ENDURING STRUGGLE

The Cerberus rebels remain vigilant, defending mankind’s sovereignty against the alien forces conspiring to gain control of the planet. Now a dark and deadly intelligence plots to eradicate what it means to be human: free will.

SNOW BLIND

In the northern wilderness, behind an artificial curtain of winter, the legacy of the deposed god kings lives on. An experimental testing ground—where computers have replaced independent choice—is turning citizens into docile, obedient sheep. The brainchild of a dedicated Magistrate of the old order, Terminal White promises to achieve the subjugation of the human race. As the Cerberus warriors infiltrate and get trapped in this mechanized web, humanity’s only salvation may be lost in a blinding white doom.

The acolyte reached for Kane’s right wrist

Kane drew back his arm before the man could touch him; his Sin Eater was hidden there, the blaster disguised by the folds of his jacket.

“It is right to feel fear on first sacrifice, but no harm will come to you,” the acolyte said gently.

“Sorry.” Kane shook his head. “Just have a thing about needles.” He held out his left arm—the one without the hidden blaster—pulling back the sleeve. “Go ahead.”

The acolyte brought the cup and needle down close to Kane’s wrist and instructed him to chant a prayer to the stone god. Kane recited the words he’d heard at the congregation a few days before, when he and Brigid had enlisted in this ragtag pilgrimage.

Kane hated the chant, but he couldn’t draw attention to himself—not until he and Brigid had found out exactly what was going on here.

Terminal White

James Axler

By indirections find directions out.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1564–1616

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A dis-placed piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning alle-giance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and aban-doned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of hu-manity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

Legend

Journal Entry

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Copyright

Designated Task #012: Sex

All residents of Ioville are expected to engage in sexual congress four times a month. Partners are selected by strict rotation to increase the chances of pregnancy. Partners are provided blind each session, and while the subject is given no choice over whom, the longevity of the operation and health of the participants are constantly assessed.

Like all functions in Ioville, the sex act is methodical and devoid of emotional resonance. It is a means to an end: the creation of children to people the ville in subsequent years. The birthrate is high, due to the strict methods employed.

My ovulation rhythms have not been fully recorded yet, which means I have yet to be slotted into the rotation. Here in Ioville no act is wasted.

Grand nurseries have been created to house the youngest of the newborns while their parents continue to perform their designated tasks. The nurseries look after the well-being and education of the children through to age eleven, at which point the young are redesignated as adults and are welcomed into the workforce, where they will be assigned their tasks. With this redesignation they are expected to engage in Designated Task #012.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 1

The bastard child of a thousand deluded devotees hurtled toward Kane across the flame-lit temple, an unearthly howl issuing from its gaping wound of a mouth.

Kane’s Sin Eater appeared in his hand, the hidden handblaster materializing from its forearm holster. The former Magistrate began blasting a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets at the eight-foot-tall monster as it charged across the slate floor at him. Its composite arms reached out and batted the bullets aside like a tumble of dislodged shale flickering through the air, lines of blood rippling between each loose stone. And then the creature reached for Kane as the horrified pilgrims watched, its stony arm distending and parting as it grasped for Kane’s weapon.

How do I get myself into these jams? Kane wondered as that inhuman arm reached for the barrel of his blaster.

Eighty-six minutes earlier

THE TOWER COULD be seen from miles away, its red eye shining even through the pouring rain that darkened the skies.

“The last time I was here,” Brigid Baptiste explained, “this whole place was just a field of beets.”

Kane pushed apart the canvas covers of the transport wag with his hands and peered out at the road. The canvas was heavy from the rain, and Kane felt a wash of rainwater run over his hand and down his arm as he adjusted the flaps to see.

They were bumping along a gravel road that was perfectly straight and was bordered on either side by a line of carefully matched stones placed at roughly twelve-foot intervals. Carved from slate, each stone was disc-like and flat like a roof tile, and each measured eight feet in height, its base sunken into the ground. The gray slate had turned black with the rainwater, and the curtain of rain continued to fall, drenching the road, the wag, the standing stones and everything else in its chilling torrent. Beyond those stones were meadows of wildflowers, their colors vibrant even now, seen through the morning shower. To Kane, a trained Magistrate, the stones looked like sentries, guarding the pathway up to their destination, the red-eyed tower.

“Never much liked beets,” Kane muttered as the rugged transport jounced along the road, the shushing noise of the gravel and the rain mingling to a roar as loud as a waterfall.

Kane was a clean-shaven, muscular man in his early thirties, with steel-gray eyes and short dark hair. He stood an inch over six feet tall and there was something of the wolf about him, not only because of his build but also because of the way his eyes took in everything and the way he always seemed to be alone no matter the company he was in. He was both a pack leader and a loner, just like the strongest wolf.

Kane’s eyes were restlessly observant, drinking in every detail of the journey and his fellow passengers—thirty-one in all, including himself and Brigid, crammed into the bus-like back of the wagon. Kane had once been a Magistrate for Cobaltville, a type of law-enforcer who followed the baron’s dictates, until he became disillusioned with the regime and embroiled in a conspiracy that had led to his expulsion from the ville. Since then, Kane had hooked up with Cerberus, an organization dedicated to the protection of humankind from outside forces. It was another kind of law enforcement, to be sure, but one predicated on a more noble foundation. It was as a Cerberus exile that Kane had faced rogue gods and deranged aliens—and sometimes both at once—and had traveled across the globe and beyond to protect his fellow man. Right now, that role had brought Kane to the arable farmlands of the north, where he was riding in the back of the scratch-built transport wagon along with his partner, Brigid Baptiste, and twenty-nine other pilgrims, heading for one of the most sacred sites in North America.

Kane knew where he was going, even if he had not visited before. It was a temple, which—in Kane’s experience—boiled down to being another way for someone to control someone else for their own personal gain. He had enforced that system when he had been a Magistrate, enforced the iron will of Baron Cobalt, turning a blind eye to the inequalities and cruelties that that system reinforced. But now the nine barons were gone and their baronies were crumbling, struggling to continue without them, the rot slowly but surely eating them up from within. In time, Kane thought, the whole system would fall by the wayside—and he considered it his job to make sure that what came next wasn’t simply more of the same.

Brigid sat on the bench seat beside Kane, watching the road and the sights beyond as the wag continued its slow journey along the recently laid track. She was a slim, beautiful woman in her late twenties, with pale skin and a mane of red-gold hair like dancing flames. Her eyes were the bewitching green of cut emeralds. She had a high forehead that suggested intelligence, and full lips that promised a more passionate aspect. In reality, Brigid had both of these qualities and many more besides. But she had one quality that was as rare as it was useful—an eidetic memory, the ability to perfectly remember anything she had seen, even just for an instant. She too had been raised in Cobaltville, working as an archivist in the Historical Division until she had stumbled upon the same conspiracy as Kane, a conspiracy at the heart of which was the intention of alien beings to subjugate humankind and destroy all independence and free will. Like Kane, Brigid had been expelled from the ville and declared an Outlander by its ruling baron, a human-alien hybrid called Baron Cobalt. Along with Kane’s Magistrate partner Grant, Brigid had subsequently been recruited into the Cerberus organization.

Like the other adherents on the transport, Brigid and Kane were dressed in ordinary clothes that suggested a farming background. Kane wore a beaten brown leather jacket, patched at the elbows, over a checkered shirt, with dark pants and scuffed work boots that had seen better days. Brigid wore a leather jacket in a lighter shade of brown, an oversize man’s shirt and sleeveless T-shirt, with combat pants and hard-wearing boots. Beneath both of their outfits, the two Cerberus warriors wore shadow suits—skintight environment suits that regulated the wearer’s temperature as well as providing protection from blunt trauma and environmental threats. The shadow suits were perfectly hidden under their ragged clothes; no one on the transport would suspect they were in the presence of two highly efficient warriors.

The other people in the transport looked to be mostly rural types. Several, however, had dressed in what were obviously their finest clothes; two men wearing dark wool suits, a woman in a rose-pink floor-length dress with a matching wide-brimmed hat resting on her lap where she sat near the open rear of the wagon. Brigid guessed that those three saw this pilgrimage a little like attending church way back before the nukecaust, the way parishioners would wear their “Sunday finest” to show their respect for the Lord.

“I miss my George so much,” the woman with the hat was telling her bench mate in a low voice. “He walked into that storm out west two years ago and never returned.”

“That storm has taken a lot of people,” her companion sympathized. “’Cause of the nukecaust, they say it might never blow itself out.”

There were several other figures inside the bus-like transport, too, and all were dressed in matching robes that looked similar to a monk’s habit. The robes were made from a rough, fustian material and featured a hood that could be drawn down over the head to hang low over the face, along with a crimson shield-like insignia sewn over the right breast. The shield insignia haunted Kane—it was eerily similar to the shield he had worn when he had been a Magistrate for Cobaltville, years before. Two similarly dressed adherents were sitting up front, one of them working the driving controls while the other had used a map to give directions until they’d reached this stone-lined road that led solely to their final destination. Kane and Brigid had met these people before—firewalkers, Brigid had dubbed them, because of their seeming invulnerability when under a self-imposed trancelike state of meditation. Whether the firewalkers could still perform such superhuman feats now, with their leader—an alien prince called Ullikummis—dead, was unknown to the Cerberus teammates at this moment. As Kane might have said in his lighter moments, that only added to the fun.

Something big was happening, the Cerberus teammates knew. Excited rumors had been buzzing in the shadowy community of stone adherents that was strung across the continent in patches. There was talk that Ullikummis walked again.

