by James Axler
“Grant and Baptiste,” Kane said with a smile. “Release them and we’ll have a fight on our hands. You’ll see.”
“So that’s your great plan?” Rosalia said contemptuously. “Open the cells and let the great unfed fight a losing battle against superior odds? Even you can’t be that foolish, Magistrate man.”
But Kane was still thinking, figuring out his game plan. “You said you heard music when you were near Ullikummis,” he said. “I heard the same thing when I was near Dylan, niggling in the back of my skull like an itch I couldn’t scratch.”
Rosalia’s dark eyes flashed beneath the hood as she looked at him. “Yes, I feel that, too, even with my stone blocked. Your point?”
“Architecture that affects people’s minds,” Kane stated, using his fingers to tick off each point he was making. “A broadcast system hidden in the shapes of the rocks. A signal sent from Overlord Ullikummis, or maybe from the chosen devotees to his cause. Dylan’s broadcasting the boss’s instructions, somehow. Maybe a bigger stone, something like that.”
Rosalia smiled wickedly, seeing Kane’s reasoning.
“Take out his stone and the system’s got nothing left to broadcast,” Kane concluded. “And in the subsequent confusion, even a half-starved army of Cerberus personnel could potentially overpower your stone-chucking friends. Am I right?”
Rosalia reached forward, placing her hands on Kane’s biceps in unconscious imitation of the way he had held her just a few minutes before. She leaned close to him, her voice low. “It’s possible, but how are you going to shut down Dylan’s broadcast stone?”
Kane fixed her with a no-nonsense stare. “The only way there is,” he said. “By force.”
The dog trotted back to them, and Rosalia offered it soothing words of encouragement. Then she looked at Kane. “You’ve fought these people before,” she said. “Do you remember?” He nodded.
“They’re strong, Kane,” Rosalia reminded him. “Not all of them, but the one with stones in their heads, here—” she brushed her finger on Kane’s forehead, just above his brows “—they can tap into something, become like stone themselves.”
“So that’s what it was,” he grumbled. “I half thought I was imagining things. They shrugged off my bullets, got up and just carried on.”
Rosalia looked at him with pleading eyes. “We could run, you know? Get away from here. I’ll get that stone shit out of you once we’re clear.”
“I won’t leave my friends, Rosie,” Kane said. “You don’t know me well, but you do know that, don’t you?”
She knelt down, stroking the dog’s coat over and over until it settled beside her. “Your concepts of honor and responsibility are so quaint,” she told Kane.
He shrugged. “Right is right. Now, these stone people, how do they become invincible like that, do you know?”
“Concentration,” Rosalia told him. “I don’t know how, but the stone works in concert with them. They’re still human beings, but they can switch, make their flesh solid for brief bursts. They just concentrate.”
“So, if we broke their concentration…” Kane began, an idea beginning to take shape in his mind.
“Yes?” Rosalia prompted.
He reached for the belt he still wore beneath his robe, running his finger along the pouches until he found what he was looking for. “You’re going to need these,” he said, handing her the things he had removed from his belt.
The beautiful dark-haired woman smiled. “Simple and brilliant,” she said with an appreciative nod.
Together, the two refugees began to work out the details of their audacious plan.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Kane found himself wandering alone through the tunnels of the eerily remodeled redoubt. Despite the surface changes, the complex was still recognizable, and now that Kane realized where he was he navigated with ease. Rosalia had left him at the doors to the hangar bay, agreeing to her part of the plan with surprising good grace. Kane needed her to free the prisoners using the stone located under her skin, while he took Dylan out once and for all.
“Keep your head down,” Kane had advised her. “No point getting killed by the guards around this place until… Well, just don’t get killed.”
Rosalia had laughed. “Oh, Magistrate man, you can be so naive. It’s almost sweet the way you care for others.” She’d pinched him on the arm then, before turning down the ill-lit tunnel and disappearing into its shadows, the pale-eyed mongrel trudging along at her heels.
