t that what Lakesh had called the design? Some kind of magical symbol capable of influencing a person’s mood and willpower.”

  Kane rested his back against the hard wall of the corridor, sighing loudly as the lights flickered and buzzed overhead. “The Annunaki never play just one trick,” he said. “They’ve always kept ten plates spinning in the air at the same time, for as long as we’ve been in this hidden war with them.”

  “You’re talking about Enlil, though,” Grant said.

  “Enlil, Marduk, Lilitu…” Kane reeled off the names of the overlords like curse words. “They’ve all been doing it, every last one of those snake-faces has demonstrated two backup schemes to every one that we’ve rumbled. And Ullikummis—the crown prince of the whole accursed line—he’s inherited all those traits. He’s followed in his father’s footsteps, taking every devious trick of his daddy’s and twisting it one turn more in an effort to ensure his victory.”

  “So, these people aren’t being controlled by sigils?” Grant asked, starting to see Kane’s point. As he spoke, he worked at the doors, pressing the heel of his hand at the seal to try to make the lock give.

  Kane shrugged. “Maybe they are and maybe they’re not, but I’ll bet you there’s more to it,” he said.

  Grant stepped away from the armory door and shook his head. “We need tools to get in here, Kane,” he admitted gravely. “Or I can try to force it.”

  Kane nodded, his brow furrowed in vexation. “Dammit, everything’s stacked against us today.”

  With a frustrated moan, Grant struck the edge of one door with his fist, denting it with a single brutal blow. “Then let’s provide our people with the best backup we can,” he growled.

  The door had buckled just slightly, adjacent to the lock, but it was enough that Grant could get a small hand-hold and pull. He jammed his hand into that buckled spot and yanked hard. In a moment, the door slid back on its track, rocking along about six inches before coming to an abrupt halt.

  Grant peered at the top of the door frame, where the tracks to the door were located, narrowing his eyes as the overhead lights flickered on and off. “There’s some crap blocking the door,” he growled, reaching up and running a finger along the inset track. “Looks like…silt?”

  Kane stepped closer, peering at the track and running his index finger along the track just as Grant had. A powdery dust dropped from the track, and Kane saw that some of it had caught under his fingernail. He cursed. “That’s silt, all right,” he agreed. “What the hell is happening here?”

  Leaning down, Grant put both hands against the door and shoved, forcing it another four inches along its clogged track. “It’s all connected,” he growled. “That much is obvious.”

  Beyond Grant, lights flickered on in the armory as the doorway became wider. The gap was now almost a foot across, and Kane judged he could just about edge through it, even if his wide-shouldered partner might struggle.

  “Stay here,” Kane instructed, pushing himself through the doorway. “And keep watch,” he added solemnly, as he made his way into the armory. “Lots of stuff going on here we don’t have a handle on yet, and I don’t want any of it sneaking the heck up on me.”

  Grant nodded. “Me, either,” he muttered, reaching for the Sin Eater as he scanned the empty corridor beneath the flickering lights.

  TWO FLOORS ABOVE, Brigid vaulted over a desk and careened through the open doorway into the research room. There were four figures inside, and she raised her TP-9 instantly, choosing targets. Three of the figures were dressed in the fustian robes she recognized from the other intruders, and one had the hood down to reveal a woman’s long, dark hair. Bizarrely, a midsize dog was sniffing around the room, some kind of mongrel with some coyote in it. While the dog sniffed at something spilled on the floor, the three intruders surrounded a fourth figure, a man of average build, brown hair and eyes. Right now, he was fending off the attackers with a flat-head screwdriver, wielding it like a dagger as he rolled a swivel chair across the floor before him. The action with the chair reminded Brigid a little of an old-fashioned lion tamer, holding the beasts at bay in a near comical manner.

  “Keep back,” the man ordered, panic in his voice. “I’m warning you.”

  It was Daryl Morganstern, a theoretical mathematician from Cerberus who had collaborated with Brigid on a recent project to refine the operational parameters of the interphaser. Broken instruments littered the worktops beside a deconstructed replica of the interphaser.

  Brigid snapped off a burst of shots even as she ran at the hooded intruders. As one, the three strangers turned, identifying Brigid as the greater threat.

  “Daryl?” Brigid shouted over the sound of her gunfire. “What’s happened? Are you—?”

  “Brigid? Is that you?” Daryl asked incredulously, swinging to face her.