They were in a place that the old maps called Saskatchewan in a country called Canada. If it had a new name, Kane had never bothered to learn it—his journeys across the globe on behalf of the Cerberus organization left him with little time to learn local customs or enjoy the sights. Rather, he and his Cerberus allies seemed to spend most of their time running headlong into danger, as arrows, bullets and honest-to-goodness death rays blasted all about them. Somehow, no matter the odds, the field personnel had always survived, thanks in part to their own phenomenal skills and in part to their backup, based in the redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana.

There was a palpable air of excitement in the pilgrims’ rugged transport now. The passengers had been gathered from a specified pickup point where they had been instructed to wait after being recruited at one of the numerous public sermons given by the stone adherents.

The wag was twenty feet long, with a wire frame over which strips of canvas had been laid to protect the travelers from the icy torrent that fell from the skies. The vehicle was unpainted, leaving the metallic frame gleaming darkly, and it featured seven wheels including a rear-mounted steering assist to tackle the rougher ground around the worship site. In the two hundred years since the nukecaust, the paved roads had fallen into disrepair, and sites like the one this wag was heading toward were poorly served by existing communications links. As Brigid had pointed out, the last time she had been here it had been a farmer’s field—and that had been less than eighteen months ago.

Brakes groaned as the transport pulled to a halt. Up ahead, Kane could see that the gravel road became wider, the standing stones funneling outward to leave a broad, circular expanse of gravel in the center of which was the towering structure with the red eye. The tower was roughly three or four stories—or thirty-five feet—high and built with straight, slightly rounded sides as if some baton had been shoved into the soil. It was phallic, Kane thought, but that didn’t come as any surprise—he had seen plenty of temples to the gods, and the phallus was a recurring theme. The baton-like structure was carved from dark stone like the standing stones, while dotted along its sides were streaks of polished red-orange glass. A single red glass circle had been placed close to the tower’s pinnacle, like a mighty eye staring down on the people below. This “eye” faced into the sun, drawing its rays inside the structure itself.

Kane recognized that design, too—it drew from the familiar pattern used in the nine baronies, the red circle atop the Administration Monolith that gave the citizens the impression that they were being watched at all times. One of the more insidious ways in which the stone adherents of Ullikummis operated was to take the familiar iconography of the baronies and twist it to their own ends—hence the cycloptic eye in the tower and the use of the breast badge that was familiar to anyone who had seen a Magistrate uniform.

“Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to make this place seem special,” Kane muttered to Brigid as he let the gap in the canvas slip closed again.

At the same time, one of the robed adherents addressed the group from the rear of the wag, close to the open gate at which passengers embarked and debarked, speaking in a bold voice. “Chosen of stone, we walk from here,” he explained, “to truly appreciate the majesty of his birthplace, as is the will of the infinite lord.”

“Will, my ass,” Kane muttered from the side of his mouth as he and Brigid joined the other passengers, filing toward the open rear of the stopped vehicle.

A moment later, the first of the pilgrims stepped from the transport, dropping down to the rain-wet gravel a few feet below. In less than a minute, everyone had disembarked from the wagon, and they clustered on the gravel in the lee of the baton-like tower, Kane and Brigid among them. The group were excited but they adopted a reverential silence as they strode across the ground before the grand structure, staring up at it in awe. To them, this was a place of incredible religious significance—the birthplace of Ullikummis, their savior, their god.

To all, that is, except for Kane and Brigid, of course; they were here to scope out the site and see whether something dangerous was building here, well out of sight of the crumbling baronies that had split North America into nine territories of harsh and subtle control. They had faced Ullikummis before—fought him and stopped him before he could take over the world.

A little over a year ago, a large meteor had crash-landed here. From within that meteor had emerged Ullikummis, a member of an alien race of creatures called the Annunaki who had posed as gods several millennia ago, and deceived humankind into worshipping them. Ullikummis had been an outcast of his own people, imprisoned in the meteor and flung into space, only to return five thousand years later and rain havoc on the world in his fury at what had been done to him. When he reappeared, Ullikummis had sown the seeds of a new religion, one dedicated to his worship and that granted its users incredible—almost supernatural—control of their physical bodies. But he had been opposed by the brave warriors of Cerberus, who had seen the worst that the Annunaki race was capable of, and realized the wicked intentions at the heart of the stone god’s plans. In retaliation, Ullikummis had almost destroyed the Cerberus organization, infiltrating their headquarters and brainwashing several of their number, including Brigid Baptiste. However, the monster had finally been destroyed by Kane, thrown into the sun using a teleportational rig.

Although Ullikummis had been defeated, his worshippers continued to blindly follow his teachings, creating a new and growing cult in his name. Kane and Brigid had initially been dispatched to check the site of the fallen meteor prison, but on discovering it was now an impenetrable and highly guarded temple dedicated to Ullikummis the stone god, they had gone undercover, infiltrating the congregation at a mass in his name before joining this pilgrimage to the site itself.

“Roundabout way to see a hunk of space rock,” Kane grumbled to Brigid as they joined the others on the walk to the temple’s entry itself.

“It’s not as if we had anything better to do,” Brigid replied, wiping aside a sodden curl of flame-red hair.

Kane had no answer to that. He just tried to resist the urge to check that he was still armed.

More adherents waited at the doors, dressed in the familiar robes of coarse fabric, red shield on the breast, hoods up against the chill and rain. Beyond them, a tall archway led into the tower itself, open but set deep into the structure so that the punishing rain would not go straight inside. There were other pilgrims, too, another smaller group just entering the grand archway, their own transport parked up to the side of the gravel pen. Several of the group stopped before the archway and knelt, bowing so that they touched their foreheads to the ground in a gesture of absolute supplication.

Kane and Brigid were ushered along with the rest of their party, making their way toward the arch. “Think we ought to bow?” Kane asked, whispering the question from the side of his mouth.

Brigid didn’t reply, but instead dropped to her knees in the wet gravel and began pleading to the stone god to help her and the world he so loved. Kane was impressed—if he didn’t know better, he’d be convinced she was buying into this stone cult nonsense, hook, line and sinker.

They passed through the archway and entered a lobby-like area, which opened out into the main chamber of the tower. The lobby was eight paces end to end, but ran entirely around the base of the tower in a complete circuit. It was divided from the main chamber by thick stone pillars, rough-surfaced and tightly packed so that only a sliver of the main room could be seen through them. The pillars were so closely spaced that only one or two people could pass between them into the main chamber at any one time, which meant that the lobby momentarily became a bottleneck as the group of thirty-one passed through.

Within, the tower felt warm after the icy rain, and Kane took a moment just to breathe in the air. It had a scent to it, a trace of burning, like toast left too long under the grill.

It was darker inside, too, even after the dullness of the overcast day. The tower had no formal windows, only ragged lines cut into the external walls. Each of these lines had been filled with red-orange glass, giving a kind of fiery half-light to the interior. It felt a little like stepping into a volcano. Kane jolted, recognizing the quality of that light: when Ullikummis had penetrated Cerberus’s defences and taken control of their headquarters, he had reshaped it into something he had dubbed Life Camp Zero, a cross between a prison and a reeducation center. The walls of the Cerberus redoubt had been masked by living rock, the light fixtures replaced with bubbles of volcanic fire, casting everything in a hot orange glow. This place—this temple—had that same glow. It disoriented Kane for a moment—he had been a prisoner in Life Camp Zero, had suffered terribly at the hands of his jailers before ultimately turning the tables and killing them. He didn’t think much about that period of his life—when he had absorbed an obedience stone into his body and momentarily sacrificed his independence to Ullikummis so that he could escape.

Brigid, too, had sacrificed her independence to Ullikummis, though for her it was involuntary. Ullikummis had held her in a cell in a sea fortress called Bensalem, where he had twisted her thought processes, brainwashing her into seeing things in a new and inhuman way—the way of the Annunaki. Brigid’s senses had been overwhelmed with the psychic onslaught and she had finally given up, hiding her real personality in a higher plane of consciousness and letting her body be possessed by her wicked Annunaki self—an abomination called Brigid Haight. The evil she had committed as Haight still haunted her, even though she had had no control of her actions.

“Kane, you’ve stopped,” Brigid said quietly, pushing her hand gently against her partner’s back.

Kane shook his head. “Sorry, I was miles away,” he admitted. “The light kind of...brings it all back.”

Brigid nodded once in understanding. “The stone lord is still with us,” she said, raising her voice so that the people around her could hear. No matter how disconcerting this experience was, she and Kane had to remember that they were here undercover; that for all intents and purposes, they were just two more pilgrims hoping to find salvation in the wisdom of the stone god.

A moment later, the Cerberus warriors had moved past the pillars and into the depths of the temple. The fiery glow was brighter here, the light shimmering a little as if it were alive—an illusion from the passing clouds and the rain on the slivers of red glass.

The interior chamber was circular and of moderate but impressive size, like a midsize conference room or a small theater, able to hold perhaps eighty people before it felt crowded. Just now, Kane estimated, there were fifty pilgrims here, plus a half-dozen acolytes, easily identifiable by their robes and red insignias. However, the room’s proportions seemed more impressive because it stretched all the way up through to the height of the tower, rising thirty-five feet into the air in a grand column, where the giant red eye glared outward and in, casting a red oval disc across a spot on the floor. That red spot highlighted a huge brown rock standing in the very center of the chamber. The rock was almost circular but it had split down the middle to reveal a hollow interior, the two sides pulled apart by incredible force. The rock was as large as a Sherman tank, and where Kane could see the interior he saw that the walls were thick, despite its hollow center. This had been the prison cell of Ullikummis, launched into space millennia ago, returning to Earth less than two years ago and bringing its sole prisoner back home. The rock was surrounded by a circle of hard-packed earth, beyond which the floor had been paved with large slabs of slate.

Across to one side stood a caldron pit, blistering with flames, their heat emanating throughout the room.