While Rosalia headed down to the remodeled living quarters that now served as cramped cells, Kane trotted along a service tunnel, searching the monotonous surface of the wall for the door he knew must still be there. He spotted the vertical ridge that marked the position of the door, used his obedience stone to unlock the rock coating, making it roll away into the skin of rock all around it. Inside, he found the locker he wanted, and the emergency survival equipment stored within, just as he had expected. Kane pushed the first-aid kit aside, reaching farther into the cupboard, where the flares were kept. He wouldn’t need them, either, just the thing that was stored beside them. Picking it up in one hand, Kane removed the little cylindrical device and hid it beneath the folds of his robe.
He continued on his way, heading back to the ops room. He realized now that this was the Cerberus operations center, that the bands of rock had been constructed over twin aisles of computer equipment. The room had acted as the nerve center for the Cerberus team, and it made a kind of perverted sense that it would be the setting for Kane’s overthrow of this terrible new regime.
He halted at the arched doorway, eyes scanning the cavernous room beyond. A dozen robed operatives were working there, and Kane concluded that they were now patching together the computers, trying to get the systems operational for their own arcane purposes or those of their leader, Ullikummis.
Dylan was sitting near the rear of the room, where Lakesh’s desk had stood just forty-eight hours earlier. Parts of the desk remained exposed, poking through the rocky veins that had clawed over it in thick, branchlike lines. Kane scanned the equipment there, searching for what he needed. The computer was almost entirely gone, hidden beneath the rock skin, but that didn’t matter— Kane wouldn’t need it. He fidgeted for a moment, feeling the weight of the thing he’d nabbed from the emergency survival kit.
Dylan looked up at his approach. “Feel better?” he asked, pushing aside the report he had been mulling over. Again Kane was aware of some second level of meaning, some trick that subliminally changed the man’s words, made him somehow more appealing.
“I need to eat,” Kane said.
“Of course,” Dylan agreed. “I’ll get something brought down while we discuss battle tactics. Lord Ullikummis wants to move swiftly on this project. Now that you’re on board I see no reason for delay.”
“How do they work?” Kane asked, standing over the man’s desk.
Dylan looked baffled, his brows knotting in confusion.
“The stones,” Kane growled impatiently. “Tell me how they work.”
“The stone we placed in you simply helps you embrace the new world,” Dylan said, “opening your mind to it.”
“What about the endurance of your people?” Kane asked. “I remember them shrugging off bullets.”
“They’re your people now, Kane,” Dylan reminded him. “You’re one of us.”
Again, a wave of pleasure swept over Kane at the priest’s words, a mother’s lullaby. Kane shook his head, willing the effect to pass. Rosalia had blocked his stone, but had said he only had a couple of hours before it bonded completely with him. Once that happened, Dylan’s words, and those of chosen servants like him, would cage Kane, alter his personality, making him a pale imitation of what he had been. He needed to break the control right now.
“Can anything hurt them?” Kane asked.
“Why would you want to hurt your brothers?” Dylan asked reasonably.
“If they’re to be my army,” Kane said, leaning his hand on Lakes
h’s desk as he bent closer to Dylan, “then I need to know their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Don’t I.”
Dylan nodded. “It’s a level of strength created by an individual’s concentration,” he explained. “So long as a warrior remains focused, he or she can assume the incredible properties of our stone savior.”
Kane pulled back, his hand brushing something on Lakesh’s desk. Somewhere beneath the stone cladding a green light flickered on, indicating that the public address system was engaged.
“Don’t let it worry you,” Dylan reassured Kane. “They won’t crack under pressure.”
“It’s not pressure I’m thinking about,” Kane said as he whipped the small cylindrical object from its hiding place beneath his robe. “And I’m not the one who should be worried.”
