Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

by James Axler

  Kane didn't like that melancholia, so over the past six months he worked very hard at burying it, at rerouting all of the repressed passions he felt toward Brigid to a dead circuit board inside of his mind.

  The circuit board sparked to life every so often, as it had in New York, on New Year's Eve, 2000, when it impelled him to kiss her. But the melancholy filled him like a cup, and he pushed her away before the sadness overflowed to such a degree he would never be able to contain it again.

  A few weeks before, when Kane had protested to Morrigan that there was nothing between him and Brigid, the Irish telepath had laughed at htm. She said, "Oh, yes, there is. Between you two, there is much to forgive, much to understand. Much to live through. Always together...she is your anam-chara ."

  In ancient Gaelic, Kane learned, anam-chara meant "soul friend."

  He wasn't sure what that meant, but he knew he felt curiously comfortable with Brigid Baptiste, at ease with her in a way that was similar, yet markedly different than his relationship with Grant. He found her intelligence, her iron resolve, her wellspring of compassion and the way she had always refused to be intimidated by him not just stimulating but inspiring. She was a complete person, her heart, mind and spirit balanced and demanding of respect.

  Only a few days ago, when cornered by Salvo's questions about his reasons for sacrificing everything for a woman, he could think of only one, clumsily phrased response "Because I know her. Because I need her."

  Kane privately acknowledged the perversity of making such a confession to a man who was his sworn enemy, rather than to the woman in question, but he was unableor unwillingto speak the same words to her.

  Brigid reached down to pick up her bodysuit, shouldering Kane aside. He recoiled, making a swiftly stifled exclamation of pain, his hand moving to the wound on his ribs.

  When Brigid straightened up, she saw the ruby bead of blood shining at the edge of the film of liquid bandage covering the cut. "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Me, too," he replied ruefully, probing at the injury with careful fingers.

  She pulled in a deep, calming breath, pushed it out and said softly, "I have no right to give you hell about Rouch."

  "That's for sure," he agreed. "Direct it toward Lakesh."

  "I don't have the right to give it to him, either," she replied. "Objectively his reasoning is sound. I have no hold over you."

  Kane frowned, not liking what she said but unable to dredge up anything to refute it. He reached a hand out toward her, but Brigid turned her back and stepped into the bodysuit.

  Thrusting her arms into the sleeves, she said brusquely, "DeFore mentioned to me that she was worried about your emotional stability. The coma you suffered after the Irish op threw a scare into her."

  Kane said nothing.

  "She's afraid you'll develop a full-blown psychosis. She interpreted your insistence on taking Salvo with us to New York as evidence of it."

  Zipping up the suit, she turned around to face him, her eyes and voice level. "She thinks that was the reason the mission failed."

  Kane opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head and said falteringly, "She might be right. Maybe my instincts can't be trusted anymore."

  Brigid's lips curved in a wry smile. "If the mission to change history failed, it had nothing to do with your instincts or Salvo. We gained important data from it. We now know the true purpose behind Operation Chronos."

  "Why didn't you tell me about DeFore's worries when I first suggested bringing along Salvo?"

  Brigid's green eyes gleamed strangely in the dim light. "What good would it have done except make you doubt yourself? She doesn't know you, doesn't know that you're at your best when faced with seemingly impossible challenges."

  He crooked an eyebrow at her. "And you know that?"

  She nodded. "I do. DeFore thinks you have a deluded self-image of yourself, that you believe yourself to be an arrogant superman, glorying in your power over life or death."

  Kane smiled thinly. "I seem to recall you saying much the same thing on occasion."

  Brigid waved aside his comment. "I was referring to your Magistrate's persona. I can see beneath it."

  "And what's there, Baptiste?"

  Very quietly she answered, "A lonely and frightened man who is doing a job that needs doing. That doesn't make you fused out, Kane. It makes you human. I saw no reason to mention that DeFore diagnosed you as human."