There was one other item in this central chamber besides the caldron and the rock, and it transfixed Brigid Baptiste from the moment she walked through the gap in the pillars. It was an exquisitely carved alabaster statue of a woman, a third again life-size, standing with arms outstretched as though to welcome someone into a hug. The woman was slim and tall, with long legs and a cloak over her shoulders that draped down past her knees. She wore a skintight catsuit that, in reality, would have hugged every curve of her svelte, athletic form. The catsuit had been painted in a glossy black, like a beetle’s wing. The face had been left unpainted, the white alabaster shining pink in the glow from the fire windows, but the lion’s mane of hair had been daubed with color—a rich red-gold like a halo of living flames.

Brigid gasped as she saw the statue. “Kane, look!” she said.

Kane turned, eyeing the statue in admiration.

“It’s Haight,” Brigid whispered. “It’s...me.”

Designated Task #004: Manufacturing

Like all villes, manufacturing is performed here at Epsilon Level. I have been assigned to a work crew of twenty people who perform the repetitive tasks of sorting, assembling and checking the parts necessary for the construction of the Sandcats. The Sandcats are sprayed white, better to camouflage them in the snow, and their tracks are rigorously tested to ensure they have sufficient grip for the treacherous icy conditions that exist beyond the ville walls.

Each Sandcat is armed with the standard array of twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns set in a blister turret above the blocky body of the vehicle itself. These guns are automated, with a linked positronic brain connecting engine to guns—this way, the engine may steer in a direction advantageous to combat as well as pursuit or retreat.

The workshop itself is noisy with the sounds of construction, welding, sifting and hammering that make up the assembling of the vehicles. No chatter is permitted from the shop floor, so I know my fellow workers only by sight rather than by name. We share occasional nods when our eyes meet, but most citizens are diligent in their work and have no cause to look up except during the brief transition periods when their shift begins and ends. At these moments, I observe my fellow workers with quiet admiration, proud of what we have achieved in a given shift.

Each shift is nine hours in total with three designated breaks. Breaks are staggered across the workforce so that the production line never ceases, and no two members of the production line are assigned a break at the same time. The three breaks are fifteen, twenty and fifteen minutes, the two shorter breaks arranged during the top and tail of the day. In these breaks, workers are provided with nutrition and water, and are allowed a comfort break of no more than four minutes. Self-decontamination is expected after any comfort break.

The rest area is slight, a small “room” shielded from the main floor of the factory by low barricades, effectively penning the worker in from the shop floor. The noise of the factory is immense in these moments, when one is trying to relax and imbibe sufficient nutrients to continue the important task.

Citizens travel to and from the factory via trolleybus or on foot, depending on the location of their residence and on the location of their designated activities before or after their shift. For two evenings of each week I am assigned to Designated Task #011—cleaning duties—after my shift, which take an additional 3.7 hours. This is for the good of the ville. Post-shift on other days, I have a rota of tasks to attend to, including Designated Tasks #008, #012 and #013.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 2

From warrior to traitor to legend—Brigid could barely process the path her life had taken. To find her effigy here, standing beside the rock that had brought these people’s god to Earth, was unsettling. She had worked for Ullikummis, acting as his “hand in the darkness” while he made a power grab to revive his mother, Ninlil, and gain control of the Annunaki pantheon. Brigid had kidnapped the hybrid child Quav, within whom the genetic template for Ninlil resided, betraying and almost killing her trusted friends in the process. She had even shot Kane, and only his shadow suit coupled with a rejuvenating pool called the Chalice of Rebirth had ensured his survival. It had been a dark time for Brigid, darker than she could bear. Her essence, her personality—even the thing that some religions might call her soul—had hidden away from the whole debacle, and had only been released when a trigger had been engaged—a trigger that had acted almost as a rebirth for Brigid Baptiste herself. So to find her dark aspect, the creature called Brigid Haight, worshipped here as some kind of—what?—demigoddess, was unnerving.

Brigid felt the tug of Kane’s hand on her arm, turned to see his stern face. “Come on, Baptiste,” he encouraged in a low voice, “people’ll notice if you’re not careful.”

“People will notice,” Brigid repeated, barely mouthing the words. What a turn of events that would be—for all these believers to suddenly learn that their demigoddess, the dark hand of the stone god himself, was walking among them.

Brigid turned away from the statue, away from its idealized representation of her own stunning appearance.

Ahead, the devotees were being encouraged to walk past the broken meteor—“the cradle of the stone god,” as the acolytes called it—and show reverence and appreciation for his mighty works and promised utopia. Everyone who passed reached out to touch the rock, some trembling and weeping as they did so. Kane found the displays of emotion disturbing—he had fought Ullikummis, knew him to be nothing but an inhuman monster subjugating mankind to use for his own whims. And yet, his message had somehow taken root in the public imagination, was growing even now, many months on from the death of the monster himself. The people craved something—release from the fear that the fall of the baronies had brought, fear that the world could devolve once more into the post-nukecaust chaos that had become known as the Deathlands era. Then, survival was everything, and the strong preyed on the weak, humans turned into little more than animals—predatory, vicious animals. The Program of Unification had changed all that, a design for living that had fostered new openness and trust between people, that had created the safe havens of the nine villes that had dominated and controlled North America. The barons had brought control, often crushing and dictatorial, but a control that people desired and needed to function and to advance after those dark years. When the barons had resigned, leaving their baronies to assume their true forms as Annunaki space gods, they had left a power vacuum that was proving hard to fill. People were scared—and this, this broken rock prison with all its connotations of evil and subjugation, appealed to that fear, quelled it in a way Kane could barely comprehend.

Kane and Brigid were next to be ushered past the rock, waiting a moment as the preceding pilgrim—a woman with tangled blond hair and a baby bump—wailed at its hollow chamber, the place where Ullikummis had waited five thousand years in cramped imprisonment. “Save us,” she cried. “Show us the glory of your utopia.”

Kane bit his tongue in disgust. Then he and Brigid stepped up to the meteor, their expressions fixed and solemn. There were two ideograms carved high on the surface of the boulder. Together they read Son Of Enlil. Enlil was the cruellest of the Annunaki royal family, and his rebirth in modern times had caused Kane and his Cerberus teammates untold hours of grief. That he had a son who’d returned to challenge him for his throne had been like a never-ending nightmare that only got worse and worse.

Kane placed his hand against the stone and bowed his head. He thought of how he had ultimately thrown Ullikummis into the sun, watched as his stone body hurtled toward the fiery ball in space, drawn by the sun’s gravity, burned up forever. “Warm our hearts, stone god,” Kane said aloud, and around him the acolytes and other pilgrims nodded and smiled in agreement at the seemingly innocuous sentiment. And burn in hell, Kane added in his mind.

Brigid took Kane’s place a moment later, staring at the rock. She had seen it before, over a year ago, shortly after it had landed here. Back then, this area had been an arable farmer’s field, surrounded by more of the same. The fields had been mostly root vegetables, with a simple farmhouse located amid them, close to the lone road. The house was destroyed now, the fields turned over to wildflowers, and this site—this abomination—had sprung up in place of the fallen meteor in the field. It sickened her—this failing by man to need leadership, to almost desire subjugation. Maybe the barons had been right all along.

Brigid stepped away, and her place was taken by two more pilgrims who pawed lovingly at the rock, this cradle of their stone god.

After conversing with the rock, each pilgrim was led to an enclosed space behind it. Kane and Brigid entered this area, not knowing what to expect. Two robed acolytes spoke to them in soft tones as they led them through a drawn curtain colored black like the wet slate. Behind this sat several simple desks and chairs, each of which was sectioned off by another short curtain that hung down only as low as a man’s waist. They were a little like the voting booths found in many twenty-first-century democracies. Kane was ushered behind one of the curtains with the acolyte while Brigid was directed to the desk next to it.

Once there, the robed acolyte—a young man with wide-set eyes and a shaven head—sat before Kane and addressed him in a calming, quiet tone. “Now you are expected to give life to god,” he said, reeling off the words as if they were entirely normal. “Have you been made aware of what this entails?”

Kane shook his head. “I must’ve missed that sermon.”

“No matter,” the robed man said gently. “It is a very simple matter.” He opened a small box located on the table—roughly the size of a travel sewing kit—and drew out an eight-inch-long needle along with something that reminded Kane of a shot glass. “We take a few drops of your blood—three or four is enough—which is your sacrifice to the stone god.”

Kane eyed the needle warily. “Is that thing clean?” he asked.

“We sterilize the sacrificial lances after each use,” the stone acolyte confirmed. “For the stone is clean and thus cleanliness is a sign of god.”

Kane nodded. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”

The acolyte drew the curtain across the little chamber for their privacy, then reached for Kane’s right wrist. Kane drew back his arm before the man could touch him; his Sin Eater was hidden there, disguised by the folds of the jacket.

“It is right to feel fear on first sacrifice, but no harm will come to you,” the acolyte soothed gently.

“Sorry,” Kane said, shaking his head. “Just have a thing about needles.” He held out his left arm—the one without the hidden blaster—pulling back the sleeve. “Go ahead.”

The acolyte brought the cup and needle down close to Kane’s wrist and instructed him to chant a prayer to the stone god. Kane recited the words he had heard at the congregation a few days before, when he and Brigid had enlisted in this ragtag pilgrimage.

“Ullikummis, lord of stone, grant me the presence of mind to recognize your works, and to embrace utopia when it descends upon us, healing all of mankind and washing away the sins of the past.”

The acolyte pricked Kane’s thumb with the needle and squeezed four droplets of blood from it.

“The bedrock of the world has slipped, but it can be corrected in time. Love shared, blessings shared, stone laid.”

Kane hated the chant but he couldn’t draw attention to himself—not until he and Brigid had found out exactly what was going on here.

* * *

IN THE BOOTH beside Kane’s, Brigid was going through an identical ritual, giving three drops of blood as she recited the prayer to Ullikummis.

