by James Axler
Ignoring the madness around her, Domi emerged from her hiding place close to the mat-trans as the door eased back on its greased tread. She had her Detonics Combat Master held out before her, and as the door slid back she began to fire, driving 9 mm slugs into the figures revealed within the swirling transport mists.
But as the door drew back, the sound of cracking ice filling the air, the figures seemed to sag, caving in on themselves even as Domi’s first bullets struck them.
“What th—?” Domi muttered, easing the pressure on the trigger for a moment.
Inside the mat-trans chamber, four dark-clad figures seemed to wither, their bodies caving in on themselves as they collapsed to the floor. Domi watched incredulously as they lost integrity, once-hard muscles turning to gelatine.
Across the room, Lakesh peered up into the barrel of a pistol as one of the remaining intruders prepared to blow his brains out.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE HALL OF JUSTICE, Kane and Grant were clambering down the side of the building. Kane had used the multikey he had acquired to free Grant from his handcuffs. The multikey was designed to work any set of Magistrate cuffs, though Kane had never known quite how useful that would prove when he had stolen it from the storeroom.
The two men moved swiftly down the building’s facade, their hands and feet skimming over the rain-slick masonry as, above them, the glowing dimensional gateway reached a crescendo. A moment later the Cerberus warriors were on the ground, running hell-for-leather away from the Magistrate Hall as a mighty shock wave rippled through it from the top floor.
They had landed behind the building, in a fenced-off area where Magistrate vehicles were parked. The area included Land Rovers, two hover tanks and a half-dozen personnel carriers, as well as several bulky Sandcats. Kane ran the magnetic multikey over the door of the nearest Sandcat to unlock it, while overhead great chunks of the building started to crack as incredible cosmic energies sought release. The driver’s gull-wing door swung open.
Grant slipped into the passenger seat as Kane ran the multikey over the ignition, starting up the engine with a satisfying purr.
Part tank, part wag, the Sandcat had a low-slung, blocky chassis supported by a pair of retractable tracks that could negotiate the most challenging terrain. The durable design also featured an armored bubble at the center rear of the vehicle, from which jutted the twin barrels of two USMG-73 heavy machine guns capable of inflicting incredible punishment on anyone who challenged the Mags. The hull was composed of a tough ceramic-armaglass bond.
All around, lightning fired into the sky from the topmost level of the Magistrate building, its electrical fingers clawing at the sky.
“Time to leave,” Grant urged as a chunk of stonework came toppling from the building’s roof, crashing through the hood of a parked personnel carrier two vehicles over from them. The personnel carrier sunk on its tires as the weight broke its suspension.
“Definitely,” Kane agreed, gunning the engine and shoving the Sandcat into gear.
A moment later, the Sandcat barrelled through the thick wooden gates of the restricted area, tracks wailing as it hit the road.
“No word of thanks?” Kane challenged Grant as he wrestled with the wheel, bringing the Sandcat around a corner over the traumatized tarmac there, its headlights carving a path ahead of them.
Grant glared at him, rubbing at his wrists where the cuffs had bound him. “I almost died,” he snapped. “So, what kept you?”
Kane smiled. “You know me, partner—fashionably late’s how I play these things.”
Grant nodded. It was good to be back among friends. He watched the road for a few seconds as Kane urged more power to the engine, eyeing the streets for landmarks. “You have any idea where we’re headed?” Grant asked.
“Hospital,” Kane told him. “Brigid had an errand to run there. I promised I’d pick her up when I was done here.”
* * *
LAKESH LOOKED AT THE black-clad infiltrator who was bringing his pistol around to shoot. Lakesh tried to scramble away, pushing DeFore and Farrell out of the line of fire as the intruder pulled the trigger.
A shot rang through the air, sounding close as Lakesh tried to get out of its way. But the shot did not scream the way that these nightmare guns seemed to. It came instead with the clean whizz of a 9 mm slug, cutting through the air and embedding itself in the black figure’s skull. It struck with a shattering crash as the intruder’s head broke apart, chunks hurtling in all directions.