Then Kane yanked the pull tab from the cylinder in his hand, and for a moment Dylan stared in horror, thinking that the ex-Magistrate was detonating a grenade. But instead of an explosion, the foghorn unleashed a deafening squeal, fiercely loud in the confines of the cavelike ops room. Before Dylan could even begin to react, Kane shoved the horn against the pickup microphone of the public address system, and its angry ululation reverberated down the tunnels and caverns of the redoubt-turned-life-camp.
TWO FLOORS BELOW, Rosalia smiled as the hideous banshee wail blurted from the speakers lining the redoubt’s walls. Many of the speakers had become buried beneath the rock coating, but they still howled with the annoying echo.
At her side, the dog yelped in irritation at the deafening racket, the poor beast especially sensitive to the hideous noise. Rosalia ignored its cries, having already placed the earplugs Kane had given her into her ears, and hurried forward with determination. All around her, hooded guards were looking about in confusion, and one man dropped a tray of food he had been taking to one of the prison caves.
Rosalia brushed her wrist against the hidden sensor panel of the nearest cell, striding on even as the door began to shudder back on its hidden tracks.
Kane’s plan was in action. It was time to release the prisoners.
Chapter 29
As Rosalia swept her wrist against the fourth sensor along the wall, one of the guards finally noticed what she was doing.
“Hey,” he shouted, struggling to be heard over the wailing sound of the alarm being piped over the PA system. “You can’t do that. The prisoners will—”
Without hesitation, Rosalia struck the man in the face with her fist, knocking him back against the rough rock wall.
“I am stone,” the man growled, clenching his fists.
This was it, Rosalia knew. This was the moment where she would find out if Kane’s plan had worked.
She kicked out, sweeping her foot high into the air until it struck the hooded guard a vicious blow to his jaw. He cried out in pain, staggering back against the wall again as one of his teeth flew from his mouth with a bloody spray of torn gum. The guard looked stunned as Rosalia kicked out a second time, striking him in the chest with the ball of her other foot. With a blurt of expelled breath, he sagged backward.
“You’re not stone anymore,” Rosalia told the guard as he fell. The sirenlike noise echoing through the tunnels had seen to that.
Up ahead, Rosalia’s dog ran toward the next guard, leaping into the air with its teeth bared.
All around, prisoners were emerging from their cells. Grant’s broad-shouldered form staggered out of one doorway, a look of consternation on his face. He grabbed at the robed guard who was just hurrying past the open cell door toward Rosalia, snagging the man’s loose-fitting robe and hurling him into the wall. The guard slammed against the wall with a crack of bones, sagging limply to the floor.
Grant looked around him, utterly confused. “What the hell is going on?” he shouted over the whine of the alarm.
Rosalia turned, pushing back the hood of her robe. “No time to explain, Magistrate man,” she said.
Grant’s brows furrowed as he took in the figure before him. He had met with Rosalia months ago, out in the open desert around the fishing ville of Hope. He didn’t quite know what to make of her appearance here now.
“What?” he spit, bewildered.
“I’m on your side,” Rosalia told him. Then she gestured to the ceiling, indicating the racket that was still playing over the public address system. “This is Kane’s doing. We’re closing down this shit hole.”
Grant scratched at the close-cropped hair on his scalp as he saw Rosalia part another of the stone walls that hid the cells.
“This is going to take some big explaining when we’re done,” he muttered. But for now, he was happy to go with the flow, turning his attention to another of the robed guards even as the man plucked a slingshot from his belt.
IN THE OPERATIONS ROOM, Kane found himself surrounded by a group of hooded warriors. The horn continued blaring into the microphone, the reverb sounding like some hideous scream in the cavelike space.
“I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing,” Dylan spit, “but this is not the right way to welcome the future.”
Kane glared at him. “Oh, this is the only future you’re getting,” he snarled. Then his fist struck out, smashing into the jaw of the nearest guard. The man fell, collapsing onto the rocky ledge that had grown over the aisle of desks.
