by James Axler
The stranger set Grant back down on his side, rearranging the blanket over him. “You’re still cuffed,” the man explained in his resonant voice. “Careful now, or you’ll roll right off this bed and do yourself a mischief.”
Grant stared at the older man in confusion. “Where...am...I?” he muttered through thick lips.
“You’re quite safe, my friend,” the man replied. “For now. Name’s Roger Burton. You’ll accept my apologies for my appearance. Been a long while since I did any entertaining.”
“Grant,” Grant told the man. “How long?”
“What?”
“Since you did any entertaining?”
Sucking at his teeth, Burton shook his head. “Months. Maybe a year,” he admitted. “Hard to keep track of time around here.”
Warily and with the gray-haired man’s help, Grant pushed himself to a sitting position on the cot and peered around the room. His head felt woozy and his throat was sore, as if he had vomited. The room seemed to pulse a little in his vision, swaying slightly as he looked at it. In the dark corners, he could still see those accusing eyes staring at him from the water basin. The air within the room was fetid, and Grant realized after a moment that the pail in the corner served as the latrine.
Grant tried to stand, but he stumbled back to the cot, sagging against Burton as the man caught him.
“Steady there, Grant,” Burton instructed. “Take it slow.”
Grant thanked the man for his assistance, struggling to piece together everything that had happened to lead him here, of how he had lost Kane and Brigid.
Burton spoke up, intruding on Grant’s thoughts. “You came as quite a surprise,” he exclaimed. “Baron Trevelyan told me everyone was dead.”
Grant looked at the man quizzically.
“I guess his counting was a little off,” Burton added with an amused smile.
“Everyone’s dead?” Grant repeated, the words only now sinking in. “Where is here, exactly? Where are we?”
“You really are lost, aren’t you?” Burton said with genuine amusement. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You must have been hiding for a long time to escape the authorities like this.”
“The what?”
“The Magistrates,” Burton elaborated. “Grant, I wouldn’t wish to presume, but it seems to me that you’re a little more than just confused. Perhaps you’d care to explain just where it is you’ve been hiding out.”
“I haven’t,” Grant told him. Something about this man made Grant feel he could trust him, something in his manner, a rather understated poise that Grant associated with men of good standing. “I traveled to this ville via a quantum inducer unit,” he explained, keeping the exact details and the fact he had been with his teammates secret.
“A mat-shifter,” Burton said, nodding.
“I’ve never seen this place before, didn’t even know it existed.”
“You must have traveled a heck of a long way,” Burton exclaimed, bemused. “Quocruft has been established for almost eighty years.”
“You said you thought everyone was dead,” Grant pressed. “What made you say that?”
“Because I killed them,” Burton told him. “I’m responsible. For the weapon that destroyed humankind.”
Chapter 21
“You ever hear of a Baron Trevelyan?” Brigid asked as she and Kane descended the stairwell of the office block. She was holding a small radio communications unit, something like a car radio with a microphone hookup.
“Me?” Kane responded, boots splashing in the pooled water on the concrete steps. “No. Why?”
“The footage in that media suite included a newscast featuring a speech from him,” Brigid explained. “I never heard of him, either. Nor this Quocruft ville.”
“He a hybrid?” Kane asked, taking the radio unit.
Brigid nodded. “Yes, looks just like Baron Cobalt or any one of the others,” she explained.
Kane slowed and turned to face Brigid. “You’re figuring something out,” he said. “Want to clue me in?”
“It’s hard to rationalize,” Brigid admitted, “but I don’t think we’re on Earth. Or at least not our Earth.”
“We got here via mat-trans,” Kane pointed out. “Some kind of glitch sent us to the wrong destination. Could be we skipped a planet.”
Brigid shook her head. “People speaking English, a recognizable ville structure—it doesn’t add up.”
“The Annunaki came from outer space,” Kane reminded her. “Could be they colonized more than one planet, seeding them with hybrids just like the barons we knew.”
Brigid’s hand ran along the metal bar that served as a banister, the dark paint there feeling cold against her palm. “Same gravity, same atmosphere, same...paint on the banisters. No, this is Earth—I’d stake my life on that.”
“Then what?” Kane asked.
They were seven flights down now, almost to the first floor, where Kane had left his prisoner.
“What if we skipped dimensions when we entered the mat-trans?” Brigid proposed.
“Is that possible?”
“The mat-trans is simply a transportation system, Kane,” Brigid explained. “At its heart, it’s no different from an automobile or an aircraft. We just took a wrong turn, landed in the wrong place.”
“Right off the map,” Kane said sourly. “If that is the case, and I’m not saying you’re right, then we can use the same process to get back to Cerberus, right?”
Brigid was silent as she thought this over. They had reached the bottom of the staircase, and she was doing her utmost to ignore the shade of Daryl Morganstern who had reappeared at the edge of her vision and was beckoning her.
Reaching for the heavy fire door, Kane prompted again, “Right, Baptiste?”
