Truth Engine

by James Axler

  She closed her eyes once more, forced herself back to that storeroom where she stood looking at the shivering form of Reba DeFore.

  Brigid remembered standing in the doorway, listening to her companion’s horrified words. “He who?” she heard herself ask.

  “THE STONE MAN,” DeFore replied.

  Crouched down before DeFore, Kane glanced up at Brigid, meeting her eyes with a significant look. They were anam-charas, Brigid and Kane—soul friends, destined to be together throughout time, their eternal souls reincarnated again and again, drawn together like magnets. Their shared bond was something that defied reason.

  “Where is he now?” Kane probed gently, turning his attention back to the Cerberus medic. “Do you know?”

  DeFore shook her head frantically, almost as though she was having a fit. “I don’t… I don’t…” she mumbled.

  Kane reached out to her, held her gently by the shoulders to still her. “It’s okay, Reba,” he soothed. “We’re here now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “You can’t stop him,” DeFore spit, her eyes wide with fear. “I’ve never seen anything like him. He’s… Nothing can stop him.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kane said, “we’ll see.”

  Standing beyond the door to the little storeroom, Grant turned back to his companions. “Company,” he warned.

  Automatically, Brigid checked the ammunition of the TP-9 semiautomatic, and Domi and Kane did the same with their own weapons.

  Outside, Grant had pressed himself against the near wall of the tunnellike corridor, the Sin Eater ready in his grip.

  “What’s going on?” Kane asked as he joined Brigid and Domi behind the broad-shouldered figure of Grant.

  The hulking ex-Magistrate gestured down the corridor with his Sin Eater. The lights flickered and popped above them, illuminating this main artery sporadically. But as they looked, they saw a bolder rectangle of light was gradually expanding at the end of the tunnel. Someone was opening the accordion-style door that led out of the redoubt into the open air.

  The Cerberus redoubt was located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana. An ancient military facility, Cerberus had remained largely forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. Indeed, over the years following that nuclear devastation, a curious mythology had grown up around the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the hidden redoubt was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, and consisted of a small band of Native Americans, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

  Hidden beneath camouflage netting, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks had chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites, working to provide much of the empirical data for the Cerberus staff. Gaining access to those satellites had taken long hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists at the redoubt, but their persistence had given the Cerberus personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the planet they had sworn to protect, as well as global communication links and the like. That was until the ops room had been all but destroyed under the devastating attack that Kane’s team had stumbled upon less than fifteen minutes before.

  Hidden away as it was, Cerberus required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was almost unheard-of for strangers to come to the main entry, a secure door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the complex via one or other variation of the mat-trans system housed within the redoubt itself. To enter via the main door took arrogance and foolhardiness, especially with the security team that patrolled the surrounding area. Yet Brigid realized now that it was through the main access door that their mysterious enemies had entered. Impossible as it seemed, an army had walked right in.

  As the distant door slowly rolled back, propelled by its whining hydraulic motor, figures became silhouetted against the sunlight beyond.

  Chalk-skinned Domi muttered something to herself, slipping once more into the fractured Outland patois she used in times of stress. “Strangers at gate,” she said. “Trouble.”

  “Stay sharp,” Kane instructed, leading the way toward them on light feet.

  The group followed him, hurrying along the wide corridor, keeping to the shadows as much as they were able, their movements silent. There was more blood splashed all over the floor, and several Cerberus personnel were lying dead, one of them with his skull caved in. Kane ignored them, his attention focused around him, using his fabled point man ability to stay alert to any threats. The intruders appeared to have all gathered at the end of the artery where several stairwells met. They seemed ignorant of the possibility of further resistance. Kane didn’t trust that ignorance—it worried him that these interlopers were so confident in their mastery of the facility that they hadn’t even bothered to post guards.

  As they neared the end of the corridor, Kane and his team saw a large group of Cerberus personnel, held by the strangers in the hooded robes. They were all kneeling, hands behind their heads, now prisoners of the hooded strangers. No weapons were trained upon the prisoners, and yet it was clear that the Cerberus staff members were utterly defeated.

  Kane scanned the group until he spotted Lakesh kneeling among them, a well-built man of medium height who appeared to be in his midfifties. The man’s dusky face was bruised, and a trickle of dried blood could be seen below his aquiline nose. Lakesh held one hand to his head, as if in pain.

  Behind him, Kane felt Domi tense, and he held his arm out like a bar, blocking her as she began to scamper ahead. “Wait, Domi,” he whispered. “Let’s not get crazy.”

  “Crazy’s already here,” Domi hissed, her crimson eyes flashing in the flickering illumination of the overhead lighting. “Didn’t bring it, just going to fix it.”

  Grant stepped up behind the albino wild child, placing one immense hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that belied his strength. “Just play it cool for now, Domi,” he told her.

  For a moment, it seemed that she would react, unleashing the instinctive rage that simmered beneath the surface of her civilized personality. But she stopped herself, visibly relaxing, though the fierce anger was still clear in her face. Domi respected Grant, and had once harbored something of a crush on the man. Domi was different, and was never more aware of that than when she was among the Cerberus staff. But Grant had always treated her with respect, and even now she knew he was looking out for her.