  Even as he turned, Brigid knew it was a mistake. Time seemed to slow down as the female intruder kicked out toward Morganstern, her right foot slapping against the seat of the chair, as she vaulted over it, to deliver a savage kick to the man’s face. Daryl went hurtling backward, toppling over himself as he crashed into the desk behind him and smashed the replica interphaser into pieces. The dark-haired woman landed beside him, sweeping her hand out and knocking Daryl’s screwdriver weapon aside.

  Brigid recognized the woman, knew her for a deadly mercenary from their meeting months ago in Hope. Rosalia.

  In a second, Brigid shifted her aim, spraying bullets in Rosalia’s direction. Exceptionally fast, the dark-haired woman leaped aside, ducking down to the floor even as one of her hooded companions readied a slingshot and launched a stone at Brigid’s face.

  Brigid dodged the hurtling missile, feeling the passage of wind as it whizzed by her face. “Come on, Daryl,” she instructed, “we’re getting out of here.”

  The dog barked somewhere in the room as another stone flew at Brigid from behind, too fast for her to fully avoid. As the stone struck the back of her rib cage, she gasped and stumbled forward even though her shadow suit took the brunt of the blow. A moment later she was with Daryl, the theoretical mathematician looking woozy as she grabbed him by the wrist.

  “What’s…?” Daryl began.

  Brigid sprayed the room with bullets, forcing her opponents to duck for cover. “Cerberus is under attack,” she explained. “We just stumbled into it.”

  “I was w-working alone up here,” Daryl stuttered. “Didn’t hear any alarm or…”

  Brigid glanced across the room, searching for the slender form of Rosalia, but the woman had disappeared, finding some hiding place as bullets and stones hurtled across the room.

  Awkward and disoriented, Daryl Morganstern was trying to keep up with Brigid as she hurried him out the door, spraying a burst of 9 mm bullets in their wake.

  “What about the interphaser?” Morganstern asked. “I’d figured a way we might circumvent the Parallax Point system by—”

  Brigid gave him a no-nonsense look. “Not now.”

  With his tousled brown hair and sweet smile, there was something of the puppy dog to Daryl, and Brigid hated seeing him in this situation. He was a mathematician, not a soldier, and he was obviously bewildered and out of his depth. Despite the clear danger all around, the poor guy couldn’t help but be enthusiastic about his latest theory. Like Brigid, he had an exceptional, near-perfect memory, and that shared trait had brought them together on recent occasions. Right now, however, Brigid knew Daryl would lose that incre
dible memory if he didn’t—

  “Get down!”

  Even as she gave the order, a spinning stone came whirring at Daryl’s head from the main lab, cutting the air with a whine. Brigid shoved Daryl in the shoulder as she gave her command, and he toppled just out of the path of the careening hunk of rock.

  A little way across the room, the alabaster form of Domi acknowledged Brigid with a single raised hand, her Combat Master blazing.

  “Brigid, let’s get moving,” she yelled over the ferocious sounds of gunfire and hurtling stones.

  Brigid saw now that three more hooded figures had entered the lab, pinning Domi down and blocking their exit. She turned to Daryl, shoving her TP-9 semiautomatic into his hands. “We came up here to grab some hydrochloric acid,” she explained. “I’m going to get a batch from that cupboard. Cover me.”

  “Cover you?” Daryl replied, his voice high with astonishment. “I can’t… Brigid, I’m not…”

  “Just do it,” she told him firmly as she leaped out from cover and streaked across the lab toward a glass-fronted storage cupboard. As she ran, Daryl Morganstern did his best to cover her, blasting bursts of fire at her would-be attackers.

  Domi tracked Brigid, too, and saw the red-haired archivist come to a halt at the cupboard, pulling at the door. “Come on, Brigid,” she urged from her position behind one of the lab benches. The bench had a built-in basin, and the faucet pipe was spraying water into the air where one of the hurtling stone projectiles had smashed it from its housing.

  Brigid pulled at the cupboard’s twin handles, only to find it was locked. Behind the glass doors, she could see four tall vials of the clear liquid she was after, red rubber stoppers at their tops. Typical, she thought as she turned back to look around at the destruction the battle had caused. Everything else was smashed, but the glass panels of this locked cupboard had somehow remained unscathed. She needed something to break the glass, she thought, bunching her fist. She knew Kane would smash it with his hand, but some instinct stopped her from doing so.