Sorrow Space

by James Axler

When Farrell questioned the order, Lakesh consented with a single nod of his head. “It’s the only way we’re going to find out what’s come through,” he reasoned. As he spoke, he reached for a small rebreather that was located in one of his desk drawers, and he watched as other personnel in the room did the same. From its operating specs, the mat-trans chamber should not open until the filtration system had cleared any toxins from the air, a fail-safe to prevent the units from accidentally carrying a biological weapon to the heart of the military redoubts where they were located.

  At the control desk, Farrell ran his eyes over the system’s stats, confirming that the air within had been cleansed. “Opening now,” he advised. “We are live in five...in four...in three...”

  Impatiently Domi leaned a little closer, watching the dark figure within the mat-trans chamber, still obscured by the transport mists.

  “Domi,” Lakesh reminded her. “Be careful.” The two of them were romantically involved, but Lakesh knew better than to try to persuade Domi to back off when there was danger near; she was too brave and too much of a free spirit for that.

  A highly skilled hand-to-hand combatant, Domi pulled her knife from its ankle sheath as she stepped closer to the door of the chamber. The seal hissed, venting air as Farrell tapped the fail-safe code into the control terminal. Then the door opened.

  The first thing that hit Domi was the smell of rotting meat that poured from the mat-trans chamber like a storm front. The stench made Domi gag, and before she could do anything else, the lone figure emerged from within, shuffling forward in a stumbling, staggering abruptness of limbs. She was tall, female, five foot ten and wearing a sheer body stocking of inky black. Her dark hair had fallen over her face. Beneath the body stocking, her frame was so slender it left every muscle on display. There was not so much as an ounce of fat on the whole of the woman’s figure, and the shining body stocking only accentuated that fact.

  The woman took four staggering steps, her movements angular like a stop-motion animation in a film, her long limbs jutting and awkward. Her face was still hidden by her drooping hair, and Domi saw now that her hair was black and wet, matching the body stocking exactly. Her arms poked out behind her, elbows bent, wrists turned backward, gloved fingers taut. And then, before Domi could say a word, the woman fell at her feet, sagging to the floor amid a forming pool of oil.

  Domi stepped closer as the woman slumped to the floor, two guns trained on her by the Cerberus security staff. The woman’s hair was in disarray over her face and Domi saw more clearly that it was streaked with black gunk, the same oily stuff that seemed to sheath her body. It was not clothing, Domi recognized now. Rather it was a tarlike substance, thick and viscous, covering the woman’s body entirely and creating a second skin that blocked every pore.

  Domi leaned down to address the woman, but before she spoke, the dark-sheathed woman started to shudder violently. Her body trembled as black gunk poured from it, oozing across the floor like an oil slick on water. Domi skittered backward, careful to not let any of the gunk touch her bare feet. Then the woman lifted her head, revealing for the first time that her face, too, was covered in the dark sludge. It shone beneath the fluorescents, obscuring the woman’s features, turning her eyes into smooth bulges like eggs, covering her open mouth with a taut skin like the top of a drum.

  Domi watched with a growing sense of unease as the woman opened her constrained mouth wider and began to scream. It sounded strained and penetrating, like a distant seagull’s caw. The awful scream seemed to reverberate through Domi’s bones, punching through to her core.

  “Who is she?” Edwards asked as the mysterious woman shook more violently still.

  But before anyone could answer—if, indeed, they had an answer—the woman’s scream turned into a wet gurgle, that sounded as though she was being drowned in a basin of water. Then—quite impossibly—the dark sheathed woman’s body lost its solidity and she deteriorated into a spreading pool of blackness in a matter of moments, merging with the gloop that had been pouring from her body in its shadowy waterfall.

  As one, the Cerberus personnel in the room held their collective breath, all eyes fixed on the mat-trans chamber door and the dark stain where the woman had collapsed.

  Chapter 2

  The Chinook helicopter cut through the air over the Panamint Range, the pilot skimming close to the tops of mountain ridges where powdery snow dappled in white buds. It looked as if the whole range had been dusted with powdered sugar, just enough to give the top of each ridge a white coating of indifference.