  “No point revealing ourselves too soon,” he told her quietly.

  After a moment, the albino girl nodded, dipping her head and stepping back into the shadows of the far wall, the Detonics Combat Master ready in her hand.

  As Grant waited with Domi, Brigid sidled up to Kane, pressing her spine to the wall. Before them, the huge steel door was still rolling back on its hydraulic system, a slow and deliberate process. Brigid recoiled as she scanned the kneeling prisoners properly for the first time. Some had their heads bowed and several were slumped in such a way that they seemed to be barely clinging to life. Most wore the standard Cerberus white jumpsuit with a vertical blue zipper down the front, but for many the white was scuffed and dirtied now by the traumas they had evidently suffered. Several had obvious wounds, blood marring the torn material of their clothing.

  Brigid recognized Donald Bry kneeling close to Lakesh, his mop of copper curls falling over his face as he bowed his head in weary defeat. There, too, was astrophysicist Brewster Philboyd, his lanky frame bent over uncomfortably as he knelt before the guardsmen. Just a few hours earlier, Brewster had been providing recon information for Brigid’s field team via Commtact link; now he knelt in supplication before an enemy.

  As Brigid’s eyes flickered across the group, she felt a growing sense of helplessness at their plight. Here was Sela Sinclair, her face bruised and blood staining the front of her jumpsuit, her left wrist hanging limply at her side, clearly broken. Ne
xt to her was geologist Mariah Falk, tears silently streaming down her face as she knelt beside her colleagues.

  But as Brigid scanned the group, she noted that there were people missing, too. She tried to ignore the awful thought nagging at her mind—that the others were dead.

  Fifteen hooded guards wandered to and fro, patrolling a group made up of at least forty Cerberus personnel. Forty was two-thirds of the staff, Brigid realized. Behind them, sunlight streamed in as the main door shuddered to a standstill.

  “So what do we do?” she whispered to Kane.

  His steel-gray eyes shifted from the scene playing out before them to the gun in his hand, assessing their chances. He wanted to tell Brigid that they could take intruders—thanks to firepower and training and some innate ability or luck they seemed to possess—and yet he knew that the other Cerberus people had tried, and he himself had been stunned by the near invincibility that their hooded foes appeared to possess.

  As Kane pondered their next move, the ground around them began to shake, and the rock walls seemed to rattle in place.

  Grant stumbled away from the wall he stood by with Domi. “What th—?”

  “Earthquake?” Domi suggested, though she didn’t sound so sure. It would be the first time the Cerberus redoubt had been struck by such a thing.

  Brigid’s breath caught in her throat as she saw another figure looming just beyond the redoubt’s wide entrance. It was the unmistakable figure of the would-be stone god, Ullikummis, the Annunaki prince she had met and challenged twice before.

  As Ullikummis stood there, arms spread before him, pillars of stone emerged from the ground, clambering out of the soil at the redoubt’s entrance like living things, twisting and spiraling upward as they stretched toward the sky. Each rough-sided pillar was four feet in diameter, and they seemed to surge out of the ground like launching missiles, kicking up dust as everything about them shook.

  Brigid, Kane, Grant and Domi watched in astonishment as the pillars continued to grow, reaching higher than the top of the redoubt door, beyond where the Cerberus warriors could see. In their previous meeting in Tenth City, all four had witnessed Ullikummis’s ability to somehow control stone, exhibiting a kind of psionic talent to command the rocks and stones about him. On that occasion, the stone-clad Annunaki had moved a wall into Brigid’s path as she had tried to escape, drawing it from the ground like a gate.

  Beyond the shaking pillars, Brigid saw the overcast skies, gray with rain-heavy clouds, and she spotted two fast-moving objects whip across the clouds, accompanied by the familiar sound of engines cutting through the air.

  “They have the Mantas,” Brigid stated, unable to suppress the shock in her voice.

  The Mantas were sleek bronze aircraft with a wing-span of twenty yards and a body length of almost fifteen feet. They looked like the seagoing manta rays they were named for, and the beauty of their alien design was breathtaking, combining the principles of aerodynamics in a gleaming burnt-gold finish, streaking across the skies beyond the edge of the mountaintop redoubt. They appeared to be flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies, an elongated hump in the center of the craft providing the only evidence of a cockpit. Finished in a coppery hue, the surface of each craft was decorated with curious geometric designs, elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire aircraft. Transatmospheric and subspace vehicles, the Mantas were used by the Cerberus team for long-range missions. They were alien vessels that had been left discarded on Earth for millennia and were discovered by Kane and Grant during one of their exploratory missions. But the twin crafts should have been safely stored in the redoubt’s hangar. No one else should have been able to access and fly them. And yet here they were.

  The Cerberus teammates watched as the two ships zipped through the air past the shuddering pillars, disappearing from view before looping back a few seconds later.

  “They’re running a surveillance pattern,” Grant growled, watching the Mantas flit past the open door again.

  “Keeping an eye out for stragglers, perhaps,” Brigid proposed.