  Kane swallowed the hot lump swelling in his throat, felt his heart thud within his chest. He averted his face from the intense pressure of her emerald eyes, knowing they peeled away the carapace to see the pain beneath. He felt the familiar, longing ache and tried to bottle it. Brigid sighed and stepped around him toward the doors.

  He turned toward her. "Baptiste?" His low-pitched voice was barely above a whisper.

  She paused. "Yes?"

  "You were wrong about one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "About you having no hold over me."

  Brigid said nothing, but inclined her head in a short nod before pushing open the doors.

  Chapter 7

  Like most of the territory surrounding the ^ille that took his name, Baron Sharpe had been dead for a long time, but spiritually really dead only for the past eight years.

  One day he had succumbed to an infection, some airborne filth that had wafted up from either the Pits or floated in from the rad-rich Outlands. Baron Sharpe coughed up blood-tinted phlegm for two days before falling into a coma. Members of his personal staff had whisked him, via mat-trans gateway, to the bioengi-neering facility in Dulce, New Mexico. There, geneticists who were intimately familiar with all the limitations of the hybrid immune systems, worked on him for a week.

  At the end of those seven days, Baron Sharpe opened his big blue eyes and sat up. They told him he was cured, that his metabolism had been adjusted, his tainted blood replaced and detoxified, his damaged organs replaced. They told him he was cured, but the baron knew better. He was dead, regardless of the fact that he walked, talked, ate and breathed.

  At first his condition disturbed him since no one else seemed to notice it. After a few months, he grew accustomed to being dead and found it oddly liberating, even exhilarating. Very infrequently, the notion that he might not be dead but simply deluded intruded on

  Baron Sharpe's peace of mind. He was unique among the members of the baronial hierarchy, of the hybrid oligarchy, and therefore he had responsibilities to the Directorate that he couldn't shirk, alive or dead, deluded or sane.

  Unlike Barons Ragnar, Cobalt, Palladium and all the others who were polyglot mixtures of human and Ar-chon DNA, Sharpe was a direct descendant of the first baron who had claimed the environs in and around Washington Hole as his sovereign territory.

  Of course, that baron's genes had been mixed, matched and spliced with Archon material, but nevertheless, there was no question of his illustrious human antecedent, four generations removed. He'd seen old pix of his great-grandfather, and the resemblance was certainly striking.

  He had inherited the same close-cropped blond hair, broad shoulders and chilling milky blue eyes the color of mountain melt water. What he didn't have was the man's six-foot height and one hundred percent human physiology.

  Unlike his ancestor, his blue eyes were very large, shadowed by sweeping supra-orbital ridges, and his hair possessed a feathery, duck-down texture. His cranium was very high and smooth, the ears small and set very low on the head. He also had inherited a few of his namesake's eccentricities, though he knew some few referred to them as insanities.

  One of his eccentricities was a fondness for picking through predark articles of clothing stored in the archives of the Historical Division and wearing whatever struck his whim at the moment. Depending on his fancy, Baron Sharpe would outfit himself in white tie and tails, complete with a silk top hat and silver-knobbed walking stick. On another day, it might be a backless evening gown of gold lame, with a teased-out bouffant wig as a shock-value fashion statement
It didn't matter much if the clothing was on the verge of falling apart with age. He was dead, and entitled to indulge his impulses.

  Still, the fact that nobody elsehis personal staff, the Baronial Guard or members of the Trustwanted to acknowledge his condition irritated him, made him question himself. To settle the internal conflict once and for all, Baron Sharpe sought the counsel of a doom-seer, a mutant giftedor cursedwith the psychic ability to sniff out forthcoming death.

  Under other circumstances, locating a doomie would have been exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Most of the mutie strains spawned after the nukecaust were extinct, either dying because of their twisted biologies or hunted and exterminated during the early years of the unification program. Stickies, slowies, scabbies, swampies and almost every other breed exhibiting warped genetics had all but vanished.

  Fortunately part of his legacy from his greatgrandfather was a small private zoo of creatures that had once crept and slithered and scuttled over the Deathlands. The monsters had been fruitful and multiplied over the decades, and one of them was a doomie called Crawler.

