by James Axler
Kane gritted his teeth as another surge of pain vibrated through his arm. “I thought you were going to take it out,” he growled.
“Do you even listen?” Rosalia retorted contemptuously. “For now, you will need the obedience stone. It is your key, you understand? Pish—Magistrates.”
“Hey, you listen, sweetheart—” Kane began angrily.
“No, you listen,” Rosalia snarled, waving her finger in his face. “You have such fucking trust issues you’re going to get us both killed. Put your head in the game, Magistrate man. I’m relying on you now.”
Lying there, with the alien thing implanted beneath his skin, Kane let out a long, slow breath. “It’s Kane,” he said finally. “My name is Kane. Not Magistrate man.”
“You think I care?”
“Look, Rosie,” Kane said. “I’m trying to trust you, but you have got to meet me halfway here. Otherwise, we’re both going to get ourselves killed so fast it’ll make our heads spin. Right?”
Rosalia let out an irritated sigh, glaring at the man who lay before her with rage still burning in her eyes. For a moment, she turned her attention to the little sewing kit she carried, replacing the needle and hiding the kit beneath her robe. “You make it so difficult,” she told him. “You’re so self-righteous. Where do you get off telling Dylan to surrender? What did you think that would prove? I could have got you out of here two days ago if you’d been smart, but instead you go looking for fights, the same way you got yourself put in here in the first place.”
“Ullikummis, your lord and master, attacked my people,” Kane pointed out. “I was defending them. Well, trying to, anyway.”
“I saw,” Rosalia acknowledged. “You fought well. Lost, but you fought well. And he’s not my lord and master. He’s nothing to me.”
“You have one of these things in you?” Kane asked. “These obedience stones?”
“I do and I don’t,” Rosalia said with a cunning smile. “You can control it, if you know how.”
“And you’ll show me?” Kane asked.
She nodded. “Yes. But you need it right now, or you’ll stand out to the others. They’ll sense if you don’t have one, and they’ll know something is wrong.”
“Okay,” Kane agreed solemnly. “How long before it starts messing with my thoughts? I mean, properly messin’—I felt a little of it once it embedded itself.”
“I’ve retarded its passage,” Rosalia said. “You’ll be yourself for a little while yet.”
“How long?” Kane pressed. “Rosalia?”
“I found that if you pierce the stones, they cease to take hold,” she replied. “But you have to time it right—too early and they break apart, fail to register in your system, and the other firewalkers see you don’t have one and try to place another inside you.”
“Firewalkers?” Kane asked, surprised.
“They’re not in their right minds,” Rosalia explained. “They remind me of firewalkers—you know? Meditating so they can walk through fire, yet not feel pain.”
Kane laughed, a warm sound in the barren cell.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“My friend Brigid Baptiste said the same thing,” he explained, “when we first saw people under the control of Ullikummis. It’s just—I don’t know—an odd coincidence the way you settled on the same term.”
Rosalia leaned close to him, holding her beautiful face barely an inch away, her hazel eyes peering into his. “Maybe it’s a good omen for us,” she suggested.
“So how long do I have?” Kane asked, closing his eyes.
“In three hours it will bond with you permanently and you’ll never be free,” Rosalia said, leaning back once more. Beside her, the dog snuffled as it napped, and she ran her hand through its matted fur.
“Three hours,” Kane mused. “That’s pretty specific.”
“It’s a guess, Magistrate man,” Rosalia said, the old contempt for him back in her voice. “What, you think I set up a little laboratory, a control group, rats in mazes? Use your head—there’s probably a hundred factors contributing to how these things affect people—your constitution, your weight, your age. Who knows what else? I dug these things out of me and I watched how they affected others. I figure I don’t want to be part of this mind cult, not ever.”
“You value your freedom,” Kane muttered.
“The only rats running through the maze are us,” Rosalia said, “and Ullikummis knows it.”
“What about Dylan?” Kane asked. “First Priest of the New Order, yada-yada. He not in on this?”