Another visitor entered the third curtained booth, performing the same rite under the direction of another acolyte, and that same rite was repeated for every visitor, forty-seven people giving just a few drops of blood to show their devotion to their lord.

This blood was then removed and each little sample was added to a large chalice carved of stone that had been left rough around its edges. By the time Kane and Brigid emerged from the booths, the chalice was almost full to the brim, topped up no doubt by blood from the acolytes themselves. Three robed acolytes stood behind the stone chalice while the others manning the sacrifice booths stepped out to add their contents to the mix.

“Any idea where this is going?” Kane whispered to Brigid as they walked out of the booths and made their way toward the caldron pit where the other pilgrims were amassing.

Brigid put a hand up to disguise her mouth as she replied. “Probably just mumbo-jumbo,” she whispered back.

Kane didn’t like that “probably”—it rankled on him like a bad tooth.

The last pilgrim’s blood was added to the chalice, and then the lead acolyte, a man Kane thought of as their leader, held the chalice aloft and began to speak in a loud, portentous tone. “Witness,” he said. “You have all given of your lives so that the stone god may rise again. Everyone who has visited this sacred place, the cradle where god was born—everyone has given of themselves and their blood, a thousand devotees who would shed their own blood to make the world a better place. You have all given of yourselves to fuel his self. You have all given your love that his love might walk here among us today.”

Beside the leader, two of the robed acolytes began using shovels to sift through a pile of pebbles behind them. Kane had not noticed that before, hidden as it was behind the flaming pit, and for a moment he mistook it for coal or a similar fuel that might be used to stoke the fire. But then he realized—with a sinking feeling—what those stones were. While he was on Earth, Ullikummis had budded “stone seeds” from his own body—hundreds, perhaps thousands of the things had gone into circulation. The stones had different properties but they each connected the user to Ullikummis in some way. For many, the stones were simply used to generate obedience, lodging under their skin and driving away all thoughts but those that Ullikummis himself planted within a victim’s mind. For others, the ones whom Brigid had dubbed firewalkers, the stones granted limited periods of invulnerability, turning their own flesh into the stone hide of their master.

The strange stones were a tie to Ullikummis, and Cerberus scientists had learned that they were powered—brought to life, if you will—by the iron content in a person’s blood. However, the stones had lost their influence once Ullikummis had been dispatched from the Earth, and the Cerberus personnel had speculated that they may work on a proximity basis as well as needing the ferrous content to fuel them.

Suddenly, Kane saw where this oddball ceremony was leading—and his stomach twisted in knots as the realization dawned. Surely they could not revive Ullikummis through his depowered stones. That could not be done—could it?

Kane and Brigid watched as two great heaps of stones were shoveled into the caldron pit, spitting out sparks as the flames touched them. As one, the crowd of pilgrims stepped back, watching in awe as the flames lit the sacred temple, turning the walls a richer shade of orange.

Then the senior acolyte stepped forward, his arms straight, holding the chalice aloft in both hands. “Our love is rock,” he chanted, “and rock never breaks.” Then he tipped the scarlet contents of the chalice into the flaming pit, moving the stone cup in a circular motion, draining it of its blood. The flames were doused in places as the liquid struck, and a hissing sound echoed through the temple as steam billowed from the caldron pit.

For a moment nothing happened; the flames kept burning, igniting higher as they recovered from the dousing that they had received. The acolytes stepped back from the caldron pit, watching it through the haze of smoke.

And then Kane saw it—something moving amid the flames. It looked like a man, head rising, shoulders, chest and arms slowly emerging from the fire.

The other people in the room saw it, too, and they stood transfixed as the imperfect figure seemed to pull itself from the flames.

It’s some kind of illusion, Kane told himself. Gotta be.

But it wasn’t. The manlike figure drew itself higher, lifting its torso out of the fire. It was rough, unfinished, its skin—if it was skin—lumpy and incomplete. There were gaps between parts of its flesh—open gaps through which the flames of the caldron could be seen. And something else became clear as it drew itself out of those flames: it was big; bigger than a man, broad-shouldered and towering to nine feet in height. That was the exact same height as Ullikummis when he had first walked the Earth, before his legs had been hobbled by Enki’s sword, leaving him a full foot shorter.

A deathly hush filled the room as the figure emerged from the fire. Kane and Brigid watched with the others as the figure took its first unsteady step out of the fire. It was made of stones, malformed and lumpy. It looked like someone had spilled pebbles into the shape of a man, a lumbering pile of shale staggering slowly across the temple. Its face was just an impression, deep, lifeless sockets for eyes, a gaping maw for a mouth.

“Our love is rock,” the acolyte leading the ceremony chanted, “and rock never breaks.” Around him, the other acolytes took up the chant, and so did the pilgrims.

The stone man took another lumbering step away from the flame pit, its footfall like a landslide smashing against the slate. Then it raised its right arm and reached for the closest pilgrim—the well-dressed woman with the hat, blond hair cut in a bob.

“Me?” the well-dressed woman gasped. “My lord, what am I to you?”

The answer wasn’t an answer; it was an action—swift, sudden and deadly. The stone figure’s arm seemed to extend, breaking apart, the gaps between each pebble-like component becoming wider, and its fingers rammed through the woman’s face, smashing through her skull in the blink of an eye. The woman let out a bleat, then her flailing body was dangling from those weirdly extended fingers, dancing like a string puppet.

A mutual gasp fluttered through the room as the pilgrims watched, and Kane and Brigid took a surreptitious step back, adopting ready poses.

The woman’s body seemed to dangle for a moment before stiffening again as the spine arched, thrusting the woman’s breasts forward while her feet slipped backward on the temple floor on pointed toes. A whimper seemed to emanate from her throat, and Kane saw blood rushing along the shaft of stones that now crossed the temple chamber, leading from the woman to the stone monstrosity that had emerged from the caldron. The woman shivered, shook and dropped, unleashing one last gasp of pain as she crumpled to the deck.

Across the room, the stone figure seemed to become fuller somehow, more substantial, sinews forming between its broken body of stones.

“Take me next!” cried one of the pilgrims to Kane’s left, stepping forward.

“No, take me!” a man demanded from Kane’s right. “I lost my wife to the west snows!”

Beside him, a woman stepped forward, ripping open her cotton blouse. “No, me. My children were taken by the snows. Let my unquenched love for them power you, oh lord,” she implored.

“This is getting out of hand,” Kane muttered as more of the pilgrims offered themselves to the stone monster.

The stone figure thrust its arms forward again, and those limbs broke apart into tendril-like appendages as they sought their next victims. The Cerberus people had seen the individual stones do this before, under lab conditions, but never anything on this scale. One of those snaking, tendril-like arms reached toward Brigid Baptiste, cutting the air like a handful of tossed stones held in freeze-frame. Kane saw it coming, shoved her back protectively with a swift jab of his arm. Brigid fell to the floor and the arm hurried on, touching the pilgrim behind her, burrowing into the poor deluded fool’s face even as he screamed in pleasure.

“Take me, oh lord,” the man cried, tears of joy and pain pouring from his eyes like an overworked storm drain. “Let me live in y— Argh!”

The man and another pilgrim stumbled back, giving themselves willingly to the artificial man. Their legs buckled, knees folded, and they sunk to the floor as their blood and life was sucked from their joyful frames, feeding into the patchwork body of the stone creature who had emerged from the fire.

Then the stone monster tilted its head back, blood rushing visibly between the mass of stones, and it cried out, an eerie, inhuman howl—the first cry after birth.

“The lord lives,” the senior acolyte cried joyously. “He lives in all of us, in all of you.”

“Not for much longer he doesn’t,” Kane muttered, powering his hidden Sin Eater pistol into the palm of his right hand from its hidden wrist holster. He had had enough of this.

The Sin Eater’s holster was activated by a specific flinch movement of Kane’s wrist tendons, powering the weapon into his hand. The weapon itself was a compact hand blaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds. The trigger had no guard, as the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically.

Beside Kane, Brigid was sprawled on the floor, her head spinning where it had struck the hard slate there, trying to shake the muzziness that occluded her thoughts. Wake up, she told herself. Wake up and act. If her body understood the words, then it didn’t seem inclined to play along.

All around Kane, people were dropping as the life force was sucked out of them by the stone abomination. Pregnant woman; bald man; teen with acne and dyed hair; overweight farmhand with a beard that touched his belly—all of them fell as the stone monster touched them with its distended fingers, exchanging their lives and strength for its own. The stone thing was buoyed with every touch, rising taller, each step more determined, and all the while its gaping wound of a mouth shrieked its hideous ululation.

“Time to put this stone wannabe out to pasture,” Kane grumbled as he stroked the trigger of the Sin Eater and sent a stream of bullets at the rough-hewn abomination.

Designated Task #009: Food Harvesting

Food is grown in massive hydroponics labs located in the west and north corners of Delta Level. Vast artificial fields have been sown with seeds which grow various crops—tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, etc.—in uniform lines. The crop is tested thoroughly throughout its lifespan to ensure it is growing in the correct manner: size, shape, color. Any imperfect crop is removed and recycled as feed for the animals in one of the other areas of Delta Level.

Picking the crops is partially automated, but the amount of moisture coupled with the gentle touch required means that humans are considered superior and more efficient with much of the menial work. As such, I have been assigned to work here two days a week as a rest from the construction of war machines on Epsilon Level. My first assignment is to tend to the pears which grow with resilience from a line of trees in room D41977. The crop is hard-skinned and tasteless, but it holds nutrients enough to sustain life. Most of it will be turned to pulp which is then added to the daily meal ration each citizen is allocated, wherein its lack of a distinctive taste will be rendered irrelevant.