  “No escape,” Domi declared. “Stuck here.”

  Kane turned to the others. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, addressing Domi’s point. “I was never one to run, and am not about to start now.”

  “We have to stop Ullikummis,” Brigid stated, the words tumbling from her mouth in a rush. “Now. We have to do it now.”

  Kane’s eyes were fixed on the spectacle outside as the stone pillars locked into place around the entrance, like iron bars on a prison window. “Yeah, but how?” he spit. “Answer me that, Baptiste, and I’ll kiss your big, freaky memory mind.”

  “Stone, stone, stone,” Brigid muttered as she reached for the possibilities in what Kane had just called her big, freaky memory mind. “There has to be something, some way to hurt him, put him out of commission.”

  “Come on, Brigid,” Domi urged. It was clear she wanted to step in, to free Lakesh. She could barely stop moving, she was so keyed up.

  Brigid went through a hundred options then, thinking of all the uses of stone, all the ways it could be shaped or moved. Stone masonry, hammers, heat, force… They had tried force, had even subjected the monster’s body to the incredible high temperatures of a furnace. But Ullikummis had survived, had brushed off their attacks.

  “Erosion,” Brigid said. “If we could erode his body…”

  Kane glared at the red-haired archivist. “Isn’t that going to take—what?—a thousand years?!”

  “Acid,” Brigid said, realization dawning. “If we could get to the lab, grab some hydrochloric acid…”

  Kane glanced back at her. “Would that work? Explain it to me.”

  “Hydrochloric acid is corrosive,” Brigid told her companions. “They used to use it in oil production, making solid rock porous so that wells could be placed and drilling could begin. In theory, it could make Ullikummis’s flesh porous—full of holes,” she clarified as Domi looked at her with confusion, “eroding him so that we could potentially wound him somehow.”

  Kane turned back to the redoubt entrance. The immense figure of Ullikummis still stood there, arms outstretched as he willed the colossal pillars into place around the open doorway. Kane could sense the simmering fury from Domi as she watched her lover and his dream suffer this final indignity. Kane knew he needed to keep the albino warrior, sometimes a loose cannon, busy or she’d bring trouble down on all of them.

  “See what you can find in the labs, Baptiste,” Kane instructed. “Domi—go with her. Grant and I will go to the armory and grab ourselves some serious firepower.”

  Brigid knew better than to argue. She was already turning, sprinting down the corridor away from the redoubt entrance, heading for the nearest stairwell, with Domi at her heels. Domi’s bare feet slapped in the pooling blood that washed over the floor of the tunnellike a scarlet lake.

  BRIGID WAS SUDDENLY PULLED out of her reverie by a low scraping noise coming from behind her in the cave. Her eyes sprang open and she automatically turned her head, momentarily forgetting that she was trapped in her chair. In annoyance, she faced front again, gazing into the mirror, eyes frantically searching the darkness behind her in the reflection. She could see nothing there.

  For a moment all was silent, and she wondered if she had imagined the noise, frightened herself the way one can when dropping off to sleep.

  Then it came again, the sound of heavy dragging, of stone on stone. Brigid’s heart beat quicker in her chest and she felt it thumping against her rib cage. There was nothing in the mirror, nothing but her face, her cloud of red hair obscuring the darkness beyond.

  Then the voice rumbled in the darkness, from behind Brigid and all around her, its rumbling echo swirling through the enclosed space of the cavern.

  “A picture,” Ullikummis said, “with no more depth than the surface of a blade of grass.”

  Chapter 10

  Alone once more in his cave
rn-like cell, Kane pressed himself against the place where the doorway had been, and felt for the edges that he knew must be there—but they weren’t. He had seen the wall move aside with his own eyes, parting like water. There had to be a gap there, a seam, a hint of the door he had seen. There just had to be.

  He peered into the darkness, struggling to make out the details of rocky surface before him. His mouth was dry, that taste of moldy food somewhere in the back of his throat.

  Kane stood, running his fingers slowly across the rough surface of the rock, feeling for the tiniest seam that would prove to him where the door was located. He pressed against the wall with his fingertips, ran the edges of his nails across every tiny bump, but still there was nothing there, still the wall insisted on staying just a wall, with no evidence that a door had ever existed.

  Kane continued to check systematically as he had been taught as a Magistrate. Licking his finger despite the dryness of his mouth, he ran his hand up and down, feeling for a draft. There was none. He put his palms against the wall and pushed at it, then tried with his shoulder, levering all his weight to try to achieve some kind of movement, feel the wall give just a little where he knew the door had to be. He pushed at it, gripped the rough stone and pulled at it, punched it, kicked it. Finally, he shouted and swore at it, reason finally giving way to frustration. And every single time it remained what it had always been—a solid wall.

  Finally, the ex-Mag sat down on the unforgiving rock floor and leaned his back against the wall, his breathing heavy, his frustration eating at him. And after a while, he lay down on the hard floor and slept, for there was nothing else left to do.

  The horror replayed itself in his dreams, and Kane relived the moment when he had come face-to-face with the stone man, whose glowing eyes bored into him through the curtain of sleep.