by James Axler
“Too close,” Brigid whispered to herself. “Way too close.”
Her head felt hot where the bullet had passed, a friction burn searing against her skin. She ignored it, driving her body onward as her heart beat a tattoo against her ribs. Behind her, Magistrate East had drawn himself out onto the same ledge, arms splayed as he scratched for a grip with his skeletal claws.
Brigid hugged the building in a solid hold, switching the shotgun from her right hand to her left. It was not an easy maneuver, not up here three stories above the hard tarmac of the street with the winds howling in her ears and the screaming bullets cutting holes all around her. But Brigid zoned out everything, determined to get the gun into position.
Magistrate East pulled himself up and began working his way along the building in the shuffling crab walk that the narrow ledge demanded. Brigid’s eyes narrowed, framing the Mag in her sights. Then her shotgun boomed, the sound muffled by the furious winds all around her. The shot missed the Magistrate, but that didn’t matter. It was close enough, and Brigid watched regretfully as the man suddenly lost his grip amid the strike of buckshot, slipped and tumbled backward away from the building’s face.
Brigid turned as he fell, urging her body to keep moving. She heard the loud crunch of metal as the Mag struck one of the personnel carriers parked outside the hospital, denting the metal beyond repair. It was done.
Swiftly Brigid scrambled to the corner of the building, doing her best to ignore the bullets that screamed all around her, pulling herself around the side of the block.
Brigid breathed a sigh of relief as she swung around the corner, clinging tightly to the building’s face. Then she turned her head, searching for the holed section of the hospital. And there, framed against the darkness of the night sky, Brigid saw fifty Magistrates climbing up the side of the building on fixed lines, like a troop of monkeys climbing a tree. They were coming for her. And she had just two blasts left in the replica Mossberg shotgun.
Chapter 27
In the aircraft-hangar-size room atop the Magistrate Hall of Justice, Baron Trevelyan was shaking his head, a cunning, lizardlike smile on his thin lips.
“The most wonderful thing about leaders is...I’m the only one.” He laughed.
Cuffed before the hybrid baron, Grant began to see it all now, piecing the clues together from everything this Baron Trevelyan had said. The barons of Grant’s world had been hybrid shells designed for one purpose—to house a genetic template that would one day be activated, securing new life for the long-dead Annunaki royal family. That process had involved a download catalyst from a starship called Tiamat, the mythical dragon mother.
But here, in this world—so like and yet so unlike Grant’s own—things had gone a different way. In the wake of the Deathlands era, the hybrid program had stuttered, creating not nine barons but just one—Trevelyan. Alone, Baron Trevelyan had created the lone ville that dominated the Earth: a megaville called Quocruft, where Grant and his companions had accidentally emerged when they’d engaged the quantum phase inducer of the mat-trans. In this world, the baron’s call to arms had never come from the dragon mother. Or, when it had, it had failed somehow, leaving Trevelyan a half-born thing with a purpose but without the knowledge of his Annunaki past. Without the competition of the other barons, Trevelyan had been able to turn all of his attention to the decimated remains of humanity—a human population that had been pared down by the nukecaust and the Deathlands period that had followed. Trevelyan’s own inhuman streak had clearly encouraged him to experiment in methods of control.
In Grant’s reality, the nine barons had been a thorn in the side of the Cerberus organization during its early days, and Grant had often wondered how much better the world would have been without those inhuman hybrid rulers. Seeing this world with just one baron made him realize it was a case of “better the devil you know.”
“The Magistrates are dead,” Trevelyan gloated. “You realize that, don’t you?”
Grant looked at the black-clad figures who flanked their baron, their rotted faces masked behind the helms they wore, each exhibiting a different stage of decay. “Yeah,” Grant said, recalling what Professor Burton had told him. “But why?”
“Technology,” Trevelyan said. “You know, it has been a long time since I’ve had someone new to speak to. I’m rather enjoying the feeling of liberation it brings. Bask in my glory, apekin.”
“So what now?” Grant asked with a sneer.
“For you? Or for me?” Trevelyan quipped.
Grant remained silent, letting the hybrid enjoy his moment of triumph while he could. He had spotted something familiar when he scanned the Dead Magistrates faces a moment ago—a figure who looked an awful lot like Kane. Furthermore, the man looked decidedly alive, much to Grant’s relief. And if Kane was here, that meant that surely Brigid wasn’t far behind. Grant’s eyes flicked in that direction again as Trevelyan spoke, trying not to make it too obvious where he was looking.
“There are other worlds out there, ape-thing,” the baron stated, gesturing wildly with his bird-thin arms. “Other Earths held in pockets, one beside the next, each one populated by millions of humans just like you. In galactic terms, only the lightest fabric separates us.”
Again, Grant put this together with what Burton had told him, realizing that Trevelyan had been seeing with his Annunaki knowledge, peering into dimensions without quite realising why or how. Properly born, the Annunaki were multidimensional, their battles fought across many planes. This one saw those planes, those other levels of the great game board, and didn’t know why.
“I have spent—” Trevelyan paused thoughtfully, his oily eyes wistful “—time breaking that fabric, tearing it aside so that I could travel there. To rule. The personnel, the power needed—it all takes so much time.”