“We don’t know why we jumped the way we did,” Brigid replied, her cool emerald eyes meeting Kane’s stare. “If something’s tapping into the quantum ether, utilizing a similar process or sending a pulse through it, then that would potentially disrupt the mat-trans flow.”
Kane glared at her. “Wait a minute. You think someone’s tapping into the mat-trans? Our mat-trans?”
“Might not be intentional,” Brigid told him. “It would take an enormous amount of energy to bridge between dimensional planes. A release of such energy—like a nuclear reactor going into meltdown—might have that effect. I stress might.”
Depressing the safety bar on the fire door, Kane pushed through it and back into the lobby of the office building. The lobby was as he had left it: charred marks across the ceiling, walls and furniture, much of the equipment damaged or melted. The same as every other building they had seen in this strange, abandoned city. He gestured to the despoiled lobby area. “Seems to me, we’ve been staring at the result of some almighty outpouring of energy ever since we got here,” he said. “What do you think?”
Brigid gasped. “The sun shield,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s utilized solar energy to generate the power to...”
“To what?” Kane asked.
“Bridge dimensions,” Brigid told him gravely. “But if he’s done that deliberately, then...”
“Cerberus is in trouble,” Kane finished.
“Not just Cerberus,” Brigid told him. “Earth and everyone on it.”
* * *
“I’M THE MAN WHO KILLED Earth,” Roger Burton told Grant earnestly.
They sat together on the bare cot in the grim cell, its light fixture buzzing in a cage above their heads. Grant watched the way the light played along the hose that was attached to Burton’s head, studying the attachment without touching it.
“I always had a talent for making things, even when I was very young,” Burton continued. “Even here, he’s given me a rudimentary lab so I can keep working, as if I’m somethi
ng other than his prisoner. After I graduated, I was placed in the research labs doing design work, engineering mostly, with some applied physics, a little chemistry. While I was there, I kept tinkering with things, improving them, coming up with new ways of doing stuff. Guess it drew someone’s interest.” He smiled in a self-deprecating manner. “One day I got called into the super’s office and she told me I would be working on a special project, something to harness energy in new ways. So I did, worked diligently and without question. Why would I question anything?”
Grant nodded in agreement. “Easy to get caught up in the system when you’re stuck inside it,” he said, speaking from his own experience as an ex-Magistrate.
“One day the baron came to visit,” Roger Burton said. “Heck of an honor that, like meeting something from one of them old ’ligious books. You read any of those?”
Grant nodded, encouraging the man to continue. He was still looking at the tube pipe. It seemed to be permanently attached to the back of the older man’s skull, pressed through his messy hair and into his skin. The tube was three inches in diameter and made of some kind of flexible metal links, stained with the grease and oil that kept them mobile. The tube was attached to the base of Burton’s skull, where it bulged out from the stem of his neck, connected via a sturdy metal band. The flesh around the circular attachment was an angry red, with old scar tissue around its edges that had never completely healed. The skin and hair had grown over parts of the metal attachment, tying it more fully to the man.
“Baron Trevelyan spoke to me, said he was aware of my work,” Burton said. “Wanted me to head up a special project, funding no issue. He wanted to explore the limits of knowledge, he said, and that appealed to me. I’m a scientist. I’d been trying to figure new ways to apply engineering my whole life. Now my baron commanded and I obeyed.” He paused, looking around the room as if for inspiration.
“I didn’t invent stuff because there was a need for it,” Burton explained sadly. “They didn’t give me these projects and say ‘There, make this better,’ you understand? I just came up with ideas, ways of doing things, new applications for old processes.
“You know, it’s been so long since I actually spoke to someone like this,” Burton lamented. “It’s almost hard to believe I’m doing it. Maybe the baron thought it would be ironic, putting us together. The last two men on Earth.”
Grant watched as the scientist shifted restlessly on the cot, pulling the tube that fed into the back of his skull around to get it more comfortable. Grant knew the body language from his days as a Magistrate, knew to recognize the man’s movements. He was regretful, ashamed, guilty.
“What did you make?” Grant asked gently.
“The regen suits,” Burton explained. “They’re what keep the Magistrates active.”
* * *
BRIGID FOLLOWED KANE through the lobby and into the cloak room behind the reception desk where he had hidden the tied body of the Magistrate, leaving the little radio unit on the desk. The figure still lay there amid the fallen coats, hands and legs bound, helmet missing.
“While you were busy upstairs, I picked us up someone to question,” Kane explained. “Get some answers.”
Brigid took another step into the room, examining the figure lying there in the darkness. Finally she looked up at Kane and her brow furrowed. “Was he alive when you brought him in?” she asked gently.
“Sure he was al—” Kane began angrily, hurrying forward to check.
Just as Brigid had implied, the Magistrate was dead. He lay completely still, his chest unmoving, and when Kane held his hand beneath the man’s nose no breath came out. “What the hell? He was alive—I swear it. I wouldn’t kill a fellow Mag, unless I had no choice.”
