by James Axler
When the recruit survivors had rushed into the water, Silam had been confident that everything was going to turn out fine, despite the initial setbacks. And he liked the idea of a last desperate stand waist-deep in the sea, sandwiched between rampaging muties and the armed uniforms. It was a perfect, bitter counterpoint to the gushy, heroic music.
Magus never rooted for the underdog. The whole point of the performances was to see the underdog crushed. He relied on Silam to offer the participants an illusion of hope, of the power of valiant struggle, and then to snatch it away.
Leaving nothing but pain and suffering.
It had never occurred to Silam that an unlikely confluence of events might reverse the situation: the blood and bodies in the water attracting muties not on the afternoon’s program, the screamies chilling muties by the score, but not a single norm, the uniforms panicking, then running their boats aground and losing control of their automatic weapons.
“You call this garbage entertainment?” Magus demanded as autofire clattered and the fleeing uniforms were chopped down. “I thought this morning’s show was pathetic. Now you’ve gone overboard in the other direction. This is turning into a rout.”
Silam wanted to say, “they call it suspense,” but he kept his mouth shut. Lecturing the master on the finer points of art appreciation was yet another quick way to get dead.
“That’s Ryan Cawdor doing the shooting down there,” Magus said. “The cyclops is tearing you a new asshole.”
Actually, the one-eyed man and his partner had already torn multiple new assholes in the backs of the running uniforms. With the help of the other recruits they collected weapons from the dead and manned the rowboats.
“They’re going to escape the islet,” Magus said in disgust. “If I had a switch, I would turn off this piece of shit.”
Silam rooted hard for the pargo as they attacked the fleeing boats. The fish had wreaked havoc before; they could do it again. When one boat was wrecked by a fish, he thought the other two would meet the same fate. But the muties let him down.
As the recruits stroked hard for the beach in the remaining boats, Magus wheeled from the window. “They’ll be at the redoubt entrance in minutes,” he said. “Do you know what this means?”
Silam had a fair inkling. If he didn’t think of something spectacular, he had about five seconds to live. The ideas that came to him were feeble and uninspired.
Everybody has a bad day.
Things average out.
As time dwindled away, he blurted, “Look on the bright side, now you can chill Cawdor face to face.”
Magus moved in a blur, grabbing hold of his hand. Silam had never been touched by the master before. The combination of cold steel and overheated flesh made his skin crawl. He would have yanked his hand back, but the grip around his fingers was too powerful to break.
“Do you think a face-to-face killing would satisfy my needs?” Magus asked. “My needs!”
“I’m afraid, Magus,” Silam said weakly.
“With good reason, you slime. You less than slime.”
The steel fingers closed tighter and tighter, a vise squeezing shut with thousands of pounds of pressure.
Silam gasped as all his finger bones shattered. Pain shot up his arm into his shoulder socket. He dropped to his knees before the master who still held him fast.
“I have been your loyal servant,” Silam wailed. “I have given you everything I possess. My talent. My imagination. I have helped to build your legend for the ages.”
“Silam, you know nothing about me. You only know the inside of your own head, your own pathetic strivings and petty frustrations. Like an infant you daub the nursery walls with the contents of your own diapers.”
Bullets from below thundered against the panel of armored glass, making it quiver in its steel frame. Silam jerked at the sounds, but Magus didn’t even flinch. He leaned closer, so close the fantasist could see the metal guy wires in his jaws and cheeks sliding in and out of their pilot holes.
“What I am, and what I am capable of is beyond your feeble imaginings. I must teach you a lesson.”
“A lesson?”
Magus released his hand.
Run, Silam told himself. Just run.
But his legs had turned to jelly. Try as he might, he could not get up from his knees.
Magus took hold of him again, working quickly, used his half-mechanical hands to crush the bones of his arm. Silam shrieked.
When Steel Eyes destroyed his other hand, turning it into a bloody mangle with a single squeeze, the poet laureate passed out cold, thereby missing the shattering of that arm, of all the bones in both feet, both legs, his pelvis, and most of his rib cage. Magus proceeded with skill and precision, tackling the job in a specific sequence, using just enough pressure to pulverize the bones. This was something he had done many times before. He left the skull and spinal cord intact.
Insistent prodding and kicking returned the spin doctor to a semblance of consciousness.
“Have you learned your lesson?” Magus asked.
“What?” Silam wheezed wetly, lungs punctured, tossed on a sea of bloodred pain. “What lesson?”
“This is what I always had in mind…”
Last thing Silam saw was Magus’s heel stomping down on his oversize skull.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It took a good two minutes for the elevator car to reach its first and only stop. The companions and the islanders had their weapons up and ready to rip as the doors opened. But there was nothing alive to shoot at.
They looked onto a broad room with a low acoustic ceiling. It was chopped up into clusters of tiny work cubicles. The dust of a century lay inches thick on the desk and computer drive towers.
Someone had passed through recently, though. There were muddy tracks in the dirt on the gray tile floor. Most of them huge, and barefoot.
J.B. knelt for a closer look. “These belong to Doc,” he said. He pointed down the hallway. “They lead that way.”
