by James Axler
She watched the cloud of swirling force, trying to judge if it was getting closer. She only hoped that her absent partners were somehow okay out there.
Brewster Philboyd’s voice crackled over the radio as Brigid continued to watch the force wave, drawing her back to its speaker. “Brigid, we have a lock on your transmission using a four-dimensional mapping program,” he explained. “We can find you, but we’re having trouble generating enough power to bring you home.”
“Acknowledged, Cerberus,” Brigid said into the microphone. “Anything I can do?”
“Hang tight, Lakesh is working on the equations now,” Philboyd assured her.
Crouched on the scuffed floor, Brigid stared at the power indicator light on the radio as the transmission went silent. All she could do now was wait—wait and hope.
But as she sat there, Brigid heard a scraping noise behind her. She reacted automatically, honed instincts kicking in from long hours in the training gym. A figure was standing in the gaping hole of the exterior wall, his tortured pose backlit by the explosive wave that was barreling through the ville. It was a Magistrate, one of the dead. His helmet was missing and he was clutching something that Brigid recognized—a twisted length of cable. It was the same length of cable that Kane had used to tie the dead man up when they were in the office building downville.
“You were dead,” Brigid stated, staring into the rotted face of Magistrate South.
Even as she said it, Brigid realized that death posed no obstacle for these revived Magistrates. Magistrate South moved with lightning speed, sprinting across the room with the cable stretched taut between his clawlike hands.
Brigid ducked, rolling out of the way as the Magistrate lunged for her throat. She didn’t have any ammo left for the shotgun and was too far away to try to electrify the floor again. As she ticked off the options in her head, Brigid found herself avoiding the Magistrate’s relentless attack, her boot heels skidding on the water-stained floor.
Once he had broken free from his restraints, Magistrate South had tracked Brigid’s signature across the ghostly ville of Quocruft, scenting her obscene livingness the way a dog scents a fox. He had been dead when Brigid and Kane had checked for his breathing back in the office cloakroom, but then he had also been dead before that—for the past eighteen months of his awful period of servitude to the baron. All he knew was to hunt for the baron, to kill for him and so replenish the ranks of the dead Magistrates. He had followed Brigid’s trail to this building, missing the main firefight by minutes. When he had arrived, the bodies of his fellow Mags were piled up all over the street but there was something else that caught his eye—fixed lines, dozens of them, rushing up the front of the building and leading right to the signature of the living woman. Magistrate South had climbed.
* * *
KANE WATCHED IN HIS rearview as the churning wave of energy surged down the street from the ruins of the Magistrate Hall. The shimmering wave of unrestrained energy was tall enough to peek over the lowest rooftops as it roared down the streets, six blocks behind Kane and his partner in the speeding Sandcat, consuming everything it touched. Beside them, the Dark Magistrate’s vehicle slammed against the Sandcat’s wing again in a bid to knock Kane from the road. Even if he managed to somehow outdrive the dead Mag, there was no way Kane could outrun that wave of energy for long.
Kane eyed the street, his mind racing, searching for some inspiration that might save their lives. He was in the business district again, the place where he and Brigid had found the abandoned media station full of video tapes. The buildings in this sector featured decorative quadrangles, open spaces with statues and fountains designed to calm their occupants. Up ahead Kane could see one of these open spaces tucked behind a series of decorative Grecian-style columns, a metal sculpture acting as a centerpiece in its concrete haven. The sculpture flashed bronze as Kane’s headlights touched it.
“Hang on,” Kane called, pumping the accelerator and pulling the steering wheel in a tight turn to send the Sandcat threading between the closest set of pillars.
Grant bucked about in his seat, clinging to the handgrips on the USMG-73s as the Sandcat left the road and leaped over the paving stones. The personnel carrier followed, the dead Mag’s eyes fixed on the Sandcat’s rear with deadly intensity.
The Sandcat zipped past the stone columns, clipping them with its right side as Kane goosed more power from the straining engine. Suddenly, his right-hand wing mirror disappeared in a crash of splintering plastic and glass, and Grant shouted a warning down from his vantage point.
“Go left!”
“Just get that monkey off our back,” Kane shouted back, his eyes fixed on the courtyard they now found themselves in where it materialized in the headlamps. The courtyard was littered with decorative features: wooden benches, water troughs and a giant chess board sitting in the shadow of the metallic sculpture at its center.
Kane wrenched the wheel, clipping a wooden bench with his front wing, knocking the seat from its restraining posts. The personnel carrier followed, keeping barely a car length behind him, rising and dipping over the cracked paving slabs. The distance was not much, but it was enough for Grant to line up his target and flick the triggers of the heavy machine guns once more, sending a stream of heavy-duty bullets into the hood of the personnel carrier, just beneath the nightmarish corpse face of its reanimated driver.
Grant’s bullets strafed the chasing vehicle as Kane weaved between benches, whipping the back of the Sandcat around as he roared past the metal sculpture in the center of the courtyard. Each bullet let out a hideous shriek as it tore from the muzzles of the USMGs as if in terrible pain. Grant ignored the noise, eyes fixed on the target.