“You’re deranged,” Grant growled.
Standing amid the Dark Magistrates, Grant’s partner Kane could not help but smile at his friend’s statement. Brief and insightful as ever, he thought.
Trevelyan inclined his head in mocking acceptance of Grant’s insult. “Our first attempt almost destroyed this settlement,” he stated, emotionlessly. “The power required to pierce dimensions is more than you could possibly comprehend. We channeled the sun’s rays across a dozen separate capacitors and still it blew out the ville like a bomb. The shockwaves rocked through every mat-shifter on Earth, wiping out great chunks of the globe.
“I’m surprised to see you still alive after so long. It’s hideous out there.”
“And then?” Grant encouraged.
“The trouble was there was no port,” Trevelyan explained. “Nothing to dock onto. We were flinging our dimensional anchor out there, but there was nothing to hook, you understand?”
In response, Grant glared at the baron. He had a nasty feeling he knew where all of this was leading—his very appearance on this world at this time was the only evidence he needed.
“Eventually, we found a receiver platform out there, on one of the worlds,” Trevelyan said. “Which meant we could send our explorers to that one specific point. Much more chance of survival, you understand?”
A chill went through Grant’s spine, already knowing what the baron was referring to when he spoke of “a receiver platform”—he meant the mat-trans. Trevelyan’s dimensional transmission was utilizing the same basic tech that Cerberus employed, which was how Grant had arrived here with Kane and Brigid, plucked from the quantum ether during an energy spike from this plane. Grant might not be a science guy, but he had spent long enough around the Cerberus brainiacs that he could imagine the basic process—it was the same as a crossed-line telephone call or a stronger radio signal interfering with a weaker one. Shit.
“You want to go conquer another Earth,” Grant said. “Is that it?”
“Not conquer,” Trevelyan said sneeringly. “Man is a plague,
a cancer. I wish to eradicate him. Surely even you can see the simple truth in that.
“Which brings us to what is to happen to you, I suppose. As you have witnessed, my Magistrates are robust. But they waste away in time, as the rot sets in. One can only hold back time for so long. We remained on this Earth rather longer than I had envisaged, and between natural wastage and the loss of test subjects while we refined the procedure, my army is beginning to dwindle. So, I would like to offer you a position—as a Magistrate, working for your baron.”
Grant eyed the rotting figures who were moving about the room, each one further decomposed than the last. “And what if I refuse?”
“That won’t matter to you for very long,” Trevelyan assured him with a hideous reptilian smile. “The brain functions are halted during the conversion, and your physical system is rewired so that it can gorge on itself, a self-perpetuating loop that grants you a reasonable period of servitude. Two years, I believe we said, didn’t we, Professor?”
Professor Burton nodded without enthusiasm. “Yes, my baron.”
“But they’re dying,” Grant said angrily.
“No, they’re not dying,” Trevelyan told him. “They’re dead. But they serve me, anyway. You’ll learn, in time, that the demarcation between life and death is a lot less solid than you had been led to believe.”
Hiding among the mingling Magistrates, Kane eyed the nearest of them warily, spying the rotten skin on their chins where their helmets left them exposed. Dead Magistrates. It was so monstrous that it hardly bore contemplating.
* * *
BRIGID CLAMBERED IN THE indigo darkness, hurrying along the ledge outside the deserted hospital. The Dark Magistrates had secured fixed lines up the side of the building using launching devices with grappling hooks on the street below. The nearest of the Magistrates was less than ten feet below her and just a little way along from where she scrambled.
Brigid halted for a moment as she passed the safety of the building’s corner, drawing her shotgun around and pulling the trigger. The Mossberg replica boomed above the howling winds in the concrete canyons, a vibrant burst of propellant lighting the night for just a flickering second.
Two Magistrates were caught by the blast. The one nearest Brigid took the brunt of it, a gob of flesh bursting from his flank and spattering across the wall like spilled paint, joined a moment later by a hissing burst of gas. Behind him, a second Mag was clipped by the wide-spread burst of fire, and he let go of his fixed line, sailing back to the ground from two stories up. On his way down, the falling Magistrate knocked two further Mags from their lines, while a third went spinning in place as his grip was jarred.
Brigid smiled grimly as she saw the first Mag dangling from his line, his head now just a bloody ruin. The immediate path was clear, but she only had one shot left in the shotgun’s breech—better make it count. At least everyone out here was her target, which made it marginally easier.
Brigid’s feet skipped along the narrow ledge running atop the windows, the soles of her boots barely making contact as she urged herself to greater speed like some crazy high-wire artist. Her left side was against the wall, hand tapping along it, pressing against it as she drove herself on, shoulder brushing its solid surface. She had to get to the mat-trans unit; that was the only priority. Once inside that room she could put her back to a wall giving her some chance, however slim, of defending herself. Out here she was so vulnerable that she may just as well have had a target painted across her back.
Brigid kept moving, foot over foot, driving herself on toward the jagged cavity in the wall. The facade of the building had taken a major blow at some point in the past, taking out a huge section between the fourth and first floors. Looking at it from the outside like this, Brigid realized that it could very well have emanated from the mat-trans itself, some rogue surge of power firing through the hospital building. Just what the hell had they been doing in there?