Lakesh turned as the infiltrator collapsed to his knees, just a headless corpse now. Gas was pouring from the stump where the masked head had been, chugging into the air in a gray-green cloud. The cloud smelled awful.
It took a moment for Lakesh to process what had happened. His eyes were fixed on his would-be killer, watching as the foul-smelling gas hissed from his suit. Then his eyes flickered, scanning the room where his security force was battling with the last of the intruders. He stopped, spotting the figure on the far side of the room standing with the outthrust Combat Master in her chalk-white hand. It was Domi—and Lakesh realized that she had shot his would-be executioner, once again playing the role of his guardian angel. Lakesh inclined his head in a nod, mouthing words of thanks.
Domi nodded back, returning to the mop-up as the last two invaders were penned in by the Cerberus forces.
* * *
IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM, the air smelled of ozone. The power hose was still skittering across the floor, writhing back and forth where the under-floor piping was exposed, its sparking end firing as it snagged the last remaining water droplets on the floor tiles. Brigid’s improvised plan had worked better than she could have hoped. None of the Magistrates were moving and nothing appeared to be coming through the gaping rent in the wall other than that relentless rain.
Brigid watched for a half minute longer, waiting to be sure that the Magistrates’ attack was over. Her long red hair stood out like a halo around her head where the electricity in the air caught it, shimmering in place. No one was coming. The attack was over; she had repelled it.
Outside the mat-trans chamber, the room still buzzed where the current played across the floor and metal lockers, the pooled water all turned to steam. Brigid watched the lightning trails, eyeing the hose that fed them from the front of the mat-trans chamber itself. Steeling herself, Brigid stepped out onto the lip of the mat-trans door and kicked out as far as she could to hook the flailing hose up off the floor. As soon as it ceased to make a connection with the copper piping the artificial storm stopped, the smell and the smoke still churning in the air.
Standing on one leg, Brigid drew the hose toward her with her other toe, pulling it close enough so that she could grab it. The hose felt hot and Brigid winced as she touched it with her bare hand. It was like touching the side of a hot oven. She grimaced, holding the hose aloft. The two metal prongs on the front had turned black, and smoke poured from their ends. No matter, the thing was still pumping power, it could still be made to suit her purposes.
With the circuit broken, the room had ceased its sparking storm. Brigid stepped out onto the burned floor, leaned down and tucked the hose carefully back into its housing beneath the armaglass panels where it could do no further harm. Then she strode across to the control podium, flattening her hair with one hand as she stepped over the singed body of a fallen Magistrate. The dead figure lay still, the chunky Soul Eater weapon still clutched in his hand, its firing pin clicking on empty. Brigid ignored him as she tapped out a command sequence on the podium, instructing the unit to power down.
A moment later she was back at her radio, examining it for damage. Miraculously, despite some singed exterior panels, it had survived the unleashed electricity. She only hoped it still worked.
Chapter 31
The Sandcat bobbed and weaved along the street as Kane floored the
accelerator, hurtling away from the Magistrate Hall as a shock wave raked through the upper floors from the damaged dimensional gate. Kane glanced in the rearview mirror. The upper stories of the building were glowing green and white, the pressure growing as the power leaked out.
Beside Kane, Grant was securing his seat belt as the Sandcat hurtled along rain-slick streets. “At least traffic won’t be a problem,” he said as Kane took a corner at sixty miles per hour, following the twin cones of his headlamps, urging more power from the engine.
“One advantage of driving in an abandoned ville,” Kane agreed as he fishtailed out of the turn, driving the Sandcat onward toward the hospital by the lake.
Two blocks behind the Sandcat, a great explosion shook the Magistrate building, vaporizing the upper levels in an instant. Green-gold energy churned forth, blazing into the heavens and firing outward into the ville. The building collapsed amid the deafening outburst, destroying the last remaining Magistrates before they could exit through the gateway. An avalanche of masonry struck the street with a roar like thunder as the building collapsed in on itself, a further great hunk of mass disappearing through the dimensional vent.