  It was more of a title than a name, bestowed upon him after his leg tendons had been severed. The psi-mutie had displayed a great cunning and propensity for escape from his compound, no doubt employing his mental talents to find the most opportune time and means to do so. After he had been crippled, his psi-powers availed him nothing, inasmuch as he was re-stricted to dragging himself around his cell by fingers and elbows.

  Baron Sharpe visited Crawler one still, sultry summer midnight. He gazed in revulsion at the human face staring back at him from a wild, matted tangle of gray beard and long, filthy hair. The baron had no idea of Crawler's age, but he understood that he was one of his ancestor's last acquisitions before his mysterious disappearance, some ninety-odd years before. He knew the doomie was very old, but some muties possessed remarkable longevity.

  Ignoring the thick waft of mingled stenches the cell exuded. Baron Sharpe commanded Crawler to approach him. The creature scrabbled forward, to the iron bars, heavily muscled arms dragging him along. Dark calluses crusted his elbows, and his atrophied legs trailed behind him, like a pair of boneless, filthy tentacles.

  Crawler's dark eyes blazed from behind a screen of stringy hair. Baron Sharpe very nearly turned and ran from the fierce heat of the doomie's eyes, especially when he sensed the wispy, cobwebby caress of a psi-touch.

  "I have a question," Baron Sharpe announced. "About my death."

  Wheezing whistles issued from Crawler's hair-rimmed lips. For a moment, the baron thought the mu-tie was undergoing an asthma attack and would expire, but then he recognized the sound as laughter.

  In a high, whispery voice, Crawler said, "That question has no meaning, my Lord Baron. You have died and crossed back. You no longer need fear death, for it is behind you, not ahead of you."

  Baron Sharpe was so delighted he came close to bursting into tears of gratitude. His hopes had been realized, his fear that he was mad proved groundless. That very night, he ordered the release of Crawler from his cage, saw that he was bathed, fed, shaved, cropped and pampered. He installed him as a high counselor, ignoring the outraged reactions of his personal staff.

  A few weeks later while pawing through the archived clothing, he made a discovery that became his personal uniform and statement of belief. It was a violet jumpsuit, with huge belled legs, flame-colored satin facings and a bat-winged collar. Long fringes streamed from both sleeves. Worked in glittering rhinestones on the back were three letters TCB.

  He remembered Crawler's phrase and knew the letters meant To Cross Back, and thusly the baron decided that by wearing the outfit, he said to the world that he had died and crossed back to the land of the living.

  Baron Sharpe was so attired when he greeted the members of the Sharpeville Trust. He met the eight men in his drawing room on Alpha Level of the Administrative Monolith. He had insisted on recreating a Victorian parlor, a cozy sitting room where gentlemen of good breeding received visitors. As a hybrid, his breeding was more than good; it was the pinnacle of genetic achievement.

  Every ville had its own version of the Trust. The organization, if it could be called that, was the only face-to-face contact allowed with the barons, and the barons were the only contacts permitted by the Archon Directorate.

  Baron Sharpe had never met an Archon, only other hybrids, though he was certain they existed, simply because the gene pool of the baronial hierarchy was a collection of superior traits derived from both human and Archon DNA.

  He understood that the entirety of human history was intertwined with the activities of the entities called Ar-chons, though they didn't refer to themselves as such. The term was very ancient, referring to a mystical force that acted as a spiritual jailer, imprisoning the spark of the divine within human souls.

  The Archons' standard operating procedure was one they had employed since time immemorialthey established a privileged ruling class dependent upon them, which in turn controlled the masses for them. In ages past, the Archons' manipulation of governments and religions was all-pervasive. However, as time progressed, the world and humankind changed too much for their plenipotentiaries to rule with any degree of effectiveness.

  Hence came January 20, 2001, and the greatest megacull in the long, confusing history of the world.

  Now, nearly two hundred years after the nukecaust, the population was only a fraction of what it had been and far easier to manipulate, with most nonessential and nonproductive humans eliminated.