Around her, the unlit ville was a ghostly presence, a shadow crouching in her field of vision like a big cat stalking its prey. It looked large, larger than any ville she had ever seen. The night sky was a deep gray now, and no stars showed through the cloud cover. It was almost as if she were running under the bedcovers.
Another bullet clipped the wall close to Brigid with an agonized scream as it drilled through the stone. As it struck, Brigid’s body trembled, and for a moment she thought she might lose her balance on the precarious ledge. She stopped, steadying herself, calming her rapid breath. Her heart was slamming against her rib cage, pulse pounding in her ears so loudly she could barely hear the bullets streaking through the air all around her. The darkness was hiding her for now, but she could not stay lucky forever. No one could.
“Keep moving,” she told herself. “Don’t stop.”
With those words of encouragement, Brigid started moving again, stretching out her feet in her boots, balancing on the soles of her toes, making as little contact with the ledge as possible.
The wall pressed against her left hand, cold to the touch. The gap in the wall came upon Brigid abruptly, so much so that it almost caused her to fall. Its ragged edges had been hidden by the night’s darkness, and she found it purely by the fact that her left arm no longer had anything to support it.
Brigid swayed in place, the shotgun swinging out like a trapeze artist’s swing as she struggled to keep from falling. Her left foot skittered on the ledge, and she levered her body through the gap in the wall. Even in the faint light, she knew she was in the wrong room. It was small, a narrow aisle running between high shelves.
She stood there just a moment, catching her breath. Outside, the fixed lines of the Magistrates cut through her view of the ville like bars on a window, another launching as she watched. She saw something flash in the distance as one of the buildings in the center of the ville came to life, as if lightning had struck within its walls.
“What on earth—?” Brigid muttered, watching the distant windows sparkle.
But there was no time to worry about that now. She needed to get to the mat-trans, tap its power supply, send a message through the quantum ether to Cerberus.
A hand reached up as Brigid stepped toward the destroyed wall. She’d been planning to step out again, run across the building’s facade and get to the mat-trans chamber that way. It could only be a room or two over, she knew—her eidetic memory granted an impeccable spatial awareness.
The gloved hand reached up, followed by its partner, scrabbling across the cratered floor inches from Brigid’s feet. The Magistrate’s head appeared a split-second later, and Brigid seemed to be watching in slow motion as the Mag called his Soul Eater pistol to his palm. The weapon revealed itself from its hidden sheath above his right wrist, barrel extending as it popped into his hand. His black lips pulled back over yellow-gray teeth that hung in receded gums.
Brigid kicked out even as the Magistrate fired, a screeching bullet cutting the air above her head before planting itself in the ceiling. Brigid’s kick struck the Magistrate full in his rotted face, the side of her boot ramming into his nose in a burst of fluids and dusty skin. The Mag’s helmet was shunted askew with the blow. Brigid followed up with a second kick, this time using the solid heel of her hoot to drive a powerful blow into the Mag’s exposed chin.
Crack!
The Magistrate slipped and fell, losing his grip on the ragged ruin of exterior wall. But as he fell, a second and third pair of hands materialized along the edge, then a fourth, a fifth and a sixth. The Dark Magistrates had caught up with her, and there was no time left to escape.
* * *
PERHAPS THE DARK MAGS could sense the living, too, Kane pondered, as something alien to them. That would explain the confusion in the stairwell when he had brushed past the two Magistrates on their way to the basement, and it might also be the reason that they had found him and his companions so easy to track in th
e abandoned ville.
Wary now, Kane took a step away from the other Mags, watching them from the corner of his eye as he listened to the baron’s continued bragging.
“Of course, by then your opinion will be very much irrelevant,” Trevelyan was telling Grant as he leaned toward his bound form. “Much as it is now,” he added with a braying laugh.
Grant stared straight ahead, eyeing the glowing ring that dominated the far end of the room. The ring had begun to crackle with witch fire, bursts of electricity firing from one side to the other, over and over. It was charging up for something, the power thrumming through the floor in a rapid drumbeat.
“After that,” Trevelyan continued, “you’ll be sent on your way, just one more loyal warrior in my conquering army as we mount our invasion.” He pointed to the upstanding hoop. Four figures stood before the hoop now. They were dressed in matte black, all-in-one coveralls that hooded over their skulls, hiding their faces. Grant guessed that they were Magistrates, seconded to do exploratory work. In unison, the quartet checked the weapons attached to their wrist holsters.
As Trevelyan spoke, Grant saw something flickering within the hoop, an image blurring into place inside the inner rim of the circle. He watched as it took hold, showed a room seen through a brown sheen as if viewed through sunglasses. The room was busy, figures silhouetted through the bottle-brown glass as they hurried about their tasks.
“My scout found a ‘port’ earlier today,” Trevelyan explained. “A beachhead for my army’s initial landing.”
Grant saw the image come into sharper focus then, lightning still playing across it where the dimensional breach rocked with incredible energies. He recognized the view, knew the room that waited beyond that tinted armaglass wall. It was Cerberus.
