Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  Kazuko monitored Grant’s vital signs as Kane spoke, using a portable computer to run a check on his transponder signal. He tapped the touch screen to bring up more detail. “When you say you’re not certain, am I to understand that Grant did not exhibit signs of this alteration until well after you had left said location?”

  “That’s right,” Kane said. “Something attacked him in a secret base about four miles out. Baptiste was—” He stopped, suddenly realizing that Brigid had not come with them when they entered the elevator. “Huh.”

  Sensing Kane’s worry, Kazuko peered up from his touch screen, where he was running over Grant’s transponder feed. “Is there something bothering you, Kane-san?”

  Kane shook his head in disbelief. “I’m surprised Baptiste didn’t come with us. I thought...”

  One of the medical assistants—Marguerite Palmer, whose light brown hair was tied back in a long braid—spoke up. “I think maybe Lakesh nobbled her to discuss what happened out there. He was pretty worried. We all were.”

  Kazuko nodded. “Brigid’s insights would no doubt be beneficial,” he agreed. “We shall run some tests here, but if you could request that she speak with me as soon as she is free, that would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Will do,” Kane confirmed solemnly. But he was worried about Brigid. After what she had said in the Deathbird, he knew she was carrying a lot of guilt.

  There had been a time, months before, when Brigid had been brainwashed, and had lost herself to a new personality, one fueled only by hate. When she recovered she had been barely able to function, caught up as she was by the evil she had perpetrated as that other self. Kane feared she might slip into that same depression spiral again, especially if Grant were to die from this. Kane needed to step in, speak to her, find the words, the argument, the logic to make her realize that what she had done had not caused this.

  The elevator halted and the doors slid back, opening onto a broad corridor within the mountain base. The corridor had been cut straight into the rock, with lights hanging from rigs set up along its vast length. It had the coldness of stone, too, and sometimes being inside the mountain redoubt could feel more like spelunking than working in a fully functioning military base.

  The floor was polished tile, and doors were arrayed along it at regular intervals. Familiar personnel, many dressed in the white jumpsuits of Cerberus on-duty staff, populated the corridor as they hurried from place to place, going about their daily routines.

  “Medical emergency, coming through,” Marguerite barked as they rushed the gurney along the hallway.

  Personnel stepped aside and a few stopped and saluted Kane respectfully as he and his out-of-commission partner went hurrying past. Yeah, Kane thought bitterly, it’s great to be home.

  * * *

  DR. KAZUKO INSISTED on no visitors while he worked on the sedated Grant, checking his metabolic levels and pumping his stomach of its contents. Kane waited just outside the examination room, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He knew this room well, had been here time and again when he or one of his teammates got hurt during a field mission. It was the province of Cerberus physician Reba DeFore, but she was still out in the field now, checking on the subterranean lair that he and his team had left.

  Kane was flat-out exhausted. It would not take him five minutes to go to sleep, but he kept himself awake, determined to know about Grant’s condition as soon as Dr. Kazuko could tell him. Grant had been his field partner for a lot of years, dating all the way back to their time together as magistrates in Cobaltville.

  Cobaltville. It seemed a different life to him now, Kane thought, and he a different man.

  * * *

  AN HOUR PASSED.

  Shizuka was waiting solemnly outside the medical wing, arms folded, staring through the observation window as Dr. Kazuko worked on her best friend and lover. She was dressed in supple leather armor, artfully tooled and decorated to accentuate the slender curves of her body. With the twin swords at her waist, katana and wakizashi, she could have been Grant’s personal guard as much as his concerned lover.

  Domi joined the woman on catlike, near silent feet. The two warriors acknowledged one another with a curt, silent nod before Domi turned her attention to the window, through which she could see Kazuko’s team working on Grant.

