by James Axler
Brigid smiled. “Bingo.”
She had power. Now she just had to run it through the radio and start broadcasting across the quantum reach.
* * *
EDWARDS, DOMI AND THE other security officers blasted back as the black-clad intruders raked the Cerberus ops room with bullets. The bullets howled, screeching through the air like living things, the screams dying on impact.
A blond sec officer called Tatlow went crashing to the floor as one of those howling bullets struck him dead center of his chest, piercing the light armored vest he wore. Edwards leaped over the falling figure of his colleague, bringing his Sin Eater around and blasting a stream of 9 mm bullets at the intruders. Bullets flew all around, slapping against the walls and the furniture in the room, shattering computer terminal screens as they struck.
Nearby, Domi ducked for cover as a cluster of strange, shrieking bullets cut the air toward her. She dove behind a computer desk as the bullets hit. The computer screen shattered and wooden chunks kicked up where bullets raked the desk.
Wary, her breath coming fast, Domi scampered down the aisle of computer terminals before peering over the top of another desk. The strange interlopers were shooting wildly, targeting anything that moved in the orange illumination. Lakesh, Farrell and Reba were at the back of the room now, close to the exit doors. Domi willed them to go out there, to get themselves out of the line of fire. But there was no time to give orders. Better to take action.
Bringing her Detonics pistol above the lip of the desk, her head so low that only her ruby eyes and white hair were visible, Domi took careful aim at one of the intruders and pulled the trigger. A steel-nosed 230-grain bullet launched from the gun’s snout in a burst of propellant.
In the corner of the operations center, the mat-trans chamber was powering up again, lethal bursts of cosmic energy rushing through the glass-walled room.
It was chaos.
* * *
BRIGID SLID HER THUMBNAIL under the open section at the front of the mat-trans, shoved her thumb in the groove and snapped the panel back as far as it would go. This was no time for delicacy; she needed to get in there and tap the power unit. A moment later, she had recovered the radio from where it was securely held under her jacket. It had survived intact, at least; maybe that was a good omen. With similar efficiency, she pulled the front panel of the radio off, working the holding screws with her nail.
Leaning down until her head almost touched the floor, Brigid stared at the guts of the mat-trans where a little power light glowed green. There was wiring there and a whole load of mechanics. A hoselike attachment corded out from the left-hand side, clipped into the door panel on molded housings. She recognized it as a test pipe, a way to reroute the energy during the necessary maintenance periods that the mat-trans would be expected to go through. She plucked the hose free, ran her exposed hand over the metal prongs that were positioned at its tip. The attachment was designed to slot into a portable analysis unit. It was not live, but with a flick of a switch and a command to the podium, she could make it so.
Brigid glanced behind her, watching the hole in the wall for a long count to ten. The rain continued to lash at the wound in the wall, pooling water at the far edge of the room. Nothing was coming yet, just a lot of noise out there where the Magistrates were regrouping.
“Come on, come on,” Brigid urged herself, turning back to the test feed line beneath the front panel.
With deft movements of her fingers, Brigid had the radio unit wired into the power hose, allowing her to pump power into it. She turned back to the podium, pushing herself up from the floor and tapping in a coded sequence to run the power test. It would send power to the radio, linking it to the mat-trans’s quantum field generator. In theory, she could use that link to jump a radio broadcast across dimensions. As she triggered the power, two Magistrates appeared in her field of vision, clambering over the rubble at the edge of the room. Behind them, more hands were appearing as their colleagues ascended their fixed lines and swarmed on their prey. The lead Magistrates brought their Soul Eaters up, squeezing the triggers. Brigid was all out of time.
* * *
IN THE CERBERUS REDOUBT where the sounds of gunfire filled the air of the ops room, Domi’s attention was drawn for a moment to the mat-trans chamber looming in the corner of the room. Her eyes widened as she saw the cosmic energies swirling there. It looked like a whirlpool of electricity and dark matter, spinning around and around within the armaglass box.
