by James Axler
A few taps of his keyboard and Philboyd had called up the older footage. Once again, the storm was in the exact same spot. They went back further over the next two hours, checking the records going back not just weeks but months. The surveillance satellite had monitored this point every day as part of its routine sweep pattern, and every day showed the same clouds in place. On some days, it would be sunny around the storm, while on others it would be so cloudy all around that they could not pick out the specific clouds that made up the storm. But over time, Lakesh and Philboyd reached the somewhat unsettling conclusion that here, on one single point on the planet, the same storm had been playing out for not just months but possibly years.
“A never-ending storm,” Lakesh said with gravity. “Incredible.”
“But not impossible,” Philboyd stated. “The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is the eye of a gigantic storm—the largest in the solar system—and our records suggest it has run for centuries.”
“But on Earth, with our wind patterns and atmospheric changes...?” Lakesh wondered.
“A holdover from the nukecaust?” Philboyd proposed. The nuclear holocaust had done dreadful things to the Earth’s weather patterns. Holdovers were rare but they did occasionally happen, particularly in areas of high radiation.
Lakesh scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What else do we know about this area?” he asked aloud.
“Right now? Not a lot,” Philboyd confirmed. “There has been no reason to pay it particular scrutiny—”
“There’s your reason, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh said, pointing at the storm cloud on his screen. “Get scrutinizing.”
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, the team regathered in the meeting room, where Lakesh and Bry brought them up to speed with what had been discovered.
“The first reference to the coordinates appears in a backup database from Ragnarville, in a file dating back three and a half years,” Lakesh explained. “The reference is minor and the information attached to it encrypted—”
“The file encryption was a beast,” Donald Bry said, taking up the story, “and we had a lot of trouble getting past it. So much so that I decided to run a search on one of the other databases. To my surprise, the same file with the same encryption appeared on the database of Baron Cobalt.”
“Same encryption means no joy, I take it,” Grant observed sourly.
“But,” Lakesh said, “it meant something. If two barons were looking at the same data, it meant they were collaborating.”
Kane shook his head. “Where is all this going, Lakesh? The barons are dead now.”
“They are, but their legacy is still with us,” Lakesh pointed out. “And what Donald here discovered may be a rather big part of that legacy.”
“So pull the trigger already,” Kane said impatiently.
Bry paused for a moment before replying. “Baron Cobalt’s database was locked just like Ragnar’s, so I tried checking through the other baronial databases. In the Snakefishville database—now Luilekkerville of course—I found the same coordinates attached to something called Terminal White.”
“And who or what is Terminal White?” Brigid asked.
“That is a mystery,” Donald admitted, “but a fascinating one. Once we had the Snakefish link I could backtrack into the Ragnarville and Cobalt databases and look for a link. The phrase ‘Terminal White’ appears in all of them, relating to an area to the north of their territories. It would appear to be a shared project involving all three barons—at least—working together toward some undefined goal.”
“Three-way power grab, maybe?” Kane mused.
Brigid nodded warily. “Hmm, perhaps they were collaborating to take over the other baronies, then split them among themselves. And that all fell apart when the snake gods emerged, changing the stakes.”
“Not just the stakes,” Kane reminded her, “but the rules of the whole darn shooting match.”
Kane turned back to Bry and Lakesh, a look of concern on his face. “So, did you find anything else?”
Bry shook his head regretfully. “We’re still running checks, trying to burrow into the data. We’ve scanned the databases of each of the baronies, well, as much as we can access at this stage. We have the name or term, but everything else is encrypted like a ticking time bomb—if we push too hard we’ll wipe the data entirely.”
“And with a lot of that data already lost or ransacked after the fall of the baronies,” Lakesh said, “much of Donald’s information is already coming from old files that would be regarded as ‘lost.’”
“The data is very high-level security,” Bry added. “I suspect a lot of this information was carried person to person, baron to baron, and not stored on any database. What little we have uncovered is purely relating to the site, but the coordinates and the site match up both with each other and with the storm we’ve observed in satellite surveillance.”
“The barons are gone,” Kane said grimly. “Any research project they started should have shut down, too. Shouldn’t it?”
Brigid shook her head. “Kane, you know we’re going to have to look,” she said. “Don’t try to find a way out of it—that’s beneath you.”
Kane ground his teeth in irritation. “I want to protect people—not databases,” he muttered.
“They’ll come,” Grant told him. “They always do.”
Designated Task #011: Cleaning
Each resident of Ioville is expected to exhibit a professional level of cleanliness at all times. The cleanliness of the ville is paramount and is the responsibility of every citizen.
After my manufacturing shift—nine hours with three designated breaks—I am assigned ville cleaning duties with another citizen, named Citizen 058F—a woman like me.
Our duties involve checking the factories and walkways of Epsilon Level, cleaning and sterilizing all walls and floors, checking and sterilizing the stairwells and elevators in the west tower, checking and sterilizing the linking walkways between west and north towers, cleaning and maintaining fire safety equipment, collecting and labeling any debris larger than a fingernail so that it may be retained and analyzed, and assisting in the cleaning of all personnel exiting manufactory 8.