Dylan looked astounded, realizing for the first time that his warriors no longer had their remarkable stonelike abilities of defense. A highly trained Magistrate, Kane worked through the untrained warriors in a matter of seconds, tossing them aside and breaking arms and legs with a succession of well-placed blows. He didn’t have long to do this, he knew. It would be only a matter of moments until Dylan shut down the shrieking foghorn and his people could gather their wits once more, turning concentration into physical endurance.
A hooded woman stood before Kane, muttering the mantra he had heard a dozen times before: “I am stone.”
Kane drove his fist into her face, collapsing her nose in a single, bloody strike.
“No, you ain’t,” he growled.
Then he grabbed the front of her robe with both hands and threw her aside even as she cried out with the pain of her shattered nose.
Dylan was at the PA system now, and he snatched up the shrieking cylinder, pulling it away from the microphone. The awful wailing noise dwindled from the overhead speakers, but the foghorn kept blurting out its angry song in the first priest’s hand.
Kane turned on his heel, knowing full well he would need something more powerful than his fists once the noise abated. He had dispatched nine of the personnel in the room in those brief instants of respite, leaving just Dylan and two of his hooded guards standing.
As Dylan shut off the irritating horn, Kane sprinted through the archway, hurrying out of the room toward the nearest stairwell. A moment later, Dylan and his people were trotting swiftly down the corridor in pursuit.
ON THE LEVEL of the redoubt that had once held the living quarters, Rosalia, Grant and a handful of other Cerberus personnel battled valiantly as a second wave of guards tried to retard Rosalia’s progress. She was unlocking each cell in turn, swiftly using her hidden stone to tap the sensors and make the doors slide open.
Abruptly, the sound from the public address speakers ceased, accompanied a moment later by cries of relief from several of the prisoners.
“No,” Rosalia hissed, “you don’t understand. Without the noise, they’ll be able to concentrate again.”
Even as she said it, that eerie battle cry seemed to echo the length of the tunnel they found themselves in:
“I am stone.”
“I am stone.”
“I am stone.”
“I am stone.”
“COME ON, COME ON,” Kane muttered to himself as he pressed his wrist to the sensor and heard the armory door unlock.
A short way down the corridor the stairwell door groaned open and First Priest Dylan led his two hooded guards out into the tunnel-like space beyond.
In an in
stant, Kane had shoved the rock-covered door back on its hidden tracks and ducked inside. Even as he disappeared into the armory, he heard Dylan calling, identifying him as he rushed out of sight.
“Perfect,” Kane muttered.
Most of the guards were down. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to stop Dylan from broadcasting instructions to Ullikummis’s people. Without him, their brainwashing should abate.
As swiftly as possible, Kane reached back, brushing his wrist against the hollow in the wall, commanding the door to seal.
The armory had changed. Where once had stood sleek shelves lit by bright fluorescent overheads, now the ceiling had lowered, and sharp stalactites pointed downward like icicles from its rocky surface. The familiar magma lights were dotted all over, casting their warm orange illumination, leaving much of the armory in shadow. The shelves were still there, and Kane recognized that their pattern remained unchanged. Yet they looked different, covered in a shinglelike skin, as if moss had encroached on the room, clambering up the shelving units with its sticky growths. Whatever Ullikummis’s touch had done, it had altered the Cerberus redoubt on a molecular level, changing the fundamental nature of things Kane had previously taken for granted.
Frantically the ex-Mag looked around him, trying to get his bearings in the half-light of the orange magma glow. Shelves of ordnance stretched out across the vast room, ammo clips, gun barrels and cases glinting beneath the soft orange lights. This had been Henny Johnson’s domain, Kane recalled. Ex-U.S. Army, Henny had delighted in the storage and cataloging of all this ordnance. Right now, Kane needed to find a weapon that would work against Dylan and his people.
Behind him, Kane heard the stone door trundle open once again: Dylan.
Hurrying down the aisles between the shelves, Kane spotted the unit holding Sin Eater pistols, their familiar wrist holsters stored in a flip-top box on the shelf above. Kane reached into the box, snagged one of the leather holsters with one hand.