  Still, the existence of the Archon Directorate remained a ruthlessly guarded secret. The Trust acted more or less as the protectors of the Directorate, and its oath revolved around a single themethe presence of the Directorate must not be revealed to humanity. If its presence became known, if the truth behind the nukecaust filtered down to the people, then humankind would no doubt retaliate with a concerted effort to wipe them out, and the Directorate would be forced to visit another holocaust upon the face of the earth. No one, not even the barons, wanted that. The planet was now orderly, and another catastrophe would cause a great deal of distressing chaos.

  The Trust stood in a formal semicircle around the high-backed leather armchair in which Baron Sharpe sat. Crawler didn't stir from his rug near the hearth, not even lifting his close-cropped head from a satin pillow as the men trooped in. All of them studiously avoided looking in the mutie's direction.

  There was a sound reason for not questioning or even acknowledging Crawler's presence in the room. Only a few days after the administrator of the Manufacturing Division lodged an objection to Crawler's input, he had vanished. His replacement, a man named Tobak, knew Crawler had claimed the man harbored disloyal, seditious thoughts. Every member of the Trust did his utmost not to draw the doomie's attention. That was all it took nowadays to disappearsimply come to Crawler's attention.

  Baron Sharpe listened graciously to the reports from the Trust, despite his disinterest. He always found it a great effort to pretend he cared about anything his subordinates considered of import.

  Ericson, the Magistrate Division administrator, spoke last, in his characteristic colorless monotone. "At the request of Baron Cobalt, I dispatched a recon party to Redoubt Papa."

  Baron Sharpe stirred in his armchair, his high forehead furrowing a bit as he ransacked his memory. "Redoubt Papa?" he murmured. "Where is that again?"

  Ericson answered blandly, "Washington Hole, my Lord Baron."

  Sharpe nodded distractedly. "And why did you send a recon party there?"

  "To honor a request made by your brother baron in

  Cobaltville." Ericson softened his clipped speech pattern, hoping he sounded unctuous. "To search for the renegades who used a gateway to kidnap a member of Baron Cobalt's Trust. Quite the outrage."

  Baron Sharpe flipped a diffident hand through the air. Impatiently he said, "Yes, yes, now I recall. Something about a renegade Mag who humiliated Baron Cobalt beyond his ability to endure. Pompous fool. S
o?"

  "The party I dispatched should have returned by now. They are nearly a half day overdue."

  "And that's bad?"

  Ericson lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Merely disquieting at this juncture, my Lord."

  Baron Sharpe narrowed his eyes. "Why do you think they have yet to return?"

  Ericson cleared his throat. "I can only speculate on the possibilities."

  "You have the floorspeculate to your heart's content."

  "They encountered mechanical difficulty with their conveyance."

  "Which was?"

  "A Sandcat. Or they encountered a difficulty that they could not cope with."

  The baron sighed. "And which do you feel is the most likely?"

  "I cannot say, my Lord. Due to the extremely high rad count in the vicinity of Redoubt Papa, it is impossible to establish radio contact with them."

  Baron Sharpe steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "And you are hesitant to send out another party of Mags to ascertain their fates."

  "Just so, my Lord."

  Baron Sharpe turned his head toward the hearth. "Crawler!"

  The doomie slowly raised his head from the cushion. "My Lord Baron?"

  "Can you sniff the dooms of the team of Magistrates dispatched to Washington Hole? Will they return?"

  Crawler's eyes widened, his lips peeling back from discolored teeth. He shivered, moaned softly, clutched at his brow. Ericson had witnessed the mutie's performance before, as if invisible antennae sprouted from his psyche and quested for answers to the baron's questions. He thought it was a sham, but a very good piece of improvised theater on the part of the doom-sniffer.

  Blinking his eyes rapidly, Crawler stared around as if he expected to see some place other than the parlor. In a strained, aspirated voice, he whispered, "Colors. Red and black, black and red. Red for joy, black for death. Those you seek have crossed over. They are happy, they are at peace. Black. Red. Black."

  Crawler lowered his hand from his brow, closed his eyes drowsily, then placed his head back down on the pillow.