by James Axler
“How old are you?” Grant pressed.
Jack laughed at the man’s directness. “Younger than the Annunaki, that’s for sure.”
Kane was beginning to understand, or at least he thought he was. Authentiville was caught in a fractal node between realities; it was a city riding the tides of a cosmic rift. Who knew how his traditional concept of time related to these people? He eyed King Jack again, figuring the man for maybe sixty years old. His wife was perhaps five years younger, but both of them were in such good physical health it was hard to say. Heck, they could be a hundred and sixty—even five hundred and sixty!—and Kane wouldn’t be able to tell.
Below, the city was awash with miraculous devices. Whole walls glowed to illuminate the alleyways, moving walkways ran between the high storys of the buildings, and people navigated the city by all sorts of means, from wheeled boards on which they could barely get both feet, to wild pods arranged in long strings, one after another, like the segments of a worm.
King Jack’s sky disk swooped down towards the industrial sector of the ville.
“Hang on,” Jack advised as he guided the vehicle down among the belching chimneys, their hot vapor clouding in mists.
* * *
AS RONALD DEALT with the sentries on duty in the reception area of the prison block two floors above, Wertham the Strange was chasing through the rooms of his apartment of incarceration after the rogue guard who had eluded him. The lights that glowed across the walls flickered as the control board downstairs was manipulated, giving the incarceration area the feel of being in the center of a fireworks display. Ronald’s doing—to disorient the sentries.
The guard, whose designation was one-nine-seven-one, had dropped his baton. He couldn’t quite process what had happened. It had taken just minutes for the whole situation to spiral out of control. Wertham was a model prisoner, at least in so much as he was the only one to ever exist in the history of Authentiville, and he had never shown any desire to escape. Perhaps he didn’t want to escape now, one-nine-seven-one realized. Perhaps he just wanted to hunt men for sport, just as the royal hunting parties would track deer out in the rooftop plains on the first of the month.
One-nine-seven-one had no weapons now, and was merely endeavoring to create as much space as possible between himself and the deranged chemist. The flickering lights were not helping; his Gene-ager eyes did not respond quickly to changes in illumination, the need had not been foreseen, so that ability had not been factored into his genetics. It was hard to see where he was going, and he ran into a low table in the living area and tripped over a chair as he passed out of the room.
Wertham moved noiselessly behind him, his body flowing like water from room to room as he chased the footsteps of the retreating guard. The sentries had locked the cell complex upon entry, which left the guard in question trapped with Wertham on the prowl. Hundreds of years before, King Jack had forbade any kind of ballistic weaponry, which left the guards relying on sprays and batons—neither of which the guard had about his person now. Naively the three Gene-agers who had come to check on the apparently hurt figure of Wertham the Strange had believed that they could overpower him should the need arise. He was, after all, just one man, and a physically weak one at that. But Wertham had been experimenting with the alien drugs for centuries; he had discovered the fight trance around the time that surface man had invented eyeglasses.
Ducking left, one-nine-seven-one found himself in the bathroom facilities of the locked complex. His breathing was coming fast now as, despite being in prime physical condition, he felt fear for the first time in his artificial life. His partner had had his windpipe crushed, a spewed trail of red running down his face. The other had struck the ceiling with such force it had either cracked his skull or snapped his neck—the guard couldn’t be sure which.
His fervent gaze raced around the bathroom, searching, searching. Maybe there was something here that he could use as a weapon. The hygiene unit was a broad, square structure that immersed the bottom half of the human body. Beside it, the bathtub was shaped like a shell, a jet of water coming from above on vocal command. Nothing there, only cleansing products. The guard couldn’t know that Wertham had used those very products to create his fight trance drug, siphoning and testing them in different combinations, utilizing flecks of the paint that daubed the bathtub to add to the mix as he put his fearsome mind to work for this very day.
The bathroom featured two doorways—the one through which the guard had entered, leading into the living space, and a second one at its far end that led around to a sparse clothing storage area, which in turn led around and into the bedroom once more. There were no closable doors within the prisoner’s apartment; everything was open and everything could be seen.
Nowhere to hide.
He stood with his back to the wall by the second doorway, concentrated to calm his breathing. The guard activated his helmet comm again. “Come in, control—what’s going on down there?” he demanded. His voice sounded harsh and breathless with its edge of panic.
As he did so, a voice echoed through the chambers. It was Wertham. “They call me strange,” he said, “because they fear what they can never understand. Do you fear me?”
The guard clenched, trying to locate the prisoner by the sound of his shrill voice. It was all hard surfaces in the bathroom, causing the sound to bounce with a cruel echo, masking its source. He looked around him, left and right, searching for any sign of the prisoner in the flickering light. Then he saw the shadow, peeping through the doorway like a grim specter.
The guard moved, hurrying toward the shadow, cinching his body against the wall closest to the doorway so that he might ambush Wertham. Both of them were unarmed; he at his physical prime, Wertham a weakling. It should be easy. But he knew it wouldn’t be—he had seen how Wertham moved while possessed by the fight trance, had witnessed the incredible feats he seemed to perform with ease.
The guard’s heart beat against his chest.
Buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom.