  The loud thrumming of the helicopter’s rotor blades made conversation difficult but not impossible. As it was, Kane had to shout to be heard over their drumming sound, which made something of a mockery of the idea that this was a clandestine meeting.

  “So, where was it you say you found this stash?” Kane asked in a raised voice. He was a tall man with eyes like blue-gray steel whose intensity demanded a man’s attention when he spoke. His dark hair was cropped close to his head, and his square jaw was clean-shaven. He wore a dark-colored suit, its neat lines clinging to his broad chest with precision. A pair of shiny black boots with well-cushioned soles finished the ensemble. There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his physicality and his manner—he had broad shoulders with rangy limbs. He displayed a natural instinct to lead and often to act alone.

  Kane was a member of the Montana-based Cerberus organization, a group dedicated to the security and welfare of the human race. Ever since their emergence as a resistance group years ago, Cerberus had been spearheading an ongoing war against the Annunaki, a group of alien invaders. The Annunaki had been involved in mankind’s affairs since the days of prehistory, in an era when man was still cowering in trees from saber-toothed tigers. When they had first come to Earth those millennia ago, the Annunaki had been mistaken for gods, and their superior technology had become transcribed into mankind’s myths and legends.

  Following the nuclear holocaust at the start of the twenty-first century, the Annunaki reappeared disguised as the nine barons, hybrid human creatures who ruled over nine spectacular walled cities amid the ravaged remains of the United States of America. It took many years for the hybrids to reveal their true nature and assume their proper forms as the entrancing, reptilian Annunaki, like butterflies shedding their chrysalis state.

  But internal rivalries among the Annunaki had proved their undoing, and over the past year they had been in retreat, appearing only irregularly in scuffles with the brave Cerberus warriors. Kane and his team had been caught dead center, however, in the Annunaki’s most recent skirmish, the so-called God War between the cruelest of their number.

  To a lesser man, one who placed undue emphasis on his own ego, it might have seemed a demotion to be aboard this scratch-built helicopter now, endeavoring to track the missing technology of one of the nine villes that those same Annunaki had abandoned. But the Cerberus organization had been on this trail for months now, and Kane and his two-man field crew knew how important it was to shut down the operation before a new batch of guns flooded the black market, bringing with them the old savageries that had once defined the landscape.

  Kane sat in a bucket seat facing the negotiator aboard the patchwork Chinook helicopter. The negotiator, Bucks, was an amputee in his late twenties whose legs had been cut off at the knees and replaced with scythelike blades of fiberglass on which he walked with surprising, insectile grace.

  Buchs had black hair slicked back from his forehead revealing a widow’s peak, and a neatly trimmed mustache brushed his top lip. He wore a silky black shirt, wide open at the collar to show three buttons’ worth of chest hair down his sternum, and abbreviated combat pants that ended in ties just beneath his knees, leaving his bladelike leg attachments free from obstruction. The chopper belonged to the negotiator’s people, one of a number of treasures they had acquired during their scavenging of th
e fallen baronies.

  “Oh, it’s more than a ‘stash,’ my friend,” the negotiator hollered back in his singsong voice. “We’re talking database material here, whole plans for how to fashion the old tech. Blasters, ammo, even a rig like this one.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the whirring rotors above them.

  Kane raised his eyebrow. “Deathbirds?” he queried.

  Buchs nodded. “D-birds, screamwings, Tomahawks, Apaches. Did you know the prenukecaust people named all their helicopters after old Indian tribes?”

  Kane gestured a nonanswer, taking the man’s point with only passing interest. “How long ’til we reach the drop point?” he shouted.

  The negotiator narrowed his eyes in confusion, cupping a hand to his ear.

  “How long?” Kane repeated.

  “Minute, maybe two,” the paraplegic assured him. “Not long. Look out this side—once we cross over the ridge you’ll be able to see it.”