With J.B. on point, they followed the bootprints around the perimeter of the room to another elevator. When the car doors opened, the odor trapped inside came rushing out.
Who had last used it was not a mystery.
“Damn, those knobby bastards reek!” J.B. said.
That they could even detect spoke volumes about its pungency. The nine of them had been fighting for their lives with edged weapons, and had acquired their own skunk funk.
“How are we going to find the gateway?” Krysty said as she got in the car.
“We can’t take the time to hunt around this place for a map,” Ryan said. “Jak, punch all the buttons.”
The albino hit the indicator for every floor below them. There were fourteen.
Every time the doors opened, the companions and islanders were ready to fight a pitched battle. No battle came. The first seven floors were deserted and quiet, except for the buzz of the banks of fluorescent lights.
When the doors opened on the eighth floor, they heard the sound of nuke generators. Not the soft throb of mimimal, redoubt maintenance output, but the grinding rumble of full power. There was nothing in the hallway before them, but that noise shouted gateway ready to transport.
“This is it,” Ryan said. “Triple red.”
Taking the lead, he trotted down the hall in the direction of the sound. There was only one doorway ahead, and it was on his side. When he looked inside, his H&K 33 out in front, he let out a groan. He shouldn’t have been surprised by the mechanized butchery, but he was. He turned away from the barrels full of specimens, and the dead thing on the operating table, opened like a trout.
Farther down the corridor, he saw evidence of recent water damage from the overhead fire sprinklers. The ceiling and walls were wet, but the tile floor was dry, except for scattered, irregular puddles. They weren’t water. They were pools of trainer sweat.
Krysty, who had moved ahead while he was checking Magus’s playroom, turned back to him and said in a whisp
er, “Got something down here, Ryan.”
What they had was a cooked enforcer. Three hundred pounds of charred corpse lay in the middle of the hallway. The wall and ceiling near it was scorched and blackened.
“Man, that was some blaze,” J.B. said.
Ryan had to agree. The body had been reduced to ashes. The heat was so intense it had melted the floor.
It was obvious that the creature had come from a doorway about twenty feet farther down the corridor. The door’s lintel and the hallway ceiling were stained black with soot, and there was a similar smear along the left-hand wall where it had staggered before falling.
What had set the trainer alight? Based on years of experience, Ryan figured that Doc Tanner had had a hand in it.
He skirted the body and the greasy patch that surrounded it and made for the scorched doorway. As he approached, he heard the sound of computers chittering. Ducking low, his weapon shouldered, he swung around the control-room entrance.
And immediately let out a shout of warning.
They had found what they were looking for, a strange, shambling figure cobbled together out of metal and flesh.
Companions and islanders rushed in behind the one-eyed man. The shooting started at once. Nine assault rifles spewed a withering torrent of lead. There was no answering fire.
The enforcers shielded Magus from the full-auto fusillade with their own bodies, about three-quarters of a ton worth. Dozens of slugs hammered each of the trainers, but they had little effect. Steel Eyes didn’t run, perhaps because he couldn’t. He walked with a decided limp.
Ryan unleashed a spray of tumblers, trying to find a gap between the hulking bastards and clip his target. But the distance Magus had to cross was short, and the opportunity was over quickly.
The door to the mat-trans chamber slammed shut, leaving two of the trainers outside.
“Shit!” J.B. cried.
As the system powered up to initiate transport, the trainers unsheathed their talons and started to advance on Ryan and the others.
“Magus’s going to jump!” Mildred said. “The bastard’s going to get away!”
“Back up!” Ryan shouted, waving the others out of the room.
If bullets were ineffective on the trainers, hand-to-hand combat was out of the question. The only other room in the hallway was a dead end. If they were going to escape with their lives, they had to go either up or down.
Ryan brought up the rear in the retreat to the elevator, occasionally skating on the sweat puddles. The trainers were in hot pursuit. When they reached the car, Eng hit the call button. Then everybody turned and opened fire in an attempt to buy time. Gunsmoke billowed down the corridor, the roar of autofire was deafening. The enforcers shielded their eyes from the bullets and continued to advance.
The car doors opened behind them. As they backed into the elevator, all the actions locked back, mags empty.
The fluorescent lights shone on the puddles of sweat they had smeared across the floor, all down the middle of the hall.
The trainers were within fifty feet of the elevator when Ryan reached for the Close button.
“Wait, Ryan!” J.B. said as he dug a match out of his pocket. “Okay, go ahead.”
As Ryan pushed the button, J.B. struck the match on his thumbnail. Just before the elevator doors closed, he flicked it out into the hall. It landed on the floor and ignited the smears with a whoosh. The line of foot-high flame raced all the way to the feet of the enforcers.
The elevator doors shut as the creatures exploded in fireballs. Ryan could feel the heat through the double layers of steel. A second later, fire alarms started going off.
He let the trainers cook a minute or two before he opened the car’s doors again.
The hallway was choked with acrid smoke. Fine spray from the fire sprinklers pelted the walls and floor. One of the monsters was down, about twenty feet away, still alive, but barely. The flames had turned it into a cinder. It didn’t make a sound with its mouth, not even a whimper. Its body hissed and steamed as the water showered down on it.
