The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus

by Matthew Smith

  Kez told me later that she had to prise me out of the driver’s seat when the fuel gauge finally hit zero and we spluttered to a stop. I hadn’t even noticed.

  THAT’S ENOUGH FOR now. Hand’s cramping, head’s hurting. Need to rest.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘IT ENDS...’

  Cafferly removed the psi-amp helm and opened her eyes. It took a moment for the rush of the here and now to reassert itself, like she had to retune her perceptions. Colours settled, sounds stabilised; everything swam into focus. If she’d still breathed, she would’ve taken a gulp of air after feeling like she’d held it for the last two—three?—hours. As it was, despite her dormant pulse, the reorientation nevertheless brought a surge of… something. Fear? Excitement? It was enervating, and pronounced enough to take her aback. She was more than used to disappearing down the rabbit hole of her own mind, but the experience under the psi-amp had been something else entirely: the only way to describe it was if she’d slid outside herself and rode a narrow-cast beam of pure thought.

  She looked down at the amp, turning it over her hands. Quite what Mortis had created here she didn’t know, but she’d never felt so powerful. It had boosted her psi-projection to an extraordinary degree, channelled it from a soft, wide-ranging talent into hard, laser-like precision. She’d felt in control throughout, never lost and at the mercy of her head like she did when she’d had to corral her senses previously to find meaning in the jumbled imagery. This was absolute mastery.

  She had to admit that she’d felt a certain degree of apprehension when the Dark Judge had foisted the instrument upon her. She’d been in no position to refuse—certainly not in front of De’Ath, who in his paranoid frame of mind would no doubt consider it insubordination and relish any opportunity to have her purged from the ranks like so many others;—to show unwillingness to aid the hunt for survivors was to suggest you weren’t fully committed. Nevertheless, she’d had her misgivings: Mortis’s experiments were notorious, as much for their side effects as for what he actually produced. That walking abomination that served as his minion—Jackson, he’d been called in life, some victim spared the dignity of true obliteration—was a walking advertisement for the DJ’s unusual predilection for testing the viability of new forms, and, it had to be said, throwing a certain scientific rigour out of the window. There was no need for the Jackson thing to exist other than it pleased Mortis to violate nature. Cafferly was under the impression that his brothers Fear, Fire and Sidney tolerated the meddling he got up to in his labs because of the results that sprang from it, but ultimately considered that when it resulted in entities like his servant, it merely seemed inefficient and unfathomable. Why play with life when you can simply exterminate it?

  The psi-amp had had the potential to be another grand folly—she’d heard rumours of his early forays into dimensional jumps that had torn his human guinea pigs in two—that could’ve rendered her braindead, or overloaded her cerebellum to the point where she’d haemorrhaged. Mortis, unsurprisingly, cared little for the failures, and she would’ve been scooped into one of the burial pits with the rest of that day’s harvest with no one to mourn her, while a mark-two version of the amp would be thrust upon the next Psi-Judge before Cafferly had even stopped twitching. It was a relief, therefore, that it appeared the DJ had got his schematics right, and so far she could feel no lasting damage.

  It had been terrifying at first, when she turned it on, but also exhilarating. She’d almost been overwhelmed by the power. Her mind had flown like an arrow, straight and true, and initially she’d had to cling to it, not letting it get away from her, seeing where she was taken. Once accustomed to its tightly channelled direction, however, she’d soon clambered into the saddle and took up the reins, all the while marvelling at how the amp purified her telepathy, left her feeling like she was a blazing comet arcing across the ether. Mental faultlines all around her lit up like a circuit board, ripe for exploiting, and she’d zeroed in on one instantly; its fragility was virtually beckoning her, her psychic bullet eagerly seeking its bullseye.