  Kane peered as indicated through a square window that sat in the middle of the side door, straining forward a little to get a better perspective on the ground. The chopper was crossing the Panamint Mountains that bordered Death Valley, an area that Kane and his partners knew well. Kane had once been a Magistrate in the nearby city of Cobaltville, an enforcer of the law within its strictly regimented city walls. That was before he had learned the truth about the hybrid barons, and with his partners, Brigid Baptiste and Grant, defected to join the Cerberus agency.

  Those same two partners were with him now, assuming the roles of science and finance advisors for the scam they were trying to pull on the negotiator and his boss. They hoped the scam would put them in position to close down this poisonous network of gunrunners and weapons-makers.

  Grant was a hulk of a man, with ebony skin and shoulders so wide he had to hunch over just to fit into the bucket seats of the retrofitted chopper. Several years older than Kane, Grant was dressed in casual wear, a dark sweater over a wine-colored shirt and heavy canvas pants that featured low pockets that bulged out along the length of his hips.

  Grant’s head was shaved and he sported a goatee-style beard above which he currently wore a pair of round-framed spectacles. The glass in the spectacles was clear, a concession to his role as advisor rather than to correct defective vision. The simple but effective trick made this brute of a man appear marginally less menacing. Grant, like Kane, was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville—in fact, the two had worked together for several years before being exiled from the ville’s walls following a terrible showdown with its ruler, Baron Cobalt.

  Grant sat silently in his seat, eyeing the armed guards who were poised beside and behind the paraplegic negotiator. There were five in all, and each one had a mini-Uzi or MP-9 cradled in his or her hands. Grant had no doubt that all of them had other blasters about their persons, too, as befitted arms dealers, and he did little to disguise his interest as he made a mental note of the bulges in their clothing where weapons likely lurked.

  Grant and his two Cerberus teammates were traveling unarmed, of course—that was part of the arrangement of meeting Mr. Buchs and his paymasters, and there was no room for negotiation with regard to that. All three Cerberus operatives had been marched through a portable metal detector and frisked with professional precision before they had been allowed to board the private Chinook. None of them had come armed—this was a reconnaissance mission; they weren’t looking to start a war. Not yet.

  Sitting beside Grant was the final figure of the field team, the beautiful Brigid Baptiste. Tall and slender, Brigid wore a figure-hugging black one-piece that left little to the imagination, accentuating the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips. Peeking above the high-buttoned collar of the suit, Brigid’s pale face wore an expression of disinterest behind her small square-framed glasses. Brigid was both an academic of prodigious intellect and a passionate romantic, and her features seemed to reflect those characteristics. Her eyes were a brilliant emerald-green beneath a high forehead, while her rose-petal lips were full and sensuous. However, Brigid’s most striking feature was her red-gold hair, which curled about her head like a sunburst.

  Unlike Kane and Grant, Brigid had never trained as a Magistrate. Her discipline had been as an archivist in the vast history project of Cobaltville. Unfortunately for her, she had happened upon evidence of a grand conspiracy that had led to her expulsion from the ville. But while Brigid was an archivist by training, she had become highly skilled in the arts of combat, having learned from Kane, Grant and others to defend herself during the fraught missions that the Cerberus trio found themselves engaged in with alarming frequency.

  Though Brigid appeared bored, she was in fact taking in everything—and in more detail than one might expect. Brigid had an eidetic—or photographic—memory, and was able to retain and reproduce the slightest detail of anything she had seen or read, recalling it perfectly after a single glance.

  As the chopper pitched around, Kane watched through the small window and he drew in a breath as their destination suddenly came into view.

  There, between the mountainous lines of the Panamint Range, crouched a long black building of sturdy construction. It looked like an upturned table with four towering chimneys, one on each corner, all four belching white-gray smoke into the atmosphere. The temperatures were always in flux in this region, Kane knew, roasting in the daytime but dipping into the minuses with nightfall. With such extremes and the lack of roadways, the factory sat in what was without doubt an inaccessible spot, free from casual discovery. Quite how its owners had managed to construct it tucked among the peaks like this, he could not imagine, but the evidence before his eyes could not be disputed.