The other trainer was staggering down the corridor, a smoldering torch. The sprinklers had extinguished the fire, but too late. The creature fell heavily onto its face, and did not stir.
The stench of roasted flesh was overpowering.
From somewhere in the ceiling, powerful fans kicked in and started sucking the smoke out. Then the sprinklers and alarms stopped.
The companions and islanders hurried back into the control room.
Ryan headed straight for the mat-trans gateway window. The chamber was empty. Magus and his trainers had escaped.
“Face it, we’ve shot our wad, Ryan,” J.B. said.
“We didn’t get him,” Krysty said. “But he didn’t win.”
Though it stuck in his craw, Ryan knew she was right. They were alive to fight another day.
Mildred walked over to a corner of the control room and picked something up from the floor. When she turned, she held an ebony cane in one hand and a lion’s-head-handled sword in the other. “Did Doc leave this behind on purpose, so we’d know what happened to him?” she said.
“Maybe wants us follow,” Jak said.
“You know he’d never give up that sword of his unless he was in bad trouble,” J.B. added.
“Or unless somebody took it away from him,” Krysty said.
Mildred agreed. “It was lying on the floor unsheathed. He could have been trying to use it to defend himself. Maybe he was taken away from here against his will.”
“We can’t piece together this puzzle,” Ryan said. “It leads in too many directions. All we know is, Doc left from here.”
“And we’ve got to go after him,” Krysty said. “He’d do the same for any one of us.”
“Go after him quick,” Jak said.
Mildred sat at a computer console and started tapping the keys, trying to see if she could call up a destination log. “Bingo. I have the coordinates that Magus transed to, and the coordinates of whoever used the system before him. Looks like the previous transfer took place about an hour ago, which would put it at about the right time.”
“When was the transfer before that?” Ryan said.
“Uh, four hours ago.”
“Then we know where Doc went,” he said. “This is a first. Punch in the numbers, and let’s go.”
It took her seconds to enter the coordinates.
Ryan opened the chamber door. “This way, Eng,” he said. “Come on, and bring your crew.”
The captain folded his massive arms across his chest and he shook his head. “We’re not going in there,” he said.
“What’s the problem?” J.B. asked.
“If we go in there, what will happen?” Eng asked.
“It’s just a predark transporation device.” Mildred told him. “A different sort of sailing ship. The coming and going is as safe as mother’s milk.”
The captain didn’t budge. He shook his head again. “We islanders travel in this world until we are called to the next by our Mother. We don’t volunteer to pass on by being transported by predark devices.”
“Suit yourself, Eng,” Ryan said.
“Safe journey, my friends,” Eng said.
“Thanks, Captain.”
The companions entered the chamber and Ryan closed the door. They got as comfortable as they could, sitting on the floor, leaning their backs against the chamber’s walls.
“We’ll get him back, Mildred,” J.B. said. “He’s a tough old bird.”
“Hard to chill,” Jak said.
A mist began to form around the ceiling of the chamber. It grew thicker and thicker, until it was like cotton, and then it started to descend around them.
One by one, the companions slumped unconscious onto the glowing plates of the floor.
Chapter Thirty
Doc Tanner felt the pulsing glow of the violet armaglass walls and floor. The warmth surged into the very marrow of his bones, and when it ebbed, it left behind a chi
ll. Warmth and chill. Warmth and chill. The mist descending from the ceiling enveloped his head and shoulders. He knew better than to fight it. Fighting was useless. Once the process was set in motion, there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Every time he’d made a mat-trans jump, he’d experienced the same initial hallucination. The seams between the floor plates appeared to yawn open like earthquake chasms, sucking him in and down, into absolute blackness.
This was something very different than matter transfer. The floor remained solid, and he had no sense of blacking out, nor of free fall through an endless void.
After a moment of extreme dizziness, the mist around him appeared to lift. Gone were the colored walls. In their place was a membranous barrier, translucent but not entirely transparent, lit from without by a warm, soft radiance. It formed the ceiling, the floor under his feet, and two of what had been the four walls. The chamber’s other walls were absent. He sat in a cylinder that extended in front of him and behind him.
On closer inspection, he saw that the walls had a texture, that they were infused here and there with a crosshatching of slightly more dense fibers. It was these fibers that kept the material from being entirely transparent.
Doc pressed his eye closer still, peering through one of the clear places. Though the image was blurred, he saw colors, glowing, shimmering colors, bright points of light in long strings. For some reason he was reminded of the streets of Paris on a warm summer evening, though there were no recognizable landmarks to indicate that that’s what it was. It had the feel of radiant life, of complex culture.
As he stared harder, trying to make out details, he realized that the blurring was not a consequence of the material he was looking through. The objects on the other side were themselves blurred, like a photographic images overprinted, the tiniest fraction of inch to one side. Only the overlaid images in this case were not identical, and they were moving.
Beyond his reach, objects whose outlines he could not quite decipher—great blobs of color, glowing orbs of light, city blocks—were sliding, all in the same direction, in a kind of cosmic peristalsis.