Edwards, meanwhile, found himself drawn into hand-to-hand combat with one of the intruders as he tried to dodge flying bullets. His own weapon had clicked on empty, but before he could reload one of the black-clad strangers was bringing his own weapon up to execute him. Edwards lurched back, kicking as he moved out of the faceless figure’s line of fire. The intruder’s Soul Eater bucked, firing another blurting bullet in a ghostly burst of propellant mist. Edwards saw a face flash in the expelled gas, imprinting on his mind’s eye. The face was in agony.
The bullet sailed over Edwards’s arched body, and then the shaven-headed Cerberus man jabbed out with his right leg, smacking the intruder a sharp blow behind the knee. The stranger wobbled but stood firm, Edwards’s kick bouncing from him with a dull thud.
The dead man turned on Edwards, bringing his Soul Eater up to blast the Cerberus warrior in the face. Edwards moved fractionally faster, slapping the gun aside as the barrel spit its screaming discharge at him. Then with a yell of sheer effort, Edwards brought his other hand around in a fist—his empty Sin Eater back in its holster—jabbing the black-clad figure in the chest.
The infiltrator toppled backward, crashing into a computer terminal and knocking it from its perch.
But Edwards was struggling, too. His leg felt cold where he had touched the intruder and he was losing the feeling in his right hand. He staggered back, stumbling blindly against a chair as bullets zipped all about him.
Close by, Domi sensed the change in the air. The whirlpool of quantum energies was slowing down inside the mat-trans chamber, coalescing into something solid. Something else was coming, she realized. More of the invaders.
Chapter 30
Standing at the control podium, Brigid jabbed at the final key and leaped. At the same instant, six Magistrates shot at her, launching a half-dozen screaming bullets across the room.
But Brigid was a blur of motion, leaping across the room to where the power cable was hooked into the radio unit. As the bullets struck all around her, Brigid kicked, breaking the power cord’s connection with the radio even before it had begun to charge. The hoselike cord flopped free for a moment as power began to surge through it. Brigid was still running, muscles pumping as she leaped into the open door of the mat-trans itself. The mat-trans had been designed to contain the quantum energies involved in moving objects through folded space; it should protect her from what she hoped was about to happen.
Bullets clattered against the pebbled armaglass panels as Brigid ducked inside the chamber. Outside, the flailing power hose danced in the air for a moment, as if it were a snake hypnotized by a snake charmer, before sinking to the floor. As it struck the floor, the sparking jack brushed against one of the exposed copper pipes that ran the length of the room beneath the broken floor tiles. Suddenly the whole room was lit as if by lightning as the floor came to life. The pooling water began to dance and pop as electricity streaked through the room.
From the safety of the mat-trans chamber, Brigid felt those first jolts tremor through the floor, felt the crackle in the air as static played across her skin.
From outside, it appeared that the hospital was trying to contain lightning as electricity sparked across the floor of the room, running through the copper pipes and sending jolts up high in the air, crackling up and down the thick metal struts that had been used to support the ceiling.
Six Magistrates h
ad been hurrying through the main room as Brigid kicked the hose, peppering the tinted armaglass of the mat-trans with screaming bullets as the first shocks struck. The electric current zapped through the floor tiles and surged through their dead bodies, striking them down like a glowing electric scythe. Five more Mags had just entered the room via the ruined exterior wall. As their booted feet touched the pooling water, they were caught up by the electric current and tossed high in the air, their bodies smoking as they slammed against the ceiling or went flying back out of the room and down into the street through the open wall.
Two more Magistrates were caught up as their colleagues tumbled into them, while another was sideswiped by an electric lance that zigzagged through the air.