Inside the Sandcat, Kane and Grant felt the shock wave as the building was leveled, the impact shaking the street as they hurried away from ground zero. The only lights in the ville came from Kane’s headlamps and the dimensional rift behind him; the rest of rain-drenched Quocruft was left in absolute darkness. The treads squealed as Kane pulled at the wheel, jouncing over the cracked ruins of the roadway.
As Kane sped over a crossway, swerving the steering wheel left then right to avoid a large hole in the road, something slammed against the driver’s side of the Sandcat.
“The hell?” Kane spit, yanking at the wheel.
Kane’s head turned, glancing down the cross street where it stretched at right angles to the one they were traveling on. With the loud roar of a straining engine, a Magistrate wag appeared just three feet away from his wing, swerving to ram them a second time, its only lights coming from the driver’s displays.
* * *
CERBERUS WAS CLEAR AT LAST. The last of the invaders had been dealt with. Edwards’s security team had trapped the last two, penning them in so they could do no further damage. But before they had been able to detain them, both black-clad figures had crumbled like crushed ice, flopping to the floor as quaking wrecks. Across the ops room, their fallen colleagues were exhibiting a similar reaction. It was as if they were watching a spilled slushie in the midday sun, black shards twinkling as all of their bodies turned to liquid.
Lakesh and Domi were joined by Reba DeFore as they stared at the sharp fragments of blackness that were all that remained of the intruders from the mat-trans.
“Any idea what happened to them?” Reba asked.
“They arrived at absolute zero and shattered like ice sculptures,” Lakesh mused. “I’d say that whoever sent them didn’t do his calculations right, wouldn’t you?”
“Tapping into the mat-trans can be a tricky business,” Domi added.
DeFore nodded in agreement. “Question is, where did they come from?”
Lakesh turned his head, fixing the physician with his penetrating blue stare. “That, my friends, is a question we may never have an answer to,” he said with an air of defeat, “and you both know how much I dislike a mystery.”
Evacuated personnel had just started filtering back inside to take up their posts when Brewster Philboyd came hurrying through the ops room doors balancing a laptop computer in his outstretched arms.
“Dr. Singh,” Philboyd blurted excitedly, “I have CAT Alpha. Brigid’s on the Commtact right now.”
Lakesh did a double take. It had been a strange few minutes, so much so that he had almost forgotten that Kane and his team were still somewhere off the map. “Brigid, my dear,” he said, bringing his mouth close to the upraised laptop’s microphone pickup. “How are you?”
Brigid’s voice came back through the portable computer’s built-in speakers, faint and a little distorted, peppered with the hiss of radio static. “Feeling kind of lost,” she admitted. “Brewster tells me you’ve been having some trouble there.”
Lakesh’s eyebrows knitted in consternation. “Nothing to worry you with,” he told her. “Where are you exactly? We’ve rather lost track.”
“That’s just it,” Brigid told him. “I’m going to need a remote pickup.”
Lakesh was the bona fide expert of the mat-trans, and Brigid’s request did not faze him at all. “Give me the location,” he said. “I take it you’re near a mat-trans.”
* * *
“I’M BROADCASTING THROUGH one,” Brigid told Lakesh as she sat on the floor before the mat-trans.
The door to the mat-trans was sealed shut, and the unit was chugging over in a sending loop, running power to its quantum phase circuitry. Brigid had been relieved to find that the mat-trans still had power, despite the rest of the ville being seemingly left without any. It seemed that the mat-trans ran on a different circuit, one that tapped into a separate grid running through the ville. Someone somewhere must have been pumping a lot of power through the linked network.
With the power running, Brigid had hooked the portable radio unit to the testing jack and, with a little inspired rewiring, got the two systems cross-talking well enough that she could broadcast to another world.
“When we accessed the mat-trans in the Panamint range, we were batted sidewise through space-time,” Brigid explained, “emerging not on our world but on another, a parallel casement. We came out at something that equates to our mat-trans, but the unit can’t send us back.”