Once our circuit is completed, another team takes our place to begin cleaning again while we are designated as off-shift. At this stage, we are stripped and sent through the personnel cleaning facility at factory 8 to ensure that we have not picked up any rogue dirt or dangerous debris. Once we are clean, we are expected to return to our residences. Citizen 058F resides in a block close to my own, and so we travel together via trolleybus. We do not discuss where she works during the day, preferring to sit in composed silence as the bus makes its circuit of the ville. She gets off one stop before me.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 6
At dawn the next morning, two sleek bronze-hued aircraft cut across the skies over the former province of Alberta in the western part of Canada. The craft were known as Mantas, aircraft designed in ancient prehistory by an alien race and capable of phenomenal acceleration and other feats, including subspace travel. They had emerged from a hidden hangar in the Cerberus redoubt at a little before dawn, launching one after another and veering northward in perfect formation.
Identical in appearance, the Mantas were constructed from a bronze-hued metal whose liquid sheen glimmered in the early-morning sunlight. Their graceful designs consisted of flattened wedges with swooping wings curving out to either side of the body in mimicry of the seagoing manta, and it was this similarity that had spawned their popularised name of Manta Craft. Each Manta’s wingspan was twenty yards and their body length was almost fifteen, but it was the beauty of their design that was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming, burned-gold finish. The entire surface of each craft
was decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. Each vehicle featured an elongated hump in the center of the body which provided the only indication of a cockpit.
Inside those cockpits sat three individuals. Piloting each craft were Kane and Grant, dressed in their shadow suits, their heads hidden behind the almost-spherical, bulb-like helmets that were built into the pilot seats of each vehicle. The interior was small and simple, with very few displays showing other than a few indicator lights. Rather, the dashboards existed in virtual space, projected onto the pilot’s retina using the heads-up technology of the weird-looking helmets.
The third occupant of the Mantas was Brigid Baptiste, sitting in the backseat of Kane’s vehicle, where she was using a portable tablet computer to analyze the local weather patterns and generally familiarize herself with the local climate and terrain. It wasn’t necessary, of course—she had already gone through all of the material the night before and her eidetic memory ensured she would not forget so much as a single detail. And yet, nervousness or perhaps that human instinct that one might have missed something made Brigid check the material again while running through scenarios in her head.
“You okay back there, Baptiste?” Kane asked, raising his voice slightly over the low hum of the Manta’s engine. The Manta utilised two different types of engines, depending on the specific flying that was required of it. One was a ramjet while the other was a solid fuel pulse detonation, which was useful for work outside the planet’s atmosphere. Neither was especially noisy, however, and Kane raised his voice more out of habit and the weird feeling of his skull being encased and muffled by the helmet rather than any real need. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“Just thinking,” Brigid said as the Manta cut through the cold air high over Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies.
“What do you think we’re going to find?” Kane asked, making conversation. “Another baron?”
“I don’t like to speculate,” Brigid said.
“Go on, speculating’s fun,” Kane encouraged.
“I hope we find nothing,” Brigid said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Yeah, that’s the adventurous spirit we’ve all come to admire in you, Baptiste,” Kane teased.
The two Mantas sped on, cutting through the cold air like knives through cloth.
* * *
THE SNOWSTORM LOOMED up ahead like an angry ghost. Dark clouds haunted the sky, thick as smoke from a fire, a thick sheet of white snow descending from them coupled with spits of razor-sharp ice. It was almost like a curtain draped across the landscape, a thick line that no one in their right mind would try to cross.
Leading to that ominous curtain was the desolate wilderness of Canada, ravines and sweeping plains, streaks of thick forest that thinned out as they approached the static storm. Down there, occasional animals could be seen flitting among the trees, birds taking wing.
Kane and Grant brought their sleek Manta aircraft toward the snow curtain on a low approach, observing the landscape carefully, searching for signs of life. Other than the occasional wolf or raccoon there was nothing but trees and scrub dappled with icy snow.
The Mantas could travel in subspace and under the sea, so neither pilot had any fear of entering the snowstorm. Their only concern was the lack of visibility it ensured, leaving them entirely reliant on their crafts’ formidable scanning capabilities.
Grant’s voice patched over their linked Commtacts. “Nothing happening so far,” he stated. “Looks clear.”
Watching his heads-up displays, Kane nodded. “Displays are clear,” he confirmed.
And yet there was something eerily uncanny about the storm, seen from high up and this far out. It really was like a curtain, a thick line delineating one part of the terrain from another. If what Cerberus had discovered was true—that this spot had been encased in this storm for years—then it was anyone’s guess what they might find within.
Kane sent more power to his engines, accelerating toward the thick white curtain of snow. A moment later the two bronze aircraft had disappeared within.
* * *
IT WAS MOMENTARILY STRANGE. Moving from light and normality into a world the only description of which was one word: white.