Closeted within the mat-trans chamber, Brigid huddled down, watching the electricity spark and flame through the multifaceted armaglass. Magistrates were still pouring through the open rent in the wall, hurrying inside after their prey, irrespective of the danger. Several managed a few steps into the room before the sparking electricity struck them down or sent them up into the ceiling or across the room until they hit a wall. Their Soul Eaters coughed as they were hit, sending great streams of bullets across the room in hideous screams until they finally fell to silence.
Brigid continued to hide in the secure mat-trans chamber where she was safe. Her hair was raised with the static buzzing through the air and her skin tingled, but the electricity didn’t reach into the chamber itself. The exposed copper piping didn’t run inside here, and the pooling water was all out in the main room, close to the opening that dominated one wall. Brigid watched as Magistrates went down like tenpins. Suddenly, her shotgun sailed past the door as a streak of electricity caught it, whipping it across the room before slamming it against the line of metal lockers with a resounding clang. The lockers, too, were alive with electricity, shaking in place as white lightning played across them.
The room seemed to shake as Brigid watched, the reanimated Magistrates being swept from their feet before they could get more than a few steps inside. The water at the edges of the room was leaping and boiling under the pressure, misting in the air as Magistrates were thrown back. For a moment, there in the mist, Brigid saw Daryl standing, watching her with accusing eyes as the reanimated Magistrates were destroyed in the electrical cataclysm.
“Don’t judge me,” Brigid told him. “You’d have done the same if you were still alive.”
* * *
KANE ELBOWED ANOTHER sickly-looking Magistrate out of his way as he forged a path to the gateway. Cosmic energies crackled all around the gate, causing Kane’s hair to stand on end as he headed toward it.
Up close, Kane could see that the device was more elaborate than he had initially registered. It was constructed of layered metal, jointed like an ancient suit of armor with thin tubes of glass running across its surface connecting all the joints. The glass pumped cooling fluids through the system from a barrellike block at the base.
As Kane stared at it, the hoop seemed to expand and contract, shimmering in place as figures moved in its impossible depths. He could see the Cerberus ops room from the perspective of their mat-trans chamber, saw the sheer chaos this infiltration by dead Magistrates was wreaking. He had to stop it. If only he could figure out where to shoot the darn thing.
Kane had been standing still just two seconds, his gaze racing across the many sections of the gateway, searching for a weak spot. From his right, another of the dead Magistrates launched himself at Kane, drawing his Soul Eater and preparing to fire.
Kane whipped his own pistol up, blasting the dead Mag full in the chest.
The way now clear, Kane turned his blaster on the gateway itself, targeting the control stand with a narrowing of his eyes. “Show’s over, people,” he muttered as reality seemed to quake and bulge before him.
As Kane squeezed the trigger he heard Baron Trevelyan scream a defiant curse somewhere behind him, the words echoing through the vast chamber. Kane’s Sin Eater bucked in his hand as he held the trigger down in continuous fire, playing the barrel left and right, peppering the whole of the control unit and the barrellike cooling system with 9 mm rounds. Bullets laced the casing, kicking up sparks as they struck against the metal, several of them deflecting away at tangents through the room. Kane’s lips were pulled back in a sneer, his eyes narrowed to slits as the circular gateway crackled and throbbed, sending shock waves of fearsome energy through the room.
Without warning, the view of Cerberus winked out and was replaced by a different view, one that showed a sun-scorched desert, its dry earth cracked and broken. Kane watched as the second wave of Magistrate travelers was pulled from his world into this new one, their bodies stretched into new and impossible shapes. The gateway glowed with the intensity of a miniature sun then, and Kane was forced to turn away as the image flickered and changed again, the desert becoming a concrete-walled bunker, a restaurant, a star field.
On the far side of the room, Baron Trevelyan watched with horror. “No, he can’t...”
Grant kicked the baron in the ribs as he ducked past another Magistrate who tried to grab him. “Keep it down, Baron Bozo,” he snarled. Then he was running through the room toward Kane. It was possibly the most foolish thing Grant had ever done, placing him closer to the source of danger as the dimensional gateway began to erupt in a wreath of crackling witch fire. But he knew that whatever happened now, he should be beside his partner, fighting the good fight.