  Cafferly had slid past the lawbreaker’s non-existent defences—Emily, her name had been, she’d noted on the way in—and found the woman’s head a mass of fears and anxieties, buoyed by a lack of sleep. Info flooded her mind the moment she took residence—Emily’s history, her son, the people she’d been surviving with and where they were—and it became relatively easy, thanks to the amp’s augmentation of her psi-processes, to pick apart her brain like shellfish and plant her own seeds of suggestion into the fertile ground. Little white seeds, she liked to think of them as, the colour of bone, embedded deep in the grey matter, and from them roots and tendrils spread, taking over the host. Emily offered little in the way of resistance, and was probably only dimly aware that there was an invading presence in her head at all; her cracked psyche just let Cafferly steal in and go about doing the maximum damage. Indeed, she could’ve shut her down entirely, reduced her to nothing more than a puppet, but a criminal needs to know why they’re being punished—see the consequences of their actions—so the Psi-Judge simply disconnected Emily for as long as was required, with the intention of giving her back what was left of her mind at the painful, traumatic last.

  Oh, the pain her victim had suffered had been joyous to sample, bordering on the ecstatic. Cafferly’s nerve endings had long since been deadened, so the pleasure hadn’t been experienced physically—it was a psychic rush delivered direct to her frontal lobe. There was still sensory life there. She knew that De’Ath and his lieutenants enjoyed the same thrill that came from punishing criminals; they’d retained a vestige of their humanity, deep in their core, so they could appreciate the satisfaction that lay in lawful, just annihilation. They weren’t mindless zombies—they didn’t decimate the living unthinkingly, oblivious to the excitement it generated. All lawkeepers got some emotional charge from bringing retribution upon the guilty—it was their job, after all; the enforcement of justice brought an inevitable frisson—so she didn’t believe she, or any of them, were traitors to the Chief’s ideology by still having that spark in their otherwise cold, post-mortem bodies. She wouldn’t feel any sense of shame at the way her brain had lit up as the woman’s raw agony had blossomed in her head like a fireball; on the contrary, it signalled a job well done. Who wouldn’t take gratification at the way this nest of perpetrators had screamed and bled as the law had landed upon them?

  With the Emily marionette at her control, she was easy to direct as a psychic beacon, broadcasting her location back to the Grand Hall. The H-wagon was in the air within minutes, and she’d watched briefly through the woman’s eyes as the flame-squad had set about burning the criminal cell to the ground. That many of them had escaped was unfortunate, but they wouldn’t survive for long out in the open; the important thing was that they were driven from their bolthole, forced to run and discover that nowhere was safe. If they were made to confront the hopelessness of their situation, to realise that evading justice was simply delaying the inevitable, then they were more likely to welcome that ultimate sanction. De’Ath wasn’t interested in those that repented or admitted their guilt—all would receive the same judgement—but if they came forward and offered themselves for execution, then it made the whole process a lot smoother, and sped things on considerably. The Chief genuinely couldn’t understand why they weren’t lining up to be judged, for they had to be aware that they reeked of sin; every breath, every heartbeat, was a criminal act. They were drowning in their own lawlessness. It had to have a cumulative effect, that they would want to seek purification before their moral turpitude overwhelmed them, but perps being perps, they just rolled in it like pigs and did everything they could to avoid facing up to the seriousness of their illegality. Consequently, every officer in the Hall of Injustice was strapped in for the long haul, aware that De’Ath’s grand design was going to take some time to achieve. The guilty wouldn’t submit to their authority willingly, and would continue to fight it. It was frustrating—i
f only they knew the peace of the grave, they’d rush towards it.

  Cafferly wondered if Sidney ever contemplated the sheer scale of what he was attempting to do—of what he would do. She suspected he was never daunted by it; his kind of pure philosophy ensured that he wasn’t intimidated by the scope of the task ahead. Rather, he relished the job at hand, the logistics it would require. When you had righteousness on your side—and the Chief’s reasoning was impossible to argue against—then it became a calling, a project for which you were destined, and which you would devote your (undead) life to. With mortality no longer an issue, it became an ongoing work-in-progress of which he’d never tire. His sponsors—the Sisters, and the beings that they represented—would make sure that his zeal never wavered, and De’Ath in turn felt that he was guided by higher powers, pushed towards a purpose that transcended any earthly pursuits. He was remaking a world, and there couldn’t be any holier mission than that—

  No remorse.