Snow fell, thick lines of it fluttering diagonally across the Mantas’ windshields, painting everything the same shade of white. People wear black at funerals, thought Brigid, but white is more somber, more chilling. When seen like this, a great expanse of nothing but white and cold, that is the picture of death, the way it overwhelms and demolishes and rewrites.
The Mantas hurtled on, crossing the vast expanse of land hidden by the blizzard, their sensor displays showing the flat terrain stretching out before them.
“There’s nothing here,” Kane muttered, triggering his Commtact automatically.
“Nothing on my side, either,” Grant confirmed. “Just snow.”
The Mantas hurtled onward, crossing the dull white landscape, ice thrown against their wings and bodies. Below, the land seemed unchanging. Whatever it had once been was hidden beneath the blanket of masking white.
“Kane,” Grant radioed, “I’m picking up a heat signature on our ten.”
Kane had seen the same heat signature appear on his own heads-up display even as Grant began to speak. “I see it,” he confirmed. “You want to give it a closer look?”
“You know I do,” Grant replied.
“Yeah, anything to break the monotony,” Kane agreed.
Without breaking formation, the two Mantas vectored toward the ten o’clock, chasing the mysterious heat signature amid the falling snow.
* * *
THE SOURCE OF the heat signature proved hard to pinpoint—not least because it was hidden by the curtain of falling snow. After a few sweeps across the general area of the source, Kane proposed landing and checking the area on foot to verify whatever it was that was pumping out warmth. His colleagues agreed and within a couple of minutes the Cerberus team had brought their sleek Mantas down in the vertical landings that the incredible vehicles were geared for, dropping out of the sky like stones.
Kane drew back the hatch of his Manta and took a breath of the cold air. The cold burned against the back of his throat as he breathed in, and he had to blink back tears. While the shadow suit would regulate his body temperature, there was only so much it could cover, and inhaling freezing-cold air is still inhaling freezing-cold air.
The snow was falling thickly, cutting vision down to just a few feet.
“Brisk day for a walk,” Grant called as he strode across the snow from his own Manta toward Kane’s. He materialized through the white curtain of snow like a shadow coming suddenly to life. He had dressed in a long leather-style coat over his shadow suit, with thick-soled combat boots to augment the shadow suit’s built-in foot molds that were more like hard socks. The top of the boots could barely be seen, for the snow here was compact but deep. Grant’s coat was made from a Kevlar/Nomex mix, making it both flame retardant and able to repel bullets. It didn’t make Grant invulnerable, but it gave him an edge at least. The last item that Grant wore was a woollen hat to cover his shaved head. The hat was black, matching the rest of his outfit.
“Damn brisk,” Kane agreed as he and Brigid exited the cockpit, sealing the hatch behind him.
Consulting the tablet’s portable scanner, the three Cerberus warriors trudged through the snow toward the heat source. Brigid’s hair fluttered wildly in the wind, as did the tails of Grant’s duster. Kane had dressed in a shorter jacket over his shadow suit, its pockets giving him extra storage space, along with a belt, which contained a half-dozen pouches within which he had stored his usual armory of flashbangs and miniexplosives.
“Could be under the snow,” Kane suggested as they looked around, mystified, for the heat source.
>
“No,” Brigid said, checking the details on her scanner. “Whatever’s emanating heat is moving...slowly, but it’s moving.”
Kane looked at the tablet screen, swiftly making sense of the icons. “There,” he said, pointing a little way to their right.
Before Kane had lowered his hand, something large and white came barreling out of the snow curtain toward them from the right. It was like a curved wall, wider than a house, and was accompanied by the growl of a mighty engine.
Designated Task #007: Food Preparation
I am assigned to Delta Level for two days every week once my shift at Designated Task #004 has finished. There, I am tasked to prepare meals for the ville, specifically for my tower. This involves cleaning, peeling and chopping vegetables and fruit before they are mulched together in a nutritious paste-like gruel. The gruel smells strongly during preparation. On my first occasion I waited forty minutes until my allocated break, at which point I left the room and vomited, the smell too much. I have trained myself to be better now, but it is all I can do to keep myself from vomiting while I wash and chop and peel, such is the sweet malodor of the mashed components.
The food is portioned into small trays, which are then distributed to the canteens around the ville. The serving of the food is a separate Designated Task, #008.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 7
Twenty feet wide and painted white, the unit was perfectly camouflaged for the environment. The noise of the engine should have given the behemoth’s approach away, but the thick snow had muffled it almost entirely until it had reached within a dozen feet of the Cerberus warriors.
Kane leaped one way, Grant and Brigid the other as the massive unit came barreling at them, accompanied by a churning engine noise that boomed like thunder in the mountains.
Kane rolled and brought himself back up as the vehicle passed, his Sin Eater appearing without conscious thought in the palm of his hand. He was tracking the monster machine as it trundled away, automatically activating his Commtact as he watched it disappear behind the camouflaging curtain of falling snow. “Check in—everyone okay?” he asked.