My crop picking is slow because I am still new to the task and have yet to get used to the automated ladders used by the pickers. These ladders stand at a thirty-degree angle with a wheeled base, and they follow the instructions of a computer brain. The brain analyzes the optimum speed for fruit picking based on a scan of each tree and its crop, then follows that calculation to provide a window within which the tree must be stripped of its bounty. The speed seems fast to me, and it becomes inevitable that many of the crop which I pick are bruised. The supervisors show no concern for the bruised fruit, and merely chastise me for my inadequacy in stripping every pear tree in my designated batch.

“Your deficiency will be taken out of your food allowance next week,” a supervisor informs me without looking up from her tally sheets. I stare at the gray peaked cap she wears for a long moment, wondering if she might meet my eyes and perhaps explain how I am to increase productivity, but she never looks up.

The conclusion of my shift is accompanied by a very real sense of disappointment, the knowledge that I have failed to live up to the expectations that the barons have in me as a citizen of Ioville. My back aches from stretching, my arms, too, from constantly reaching above me. I vow to try harder tomorrow.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 3

A stream of 9 mm bullets zipped across the temple at the wretched stone monster that had emerged from the fire. Kane watched as the bullets trailed from his Sin Eater, while around him two dozen of the faithful who had joined him on this pilgrimage looked horrified at the sudden turn of events. They believed they were there to give of themselves whatever their god required, even if it was their lives. But Kane didn’t believe—he knew better. He knew that this stone monstrosity was nothing more than a trick. The iron content in the blood it was being fed combined with the trigger inside those stone seeds, bringing it to nothing more than a cruel imitation of life. At least that’s what Kane guessed was happening as he squeezed the Sin Eater’s trigger.

Bullets hurtled toward the stone menace. The first bullets struck its rocky, mismatched hide and the creature let loose a surprised shriek, its distended fingers pulling free from two more sacrifices—a dark-skinned woman with a mop of braided hair and one of the robed acolytes who was ministering the proceedings. The stone monster’s fingers rattled back into the hands, the wrists pulling back and the overlong limbs retracting to a more normal length, returning to the stone figure’s shoulders. In their wake, its two victims sagged to the floor, visibly shaking, neither fully awake nor truly asleep.

Kane’s bullets sparked as they struck the creature’s rough hide, sounding like cymbals being clashed together with every rebound. But the monster only turned, fixing Kane with its dark, shadowy glare.

“You recognize me?” Kane challenged the creature as around him pilgrims ducked out of the way of the fight.

The stone creature tilted its head in the semblance of a nod.

“Yeah, I think you do,” Kane snarled. “I’m the guy who killed your daddy.”

The bastard child of a thousand deluded devotees hurtled toward Kane then, charging across the flame-lit temple floor, screaming an unearthly howl from its gaping wound of a mouth.

Kane’s Sin Eater pistol blasted again, a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets catching in the light of the flames like fireflies in the dusk.

The monster’s composite arms reached out and batted Kane’s bullets aside, like twin landslides waving impossibly through the air, lines of warm blood rippling between each loose stone.

Kane leaped back but he was too late. The creature grabbed him, shooting one of its extending arms toward him and snagging his Sin Eater out of his hand.

How do I get myself into these jams? Kane wondered as that inhuman arm flicked the Sin Eater aside.

But there was no time to think—only to act. As the stone monster hurtled closer, charging for all the world like a runaway steam train, Kane began running at it. The two figures met in a crash of breaking shale amid the firelit chamber, and suddenly Kane was running up the monster’s body, using its rocky crags as steps before driving his booted foot into the abomination’s face.

The monster wavered in place, great chunks of its still-forming body spilling to the floor like so much thrown sand.

All around the temple, the pilgrims were reacting with horror, calling for it to stop, asking who this man was who would dare violate their god. Kane ignored them as he leaped from the stone edifice that walked like a man, ducking and rolling to the slate floor even as the nightmare figure reached for him with one of its extending, pendulous arms. He recognized it—kind of. It was a pale imitation of Ullikummis, a memory only half-remembered, the details blurry, forgotten.

How do you break a thing that’s already broken? Kane wondered as a lashing arm came sailing toward his head in a flurry of stones and blood.

Kane dropped out of the way of that swinging extendable arm, slid on his buttocks across the slate floor to where his blaster had dropped, snatched it up as he rolled.

A half-dozen pilgrims surrounded Kane as he recovered, their outraged faces glaring at him. Two men took the lead and kicked Kane while he lay on the ground, booting him in the sides. Kane groaned as he felt the first foot strike him on the ribs, followed an instant later by a second kick in the gut, forcing him to double over and expel the breath he held.

Kane could not shoot them. They were victims. Stupid, yes, but victims all the same.

Another foot sailed at Kane’s face and he reacted instinctively, left arm snapping up to block it, then grabbing his attacker’s ankle and twisting. The pilgrim shrieked as a sudden stab of pain tore through his ligaments, and then he crashed to the floor beside Kane, grasping in agony at his twisted ankle.

From across the chamber, the hulking form of the stone monstrosity stalked through the flame-lit darkness, seeking out its next victim and the blood it desperately craved.

“Stop!” It was a woman’s voice, loud enough to penetrate the rabble of panic and confusion, and it was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light and clap of thunder.

Everyone in the chamber turned, all except for an elderly man who walked with a stick who was even now having his blood drained from him by the stone thing that had come to life.

Across the chamber, Brigid Baptiste was standing before the statue of her other self, of Brigid Haight. She had stripped off her jacket and the loose shirt she had worn, revealing the tight black bodysuit she wore beneath—the shadow suit. The shadow suits had been discovered in Redoubt Yankee and were so named because they absorbed light, reducing the profile and visibility of the wearer. However, in the flickering light of the temple, the shadow suit’s similarity to the sleek black leathers, which Brigid had worn while possessed by Haight, “wrapping her body in the dead” as she had termed it then, was impossible to miss. With her grim expression and wild halo of red-gold hair, she looked for all the world like the hateful thing she had been before—Ullikummis’s hand in darkness.

“Stop this, all of you,” Brigid shouted, her narrowed eyes scanning across every face in the room.

For a moment there was silence—shocked silence at this vision of the woman whose statue dominated one wall of the temple chamber. Then, the leader of the robed acolytes cried, “The demigoddess has returned!” He dropped to his knees, arms outthrust in praise.

Beside him, two more acolytes fell immediately to their knees, bending low until they touched the floor with their foreheads, muttering confused praises for the glorious return they were blessed to witness. In a few moments, it seemed that everyone in the temple had fallen to their knees to worship Brigid—all except for Kane, who lay sprawled and bloodied on the floor, and the stone monster that loomed over its latest victim.

Still surrounded, Kane peered between the kneeling bodies of his attackers, and his brow furrowed. “Baptiste?” he muttered incredulously. “Don’t tell me this has all got to you.”

“Hear me now and hear me well,” Brigid announced, pitching her voice in a low timbre of command. “This monster—” she pointed to the stone creature that had been brought to life in the flaming pit “—is a false god. He is not the great one. He is nothing but simple puppetry, brought to life to test your faith.”

A stunned buzz burbled through the worshippers, and one pilgrim loudly cried, “We’ve been tricked!”

“Yes, you have been tricked,” Brigid assured the crowd, striding toward them on her booted heels. “I walk among you now because such heresy cannot be allowed to flourish.”

As she passed Kane, Brigid caught his eye and he detected just the slightest wink of one narrowed eye. Relief sang through him, bolstering his tired limbs and aching body.

“B-but what should we...?” an elderly woman asked, confused by the direction her pilgrimage had turned.

“Leave this place,” Brigid told her, addressing everyone in the room. “Feed not this false idol. Let it wither and die, struck from your very minds in disgust.”

“Oh, brother,” Kane muttered. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we?” But no one heard him.

The pilgrims and the acolytes were stunned, and for a moment they all just knelt there, watching the demigoddess Brigid Haight walk among them, a vision from legend come back to life.

“Go now!” Brigid commanded. “Swiftly. While I deal with this pretender!” And she stomped with a determined swagger toward the stone monster that loomed by the fire pit.

There came a mass exodus from the temple then, pilgrims and acolytes hurrying out into the rain. Kane joined the crowd, slipping behind a pillar as sixty-something people hurried from the temple, which was alive with more flashes and bright bangs, as if a thunderstorm were occurring within its hallowed walls. Kane knew it wasn’t a thunderstorm, of course, or any other kind of godly, supernatural show. No, he had recognized the thing Brigid had used when she had made her first dramatic reappearance as “Brigid Haight.” She had employed a man-made device called a flashbang, similar in shape and size to a palm-sized ball bearing and designed as a nonlethal part of the standard Cerberus field mission arsenal. Once triggered, the flashbang brought an almighty flash of light and noise. It was similar to an explosive being set off, only the flashbang did no damage, as such. Instead, it was used by the Cerberus personnel to confuse and disorient opponents—and, just once, to pose as demigods, it seemed.

Once the temple was clear, Kane made his way across to Brigid, who was standing a good distance away from the other standing figure in the room—the stone monster—watching it warily as they slowly circled one another. Around them, the fallen bodies of almost a dozen pilgrims and one robed acolyte lay, their skin pale where the blood had been drained.

“So, what do we do now,” Kane asked, “your goddess-ness?”

Brigid shot him a look. “Worked, didn’t it?”

“I had things in hand,” Kane assured her.

“You were getting your ass handed to you by three hick farmers and an old woman who walked with a stick,” Brigid shot back.

Kane shrugged, knowing that now was not the time to argue. “Plan?”

Brigid eyed the stalking stone figure across the temple. It was moving slowly, its limbs breaking apart, chips of stone trailing behind the main body.

“It needs blood,” Brigid said. “Its body is made up of stone seeds—the obedience stones Ullikummis generated from his body.”

“Yeah, he’s a regular chip off the old block,” Kane agreed, as the stone monster lunged at him and Brigid.