  (No

  going back—)

  Cafferly winced, instinctively holding her right hand up to her temple.

  One law.

  (Justice

  for all—)

  She’d never got any flashes from her previous life, but she had one now, and it startled her in its vividness. Thinking about Sidney’s crusade brought to mind a general she’d seen on television when she was a child, interviewed about the war he was engaging in a foreign land—he was a ranking officer in Justice Department’s military wing, leading an invasion (she couldn’t remember the exact whys or wherefores, but it seemed like the opposing country had different political beliefs; there were quite a few similarly motivated interventions in those days, or so it felt). Her parents had insisted she watch it; she remembers them making her sit before the screen. The general’s face filled Cafferly’s mind as clearly as Emily’s son had just moments before when he’d pleaded for his life; she could suddenly picture the craggy pores in the man’s cheeks as the camera zoomed in, the jutting chin, the sun glinting on his silvery mirrored shades. She could visualise the yellowy, bleached scrub of the landscape behind him as he gave his press conference, radiating dust and heat, and she focused on the pulse in his jaw as he chewed gum while he spoke to the assembled journos. There was the soft clicking of photographers off-camera. This moment from thirty years ago was right there behind her eyes, unbidden, perfectly captured. The general looked at her, right out of the TV, and said in cold, deliberate tones that there would be no respite, no negotiation, no compromise, only total decimation. There was one law and it was absolute. He made it sound like the most reasonable course of action possible, for to disagree was to side with the enemy. It was that simple. It had struck her just how plainly his ruthless plan had been spelled out, the unwavering strength of will. Doubt or empathy would never enter his mind.

  One law.

  (Justice

  for all—)

  “Dammit,” Cafferly murmured aloud, rubbing her head. An ache bloomed in her skull.

  That moment, that general and his stony-faced adherence to absolute certainty, stayed with her for years. She wasn’t sure at the time why that particular image lodged, splinter-like, in her brain, impossible to shake free; yet when she’d close her eyes at night, there it was, affixed to her retina. Not long afterwards, her parents entrusted her to Justice Department, and she began to wonder if the connection she’d felt with the man on the TV screen had been some kind of coded message from the future, reverse déjà vu that had significance for what was yet to come. Her nascent precognition was tweaking her, speaking to her before she fully understood the language.

  (No remorse.)

  A figure, standing in a bare room, haloed by fire. The punishment due.

  All this has been seen before.

  She shook her head to dispel a rush of images. Light flickering through holes in skin. She saw herself as a child, curled in the dark at the top of the stairs in her home—

  (punishment)

  This wasn’t right. Post-mortem, much of her experiences from the time before had been wiped from her memory, a clean reboot so she could dedicate her powers to De’Ath’s cause without distraction. The Sisters had made sure of that. Her history hadn’t penetrated her thoughts like this since she’d consumed the Dead Fluids.

  All this

  (is due punishment—)

  She realised she was still holding the psi-amp in her trembling left hand, and flung it down onto the stone floor, where it bounced with a dull clang and rolled next to her boots. She slouched forward in her chair, resting her elbows on her knees, panic gnawing at her. Was Mortis’s contraption opening fractures in her own head? It had sharpened her soft talents, but could it have sliced the wielder at the same time? And what else was going to come bleeding through, presuming the damage was irreparable?

