by James Axler
* * *
AFTER THAT IT was just a mop-up operation.
The walker’s driver had survived, but he was badly burned and had been shaken up to the point that he could hardly string a sentence together. The walker itself was nothing more than a burned-out shell.
Domi, Brigid and Kane had all survived, although they each sported a few scrapes and bruises from the adventure, and Kane’s left shoulder complained a little when he tried to raise his arm above his head, causing him to wince.
The other members of the road crew didn’t fare as well. The gunner who had worked with Brigid had been caught by the heat ray and was now nothing more than hanging, ash-black flesh on charred bones, and Kane’s gunner had died instantly when his vehicle had split apart. The others had some cuts, but they had mostly survived intact.
Two-thirds of the cargo that the wags had been carrying had survived, although the wags were shot, meaning that Ohio Blue would need to source more transportation before the mercy op could be completed. “Grain keeps, my sweet prince,” she told Kane when he spoke to her via radio comm. “At least we know the next journey through this pass will be less fraught. More important, when might I see you to thank you in person? My gratitude is overflowing, you know.”
Kane passed on that offer. Blue had always been flirtatious with him, and her affection for him, whether or not it was reciprocated, gave Kane—and Cerberus—a useful contact in the darker underworld that existed outside the villes. For now he would keep Ohio at a safe distance, without actively discouraging her. “No point breaking a pretty woman’s heart,” he told Brigid as they gathered themselves up for the trip back home.
Brigid gave a bark of sarcastic laughter in response. “You couldn’t break a woman’s heart if you tried,” she told him.
Kane had the good sense to look wounded rather than to argue. He could not face another fight today, not even a verbal one.
Ohio would be sending another vehicle shortly to salvage what she could and pick up her surviving team. While they waited, the trio of Cerberus warriors looked across the fields where the altercation had played out. Smoke billowed from the carcass of the walker vehicle, and trailed here and there from the wrecked wags and tracts of soil that had been caught up in the battle.
“Guess it’s time to go home,” Domi said as they retrieved their belongings, which included an operational interphaser, from the wrecked wags.
“Guess so,” Kane agreed while Brigid calculated where the closest parallax point was through which they could teleport themselves home. “Baptiste, what’s the news?”
Brigid peered up from her calculations and flashed him a tired smile. “It’s a ten-mile walk to the nearest parallax point,” she said. “And when I say ten, I’m trying to make it sound closer than it really is.”
Kane sighed with resignation. “So,” he said cheerily as the group began the long trek to their jump point, “does anyone want to guess how much more fun Grant’s having than us on his vacation?”
Chapter 8
The Pretors obtained a register of who had been at the hotel at the time of the incident, but the records were inexact. There was a register for who had booked in, of course, but no definitive record of how many people had come to the dance. City fire regulations required only that a cap be placed on the number of people in a room, not that each was logged in or out.
Thus, it was assumed—wrongly—that the people found hanging at the scene had been the only ones who had died. However, there had been in fact three more deaths: a young couple honeymooning in the city, and an older woman who had returned here for the first time in a decade and had happened upon the “dance sinister” by chance when she had been searching for the hotel’s restaurant.
All three had died, but their bodies were shuttled elsewhere, to let blood. Blood was needed. The why would come later.
Chapter 9
Grant had been left alone in the Pretor interview room where he was provided with water and allowed an escorted rest break before the lights were dimmed. The room was warm but not uncomfortably so, so Grant removed his jacket while he was uncuffed to use the restroom, and he hitched it over his shoulders for the rest of the night while he waited for Corcel to come back to him. He had no doubt that his story would check out, so he put that to the back of his mind and thought instead about the hanging bodies and the strange people he had seen in the alleyway behind the hotel.