The Sandcat kicked into the air, leaping over a raised section of the courtyard, slamming down again with a heavy bounce, bullets streaking from its top-mount turret. Kane yanked the wheel hard, forcing the vehicle toward the line of columns at the edge of the quad once more.
Grant tracked the personnel carrier that followed, keeping it dead in his sights as they raced through the paved area that fronted the office block.
The dead driver was struggling to keep up with Kane’s driving prowess, his heavier vehicle proving no advantage now in the tight space. Bullets were streaming before his armored windshield, kicking up debris and obscuring his vision.
Grant dipped the guns lower, targeting the grille of the chasing wag, his fingers never easing on the triggers. An unbroken stream of bullets slammed into the personnel carrier, rattling across the grille, staking it again and again with their pointed tips.
Suddenly, smoke began pouring from the personnel carrier’s hood, but Grant did not let up for even a moment—he kept strafing the engine cover with bullets, hitting as often as he could with the bouncing path that Kane was taking.
Kane pulled at the wheel again, hurtling around toward the bronze sculpture, shifting gears as he fought to keep traction. He heard something explode behind him, and Grant let out a cheer at the same moment. Behind them, the personnel carrier was on fire, its strengthened grille shattered by the relentless assault of the USMGs.
Kane hooked the Sandcat around, weaving back through the columns and onto the street. Behind him, the personnel carrier became a fireball before slamming against one of the pillars. Flames licked up the pillar, black smoke souring the night air.
“Nice work,” Kane congratulated as he watched the fireball in the rearview mirror.
But there was no escaping the ominous show of energy that powered through the ville from the direction they had come. It was getting closer all the time.
They were back on the road, but there was no time to let up.
* * *
DEAD MAG SOUTH LUNGED for Brigid again with the cable, his dead eyes staring into hers. Brigid sidestepped, gasping as the length of cable snapped against her like a whip. She danced out of
the way, feeling the pain in her side where the cord had struck.
The Magistrate came for her in the darkness, lashing the whip-cord up and back so that it snapped in the air.
At least he no longer has his gun, Brigid thought. That’s something.
She ducked around a ceiling support strut as the cable slashed through the air at her face, almost stumbling over the fallen body of another Magistrate blackened from electrical burns. Mag South slapped his palm against the metal strut, unreeling the cord at Brigid’s face. She felt it lash against her cheek, stumbled back at the sting.
Her face was throbbing around the cut, and when she touched her cheek she found that the cord had drawn blood. She looked up as the shadow of the Magistrate fluttered past her vision, skipped back as he grabbed for her...and slipped.
Suddenly Brigid was falling, the broken wall at her back, just two inches of floor under the toes of her boots. She reeled in place, bringing herself back from the brink and right into the arms of the dead Magistrate. The Mag cinched the cord around her throat in an instant, shoving her down to her knees with a violent thrust. He stood over her, the electrical cable wrapped around Brigid’s neck, one hand on each end as he pulled it tighter.
Brigid made a gagging noise, felt the pressure on her windpipe. She grasped for the electrical cable, tried to hook her hands under it to alleviate the pressure. Standing over her, the Magistrate just pulled harder, using his leverage to force her back to the edge of the floor where the outside wall was missing.
Brigid’s back arched, her head tilted backward out of the wall, rain falling against her face. The Magistrate would kill her now; she had nothing left to give, no way to fight back.
Her hands skittered on the floor seeking purchase, her head reeled. There had to be something she could do, some way to stop this monster that she and Kane had left in the offices.
In the offices.
Of course, that was it. As black spots swam before her vision, Brigid’s right hand reached behind her, feeling desperately along her waistband until she found the snub-nosed .38 she had jammed there, discovered in the skeleton hand of Bryan Baubier.
Brigid pulled the weapon free, brought it around without really seeing anymore, flipping the safety off as she guessed where the Magistrate was—and pulled the trigger, all in the space of a second. The .38 boomed loud in the darkened room, expelling its bullet in a flash of explosive.
The Magistrate took the bullet to the side of his skull, no longer protected by the lost helmet he had worn.
Brigid felt the pressure on her neck ease as the Magistrate’s grip slackened. She wrenched the cord from her throat as the reanimated Mag stomped backward clutching the gaping wound in his desiccated face.
Her mind still whirling, Brigid tried to make sense of the scene before her as the Mag stumbled back, the glow of the approaching energy wave behind him. Brigid levelled the .38 and took another shot, blasting the Magistrate from her crouching position, driving a bullet through his forehead, right between the eyes. The Mag stumbled back with the hit, and then suddenly he was gone, his feet on empty air, tumbling over the side of the building through the missing wall.
Brigid stood up and ran across the room to the space where the Magistrate had disappeared, watching with satisfaction as he struck the street below in a jangle of limbs. The tidal wave of energy was edging ever closer. And down there, among the abandoned buildings, she saw twin headlights traveling at high speed toward her, bumping and weaving past the wrecked vehicles that lined the deserted streets.
Brigid smiled, shaking her head. “Got to be Kane—no one else drives like that,” she said, her throat raw from the attempted strangulation.