The two Cerberus warriors danced out of the way—which was far easier now that the temple wasn’t crowded with other people—and they sprinted across the empty room until they were behind the fallen meteor, placing it between them and the monster.

“Those stone seeds require the iron content in human blood to power them, remember?” Brigid told Kane. “Without blood, they revert to a dormant state.”

“But Junior there just got a big feast of blood,” Kane reminded Brigid. “Enough to bring him to life.”

“Yes, enough to bring him to life,” Brigid agreed, “but not enough to sustain him. That’s why he needs to absorb the blood from his victims.”

The stone monster emerged from behind the meteor rock, unleashing a gurgled cry as it reached for Kane and Brigid. Brigid spun out of its reach while Kane dropped back and blasted a burst of fire from his Sin Eater. The monster swayed in place, recoiling from the impact of 9 mm bullets peppering its disjointed stone body.

“How long do you estimate before the kid needs his next feed?” Kane asked Brigid in a breathless voice as he hurried across the temple to join her.

“Hard to say,” Brigid answered, “but I think he’s moving slower than he was. Don’t you?”

Kane watched the stalking figure emerge from behind the rock prison. It was moving slower; Brigid was right. It seemed to lurch more now, and barely remained upright as it searched for the two Cerberus warriors—the only sources of blood left in the temple chamber.

“So, what—we keep out of that thing’s way until it burns through its energy source?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Brigid said with a smile. Kane looked down and saw what she held in her open hand. It was a metal sphere, similar to the flashbangs she had used to shock and awe the pilgrims in the temple—only this one was primed with a full explosive load.

The stone monster charged at them again, but this time Brigid was ready. As it came within a dozen feet of the Cerberus duo, she primed and tossed the explosive, then she and Kane ducked and turned away. A moment later, an explosion rocked the temple, and tiny chips of stone hurtled across the room as the monster’s body was split into a thousand pieces.

“I thought you came on this mission unarmed?” Kane challenged Brigid as they drew themselves up from the slate floor.

“No blaster,” Brigid agreed, “but I still sneaked a few things into my pockets. Just in case.”

“You sweet, sweet demigoddess,” Kane replied with a smirk. “No wonder your people love you so.”

Designated Task #015: Fitness

Twice a week, I have been assigned to a training facility on Cappa Level where I am instructed in basic protection. “A ville is only as safe as its weakest member,” we are told, and so each member is rigorously trained to remain in the peak of physical health.

The training is threefold. Emphasis is placed on the basic strengthening of the body—something I have been informed is unnecessary in my case as I entered Ioville in prime physical condition.

When this entry occurred I cannot say. However I have been led to understand it was recently.

The second task is combat, which takes the form of hand-to-hand defence along with instructions on how to initiate a successful attack. Once again, it appears that I am competent at these tasks, despite having no specific memory of training for them.

The third task involves the familiarity, usage and maintenance of weapons including firearms. Most of this training concentrates on the use of small arms. However, I have also been shown how to operate the USMG-73 heavy machine guns which arm the Sandcats I build in the workshop at Designated Task #004, the standard weapons arrays on Deathbird helicopters, and have been shown how to use and sharpen a combat knife.

Fitness strikes me as a strange task, because it is the only place in the ville where one hears talking between the participants. The instructors are all Magistrates and it seems that they are determined to make the citizens as proficient as they are.

The older citizens of Ioville struggle with the tasks.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 4

Kane and Brigid exited the temple shortly after, taking a few sample stones with them for full analysis back at Cerberus headquarters. Brigid pulled her jacket back on over her shadow suit, and used the shirt she had removed to tie her hair up like a scarf, wrapping her red-gold locks in the light cloth to disguise her most eye-catching feature and enable her to pass among pilgrims without comment. They left the temple amid another explosion from a flashbang, ensuring that no one saw them exit.

The acolytes and pilgrims were still waiting outside, close to the temple, kneeling and chanting as they listened to the ominous sounds of explosions and wondering what was occurring within. Brigid had had two more charges with her while Kane was carrying four of his own and so, setting timers on the devices, they had left them to continue exploding, putting on a show that ran for another ten minutes, with a new explosion every couple of minutes to stop the curious pilgrims from reentering their sacred place too soon.

“Our love is rock and rock never breaks,” the devoted repeated as a mantra from where they knelt in the gravel outside the temple doors.

Kane shook his head in despair as he and Brigid emerged during a cacophonous explosion. “Poor deluded saps,” he muttered, disgusted by their devotion.

Some of the pilgrims appeared terrified by what they had witnessed, while a few bore tears of joy on their smiling faces as they praised the return of the demigoddess. The tears mixed with the relentless rain, washing from the heavens with disinterest.

Kane and Brigid joined the worshippers outside the temple, and when the next explosion rocked the sacred site they were ready. During the general confusion, Kane and Brigid slipped away, taking a route across the fields, staying low to the ground and hidden by the overgrown wildflowers from a casual glance. Behind them, the other pilgrims and the acolytes bowed their heads lower, imagining what must be going on inside the temple grounds. They were dumb, in Kane’s opinion, but it wasn’t their fault—the barons had kept people dumb, drummed out their curiosity. The barons hadn’t wanted people—they had wanted devoted automatons who would worship and praise them. Here was their legacy.

Brigid and Kane walked in silence for a while, just creating as much distance from the site of the temple as they could. Finally, Kane turned to Brigid, worry creasing his brow.

“You know, for a moment back there I thought you’d turned sour,” Kane admitted, the concern clear on his face.

Brigid shook her head. “Never. Never again,” she promised.

It was all they needed to say, but they had needed to say it. Brigid had been changed once by Ullikummis, possessed by her dark self, the creature called Haight. She had turned on Kane and their allies, shot Kane in the chest while he was defenceless. The wound between them would always be there, but they worked every day to get past it, to erase its memory.

Kane and Brigid were anam-charas, soul friends, their destinies entwined throughout all of time. No matter what form they took, no matter what bodies their souls wore, they were destined to always find one another, watch over one another, protect one another. It wasn’t love, not in a carnal way, anyway—it was something deeper and more transcendental than that. Their friend Domi had once asked Brigid if the anam-chara bond was like they were brother and sister, and Brigid had laughed. “If Kane were my brother he might listen to me once in a while,” she had said. Beyond that, she had never been able to explain what the bond really was; she only knew it was theirs and that it was eternal.

They trekked for an hour before reporting in to Cerberus to request their ride back home. By that time they had reached a dirt track running between two vegetable fields, carrots to one side, potatoes to the other, a distant farmhouse looking out toward them.

“Grant, this is Kane,” Kane said, activating his Commtact. The Commtact was a small radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin of all Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtact could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funnelled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the additional effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf they would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

The radio link molded below Kane’s ear spoke with the familiar voice of his partner. “Hey, Kane, how did it go?” Even over the Commtact relay, Grant’s voice was deep as rumbling thunder.

“We bewildered and destroyed,” Kane replied. “Just another day at the office.”

Grant’s laughter echoed through Kane’s skull from the Commtact.

“Triangulate on our position and give us a ride,” Kane said. “We’re all set to go home.”

The triangulation was easy. Kane, Brigid and all other Cerberus personnel had a biolink transponder injected into their bloodstream. The transponder used nanotechnology to relay a subject’s position and detail their current state of health to a satellite pickup station, which then delivered that information to the Cerberus redoubt in the Montana mountains. This technology along with the Commtacts allowed Cerberus to remain in constant touch with its personnel while they were in the field, and it could be accessed by the operations staff to home in on an individual to deliver aid.

In this case, that aid came in the form of a Deathbird, a modified AH-64 Apache helicopter, that arrived over the field of potatoes, shaking their fluttering leaves in its passage. The Deathbird featured a turret-mounted chain gun, as well as missile armaments—and it had been on call in case the mission went sour.

Kane and Brigid watched as the Apache dropped down to the ground, landing gently on the dirt strip between fields, its rotor blades whirring in a blur. As soon as it was down, the two Cerberus rebels hurried toward it in a crouched run, keeping their heads and limbs well below the height of those rotating blades, even though they knew there was room to maneuver below them. Too many times, the drag created by the rotors had wrong-footed a man and created a shockingly swift accident as the fast-spinning rotors became like knives cutting the air.

Kane drew back the side door. Brigid tottered inside with Kane just a couple of steps behind her. As soon as Kane was in, Brigid shouted, “Clear!” and the helicopter ascended into the skies once more.

Piloting the craft was a large dark-skinned man in his late thirties, with a shaved head and gunslinger’s mustache. He was wearing a shadow suit that matched those worn by his passengers. Though large, the man was all muscle—accentuated by the tight fit of the shadow suit—without an ounce of fat on his body. This was Grant, who had served as Kane’s field partner all the way back to their days as Magistrates and with whom he had been partnered ever since. Grant was a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, as well as being trained in the use of most ballistic weapons. He was also a phenomenal pilot—Kane would argue he was the greatest pilot that Cerberus would ever know...excluding himself, of course.

“So, you guys pick up anything good while you were shopping?” Grant asked in his rumbling-thunder voice as Kane drew the side door closed.

Kane shrugged. “Trouble, a few stones. The usual.”

“Stones,” Grant muttered, shaking his head. “Like we’ve not had enough of that for one lifetime.”

Kane and Brigid had to agree.

* * *

THE TRIO ARRIVED back at the Cerberus redoubt two hours later. The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in the Bitterroot range in Montana, where it was hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base which had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust of 2001. A peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains in the years since that nuclear conflict, with their dark, mysterious forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now, the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago.

Inside, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology despite its rough exterior. The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study. The staff relied on two orbiting satellites at their disposal—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humankind. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were tucked beneath camouflage netting around the redoubt, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range and chattering with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the staff in residence a near-limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe, such as Kane’s team, which was designated CAT Alpha.