“Didn’t you say you were running this broadcast through it?” Lakesh asked. His voice came with a burbled, distorted edge from the radio speaker, as if heard through the end of a vast metal pipe.
“Yes,” Brigid confirmed, “but I don’t see any way to send humans. It’s not powered to do that, only to receive.”
Through the radio’s static buzz, Brigid heard Lakesh humph to himself. “So we need a power supply strong enough to hook you and your team out of another reality,” he mused. “This will take some doing.” He didn’t need to add “if it’s possible.”
“I have faith in you, Lakesh,” Brigid said, staring at the radio speaker in the pitch-dark room in the abandoned hospital in the dead ville.
* * *
KANE WINCED AS THE personnel carrier struck them again, fighting with the steering wheel to keep the Sandcat on the road.
“If it ain’t one thing, it’s another,” Kane growled, spotting the grim visage of the dead Magistrate at the wheel of the other vehicle. The Mag’s helmet had a wide split running from crown to eye, and his expression was a fixed lunatic’s grin.
“Guess I spoke too soon about the traffic situation,” Grant quipped, snapping open his safety harness and ducking back into the rear of the Sandcat. A moment later the big man clambered up into the armored port at the top of the Sandcat, seating himself in the gunner’s bay. Rain lanced against the clear bubble as he took his position behind the machine guns.
As an ex-Magistrate himself, Grant knew how to handle the Sandcat’s weapons. He powered up the twin USMG-73 heavy machine gun array as the Sandcat was buffeted again by the heavier personnel carrier, scanning the street for more hostiles. It seemed their nemesis was alone—probably a straggler from some op across town.
Grant brought the guns around, swinging them in the direction of the personnel carrier as it raced beside them, kicking up a wall of water as its tires tore through the puddles at high speed. “I’m gonna need some space to get in my shots,” he shouted down to Kane. “See what you can do.”
Kane scanned the street ahead through the narrow beams of the headlamps, looking for some maneuvering room. The personnel carrier was heavier and faster than his vehicle, and while the Sand
cat was built like a tank it was not immune to being knocked into a wall or, worse still, rolled onto the uneven road surface.
The Dark Mag pulled back for a moment, swinging his vehicle away before coming back at Kane’s wag from the side.
Grant tapped the twinned triggers of the heavy machine guns, sending a stream of bullets from the armored turret. The heavy rounds punched into the road with eerie screams, kicking up great hunks of tarmac but missing the fast-moving Mag’s vehicle by six feet or more.
“Bastard weapons got the same screaming report as their Soul Eaters,” Grant muttered to himself as he targeted the fast-moving personnel carrier. “Like that’s helping anything.”
The Mag floored his accelerator at that moment, ramming into the Sandcat’s back wing, the nose of the personnel carrier striking the port-side treads. Kane gripped the steering wheel, battling with it as the Sandcat threatened to go into a skid on the wet road.
“More space,” Grant shouted from above him.
“I’m trying,” Kane growled back, willing the Sandcat to more speed.
No matter what he did, there was no escaping the fact that the personnel carrier had greater acceleration and was far more maneuverable in this urban environment. As Kane scanned the street ahead, searching for some way to outdrive his assailant, Grant’s raised voice came to him again.
“Kane, you want to check the mirror right about now,” he said.
“What?” Kane asked as he zipped over another empty intersection, passing the burned-out wrecks of automobiles on either side. “Why?”
By then, Kane was looking in the rearview, and he saw what Grant had seen a few seconds before. The shock wave from the Magistrate Hall of Justice was expanding, ripping through the streets in a tidal wave of energy, obliterating everything it touched.
* * *
BRIGID WAS DRAWN TO THE hole in the wall by the light. She scurried over to take a closer look. She could see an explosion had obliterated the central area of the ville some blocks away. The explosive force glowed a sickly gray-green and it seemed to be spreading in a towering whirlpoollike swirl, like a twister on the horizon. Brigid did not know what it was, but she figured she had a pretty good idea who had caused it. “Kane and Grant,” she muttered with a shake of her head. “Every time you boys get together, something like this always happens.”