It was impossible to guess at what he and Shizuka had stumbled upon. He had none of the facts, and reading between the lines he suspected that there was a lot that the local Magistrates—or Pretors—were not telling him right now. One thing seemed clear—they had seen this kind of activity before, presumably recently, and had eyewitnesses to at least one of the possible perpetrators, a man whose description matched Grant’s to some degree. That could be one of the men he had seen, the bare-chested brutes who had thrown the lethal razor discs.
By three in the morning, Grant was pretty certain that he was not being observed. He was still sitting at the table, his head resting on his outstretched arm, eyes closed as if in sleep. He was alone in the room, but he could see there were cameras watching the interview room at all times. He made an educated guess that those cameras were recording and monitoring the cell twenty-four hours a day and that someone was watching that feed—along with a number of others. But three in the morning was that time when even the most diligent of Mags gets bored and their attention starts to wander. Grant figured he could take a chance and maybe get a message out to Cerberus. Sitting there, Grant engaged his hidden Commtact and subvocalized a question.
“Cerberus, this is Grant,” he hissed. “Have run into some trouble. Please respond.”
There was a momentary pause before a Cerberus operator called Farrell answered. “Receiving you loud and clear,” Farrell said. “What’s the trouble?”
Grant gave a brief outline of what had occurred, of how he and Shizuka had walked into what appeared to be a mass murder scene and how he had subsequently been arrested for the crime.
“You need backup sent?” Farrell asked over the Commtact link, his words vibrating through Grant’s skull casing.
“Not at this stage,” Grant decided. “Is Kane there?” Kane had been Grant’s partner in the Magistrates for years, before the two of them had become field agents for the Cerberus organization. They were a solid partnership, along with the third member of their trio—Brigid Baptiste—and were often considered inseparable by their fellow operatives.
“Kane is on-site,” Farrell confirmed. “Just got back and probably sleeping off his last mission. You want me to hail him?”
“No, I can do that,” Grant said thoughtfully. “Just speak to him when he’s awake and tell him to stay ready. We may need him on this side of the pond.”
“Roger that,” Farrell confirmed. “Anything else?”
“Get Brigid and Lakesh and replay them the description I gave to you of the strangers I chased,” Grant said. “Let me know if anything there rings a bell.”
“Will do,” Farrell agreed before signing off.
In the aftermath of the conversation, Grant tried his best to relax his mind and get some much-needed sleep.
* * *
MORNING CAME, AND with it the news that Cáscara had tracked down the restaurant owner as he opened up his café for the day. Emiliana Cáscara showed him her Pretor badge and explained whom she was looking for information about. The ruddy-cheeked owner nodded.
“Si, Si,” he said as he poured her a black coffee from the machine. “Two Americans, didn’t drink any wine. Typical Americans—ate fast, somewhere to rush off to.”
Cáscara nodded thoughtfully as she stirred cream into her coffee. “Can you confirm what time they were here, and when they left?” she asked.
The café owner pondered this for a moment, then snapped his fingers in recollection. “They were here less than two hours and they arrived late,” he explained. “Their table was booked for eight and the pret
ty lady was very apologetic about their lateness, but I assured her it did not matter to me and to enjoy themselves. They would have left a little before ten. This door,” he added, pointing to the main doors of the café.
“Ten,” Cáscara said thoughtfully. “That puts them… Yes, that works.”
The café owner looked at her and smiled. “You want to stay for breakfast, Pretor?”
“Want to—yes,” Cáscara told him as she stood up. “Going to—no.”
“You’re welcome back here anytime,” the owner told her as the dark-haired Pretor left the café.
CÁSCARA RETURNED TO the Sector Hall of Justice for Zaragoza and passed her findings over to her partner, Juan Corcel.
“They’re a strange couple,” Corcel mused, “but the woman’s story certainly checks out.”
“You still think they had something to do with the deaths?” Cáscara probed.
Corcel shook his head slowly as he pondered her question. “No, but I do think there’s more to these two than meets the eye. The woman’s too graceful, too poised. And the man, Grant—he freely admitted to being an ex-Magistrate. I just couldn’t get a lead on what it is he does now.”