Chapter 15
Wertham the Strange stepped through the gap an instant later, head down, arms outstretched, hunkered into himself to present a smaller target and to keep his center of balance low. The Gene-ager guard whipped around, bringing his knee up toward Wertham’s crotch.
The knee struck, missing Wertham’s groin in the flickering illumination but driving against the side of his leg with such force that it would have knocked another man off his feet. As it was, Wertham danced backward, taunting with a brash “Hah-har!” Truly the appellation of “Strange” had been well attributed, one-nine-seven-one thought as he followed up his blow.
Wertham blocked a punch to his face with his forearm, sweeping it away and throwing off his attacker’s balance. His open left hand rushed toward the guard’s disguised face, slapping against his exposed chin with a clap of applause. The guard staggered back, taking two steps away from the wall before catching his heel against the edge of the shell-shaped bathtub. He struggled to remain upright, feeling the sting of that blow to his chin.
Wertham stepped closer, a cruel smile on his thin lips. “You held me here without question,” he said in a voice like a snake’s hiss. “Ignored my pleas. Now you will plead to me, and—trust me—I shall ignore your pleas.”
The guard brought his fists up to strike Wertham again, but Wertham moved faster, brushing them away before driving a vicious kick to the man’s gut.
The guard doubled over with the blow, toppling into the bathtub. Wertham was over him in an instant, clapping his hands against either side of the man’s helmeted head.
“Breathe deep, brother,” Wertham instructed cruelly. And then he gave the command—“bathe”—and the water began to pour from the ceiling-mounted spigot. It came in a torrent, as if the two figures were poised under a waterfall. Wertham bowed his head as the water lashed again
st his shoulders, pulling the guard’s head up until it was directly in the path of the powerful jet of water. The guard spluttered, struggling to breathe as the water drilled against his face with ferocity. Every time his head tipped back Wertham pulled him forward, forcing him to remain in the direct line of the powerful jet of water.
Fifty seconds later, the guard designated one-nine-seven-one was drowning, water filling his lungs. His struggles stopped forty seconds after that, and then his spluttering ceased shortly afterward.
When Wertham let him go, the guard sank beneath the now-filled bath, his body no longer moving, no longer alive.
* * *
“THERE ARE SOME bad people on the rise,” Queen Rosalind intoned softly as she sat on a comfy chair to the side of the Prophecy Room. She was clearly shaken, even though it had been almost ten minutes since she had seen the strange patterns on the receiver screen. Brigid theorized that the user must connect with the machine on a psychic level, similar to the astronavigation chairs she and Kane had sampled. Rosalind’s skin had turned pale, her ruby lips taking on the lighter pink of a blush.
“Can I get you something, Your Majesty?” Brigid asked. “Another glass of water?”
Rosalind looked at her, her neon-blue hair brightening and dimming as if alive. “You’re very kind, Brigid,” she said, pressing her hand against Brigid’s. “Don’t lose that.”
Brigid looked at the woman askance, absorbing what she had just said. “Why...do you say that?” she finally managed.
Queen Roz’s face took on a solemn aspect, and for the first time Brigid truly saw the weight of years in that face. There was wisdom there, and eyes that had seen more than the queen could ever recount. “The life you live, the war you fight—these things can change a person,” Roz said. “But only if they let it.”
Brigid felt the blush of embarrassment rise to her cheeks. Not very long ago, she had been turned by “the war,” as the queen had called it, and had momentarily become a darker aspect of herself, a vile creature called Haight. It had been a combination of brainwashing and regret that had brought upon the Haight persona, but deep in her heart Brigid feared that it might one day return. As Haight, she had shot Kane. He had forgiven her, but if the personality re-emerged, Brigid could only guess at what it would be capable of.
As Brigid’s thoughts wandered, Domi returned with a second glass of water for the queen.
“Your Highness,” said Domi, handing the glass to the neon-haired woman with a respectful dip of her head. She did not seem to have noticed how pale Brigid had gone in the meantime.
Brigid watched as Domi waited on the queen. This was not like Domi—the albino woman was a free spirit. True, she had sold herself into sexual slavery once, years before, in an attempt to become a part of Cobaltville’s protective environment, but that had only given her even more reason to despise any form of servitude. Brigid saw the change then, even as she thought it. Domi was not serving the queen out of obligation or respect. She was doing it because she wanted to be here, to ingratiate herself, to stay. Domi’s words came back to Brigid from just a few minutes before—how she had found her place here in the cosmic rift, how she felt at home among these people with their future technology and strange society. Brigid couldn’t help but wonder if Cerberus had already lost one of their brightest and best warriors.
* * *
“YOU EVER HEARD of an ageless pool?” King Jack asked as he stepped from the sky disk with Kane and Grant.
He had landed the graceful vehicle in an open area before one of the towering factories. The building’s exterior walls were a burnished golden and they caught highlights from the shimmering sky that surrounded the floating city. High above them, three towering chimneys bent upward into the air, not straight but curved like bows, pouring a steady stream of water vapor up into the air. The vapor was clear, misting just a little to create a miragelike heat haze in the air immediately above the industrial district. It struck Kane as a good metaphor for Authentiville in general—the whole golden metropolis had the appearance of a mirage.