“He has a stone buried in him,” Rosalia said, “just like all the rest of them. Susceptible and happy to join up for the latest promise.”
“While you value your freedom,” Kane mused, almost repeating what he had said just moments before.
“Why do you keep saying that, Magistrate man?” Rosalia asked. “Are you slow?”
“I left the Magistrates to search for true freedom,” Kane told her. “I joined Cerberus to secure it, not just for me but for all mankind.”
She stifled a laugh at his words, and when Kane glared at her she did her best to look contrite.
“When we get out of here, I’m not doing it for you,” Kane told her. “I’m doing it for everyone. Freedom for all.”
Slowly, Rosalia nodded in understanding, letting his words sink in. “You said ‘when’ and not ‘if’,” she murmured after a moment’s thought.
“Never go into a battle saying ‘if,’” Kane told her. “Do that and you’ve already lost.”
Rosalia nodded once again, considering his words. “Okay, Kane,” she said, for the first time using his name without contempt, “we’ll get everyone out.”
Kane allowed himself just the whisper of a smile at that. For the first time in over two days, he had a good feeling about where things were leading.
Chapter 24
Lakesh sat in his own cavelike cell, his thoughts running wild in his head. He was the director of the Cerberus operation—indeed, it had been established at his insistence and he knew every inch of the hidden redoubt base. Lakesh might be little more than a nominal head at times, and he was well aware that the members of his team didn’t always understand—or trust—his motives, but he still felt responsibility for all his personnel, in much the way a ship’s captain would take responsibility not only for his crew but for any passengers his vessel carried. While the Cerberus staff might not have always appreciated Lakesh’s interference, he still held their safety and well-being paramount.
The attack had come with the swiftness of lightning. He had been overseeing a field mission from the operations room when Edwards had excused himself from his sentry post at the doors. Edwards had exited, complaining of a headache, muttering something about needing fresh air. Lakesh sympathized—located in the heart of a mountain, the Cerberus redoubt could become a little claustrophobic at times. Automatically, Lakesh had waited until a light on his control desk winked on, alerting him to the fact that Edwards had used the redoubt’s main exit—the rollback door that led out onto the mountain plateau, a barren spit of rock and dust.
Perhaps thirty minutes had passed before Lakesh noticed Edwards return to the ops room. By then, the elderly cyberneticist had been working with Donald Bry on a remote command to fire up the sprinkler system in a far distant redoubt, a plan that would aid the field team led by Kane. Edwards had returned to his post in silence, joining Domi where she crouched close to the doors.
Domi had looked up, acknowledging Edwards with a brusque nod. To her surprise, Edwards had been accompanied by someone else—a figure dressed in what appeared to be a monk’s habit, its hood drawn low over his face. Even as Domi watched, a second robed figure entered the ops room, then a third.
Lakesh turned at Domi’s shout. “What is it, dearest?” he asked, as he tried to locate her in the busy ops hub.
Over by the entrance, Domi was pushing herself up from her haunches. Beside her, Lakesh spotted Edwards and three
hooded figures he did not recognize. The high doors to the room were still open, and another of the monklike figures entered as Lakesh watched.
“Now, see here,” he began, striding across the ops center. “Just who the devil do you think—?”
The closest of the hooded figures brought his hand up in a rapid flipping motion, and Lakesh saw the blur of something roughly the size of a man’s fist being thrown at him.
“Grenade!” Lakesh shouted, lunging to one side as the projectile hurtled through the air toward him.
Considered levelheaded by his friends, Lakesh was not a man prone to panic. When he shouted his warning, the personnel in the ops room responded immediately, diving for cover even as the thrown object flew across the room. The fist-size missile bounced off one of the computer terminals before dropping to the floor and skittering across its tiled surface, eight feet from where Lakesh lay. He turned away, covering his head with both hands. But to Lakesh’s surprise the thing did not explode.