“Lot of work for ex-Mags,” Cáscara mused. “You think he’s a merc on business out here?”
“The pattern of deaths has been random,” Corcel said, “but heaven help us if this is some prelude to a gang war or something of that nature.”
Cáscara nodded solemnly. “So, I guess we release them, then?”
“Yes,” Corcel agreed. “And let’s hope our paths don’t cross again.”
* * *
A LITTLE PAPERWORK LATER, Grant and Shizuka were released from custody. Corcel explained to Grant that they were confiscating the items he had retrieved from the scene—the metal throwing disc and the bloodred feather—as evidence and that he would need to sign a waiver to the effect that he had been informed of this, and to make himself available for follow-up questioning if anything should arise.
“I know the procedure,” Grant grumbled good-humoredly. “We’re here for three days, staying at a hotel on the west bank called El Castillo.”
Corcel nodded. “I know it.”
“You have any problems, we will do what we can to help you,” Grant promised.
Then Corcel and Cáscara escorted Grant and Shizuka downstairs, taking a gloomy staircase down to the first floor, and from there they went through a security door and out into the main foyer to the Sector Hall. The foyer was a grand space, with wooden walls and an eight-foot-high decorative shield of justice affixed to a wall behind the reception desk. A Pretor in black-and-red armor was poised behind the desk, discussing some infraction with a tired-looking man with scruffy hair and a knot in his shoelace. Other Pretors were just heading out to go on patrol, while civilians waited for their turn either to speak with the Desk Pretor or to be collected by someone within the building.
The four of them—Grant, Shizuka, Corcel and Cáscara—stood there facing one another as the noise and rush of activity burbled all around them like bubbles in a carbonated drink.
“I am sorry that we had to keep you overnight,” Corcel said with genuine regret.
Grant shrugged. “Can’t say that this was my first choice of cultural center to visit, but I kind of enjoyed seeing how you guys here run things,” he said amiably.
Shizuka bowed at the waist as she faced Cáscara. “Thank you for the understanding and sympathy you showed me last night, Pretor,” she said. “These are difficult times, but your behavior was faultless in the circumstances. I wish you swift success with your investigation.”
“Thank you,” Cáscara said with a smile.
Grant and Shizuka watched the two Pretors pace back through the security door that led to the staircase. It had been a lousy set of circumstances, but they had navigated it, and maybe even helped the investigation a little. Still, Grant could not help but wonder what it had all been about.
The pair turned to make their way through the busy foyer and back to their hotel for a change of clothes. And then—
Pop!
It was like a lightbulb switching on in Grant’s mind. One instant things in the foyer of the Sector Hall were entirely ordinary, the normal buzz of morning traffic as Pretors came and went about their business, shuffling paperwork and arming themselves for the streets. The next instant, Grant felt an eerie shiver, and it seemed as if the whole building had gone silent. It hadn’t—that was just his instincts kicking in, years of experience as a hard-contact Magistrate alerting him to the sudden change in circumstances.
He turned, holding one protective arm up automatically before Shizuka where she walked beside him, scanning the foyer area. The Pretor at the desk had his head down, checking over a release form; two more Pretors, a man and a woman, dressed in the scarlet-and-black armor of the city, were just passing through the foyer on their way out to the street. A civilian waited in street clothes on a bench set against the wall before the desk, unshaven and with his dark hair in disarray, waiting to be seen. And Corcel and Cáscara were just leaving the foyer, returning upstairs to their desks, the door sealing behind them. But there was someone else, Grant spotted—a woman carrying a child’s stroller through the double doors leading into the foyer, a scarf around her head, pulled low as if to hide her face. Grant sensed the nervousness in her posture, the way her eyes were darting anxiously left and right as she drew the stroller into the foyer. All this he took in in less than a second, honed instincts assessing everyone and everything as he locked in on the source of his concern—the woman.
