by James Axler
Kane tried to estimate the thing’s size. It towered high above the vehicle itself, adding perhaps half the height of the vehicle again, perhaps more than that—it was hard to tell with the white painted exterior against the snow-thick sky.
And the snow was thick. Really thick, like looking into the glass bowl of a popcorn maker, thicker by far than it had been at ground level. Kane realized with a start just why that was—the chimney was billowing a white plume of snow high above, blasting a chill jet into the air above the vehicle as it trundled along on its indefatigable path.
“It’s making snow,” Kane muttered, the words lost to the roiling roar of the mechanism before him.
He watched for a moment as the broad chimneylike structure continued to belch snow into the sky above him. The jet blasted high into the air like something at a fireworks display, and Kane realized that only a small offshoot of that snow jet was falling down on him—most of it was being channeled far higher into the atmosphere, generating a continuous stream of white flecks.
But why, Kane wondered, would anyone want to make snow?
It didn’t make sense.
The answers, he realized, had to be below, inside the cab of this one-of-a-kind machine. Kane looked around him, searching for a way inside.
As he looked, the vehicle lurched over a bump in the ground, and Kane was thrown a half-dozen paces around the rooftop until he found himself scrambling for purchase, his legs dangling over the side. He clung there as the vehicle trundled on, reassuring himself that it had righted its path over whatever had got in its way.
Then he pulled himself back on board and scrambled across the snow-wet rooftop, keeping his head down and his body low. His breath came behind him in huffed clouds of vapor while Kane tracked around the chimney.
He figured there had to be a way in from up here—an access hatch for repairing the chimney itself. Sure enough, there was. A covered manhole lay at the front of the vehicle just beyond the edge of the chimney, painted white like everything else on the vehicle, with a bar-type handle secured beside it to assist anyone who climbed up here. Kane crept toward it.
* * *
HIDDEN AMONG THE tiny group of trees, Brigid spun as another dart whipped through the air before her. The dart glanced against her chest, but the strong weave of the shadow suit deflected it, butting it away so that it landed on the snowy ground, its energy spent.
Got to disarm them, Brigid told herself as she raised her blaster and located one of the hidden figures amid the whiteness. The TP-9 bucked in her hand as she fired, sending a single 9 mm bullet into the white-clad figure’s leg with a sound like thunder. Brigid watched in grim satisfaction as the figure pirouetted and fell to the ground, a tiny spray of blood crossing the air in a flurry of red beads.
But she was too slow—another figure had reached Brigid, perfectly camouflaged in his mirrored outfit, and swiped at her with an outthrust leg. Brigid heard the movement at the same time that she felt the blow strike her behind the knee, and she went tumbling forward, her pistol blasting a useless stream of bullets ahead of her as her finger clenched involuntarily on the trigger.
Brigid struck the snow chin-first, but it was soft, forgiving. She rolled onto her back in an instant, scissoring out with her legs to try to catch her attacker before he got out of range. Liquid fire seemed to burn through her left knee in protest as she moved the leg where her attacker had connected, but she ignored it, sweeping her leg into his feet as he tried to sidestep.
Brigid saw a blur of whiteness, heard the sudden flump as her attacker caromed off the ground. She sprung across to him, drawing the TP-9 around to target the face obscured behind the all-encompassing hood. As she looked at it, she saw only her own face, distorted and red-cheeked, reflected in the uneven mirror.
“Who are you?” Brigid spat. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
The man—and she was certain that it was a man now, beneath all that mirrored material—drove his knee up and into Brigid’s gut, catching her just below the rib cage. She fell back, gasping for breath.
“I have her,” the man announced, saying the words loudly as he pulled himself up to a kneeling position.
Brigid sucked in a breath, the cold air burning her throat and lungs. Beside her, the figure in the camouflaged outfit drew one of the white-painted pistols from a buckled holster at his side, raising it mechanically toward Brigid’s prone form.
Brigid grimaced, her eyes narrow as she fought against the pain in her belly and knee. Grant was out there, unconscious and unprotected, and here she was, struggling to draw breath, no use to him.
“Kane, I—” she began, firing up the Commtact without a conscious thought.
The man in the mirrored clothes blasted her then, sending another of those strange dart-like projectiles at Brigid where she lay helpless. It drilled into her chest, just to the left of her breastbone, its tip penetrating the strong weave of the shadow suit beneath her pale jacket.
“—need...” Brigid continued, forcing the words out as the dart released a powerful drug through her system. The next word didn’t want to come and so she lay there, helpless, as the insubstantial shapes of her attackers moved closer, weaving through the trees. “...help,” she managed at last before dropping into the frightening and hollow darkness of drug-induced unconsciousness.
Designated Task #013: Child Care
Child care is performed on Beta Level. And is the responsibility of all citizens of Ioville, although some have the designed task as their main duty. I provide support during three morning shifts a week, before I clock in for my main role at Designated Task #004.
The children are schooled and disciplined through to age eleven, at which point they have gained maturity and join the workforce.