Down on the ground, the streets were a rich, reddish-copper color. Up close, Kane and Grant saw that the streets were paved in a mosaic fashion, tiny tiles interlocking to form the surface like pebbles on a beach. It made the streets seem less garish up close.
Besides the royal sky disk, there were other vehicles parked outside the factory, though not as many as Kane would have expected for such a huge facility. In fact, there were barely a dozen other craft parked there, and they included two sky platforms like Jack’s and something that resembled a snail made of metal probing outward in front with a spiraled passenger compartment in the rear that stood eighteen feet high. The snail-thing had wheels with thick tire treads, each wheel coming up as high as the ex-Magistrate’s shoulder.
Despite his suspicions, Kane played dumb as Jack led them across the courtyard and into the factory building. “Ageless pool? I don’t think so.” It was better to let the old man show him than to try to second guess, and maybe reveal something he would have rather kept to himself.
Jack smiled as he strode into a vast, two-story anteroom dominated by towering pillars. Inside the anteroom, the building had a familiar scent. Both Kane and Grant recognized it immediately. It was the smell of a Chalice of Rebirth. The Chalice, or Cauldron, of Rebirth was an Annunaki-Tuatha hybrid design that consisted of a bathing pool into which warriors could dip to repair their wounds. The units had turned up in a few places in mythology, most notably the Irish myth of the Cauldron of Bran. Cerberus field teams had stumbled upon a few of the pools during their travels, and had even employed one to repair one of their colleagues.
The walls here were lit, like those of the palace, by hidden illumination. It created a translucent sheen to the walls, not so bright that it was hard to look at yet radiating enough light to make the place feel welcoming. One peculiar effect of this lighting was that it threw almost no shadows— because light was coming from everywhere, it meant that the shadows it cast were very short, a little like standing out in the midday sun. The effect was momentarily disorienting to Kane and Grant.
There was a single desk in the anteroom, taking up about a quarter of its length along the left-hand wall, like the bar in an old drinking establishment. The desk was manned by two figures—stylized women rendered in a silver metal that seemed almost liquid in nature. As Kane strode past he noted that neither figure had legs. They were propelled along the desk via a swiveling arm-type arrangement just below its surface.
The silver women spoke in near unison. “Good afternoon, Your Highness.”
Still talking with Kane and Grant, King Jack acknowledged the greeting with a vague wave of his gold-gloved hand. “When I came across my first pool I didn’t have clue one what to do with it. Figured out later it could heal wounds. Took us a while to work out how to get one here and get it operational.”
The trio of men walked toward a doorway at the far end of the anteroom. The doorway was nothing more than a gap in the wall reaching all the way from floor to the ceiling sixty feet above. Perspective made it look narrow, but as they neared, the Cerberus men saw that the doorway was almost wide enough to fly a Manta through. As they got closer, they could hear the thrumming sounds of machinery along with the steady drone of voices.
“Through here,” Jack said.
Past the towering doorway was a vast chamber with a sunken center, around which ran a walkway wide enough to drive an automobile or a Sandcat. The sunken area was a quarter mile across and half that again in width, taking up a rectangular space that encompassed most of the high room. It was surrounded by a continuous narrow metal band covered in glyphs and symbols.
Amber liquid bubbled like liquid sunlight in the pit, which was so vast it moved with its own tides. Great cauldrons fed the pool, pouring hundreds of gallons of liquid into the colossal reservoir. There were several dozen peo
ple in the pool, stripped for swimming or bathing, along with several boatlike vessels floating across the golden lake.
“Phew,” Grant whistled. “That’s one mighty big pond.”
King Jack laughed. “It is at that, son, but you’ve probably noticed by now that I never do things by half in my kingdom.”
“You built this?” Kane questioned.
“A lot of people think I did,” Jack told them both with a wink. “That’s why they call me the king. Hey—who am I to say otherwise and shatter people’s illusions? People need heroes, Kane.”
“Then you’re a hero?” Grant asked him.
“We can all be heroes,” Jack told the Cerberus men earnestly. “It just depends on how people choose to tell our stories.”
Together, the group strode across the walkway toward the edge of the ageless pool.
* * *
WERTHAM’S FACE TOOK on the look of sweet serenity as the trance passed. His true mind reengaged with his body, swimming out of the fugue state and back to the real world. He was still standing in the shell-shaped bathtub, the stream of water flowing over his back and shoulders, covering the corpse in the tub at his feet.
“Cease,” he said, pushing back his wet hair from his eyes. Above him the jet of water came to an abrupt stop, no longer filling the exquisitely designed tub.
“Void,” Wertham said.
Openings appeared around the bathtub at the command, like mouths amid the water. The bathtub began to empty, the level of warm water sinking as Wertham stepped over the lip of the tub and down onto the floor.
He left wet footprints as he walked through his apartment prison, making his way back to the bedroom where the guards had first discovered him.
When he reached the bedchamber, Wertham saw the figure waiting on the other side of the barricade. Dr. Ronald was still dressed in his immaculate high-collared uniform, resting in the sleek conveyance he required to transport his body in light of his ruined legs.