“I believe you,” Brigid said to placate him. Crouched over the Magistrate’s supine form, she rolled his body and checked for any evidence of tampering. The face looked ghastly, the skin rotten and the bulging eyes staring out into the darkness of the cupboard. But it was a level of rot that should have taken several days to reach, longer still in a cold climate. “Kane, did he look like this when you brought him in?”
Kane nodded. “Ugly mother. Helmet came loose during the scuffle. I figure he was a carrier for something nasty, plague or some shit. You’d said something about a virus maybe doing this to the ville, right?”
Brigid stared up at Kane in wonder. “And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Back when we were in Cobaltville we were regularly vaccinated against everything from radiation sickness to the black death,” Kane replied nonchalantly. “If what he’s got is catching, and if I’m not immunized, then—one—I’ve got it and—two—we’re still stuck here with no way home.”
Brigid shrugged, accepting Kane’s explanation without too much bother, aware they had bigger problems right now. “On the physical evidence alone I’d say this man’s been dead four days minimum,” she explained.
“Impossible,” Kane spit. “He was up and walking a half hour ago. I was fighting with him. He fought back. He shot at me.”
“Well, he isn’t shooting now,” Brigid told him.
* * *
“THE REGEN SUITS ARE WHAT keep the Mags active,” Burton told Grant. “I almost said ‘alive,’ but it’s not that. ‘Active’ is the polite term for it, you get me?”
“You mean they’re dead?” Grant asked. He thought back to the Dark Magistrates he had seen since he emerged from the mat-trans, the ones who had chased him through the hospital, the ones who had dunked his head in the basin of water until he could no longer hold his breath.
“I didn’t invent it for that, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Burton blurted. “The design was intended to prolong life for the terminally ill. Baron Trevelyan insisted it be tested to the limit. He wanted to see whether you could take a fresh corpse, bring it back and make it remain alive, on the verge of death. I saw the Magistrates kill test subjects on the baron’s instructions, just so that they could test it.”
“It worked,” Grant said sourly. “But why would anyone want to animate the dead like that?”
“Nearest I can figure,” Burton told him, “Baron Trevelyan is what they call a control freak. He wants absolute loyalty—demands it.”
“Sounds like a baron,” Grant lamented.
“The dead don’t answer back,” Burton reasoned.
Grant nodded, accepting this without cheer. “Why are you hooked up like that?” he asked, indicating the hose going up to the ceiling.
“This? Little of my own medicine. I got exposed,” Burton explained, “to one of my own inventions. Now I have to keep being fed with it or I start...well, the reaction isn’t good.”
“What’s the invention?” Grant asked.
“The Guilt Bomb,” Burton said.
“Guilt Bomb?”
“Yes, well, that’s what they called it anyhow,” Burton explained, embarrassed. “Not my name, you understand. For one thing, it wasn’t a bomb. It was a chemical agent that required a dispersal method, but there was no explosive involved. It went in the water, that’s how they transmitted it.”
“Doesn’t sound like engineering,” Grant pointed out.
“Chemistry plus a little applied physics,” Burton agreed. “How it worked didn’t matter so much as how they spread it. The Magistrates needed a docile population, baron’s orders. People were becoming restless. He wanted us to submit, to give ourselves to him.”
“But you said it wasn’t a bomb,” Grant prompted in a querying tone.
“No,” Burton agreed, “it was disseminated through water, like I said. In small quantities it works like a tranquilizer.”
“What about larger quantities?” Grant asked.
“Repeated exposure brings about morose paranoia. More than that and...” Burton paused, jabbing his thumb in the direction of the hose in hi
s skull.
“It’s addictive?” Grant queried.
“The constant supply keeps my head clear,” Burton told him. “Relatively. Sin is a knowledge that we cannot lose, Mr. Grant.”
Chapter 22
Brewster Philboyd came to Lakesh’s desk in the Cerberus operations room with a sheaf of notes in his hand.
“Mr. Philboyd?” Lakesh said encouragingly, peering up from the data screen he had been analyzing.
All around them, the operations room was buzzing with activity. Personnel were checking the rolling data from the satellites; Donald Bry and his programming team were strengthening the security protocols of the computer aspect of the mat-trans; physician Reba DeFore had accompanied Farrell as they checked the interior of the mat-trans chamber itself. She was looking for biological residue, while he searched for any physical weak points that may have been created with the arrival and rapid demise of their mysterious visitor. Domi, meanwhile, had joined Edwards at a group of desks arranged before the mat-trans entrance, where they discussed possible response to any further infiltrators.
“Kane’s squad definitely reached the mat-trans outside of Panamint,” Philboyd confirmed solemnly as Lakesh listened. “Accessing the records remotely, the mat-trans there shows activation at 14.07, which tabulates perfectly with their arrival time, factoring in the additional time it would have taken them to reach the mat-trans itself. We can assume they used the mat-trans.”
“I don’t like this word—assume,” Lakesh said. “It suggests a margin of error.”