They convened in the Cerberus meeting room, a rarely used lecture theater with several stepped rows of fixed seats. Kane and Brigid had showered and changed clothes, so Grant was already sitting when they entered, his massive frame almost too much for the regular-size seat. Three other people were in the room—Lakesh, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore—and all were dressed in the standard white duty uniform.

Mohandas Lakesh Singh was a physics and cybernetics expert who was the head of the Cerberus organization. A man of medium height, he appeared to be in his fifties, with a dusky complexion and vivid blue eyes that shone like sapphires when he addressed you. His black hair was slicked back away from his forehead, showing a few threads of gray, especially at the sides above the ears. Lakesh had an aquiline nose and a refined mouth, and his breadth of knowledge was second to none, except perhaps Brigid’s. Though he was, for all intents, a man in his fifties, Lakesh was in fact far older than that—he had been born in the twentieth century, but thanks to cryogenics and organ replacement, he had lived past his two-hundred-and-fiftieth year and was still going strong. Amazingly, Lakesh had been one of the original scientists involved in the Cerberus facility based at this redoubt in the twentieth century, a research project developing and investigating the applications of a fixed-point teleportational device called the mat-trans. The mat-trans was still in operation all these years on, although it was only one of a number of transportation options that the Cerberus personnel employed.

Beside Lakesh stood Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man and the unofficial second-in-command of the Cerberus operation. In his thirties, Donald had an unruly mop of ginger curls atop his head and a look of perpetual worry on his features. Donald’s field of expertise was computers, but he was also knowledgeable about most of the general goings-on relating to Cerberus and its field operations, including communications and the intricacies of the biolink transponders.

The final person in the room was Reba DeFore, a stocky, bronze-skinned woman with ash-blond hair, which she had clipped back from her face in an elaborate French twist. DeFore was the redoubt’s medical expert, and she had patched up Kane, Grant and Brigid more times than she cared to count.

“Grant tells me you ran into an old friend out in Saskatchewan,” Lakesh began after welcoming Kane and Brigid. They had been gone for four days.

Kane nodded gravely. “Ullikummis. Not quite back, but his devotees are trying real hard to hasten the second coming.”

“Wrong savior,” Brigid corrected him. “They were using the old stone seeds,” she elaborated, “that budded from his body, charging them with human blood.”

“Sacrifices?” Lakesh asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” Brigid said. “At least, none so far. The blood of pilgrims gave the thing life, but it seemed mindless—like it didn’t have any purpose. It just stumbled around draining blood from anyone who stepped into its grasp.”

“And we blew it up before it could get very far with that,” Kane added.

Lakesh nodded solemnly. “A worrying development, dear friends,” he said.

“Were any of you hurt?” DeFore asked as the room went silent.

“I took a few knocks,” Kane admitted, “and Brigid took a few, too—”

“When you knocked me to the floor,” Brigid pointed out.

“—but we’re all good, I think,” Kane finished.

DeFore proposed checking them over anyway and, using a portable medical kit, accessed their transponders for a full rundown on their current health. The shadow suit had protected Kane from most of the knocks he had taken at the hands of the deluded pilgrims, and other than a bruised arm, Brigid had got off scot-free.

While DeFore was sterilizing the few scrapes and grazes Kane had taken during the frenetic conflict, the group discussed their mission in detail. As they reached the wrap-up, Brigid recalled one thing that had stood out as possibly important.

“A few people have mentioned something about a storm out to the west over the past few days,” she said. “Sounded vicious, like it’s taken some lives.” She shrugged.

Donald Bry brought up a map on the projector screen that dominated the wall behind the stage. Using the old designations, west of Saskatchewan was Alberta or British Columbia. “This is pretty much no-man’s-land now,” Bry stated as he indicated those areas.

“Well out of reach of the baronies,” Kane pointed out as he eyed the map.

Lakesh looked at Kane querulously. “Something on your mind, Kane?” he asked.

“Not sure,” Kane said. “People were speaking about this storm like it was a big deal. A big deal well away from the baronies, where there wouldn’t likely be much in the way of organized help.”

Lakesh took a slow breath as he looked at the map. “We could send out a rescue party, see if anyone needed our assistance,” he said.

“Helping people is what we do,” Grant reminded everyone. “Can’t always be fighting crazy aliens and nutty priests.”

“It’s a lot of territory,” Bry argued. “Do you have any idea whereabouts this storm hit?”

Brigid’s red-gold locks cascaded about her face as she shook her head. “We had more important concerns at the time.”

“Would a satellite scan find evidence?” Kane suggested.

“It may,” Lakesh confirmed. “It really depends on how much damage the storm created and whether there was any notable habitation there to begin with. If it’s trashed, unpopulated territory we’d be hard-pushed to confirm it from the air.”

Kane fixed Lakesh with his no-nonsense stare. “Look,” he said.

Lakesh nodded once, accepting Kane’s challenge. He had organized Cerberus to help people, and while a storm was not the kind of threat he had had in mind, helping those in danger or trouble was the operation’s remit. They would use the satellites to scan the area to the west of the sacred temple of the stone god, and maybe—just maybe—find a place where help was needed.

Designated Task #016: Sleep

Sleep has been prescribed for all citizens at an optimum 6.2 hours a day. Sleep occurs when a citizen is not on shift, and this may be in the day or night. After 6.2 hours an alarm alerts the citizen to wake, after which their routine begins again.

I note that the sleep patterns of my immediate neighbors in this residential block are different to my own, accounting for their own shifts at their designated tasks.

My bed is soft and uncomfortable, the padding inadequate and the base structure of the sofa which it converts from pushing against my body as I toss and turn. I have no one to report this to.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 5

“Storm,” Brewster Philboyd announced emotionlessly.

“Storm,” Lakesh agreed.

The two of them were sitting in office chairs in the Cerberus operations room. The room was a vast space with high ceilings and pleasing indirect lighting. Two aisles of computer terminals faced a giant screen on which material could be flagged. A giant Mercator map dominated one wall, showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The map was peppered with glowing locator dots, which were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. The indicated routes were not flight paths, however, but rather they showed the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network. Developed for the US military, the majority of the units were located within North America, but a few outposts could be seen farther afield.

A separate chamber was located in one corner of the room, far from the entry doors. This chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color. Within was contained the Cerberus installation’s mat-trans unit, along with a small anteroom which could be sealed off if necessary.

Right now the mat-trans chamber was empty but the main ops room was buzzing with activity.

“Big one, too,” Philboyd said as he enhanced the satellite image on his screen, giving a wider view of the storm over British Columbia. Philboyd was a tall, lanky man who seemed somehow hunched over whenever he sat in the standard office furniture of the ops room. His blond hair was swept back and slightly receding while the skin on his cheeks showed evidence of acne scarring from his youth. Philboyd wore round spectacles with dark frames and was a physicist of some good standing. Like many of the personnel who populated the Cerberus redoubt, Philboyd was a transplant from the twentieth century, part of a research project that had been located on the Manitius Moon Base. After the nukecaust had struck, the moon base had gone into lockdown, plunging its staff into cryogenic deep freeze and retaining that expertise for another generation. It had taken a Cerberus exploration party to discover and relocate them to the redoubt.

Lakesh looked at the monitor screen where the satellite feed was playing out. It showed a desolate area of the territory that had once been Canada, around the point where Alberta met British Columbia. The area was white with fallen snow, a few clumps of trees visible as dark shadows on the ground. There was no sign of human habitation; any roads or tracks cutting through the land had been painted white with snow. In the midst of this desolate wasteland was a whirling blur of cloud, feeding the land with ice crystals. It was a small, isolated shower but it still covered several miles. “I didn’t expect the storm to still be raging,” Lakesh muttered, shaking his head.

“No housing nearby,” Philboyd observed, twiddling the image control dial to pull out farther from the storm. “Closest settlement is approximately ninety miles away. If this is your storm, it’s not affecting anyone other than the moose and squirrels.”

Lakesh rubbed his forehead, deep in thought. “Storms move,” he said. “Can we trace its path, backtrack to see if it has caused any devastation?”

Philboyd looked quizzically askance at Lakesh. “With respect, Doctor, I understood that what we were looking for was a past event. This storm is happening very much now.”

“It is,” Lakesh agreed, still thinking, “but hurricanes and tropical storms can rage for days, even weeks.”

Philboyd widened his search area, scanned for signs of devastation. There was nothing obvious—if the storm had destroyed anything it was obscured by the clouds.

Lakesh was still thinking, working through the possibilities in his incisive, analytical mind. “What are those clouds hiding, Mr. Philboyd?” he pondered.

Philboyd didn’t answer, but merely tapped a few commands into his computer keyboard and brought up a surveillance map showing the area. The map showed in a separate window on-screen and it was blank. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wilderness.”

Lakesh bent closer to the screen, studying the map. “Not wilderness,” he decided. “It’s too flat for that.”

“Sir?”

“Brewster—can we backtrack this image twenty-four hours, say?” Lakesh asked. He knew that they could; the satellite would have made a sweep over this area one day before. He was already beginning to suspect something, although he couldn’t put his finger on what.

Philboyd pulled up the records, ran the surveillance footage from one day before. Its time stamp glowed in the lower left corner as it played, moving slowly across the area which Lakesh and Philboyd were looking at now in a standard sweep. As it crossed the particular spot they had been observing, Philboyd let out a surprised laugh.

Lakesh did not laugh, however. What they were looking at, remarkable as it seemed, was what appeared to be the very same storm playing out in the very same spot.

“That’s one persistent storm,” Philboyd stated.

Lakesh pointed to the screen. “But not crossing here, or here,” he said. “It’s fixed to one location. Brewster—take us back another day.”