Voices were coming from all around the room now as people gave vent to their confusion. Lakesh turned back to look at the thing he had taken to be a grenade, and saw it was just a rock, smooth and circular, a little smaller than his bunched hand.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lakesh muttered as he turned back to study the hooded figures at the door. There were seven of them now, and he saw them draw back their arms and launch a barrage of similarly sized rocks across the room, smashing terminals and striking unwary personnel as they peered from their hiding places.
Domi was pulling the Detonics Combat Master pistol from the waistband of her short shorts, bringing it up toward the nearest of the hooded strangers as Lakesh watched. Then Edwards struck out with his right palm, powering it into her outstretched arm even as she prepared to take her shot. Surprised as she was, her shot went wild, the great boom of the blaster loud in the enclosed operations center.
Lakesh watched helplessly as Edwards backhanded Domi across the face, knocking her to the ground, even as a second barrage of stones came hurtling across the room from the group of hooded intruders.
A leader’s job was to lead, Lakesh reminded himself as he reached for the microphone of the public address system where it lay on his desk. An unobtrusive green light winked on.
“We are under attack,” he began, speaking into the microphone as a rock hurtled past him. But before he could even finish those words, the PA system went dead, a burst of sparks exploding from the pickup unit at the side of his desk.
On the other levels of the redoubt, all that the personnel heard was Lakesh saying “We are—”. Many of them took this to be a simple error, the wrong switch being flicked during some tedious moment in the ops room. When no further words were issued, everyone ignored the announcement.
Lakesh’s heart sank as the PA mic fizzled and died. There was a second microphone set in the body of the desk itself, but it was already too dangerous to sit down, he knew, to lean over and talk into that. Ahead of him, he saw one of the hooded figures spinning something in his outstretched hand, and Lakesh recognized it as a whirling leather slingshot. As the slingshot reached the apex of its arc, the hooded stranger flicked his wrist and a stone was launched from the simple weapon, rocketing across the room at incredible speed.
Lakesh dived out of the path of the hurtling stone, heard it whiz past him less than a foot away. Around him, the hooded group was fanning out, corralling the personnel in the room and attacking them with stones and savage blows from their fists. Although all the Cerberus staff had some military training, the majority of people working the ops room were scientists and clerical personnel; they had little stomach for the harsh reality of combat.
Lakesh weaved among the desks, feeling disheartened as one of the terminals to his left exploded in a shower of sparks as another of the thrown stones tore into it. Across the room, Domi was engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight with Edwards and one of the hooded figures, bringing her gun to bear, only to have it slapped away before she could unleash a shot from its chrome-plated muzzle.
A moment later, Lakesh found himself at the armaglass walls of the mat-trans, as far from the figures at the entry doors as he could manage. The mat-trans unit dominated one corner of the operations room, the unit itself hidden behind brown-tinted glass walls. From here, Lakesh could survey the damage already being inflicted on his operations room, and his mind raced, wondering if this scene was being repeated everywhere, or if the attack was just here at the heart of the Cerberus facility.
“This is Lakesh,” the elderly scientist shouted, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of combat. “Clearly, we are under attack. Defend the equipment if you can, but not at the expense of your own safety.”
A rock hurtled toward his head, missing him by inches before it crashed against the reinforced glass of the mat-trans.
“Protect yourselves,” Lakesh shouted. “Run if you can.”
He needed to alert the security personnel, but with Edwards apparently working with these mysterious strangers, Lakesh wasn’t sure who he could trust.
At the far side of the room, Domi was surrounded by Edwards and two of the robed figures. Like a jack-in-the-box, she flipped, kicking one of them in the face with her left heel even as her other leg stretched above her in a graceful arc until the pointed toes connected with Edwards’s front teeth. The man fell backward, growling in pain as his lip split open. Domi ignored him, using her impetus to vault the nearest desk and leap high into the air.
Lakesh watched as she made a grab for the metallic grille high above her. Fifteen inches by twelve, the grille was a part of the air-conditioning system, a vent used to distribute air to the room. Small but sinewy, Domi pulled at it with both hands, lifting herself up until her bare feet were pressed against the ceiling tiles, her body poised like an upside-down crab.