  She angrily got to her feet, the chair scraping back, and kicked the device across the room, where it disappeared into a shadowy corner. She was in one of the small isolation chambers psi-operatives used for out-of-body operations, and as such it was little more than a gloomy cell—all the better to turn her concentration inwards. Now it felt claustrophobic, and she paced its circumference, trying to calm herself. As exhilarating as the use of the amp had been, she was regretting now ever allowing it access to her head—once doors were opened, they couldn’t often be closed again. This kind of psychic fragility she knew all too well, and had exploited it often enough in the past. The mind of the woman, Emily, for instance, had been the equivalent of a rickety wooden gate, hanging off its broken hinges, requiring only the lightest of nudges to push it wide. She would never have been able to keep Cafferly out. But the Psi-Judge now recognised a similar precariousness in herself; what once was stable now seemed loose and floating. Her psyche had become unmoored. Whether she’d be able to tether it again, she didn’t know.

  (—pure justice—)

  She screamed, hammering the heels of her hands against her temples, willing herself to clear her mind. Discipline, she told herself. Composure. After a moment, the chaos in her head faltered and faded. She was back in charge.

  One thing was for sure, she thought: the amp was like bad acid—an experience not to be repeated. Additional exposure was undoubtedly only going to further loosen the bonds in her brain, and she had to keep it together. That the HoJ was such a bear-pit, where every thought and utterance could be used against her, was enough of a challenge; if she didn’t approach it confident of her own mind, then her enemies were going to eat her… well, if not ‘alive,’ then the undead equivalent.

  She stopped pacing and glanced suddenly towards the chamber’s door. Paranoia crawled up her spine. Mortis had pointedly singled her out for flight-testing the prototype—what if he was aware of what it would do to her? What if Phobia and Nausea had pushed him towards it? But to what end—to weaken her, eventually destroy her? There were simpler ways of getting rid of her if they saw her as a rival or felt she was showing signs that her resolve was softening. They could probably atomise her with a word. An experiment to see what the amp’s after-effects were? There were prisoners in Mortis’s labs that would’ve been just as disposable. Nonetheless, the suspicion that this had been done to her deliberately clung, as if it was a smell she couldn’t get out from under her nostrils.

  She shook her head. The paranoia could just as well be another symptom of her mind’s displacement. But what felt more likely was that it was magnifying what she already suspected; that there were forces at work of which she had to be wary. It had heightened her sensitivity. She would have to be careful she didn’t betray her feelings to Sidney and the rest whenever she was in their vicinity. Better to maintain a straight face, let them assume there had been no change.

  Cafferly walked over to where she’d kicked the device and plucked it back up, dusting it down. They couldn’t know.

  She wrenched open the door, and strode out into the corridor, where she found Mortis waiting for her, that smooth white head looming out of the dark
like an undersea predator. She should’ve expected that he’d be there, but his abrupt, silent presence nevertheless forced her to bite down on a surprised reaction.

  “Excccellent work,” he hissed. “The resssponsse time was exccceptional.” He held out his hand, and she passed him the amp. He studied it with the care a child might devote to a pet. “How did you find it?”

  “Powerful.” He glanced at her, clearly expecting more. She was conscious her reticence was too obvious, so she attempted to elaborate. “I mean, it took me a few moments to control it. Once I did, though… it was like I was at the centre of everything.”

  That seemed to please him, and he returned to prodding his toy. “There will inevitably be sssome fine-tuning. I want to eventually roll them out to all psssi-unitssss. It would strengthen our forccce a thousssand-fold. You’d have no problem with that?”

  She shook her head.

  “Imagine,” Mortis continued, “the ability to detect and eliminate every lawbreaker the world over. Nowhere would be sssafe. There’d be nowhere to hide. An entire psssi-amplified divisssion that could make the criminalsss desssstroy themssselvesss, if their mindsss were put to it.”

  “It would streamline the process immeasurably.”

  “And you got no psssychic backwassssh?”

  “Nothing I noticed.”

  The Dark Judge nodded, or gave the approximation of a nod. “I want you to have further ssesssions with it. Let me adjussst the levelssss, sssee if it can be further attuned to your pssignature.”

  Cafferly watched him retreat down the corridor. She had little doubt now they were using her—she had to find out why before they broke her head apart irrevocably.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  30 March