Grant was moving straightaway, scrambling across the busy foyer toward the woman at a dead run as she pulled the nose of the stroller through the doors after her and let them swing closed again. Her eyes were fixed on the desk where the Pretor was engaged in a discussion, and Grant seemed to watch in slow motion as her hand reached beneath her flower-print skirt, a flash of bare leg showing before she pulled free the blaster that was holstered there.
“Corpses for my mistress!” she yelled in embittered Spanish, squeezing the trigger and unleashing the first bullet at the Desk Pretor.
Her eyes widened as Grant hurtled himself into her in a tackle, disrupting her aim as the blaster kicked in her hand, and shoving her toward the floor. She struck with a loud thump, and Grant was on top of her in an instant. He pushed her down by the face as he grabbed for the blaster with his free hand, trying to wrench it from her grip.
“Muerte!” she cursed as the blaster reeled off another shot—the bullet going wildly into the ceiling—before being yanked from her hand. “Death!” Her eyes were like pinpricks in their sockets, pupil and iris almost lost in the white abyss.
All around the foyer, people were reacting. Grant had disarmed the woman in two seconds flat. Grant was aware of voices asking what was going on, of blasters being drawn from holsters and people ducking behind convenient furniture as they tried to figure out what was happening and whether they were in the line of fire.
And then Grant realized that there was a second threat. The woman had brought in a baby cart before embarking on her killing spree, which made no sense—unless the cart contained something other than a child.
“The stroller!” Grant yelled as he held the woman down. “Somebody—”
The stroller blew up in a cacophony of sound and brilliance.
Chapter 10
The reinforced glass of the Sector Hall foyer shattered into a million tinkling pieces, spraying across the room in a sudden spread of gravel-like shards. The grand double doors of the building shook in their frame, one lower hinge buckling as the door tottered in place, another melting into a lump. The noise of the explosion continued to ring through the room for at least ten seconds, its echo reverberating from the metallic surfaces within—the lamps, the door handles, the window frames and the computers at their desks.
In the aftermath of that explosion, the sound of nearby alarms assailed the air, exacerbating the ringing in the ears of the
people who had been caught up so close to the exploding baby stroller.
* * *
IN THE STAIRWELL BEYOND, Pretors Corcel and Cáscara were thrown off their feet and now found themselves sprawled on the stairs, with Corcel sporting a bloody cut to his left temple where he had been thrown against the banister on his way down.
Cáscara was the first to rise, pushing herself warily up onto her knees, her head dipped down and swayed heavily.
“¿Qué pasó?” she muttered uncertainly, looking up at the staircase. One of the lights was flickering where a circuit had been jangled, and the flashing made Cáscara feel slightly unreal. Then she saw her partner lying against the banister, his head bleeding from the cut there.
“Juan, are you okay?” Cáscara asked in Spanish, reaching for his arm. “Juan?”
Juan Corcel nodded heavily. “Head stings,” he admitted. “Do you know…what happened?”
“Bomb,” Cáscara reasoned without a moment’s hesitation. Even as she said it, she was pushing herself up to a standing position, and a moment later she began trotting back down the stairs. “Came from the foyer,” she said, calling back to Corcel.
“Go,” Corcel told her. “I’ll follow in a moment.” Just as soon as I’m able to stand, he mentally added as he felt a wave of nausea run through his gut.
* * *
BEFORE SHE STEPPED through into the foyer, Emiliana Cáscara pulled her Devorador de Pecados 9 mm pistol. The weapon had no safety, as that precaution had been deemed unnecessary when the Pretors had taken charge of enforcing the law decades ago. They were the ultimate authority in post-holocaust Spain.
She punched in the electronic code on the keypad beside the stairwell’s door, and it unlocked with a soft click. The door featured narrow slats of reinforced glass, and although these had held, two of them now featured a spiderweb of cracking across their surface where they had caught the shock wave from the explosion.