  “There she blows,” Buchs told him, leaning across for a closer look.

  Kane glanced at the man for a moment, smelling mint julep on his breath as he spoke. “Mighty impressive,” he commented. “You find this place or build it?”

  “Built it,” Buchs shouted with a proud, toothy smile. “The air around here is real clean, good for manufacturing the kind of stuff we wanted, free from dust and junk like that.”

  “And prying eyes,” Grant added from over Kane’s shoulder. Even raised as it was, Grant’s voice was a low rumble like approaching thunder, emanating from somewhere deep in his chest.

  The mustached negotiator nodded. “Life’s easier that way, isn’t it?”

  The Chinook dipped lower, circling the vast factory. Oblong in shape, Kane estimated that the factory stretched the length of a thousand feet. Veering around, the Chinook’s pilot located the landing pad—just a square of smoothed rock among the otherwise uneven ground—and brought the craft down into a swift drop. There were roads here, Kane saw as they descended, rough paths cut through the uneven terrain. Perhaps not so inaccessible after all, then.

  Recognizing the landing pattern, the paraplegic shimmied back in his seat and clung to a handhold that jutted from one wall. He gritted his teeth as the chopper came down, landing with the violence and abruptness of a prizefighter’s punch.

  Kane had taken the cue and braced, too, as the craft came to land. Behind him Brigid lurched forward in her seat, tumbling toward Kane’s seat back until Grant grabbed her with one of his big paws, his well-muscled arm stopping her like a safety bar on a fairground ride. An experienced chopper pilot and passenger, Grant dismissed Brigid’s thanks with a smile. “Gotta know when to hold ’em,” he told her.

  “And when to fold ’em,” Brigid finished, smiling back.

  An instant later, two of the armed guards hurried forward to unlatch and draw back the doors before their leader, Buchs, made his way out of the craft on his gracefully curving fiberglass limbs. His artificial walk reminded Kane of a grasshopper, with a bouncing gait that made it appear he was walking on a springy surface like an old bouncy castle.

  Kane stepped from the helicopter and joined the negotiator while Grant, Br
igid and the other security officers followed. They were thirty feet from the outside wall of the factory, where a set of rollback doors had been opened wide. The sunlight turned the brown paint of the doors a pleasing shade of umber. People and machinery could be seen working inside the building, sparks flying like film scratches on the air where metal was tooled and cut, whining and screeching like a choir of cats. Beside the rollback doors, a line of jeep-type road vehicles had been parked, six in all, roofless and each one painted black. They looked new and Kane suspected they had come from the factory’s production line.

  “So, what is it you make here, Mr. Buchs?” Kane asked as he kept pace beside the negotiator.

  “Little of everything,” Buchs told him, trudging along with his strangely bounding steps. “Your people said you’d be able to fund us through to the year after next, but I have to warn you it’s a pretty big production line we have going now.”

  Kane smiled. “All to the good,” he said, “if it means a better return on our investment, right?”

  The negotiator laughed. “Sure.”

  Stepping past the jeeps—and noticing their wet-paint smell even as he did so—Kane made his way through the wide doors and into the factory. Three stories high from the outside, the factory was four deep within, another story carved into the rock itself. It appeared to be just one gigantic room split in two down the middle. Vast conveyor belts snaked through the room, rising to a height of fifteen feet or more, many of them wider than the vehicles at the doors. There were more vehicles inside, including several jeeps in use, a flatbed truck and two helicopters. The helicopters were still in the process of being built, their exposed shells looking like something ravaged by locusts.

  There were other things being constructed in the factory, too. Kane recognized several types of weapons, including his favored Sin Eater, trundling along a production line and spewing from a buzzing mechanical unit overseen by a half-dozen women in overalls. The whole factory was a cacophony of noises, buzzing and hissing and clanking and whirring, as various units pressed and popped and moulded and shaped a plethora of items. Despite the harshness of that wall of noise, it sounded somehow tranquil after the heavy thrumming of the Chinook’s rotors.