With a grunt, she pulled the grille from its housing, and screws snapped from the wall like bullets fired from a gun. She was falling then, the grille still in her hands as she tumbled back to the floor. She landed hard, taking the impact with bended knees, then rolling automatically into a crouch.
One of the hooded attackers was running at her, and Domi turned and threw the rectangular grate at him, tossing it like a discus so that it flew through the air in a spinning, horizontal arc. The heavy grate slammed into the man’s stomach, making him double over and fell backward.
Domi turned, spying her lover at the far end of the room. “Lakesh,” she shouted, pointing to the hole above her. “Quickly, I’ll help you up.”
“Dearest, I don’t know if—” he began. Then one of the slingshot-thrown rocks smashed into his head and he was out cold.
As Lakesh’s still form collapsed to the floor, taking the contents of the nearest desk with him as he fell, Domi leaped up and disappeared into the ventilation pipe. The time to mourn was later, she knew—right now survival was her priority.
Lakesh had seen his people ambushed, overwhelmed, their equipment destroyed. When he had awoken he had been in the redoubt’s main corridor along with his colleagues, their ankles restrained, more of the robed and hooded figures patrolling around them. The sounds of combat echoed through the tunnel.
Groggy, Lakesh turned, peering around him at his fellow prisoners. There was no sign of Domi, and so he had to trust that she had escaped somehow.
Beside him, Brewster Philboyd noticed that Lakesh was moving, and he offered a wary smile. “How’s your head, Doctor?” Philboyd asked gently, his voice little more than a whisper.
“It’s—” Lakesh winced “—more painful than I expected. I was hit?”
“Someone threw a rock at you,” Brewster explained. “Knocked you out cold.”
Lakesh thought back, the faint feeling of nausea threatening to bring the contents of his stomach up into his mouth for a moment. “What did I miss?” he asked.
“Trouble and lots of it,” Philboyd began, explaining everything that had happened since Lakesh had been struck. It amounted to the same
thing, really—the Cerberus redoubt had been overwhelmed by these mysterious enemies armed with stones and slingshots. “They’re damn strong, too,” Philboyd continued. He and Lakesh looked up then as security specialist Sela Sinclair, beaten and bloody, was dragged in to join the group, along with several others, including geologist Mariah Falk.
Lakesh waited, watching in silence until their hooded guards moved away once more.
“How many of them are there?” he asked Philboyd.
“Don’t know for sure, but there’s got to be at least thirty,” the man replied. “My guess is if they don’t outnumber us then they at least come close.”
Lakesh nodded gravely. An army then, an organized squad come to take control of Cerberus. He felt tired in that moment, tired and old.
NOW LAKESH SAT on the floor, his back propped against the cold, unforgiving wall of rock. A shallow bowl of something rested beside him. Food, he knew, but other than that he couldn’t find a word to describe it. It was liquid with lumps in it, cold and viscous. It tasted like a texture rather than a flavor.
He and his people had been captured. It stood to reason that if he had been imprisoned like this, then his fellows had been likewise incarcerated, those that hadn’t died like Morganstern, at least. Lakesh estimated that it had been two days, perhaps three, since he had been placed in this tiny, entranceless cave. He had had almost no human contact in that time, and it was becoming harder to judge time’s passage now, with his wrist chron removed.
The food was unappetizing; it smelled of nothing and tasted of phlegm. He had eaten it because it was there, and because he wanted to survive, but it had taken all his willpower to stomach it. And it had gone through him rapidly, expelling as watery diarrhea—with no toilet facilities.
No one had spoken to him. No one had questioned him, threatened him. No one had even told him why he was here, wherever here was. The blow to his head had left a wound that scabbed over, and the edges of the scab felt hot when he touched them. He had slept for two days as his body recovered from the punishment it had received. He had woken sporadically during that period, but by the time he could finally organize his thoughts properly he had lost his sense of time.