Chapter 32
“So, who was the old guy I saw you with?” Kane asked as they pulled up outside the hospital. The street was littered with the broken bodies of Magistrates. Their limbs sprawled at painful angles and many exhibited awful blaster wounds on their rotted torsos and ruined faces. Not one of them moved.
“Scientist,” Grant told Kane as he climbed out of the Sandcat’s cab. “Professor type. He was a plaything of a baron. Just like all of us were, once.”
Kane surveyed the dead bodies of the Magistrates where they lay in the rain, their vehicles abandoned. Two-dozen fixed lines were attached to the ruined front of the hospital building, swinging in the wind. “Looks like Brigid has been busy,” he deadpanned, reaching for one of the dangling fixed lines. He gave it a hard tug to test it. “Cords seem secure. Gonna be our easiest way up.”
The two friends looked back down the street for a few seconds. In the distance, the roads were rippling with energy as if an earthquake were shaking them apart, great gouts of lancing electricity crackling into the air in plumes as it carved a path outward from the Magistrate headquarters. In the far distance they could see a glowing column of fire, the Magistrate Hall burning itself into oblivion, folding in on itself as the overloaded gateway seared through the dimensional rift it had carved.
“Easy’s good,” Grant acknowledged, reaching for a rope. “Quick’s better.”
The two men hurried up the fixed lines, pulling themselves up with their hands and ankles, grips tight despite the wetness of the cords from the rain.
* * *
THEY FOUND BRIGID TALKING into a deconstructed radio unit beside the mat-trans chamber. Lakesh’s voice was coming from the tiny speaker, sounding small and distorted by an overlay of static.
“We need to get more power to pluck you from your current location,” Lakesh was explaining.
“There’s nothing here,” Brigid told him in her hoarse voice. “I’m sorry. If I could figure out how we’d been misrouted here then maybe I could find us a way back.” She looked up as Grant and Kane came trudging in out of the rain, the fierce energy churning in the streets behind them.
“Hate to admit this,” Kane said by way of greeting, “but I think I may have blown up our only way home.” He gestured to the green-gold column of fire that could be seen billowing through the missing walls.
Brigid shook her head thoughtfully. “No,” she insisted. “If I can send a signal to Lakesh then I can send a person. There has to be a way. What did you blow up?”
“Dimensional gateway,” Kane said, brushing a hand through his rain-soaked hair.
Brigid eyed the gold-green column that was blasting into the atmosphere. “Which means those energies...” she began.
“Already ahead of you,” Lakesh’s voice said from the tinny speaker of the radio unit. “How long do you think you have there?”
Brigid, Kane and Grant watched as the fiery column cut through the ville like the sword of some great, mythical god. “Not long,” they agreed in unison.
“Sooner’s better,” Kane added.
“Always,” Lakesh agreed, his voice beamed to them from another Earth.
* * *
IN THE CERBERUS OPS ROOM, things were getting back to normal. Cleanup teams were already packing up the ruined computers and bringing in replacements, while Donald Bry ran a subroutine check on the mat-trans. A team would replace the armaglass before the day was over.
“We’re tracking a major power spike in Brigid’s immediate vicinity,” Brewster Philboyd related as he studied the readings on his laptop. His fixed computer had been trashed by a Magistrate’s bullet somewhere during the firefight.
Lakesh looked up from his own screen, studying Brewster’s for a few seconds. “Whatever that energy source is, it appears to be expanding,” he observed.
“It is,” Brewster confirmed. “Exponentially. I don’t know what it is but it’s cutting a hole right through dimensions. My guess is it has something to do with how Kane’s team ended up on that other Earth.”
“Agreed,” Lakesh said, but he was already figuring out a way to tap it. “Reroute power through the CJ-GS circuit cluste
r,” he commanded, leaping up from his desk.
Donald Bry shook his head. “Those circuits can’t take much,” he stated dourly as he ran the systems check.
“Precisely,” Lakesh replied. “I want to overload them. We’re going to route everything through them and during the power spike we should be able to hook CAT Alpha up, bypassing the normal safety protocols.”
Bry began rechecking Lakesh’s calculations, tapping figures into his calculator pad. “I really think—” he began.
“No time for that,” Lakesh warned as he pushed Bry gently from his seat at the mat-trans terminal and took over. “Reroute the circuits, Donald. And as soon as he’s done, Brewster, transfer the power. No stalling, we do this now.”
Bry ran a power switchover from his adjoining computer, the one he had been using to double-check his adjustments to the compromised mat-trans. With so many bullets flying, half the equipment had been compromised. It took just ninety seconds, and Bry told Lakesh the second his change was live. An instant later, Lakesh had toggled a run of virtual levers on the control computer, activating the corresponding circuits deep inside the mat-trans itself. Suddenly, the mat-trans was running through its power-up cycle, the chamber’s internal lighting brightening.
Domi was standing over Lakesh now, watching the lights power up through the tinted armaglass. “This will work, won’t it?” she asked.
Lakesh smiled grimly as he reprogrammed the mat-trans on the fly, drawing on his incredible knowledge of the system to reposition its command protocols. “We live in hope,” he told her breathlessly.