  Domi cut a strange figure. An albino woman with a petite frame, she wore her hair in a ragged pixie cut that accentuated her sharp cheekbones and slender neck. Her skin and hair were chalk-white, while her eyes were a vivid ruby red. She was wild; some even thought her feral. While the other personnel of the Cerberus redoubt mostly dressed in regulation jumpsuits, or smart-casual when off duty, Domi preferred to wear as few clothes as possible. Right now, she was dressed in an abbreviated crop top that left her belly exposed, and a pair of cutoffs that left her legs bare. She wore no shoes, but had a large hunting knife in a leather sheath strapped to her ankle. She had history with Grant, had become infatuated with him after he had saved her life, and that infatuation had made her relationship with Shizuka tempestuous. Domi had ultimately made her peace with the situation and with the samurai woman, and had finally found love with Lakesh, a man far older than her and far different, but who somehow understood her needs.

  “I’m sorry,” Domi said at last, watching the medical staff buzzing around Grant’s supine frame.

  Shizuka inclined her head and looked at her. “Why? Why are you sorry?” she asked, an edge to her voice. “You played no hand in this, Domi. You have no place to be regretful. No place at all.”

  Domi looked at Shizuka, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry because I know how you feel about Grant,” she said, “and I know how much it must hurt to see him like this.” Then she turned back to the glass and continued to watch as Dr. Kazuko and his people added saline feeds and nutrient drips to Grant’s unconscious form.

  Shizuka had been hard on Domi, for no reason other than her own fear manifesting inappropriately as anger, a feeling that her space was being intruded upon, perhaps. For Domi to say what she had—the wild child, the semiferal outlander who had grown up in the wastes outside of any ville—that must have been difficult.

  “I’m sorry,” Shizuka said, reaching out and touching Domi’s bare arm.

  “Why?” she asked, sniffling.

  “Because I know how much he means to you, too.”

  * * *

  KANE FOUND BRIGID over an hour later. She was sitting alone on the rock-lined plateau outside the redoubt’s double doors, her back toward them and legs stretched out before her, watching the last of the afternoon sun sink low in the blue sky. It surprised him that it was only afternoon. It had been a bastard long day already.

  “Figured I’d find you out here, Baptiste,” he said as he strode toward her.

  Brigid turned her head slightly, but not enough to face him, just so that she could see him from the corner of her eye. “Excellent detective work, Magistrate,” she said with a note of sarcasm.

  “Not that excellent,” Kane admitted. “I checked your quarters, the mess hall, the data banks and the gym—including the pool—twice before I thought to look outside.”

  Brigid said nothing for a moment as Kane walked over and joined her on the sun-warmed outcropping of rock where she was sitting. “How is he?” she asked at last.

  “Stable,” Kane said. “DeFore will be back soon and she’ll have more insight once she’s tested the inhabitants in the cells.”

  “And in the meantime?” Brigid asked, turning to face Kane, fear in her emerald eyes.

  “Doc Kazuko’s monitoring him,” Kane reassured her, “under pain of death from Shizuka. Well, I say death—you never know with Shizuka. Could be something worse than—”

  “How can you joke at a time like this?!” Brigid spit angrily, cutting him off in midspeech.

  “Sorry,” Ka
ne replied. “I’m sorry. Bad joke. Bad taste. But, you know—he’s my friend, too. Lying there infected with who knows what, health deteriorating at a rapid pace. So, how can I not joke? Because the other thing—well, that would be too serious and make it all feel too real.”

  “It is real, Kane,” Brigid snapped, tears welling in her eyes. They were already red-rimmed from crying, Kane saw now.

  “He’s not going to die,” he told her. “Not Grant. Not today.”

  “This...plague got into him,” Brigid said, “because he didn’t have...because I had his rebreather.”

  Kane shook his head. “No, it got into him because that subhuman thing attacked him, and it got into him because someone—probably that lunatic in the fright mask—has been testing viruses in that lab.

  “Besides, Grant doesn’t die like this,” Kane assured her.