Education is conducted via light screen and private audio, meaning my role is purely as supervisor and to ensure no sickness or other disruption affects the classroom of the six-year-olds assigned to me. Other than the whisper of the private audio leaking through the earphones, the room is silent and, as such, calming. I take these shifts willingly, allowing my thoughts to wander. Sometimes I think back to the man whom I met on the day I was assigned my new apartment, the man with broad shoulders and blue-gray eyes, whose anxiousness seemed to rage like fire. I wonder: Whatever became of him?
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 9
The towering vehicle trundled over the icy terrain, its broad chimney spewing cool snow up into the atmosphere. Kane hurried over to the manhole on its rooftop and ran his fingers along the edges. He searched for a moment, feeling at the seam with his gloved hands, cold from the punishing weather and losing a little sensation even despite the best efforts of his shadow suit to keep his core temperature regulated.
It took ten seconds to find a gap in the cover wide enough to slip three fingers in, another five to pull and push it until he had figured which way the hatch moved. It opened inward, Kane discovered, flapping down on a hinge that dropped it inside the body of the vehicle itself before locking against the wall with some kind of magnetic seal, holding it in place to the opposite side from the rooftop handle.
Kane peered down into the open hatchway. The hatch was rectangular and opened into a circular tunnel that dropped straight down into the body of the vehicle, disappearing into darkness after a half-dozen feet or so.
“Belly of the beast,” Kane muttered to himself as he grasped the handle and swung himself down into the vertical tunnel. A moment later, he had slipped beneath roof level, snow swirling after him in his wake. He chose to leave the hatchway open—he didn’t know what to expect down there, and standard protocol was to leave himself with an escape route.
The tunnel was narrow and cold, with slick sides and a single ladder that Kane estimated ran almost the full height of the towering vehicle until he was almost back at ground le
vel. It made sense—most of the vehicle must have been taken up by that colossal chimney that utterly dominated the roof, and its pumping system would most likely take up almost all of the strange-looking vehicle itself.
It was loud, too, almost deafening, in fact, where the mechanics that ran the pump—or whatever it was that was generating all that snow—churned behind the wall at Kane’s back.
Kane moved quickly, his muscles pumping efficiently as he clambered down the lone ladder that was molded into the wall.
As he neared the bottom, Kane slowed his pace and listened, his feet still higher than the bottom of the ladder where they might be seen. Some might observe that it was a vain hope that Kane might somehow detect someone waiting just below him in the chamber that the tunnel opened into. But those observers would not have known about Kane’s fabled pointman sense, a seemingly supernatural ability to detect danger before it appeared. It was not supernatural, however. Like everything else in Kane’s repertoire, it was the product of many hours of training and drilling, dating all the way back to his days as a Magistrate in distant Cobaltville. Another life, almost another world—but still Kane relied on the things he had learned there, the tricks he had perfected in the name of survival.
For a moment, all Kane could hear was the loud hum of the mechanism powering the chimney, a great bass thrumming that shook through his bones and in his chest cavity. Perfectly still on the ladder, Kane filtered that noise out, listened more intently for something—anything—else. After a moment he picked up a familiar sound, the low hum of fans cooling electronic machinery. There was a pip of electronic chatter, then relative silence once more as the vehicle continued on its journey. Kane could not detect anything else.
Confident that he was not walking into an ambush, Kane clambered down the final few rungs of the ladder, keeping his movements economical and appreciably silent despite the loud whir of fans and pumps just a few feet behind the metal wall at his back. He dropped into a crouch at the bottom, commanding the Sin Eater back into his hand as he landed.
Like the access tunnel, it was unlit here, too.
Kane reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled free what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses, which he slipped over the bridge of his nose. The glasses had specially coated polymer lenses and were designed to draw every available iota of light to create an image of whatever was around the viewer, acting as a kind of proxy night vision. Kane scanned the area through the polymer lenses, allowing them to gather the light.
The change was immediate. The walls came into sudden sharp relief through the miraculous lenses. Kane was in a small chamber, its ceiling just five feet high, low enough that he would need to duck if he tried to walk upright. It was an access area, nothing more, linking the rest of the vehicle to the access tunnel leading to the roof hatch. The walls were plain, flat and straight in a hexagonal pattern, with enough space for two men to work with maybe a little space between them. The chamber featured a cupboard on one wall with an open handle—the kind one puts one’s finger in to pull the door open.
The chamber also featured a single doorway, round like a porthole, that a user would have to crouch to step through. Kane peered through the doorway briefly, jabbing his head through the partition for a moment before darting back inside. A corridor ran from the porthole into the depths of the vehicle, unlit but shown in stark relief care of the polymer lenses. The corridor was bland and empty, with blank walls lined with thick pipes.
Kane turned back to the chamber he was in, reaching down for the cupboard. Kane tried it, stepping back just far enough to let the door swing a few inches from the wall. Inside was a fire extinguisher with a small shelf above it. The shelf contained a little case, which Kane pulled out and opened. Inside was a basic repair kit, screwdrivers, a sealed pack of spare screws, a container of multifunction oil, rubber bands and a few other items that could come in handy when making a temporary fix on a machine. There was nothing particularly telling or useful to Kane’s current situation, however.