Behind Grant, Roger Burton was eyeing the hybrid baron with something other than fear for the first time in years. He felt a new emotion rising in his chest, an emotion he had been denied as he was fed his own self-loathing. The emotion was hate, hate for the inhuman thing who had perverted his inventions, who had wasted his genius on new methods of cruelty. As Baron Trevelyan recovered from the kick to his ribs, he saw Roger Burton reach down for him, as if to help him up from the floor.
“Yes, yes,” Trevelyan encouraged. “Help me up. We can still rectif—”
But Burton didn’t allow the baron to finish the sentence. The baron flinched as he saw something thick and metallic snap at his head, smashing him in the face; it was the hose that had fed guilt into Roger Burton’s brain, still connected to his skull like a tentacle. Burton leaned down, his hands around the midsection of the hose, striking with it again and again at the baron’s bloody face.
All across the room, the Dark Magistrates seemed disoriented by the sudden outpouring of cosmic energies, the sum total of everything the sun shield had trapped to power this incredible hole through the universe. The floor seemed to buckle as a burst of radial energy spit from the dimensional hoop, running through the room and knocking a dozen Mags off their feet, shattering the windows behind the gateway. Grant leaped as the wave of force came at him, felt it buffet his body as the floorboards were torn from their housings.
Standing before the blaze, Kane continued washing the machinery with bullets, doing his best to ignore the wild forces that were playing out before him. The view through the hoop had become a jumble, a thousand flashing images streaming across its tesseract depths, a window into a thousand different realities.
“Dunno what you did,” Grant said breathlessly, appearing at Kane’s side, “but I think it’s time we made our exit.”
Kane watched as the impossible window flickered and changed views once more, out-of-control energy playing across its surface. “Couldn’t agree more,” he said. “You got a friend?”
Grant glanced back into the room. Professor Burton had the metal hose stretched across Trevelyan’s throat, cinching it around the hybrid’s neck, crushing his windpipe. The professor was wide-eyed, blood on his clothes. He looked deranged. “I think he has some things he still wants to work out here,” Grant admitted.
As the dimensional gateway hit critical, Kane and Grant made their way to the rear of the room, clambering up onto the desks there b
efore launching themselves out of the broken window. Sure, there were better ways to exit the building, but they both knew that they didn’t have the time to spare. The gateway was about to blow.
* * *
A WORLD AWAY, WITHIN the Cerberus ops room, Domi waited behind the cover of a bullet-riddled desk. Her eyes were fixed on the mat-trans chamber door as four new figures began materialising inside. “Come on,” she muttered. “Bring it.”
The very second that door opened, Domi would shoot them, she vowed; there was no way that she would allow herself or her people to be put in any more jeopardy.
Behind Domi, the ops room was alive with fighting. The Cerberus security team was doing its utmost to hold back the first invaders, four black-clothed figures with masks over their heads.
One infiltrator had fallen thanks to Edwards’s relentless attack, but the others were proving durable even under heavy fire.
“Their suits are deflecting bullets,” Lakesh realized from where he watched with Reba and Farrell, crouching beneath the Mercator map by the room’s doors. “I’d guess they’re wearing...Kevlar.”
Even as he said it, he and DeFore exchanged a meaningful look. According to DeFore’s analysis of the mysterious woman who had emerged from the mat-trans a few hours earlier, she had been wrapped in a mixture of Kevlar, Mylar, Nomex and nylon. It confirmed that these people came from the same source, even if it did nothing to inform Lakesh what that source was.
DeFore looked helpless as another howling bullet zipped by the trio before embedding itself in the wall six feet from Farrell’s dangling gold hoop earring. “I don’t know what to do, Dr. Singh,” she admitted with a shake of her head. “I just don’t know.”