  “What, you think he goes down in a blaze of gunfire, saving a wagload of children from some Annunaki death god?” Brigid retorted hotly.

  “No, that’s how I go,” Kane told her with a smirk. “Grant lives to a ripe old age, settles down with Shizuka and they have lots of samurai children—like, ten at least—who finally see what a soft side Grant has when he’s not fighting those Annunaki death gods.”

  Brigid smiled despite herself. “You really think he’ll make it?”

  “Grant’s strong,” Kane told her. “Strongest man I know. And you’re not responsible. You know that, Baptiste.”

  “I had his rebreather,” she said.

  “You offered it back to him,” Kane reminded her. “You casting yourself as the villain doesn’t make Grant any more of a hero, you know? He’s already got ‘hero’ enough in spades. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Brigid looked away for a moment, considering the sunset as it played out its last orange rays across the mountain peaks.

  Kane wrapped an arm around her, drawing her close. “He’ll pull through,” he assured her. “Now, come inside and let’s start figuring out a strategy for nailing this nutball in the fright mask.”

  Brigid nodded wearily. “Sure,” she said. “Just let me freshen up first.”

  Then she stood and made her way back to the open redoubt doors, leaving Kane sitting on the rock, watching her go. When she reached the doors, she turned back to him and smiled tentatively. “Catch,” she said, and she threw something to Kane that was not much larger than a marker pen. He grabbed it from the air and held it in his hand, smiling to himself. It was Grant’s rebreather.

  Chapter 17

  “What do you mean, you lost ’em?” Kane demanded hotly. He was straddling a chair in the Cerberus ops room, talking to Brewster Philboyd at the comms station, while Lakesh went over the data. Brigid Baptiste was perched on the edge of the desk beside Kane.

  The other operatives in the room turned when they heard his raised voice, ducked back to their work when they saw him angrily glaring at them.

  “I mean I lost them,” Philboyd said. He was not a fighter like Kane, but he was anything but timid and was not given to backing down—from a problem or an argument. “I tracked your SandCats for forty miles, but then cloud cover interrupted the satellite view for too long, and wherever they emerged, I’d lost them. It’s not an infallible system, Kane.”

  He began to reply, but stopped himself, biting down on his anger.

  “You scanned, of course,” Brigid interjected.

  “Of course,” Philboyd confirmed. “The vehicles were heading in a rough northeasterly direction, barring a few diversions in the road. Which is to say, the untilled dirt.”

  “Northeast,” Brigid repeated thoughtfully. “That’s not back to Freeville—”

  “Where?” Brewster asked.

  “The rogue settlement where CAT Alpha first discovered evidence of this person we assume to be driving the vehicles,” Lakesh said, putting the report data back on Brewster’s desk. “Good work, incidentally, Mr. Philboyd.”

  “Good work?” Kane snapped. “He lost our targets.”

  “But not their direction,” Brigid said.

  Kane looked at her uncertainly. “What does that mean?”

  “Kane, what’s closest to the underground bunker we found?” she asked.

  Kane thought for a moment, then the light of recognition flashed across his face. “Cobaltville. Makes sense, as the guy was wearing a Cobaltville Magistrate badge, and so were the SandCats.”

  “There’s just one problem,” Brigid said. “I don’t think he’s a magistrate.”

  Kane looked at her in astonishment. “What?”

  “I looked around his laboratory while you were waiting for Edwards to pick us up, remember,” she stated. “I went through what computer records I could access—not all of them, but enough.”

  “You broke the encryption?” Kane asked. “We weren’t there that long.”

  Brigid shook her head. “He hadn’t encrypted everything. I guess he didn’t feel much need to, what with being out in the middle of nowhere in a locked bunker. He was using that bunker we found as a research lab, I think, which is why there were those wretched things in the cages. It looked like he was experimenting with some old diseases, stuff that should have been extinct centuries ago.”

  “Prenukecaust?” Kane mused.