Leaving the contents of the cupboard in place, Kane stepped out through the porthole-like doorway and into the corridor beyond. Pipes ran along both walls, many of them over a foot thick. He touched one of the pipes—it was ice-cold.
Kane made his way along the corridor and stopped when he reached its end. An open doorway waited there, once again round like a porthole. Kane held his blaster ready and listened once more, feeling out with his pointman sense.
Nothing.
He was certain that he was alone. Almost certain, anyway. There was always a chance that this vehicle had a driver—in fact, that would have been Kane’s assumption. But even discounting the roar of the processing plant contained within the body of the vehicle itself, he could detect no voices, no sounds of breathing or any of the other unconscious-body noises a person makes even at rest.
He stepped through into the main chamber of the vehicle.
* * *
BRIGID AWOKE IN the back of a moving Sandcat—a land vehicle favored by Magistrates with a wide holding area inside and an abbreviated ladder leading up to a rooftop turret. The Sandcat was an armored vehicle with a low-slung, blocky chassis supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks. Its exterior was a ceramic armaglass compound that could shrug off small-arms fire, and it featured a swiveling gun turret up top armed with twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns.
The dart had contained some kind of sedative, Brigid realized groggily, replaying her last conscious memory in her mind’s eye as she lay against the cold metal floor of the Sandcat.
She was slumped against the vehicle’s wall, her blaster no longer in its holster pressing against her hip, the side of her face pressed against the cold metal floor. There was a figure sitting beside her, dressed in the strange reflective suit of her attackers—presumably one of them. He had the hood down and the mask off, showing the face of a young man with close-cropped black hair and a scar down the left-hand side of his face, a quarter inch wide of his eye. He held his leg out before him, a bloody smear showing on the torn material there, so Brigid figured he was one of the ones she had shot. The man’s teeth were clenched, lips pulled back as he massaged his knee.
Carefully, conscious of the enemy sitting beside her, Brigid tried turning her head and found she couldn’t. Whatever was in that dart was still racing around her system, leaving her paralyzed. Her chest felt tight, mouth dry. It would pass, she knew; no one used a tranquilizer dart in that situation unless they wanted their victim alive.
She took some time then just analyzing her situation. Her eyes could still move, although they felt gritty and tired. The top of her head was facing the direction of travel, which made it hard for her to see up front when she couldn’t move her neck. She rolled her eyes up and to the side, taking in what she could from the angle. There were two seats up front of the Sandcat, driver and passenger. Both were occupied by men in the reflective camo suits. They traveled in silence, only the growl of the engine accompanying their path across the settled snow.
So, three hostiles in all—one wounded.
She was sure there had been six attackers in the trees, though, which meant three of the enemy were unaccounted for. That suggested another Sandcat, splitting the group in two. Brigid knew that a three-man crew in a Sandcat was SOP for Magistrates. Were these people Mags, then?
Outside, through the windshield, Brigid could see the snow, a great blanket of white with more snow falling in great flurries across the glass.
She shifted her gaze until she spotted the other figure in the back—Grant, a dusting of snow at the edges of his goatee beard, eyes closed in sleep. He had been knocked out good by his altercation with the tree, and it was entirely possible he had been drugged since then when these strangers had grabbed them both.
Brigid tried to hail him on her Commtact but she found she could not work her mouth muscles enough to even subvocalize a me
ssage to him. The best she could manage was to click her tongue a few times against the roof of her mouth, and she received no response over the hidden Commtact behind her cochlear.
So she lay there, helpless and cold as the Sandcat bumped over the rugged terrain. Wherever you are, Kane, Brigid thought, I hope you can help.
* * *
KANE CLAMBERED INTO the cab of the huge vehicle with the belching chimney stack. The cab was unmanned, though it featured a single seat placed centrally amid a semicircle of information screens and controls.
Warily, Kane paced across the space to the seat, checking behind him—behind the door—in case he was walking into an ambush. There was no one present.
Kane leaned over the console, eyeing the controls. There were five glass-fronted screens, showing computer displays and a radar feed, along with several pressure gauges with wavering needles shaking like wagging fingers behind their glass. There were no windows in the room, no windshield through which a passenger might look out from—just the screens, their twinkling lights casting the only illumination in the room.
Carefully, Kane sat in the seat and looked more closely at the controls. He was not an engineer but he recognized a diagnosis feed on one of the screens. It showed a wire-frame plan of a tower containing a pumping unit at its base, and it took Kane just a moment to conclude what it was—the chimney.
It was a snow machine, he realized now, the great bulk of the vehicle dedicated to the intake and cooling of water vapor, which it then expelled as flecks of ice, generating artificial snow. In large enough quantities that ice could affect the weather in the immediate area, possibly enough to create the snowstorm that Cerberus had identified as dominating this region for over a year. But that surely would take more of these chimneys and perhaps something more substantial, Kane reckoned—which meant that there was every chance there were more of these weird “snow wags” trawling the plains.
He activated his Commtact automatically, patching through to Cerberus in an instant. “Think I’ve found the source of our weather pattern,” he said. “Acknowledge.”