  “It makes a certain degree of sense.,” Lakesh chimed in. “That base you discovered was a medical research facility used by the military.”

  “Germ warfare?” Kane asked.

  “Nothing so sinister,” Lakesh said. “It took us a while to get to the bottom of the information we had on it, but it seemed to be developing vaccines to help soldiers in the Gulf conflict, not hurt people.

  “Of course, every vaccine begins with a tiny droplet of the disease that one hopes to cure.”

  Kane tamped down his irritation as he spoke to Brigid. “You kept all this quiet on the ride back,” he said.

  “I had some other things on my mind,” she retorted, and Kane suddenly felt like a louse for bringing it up.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “This guy’s had magistrate training, though,” Kane continued after a moment. “Could see that in the way he fought. He was using those hoses like twin sin eaters. The stances, the movements—it was all there.”

  “Could be an ex-mag like you,” Philboyd pointed out.

  “He knew who we were,” Kane said, thinking of the way the man had identified him and Grant. “Didn’t have any sympathy for our situation. Spoke about passing sentence and bringing judgment.”

  “Do you think he could be a magistrate who somehow got left out in the cold?” Brigid asked.

  “No, he’d be welcomed back in without any problem,” Kane said. “But the way he spoke, that mask he wore—the guy’s not... I dunno. He wouldn’t be let back on the force like that. A psych report would have picked that up and...”

  “And?” Lakesh prompted.

  Kane looked from Brigid to Lakesh to Philboyd, wondering how much he should tell them about the inner workings of the magistrate system. These were his friends now, and he trusted them—more than he could ever trust the magistrates and their ways. Though the secrecy had been drummed into him, it was misplaced loyalty to keep that old trust after all this time. “Back when I was a mag,” Kane began, “they would compile psychometric reports on every serving magistrate at regular intervals. If you were involved on a big operation, especially outside the walls or on triple P—”

  “Triple P?” Philboyd queried.

  “PPP—pedestrian pit patrol,” Brigid clarified. “Checking on the inhabitants of the Tartarus Pits.”

  “—you would be subject to a full psych evaluation,” Kane continued. “These tests were to see how mentally stable you were. Being a magistrate is a demanding job. It can be mentally exhausting, and the things you see while we
aring the uniform can change a man. I’ve seen good men reduced to desk jockeys—no offense, Brewster—and others just quietly let go, never to be heard from again. Those were the ones who ended up in the psych ward, well away from public eyes. Of all the nasty rumors about what happened there; the nicest I heard was that crazy mags got executed, so make of that what you will.”

  “Conjecture,” Brigid began. “Our man is an ex-magistrate who failed a psychometric report and was moved off duty. What would likely have happened?”

  “Psych ward, desk job.” Kane ticked them off on his fingers., “Demoted to civilian, expelled from the ville. There were a lot of options, some I probably never even heard about.”

  “He’s not happy about this,” Brigid said. “He still thinks he’s a mag. So when he ends up outside the ville, he starts making a plan.”

  “What’s the plan?” Kane asked.

  The next thing that Brigid said sent chills down everyone’s spine: “Freeville. That’s the plan.”

  Chapter 18

  Two near-identical vehicles roared across the bleak landscape of the Sonoran Desert, kicking up a dust plume in their wake that could be seen for miles. The follower, a beat-up SandCat with a patched side window and a chunk missing from the driver’s door, perfectly mimicked the lead vehicle, compensating for every turn and bump that its leader negotiated.

  Inside the first machine, his face hidden behind the beaked mask of his sterile suit, DePaul grimaced. The drone SandCat was responding perfectly, clinging six feet from his rear fender with its cargo intact, following him toward Cobaltville. But he could not put the thought of the intruders to his laboratory out of his mind. They were guilty, he reminded himself, recalling the words his mentor, Magistrate Irons, had recited again and again: Everyone’s got a crime to hide if you look deep enough, rookie. Everyone’s a criminal at heart—you just have to know how to look.