A few taps of his keyboard and Philboyd had called up the older footage. Once again, the storm was in the exact same spot. They went back further over the next two hours, checking the records going back not just weeks but months. The surveillance satellite had monitored this point every day as part of its routine sweep pattern, and every day showed the same clouds in place. On some days, it would be sunny around the storm, while on others it would be so cloudy all around that they could not pick out the specific clouds that made up the storm. But over time, Lakesh and Philboyd reached the somewhat unsettling conclusion that here, on one single point on the planet, the same storm had been playing out for not just months but possibly years.

“A never-ending storm,” Lakesh said with gravity. “Incredible.”

“But not impossible,” Philboyd stated. “The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is the eye of a gigantic storm—the largest in the solar system—and our records suggest it has run for centuries.”

“But on Earth, with our wind patterns and atmospheric changes...?” Lakesh wondered.

“A holdover from the nukecaust?” Philboyd proposed. The nuclear holocaust had done dreadful things to the Earth’s weather patterns. Holdovers were rare but they did occasionally happen, particularly in areas of high radiation.

Lakesh scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What else do we know about this area?” he asked aloud.

“Right now? Not a lot,” Philboyd confirmed. “There has been no reason to pay it particular scrutiny—”

“There’s your reason, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh said, pointing at the storm cloud on his screen. “Get scrutinizing.”

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER, the team regathered in the meeting room, where Lakesh and Bry brought them up to speed with what had been discovered.

“The first reference to the coordinates appears in a backup database from Ragnarville, in a file dating back three and a half years,” Lakesh explained. “The reference is minor and the information attached to it encrypted—”

“The file encryption was a beast,” Donald Bry said, taking up the story, “and we had a lot of trouble getting past it. So much so that I decided to run a search on one of the other databases. To my surprise, the same file with the same encryption appeared on the database of Baron Cobalt.”

“Same encryption means no joy, I take it,” Grant observed sourly.

“But,” Lakesh said, “it meant something. If two barons were looking at the same data, it meant they were collaborating.”

Kane shook his head. “Where is all this going, Lakesh? The barons are dead now.”

“They are, but their legacy is still with us,” Lakesh pointed out. “And what Donald here discovered may be a rather big part of that legacy.”

“So pull the trigger already,” Kane said impatiently.

Bry paused for a moment before replying. “Baron Cobalt’s database was locked just like Ragnar’s, so I tried checking through the other baronial databases. In the Snakefishville database—now Luilekkerville of course—I found the same coordinates attached to something called Terminal White.”

“And who or what is Terminal White?” Brigid asked.

“That is a mystery,” Donald admitted, “but a fascinating one. Once we had the Snakefish link I could backtrack into the Ragnarville and Cobalt databases and look for a link. The phrase ‘Terminal White’ appears in all of them, relating to an area to the north of their territories. It would appear to be a shared project involving all three barons—at least—working together toward some undefined goal.”

“Three-way power grab, maybe?” Kane mused.

Brigid nodded warily. “Hmm, perhaps they were collaborating to take over the other baronies, then split them among themselves. And that all fell apart when the snake gods emerged, changing the stakes.”

“Not just the stakes,” Kane reminded her, “but the rules of the whole darn shooting match.”

Kane turned back to Bry and Lakesh, a look of concern on his face. “So, did you find anything else?”

Bry shook his head regretfully. “We’re still running checks, trying to burrow into the data. We’ve scanned the databases of each of the baronies, well, as much as we can access at this stage. We have the name or term, but everything else is encrypted like a ticking time bomb—if we push too hard we’ll wipe the data entirely.”

“And with a lot of that data already lost or ransacked after the fall of the baronies,” Lakesh said, “much of Donald’s information is already coming from old files that would be regarded as ‘lost.’”

“The data is very high-level security,” Bry added. “I suspect a lot of this information was carried person to person, baron to baron, and not stored on any database. What little we have uncovered is purely relating to the site, but the coordinates and the site match up both with each other and with the storm we’ve observed in satellite surveillance.”

“The barons are gone,” Kane said grimly. “Any research project they started should have shut down, too. Shouldn’t it?”

Brigid shook her head. “Kane, you know we’re going to have to look,” she said. “Don’t try to find a way out of it—that’s beneath you.”

Kane ground his teeth in irritation. “I want to protect people—not databases,” he muttered.

“They’ll come,” Grant told him. “They always do.”

Designated Task #011: Cleaning

Each resident of Ioville is expected to exhibit a professional level of cleanliness at all times. The cleanliness of the ville is paramount and is the responsibility of every citizen.

After my manufacturing shift—nine hours with three designated breaks—I am assigned ville cleaning duties with another citizen, named Citizen 058F—a woman like me.

Our duties involve checking the factories and walkways of Epsilon Level, cleaning and sterilizing all walls and floors, checking and sterilizing the stairwells and elevators in the west tower, checking and sterilizing the linking walkways between west and north towers, cleaning and maintaining fire safety equipment, collecting and labeling any debris larger than a fingernail so that it may be retained and analyzed, and assisting in the cleaning of all personnel exiting manufactory 8.

Once our circuit is completed, another team takes our place to begin cleaning again while we are designated as off-shift. At this stage, we are stripped and sent through the personnel cleaning facility at factory 8 to ensure that we have not picked up any rogue dirt or dangerous debris. Once we are clean, we are expected to return to our residences. Citizen 058F resides in a block close to my own, and so we travel together via trolleybus. We do not discuss where she works during the day, preferring to sit in composed silence as the bus makes its circuit of the ville. She gets off one stop before me.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 6

At dawn the next morning, two sleek bronze-hued aircraft cut across the skies over the former province of Alberta in the western part of Canada. The craft were known as Mantas, aircraft designed in ancient prehistory by an alien race and capable of phenomenal acceleration and other feats, including subspace travel. They had emerged from a hidden hangar in the Cerberus redoubt at a little before dawn, launching one after another and veering northward in perfect formation.

Identical in appearance, the Mantas were constructed from a bronze-hued metal whose liquid sheen glimmered in the early-morning sunlight. Their graceful designs consisted of flattened wedges with swooping wings curving out to either side of the body in mimicry of the seagoing manta, and it was this similarity that had spawned their popularised name of Manta Craft. Each Manta’s wingspan was twenty yards and their body length was almost fifteen, but it was the beauty of their design that was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming, burned-gold finish. The entire surface of each craft was decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. Each vehicle featured an elongated hump in the center of the body which provided the only indication of a cockpit.

Inside those cockpits sat three individuals. Piloting each craft were Kane and Grant, dressed in their shadow suits, their heads hidden behind the almost-spherical, bulb-like helmets that were built into the pilot seats of each vehicle. The interior was small and simple, with very few displays showing other than a few indicator lights. Rather, the dashboards existed in virtual space, projected onto the pilot’s retina using the heads-up technology of the weird-looking helmets.

The third occupant of the Mantas was Brigid Baptiste, sitting in the backseat of Kane’s vehicle, where she was using a portable tablet computer to analyze the local weather patterns and generally familiarize herself with the local climate and terrain. It wasn’t necessary, of course—she had already gone through all of the material the night before and her eidetic memory ensured she would not forget so much as a single detail. And yet, nervousness or perhaps that human instinct that one might have missed something made Brigid check the material again while running through scenarios in her head.

“You okay back there, Baptiste?” Kane asked, raising his voice slightly over the low hum of the Manta’s engine. The Manta utilised two different types of engines, depending on the specific flying that was required of it. One was a ramjet while the other was a solid fuel pulse detonation, which was useful for work outside the planet’s atmosphere. Neither was especially noisy, however, and Kane raised his voice more out of habit and the weird feeling of his skull being encased and muffled by the helmet rather than any real need. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“Just thinking,” Brigid said as the Manta cut through the cold air high over Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies.

“What do you think we’re going to find?” Kane asked, making conversation. “Another baron?”

“I don’t like to speculate,” Brigid said.

“Go on, speculating’s fun,” Kane encouraged.

“I hope we find nothing,” Brigid said. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Yeah, that’s the adventurous spirit we’ve all come to admire in you, Baptiste,” Kane teased.

The two Mantas sped on, cutting through the cold air like knives through cloth.

* * *

THE SNOWSTORM LOOMED up ahead like an angry ghost. Dark clouds haunted the sky, thick as smoke from a fire, a thick sheet of white snow descending from them coupled with spits of razor-sharp ice. It was almost like a curtain draped across the landscape, a thick line that no one in their right mind would try to cross.

Leading to that ominous curtain was the desolate wilderness of Canada, ravines and sweeping plains, streaks of thick forest that thinned out as they approached the static storm. Down there, occasional animals could be seen flitting among the trees, birds taking wing.

Kane and Grant brought their sleek Manta aircraft toward the snow curtain on a low approach, observing the landscape carefully, searching for signs of life. Other than the occasional wolf or raccoon there was nothing but trees and scrub dappled with icy snow.

The Mantas could travel in subspace and under the sea, so neither pilot had any fear of entering the snowstorm. Their only concern was the lack of visibility it ensured, leaving them entirely reliant on their crafts’ formidable scanning capabilities.

Grant’s voice patched over their linked Commtacts. “Nothing happening so far,” he stated. “Looks clear.”

Watching his heads-up displays, Kane nodded. “Displays are clear,” he confirmed.

And yet there was something eerily uncanny about the storm, seen from high up and this far out. It really was like a curtain, a thick line delineating one part of the terrain from another. If what Cerberus had discovered was true—that this spot had been encased in this storm for years—then it was anyone’s guess what they might find within.

Kane sent more power to his engines, accelerating toward the thick white curtain of snow. A moment later the two bronze aircraft had disappeared within.

* * *

IT WAS MOMENTARILY STRANGE. Moving from light and normality into a world the only description of which was one word: white.

Snow fell, thick lines of it fluttering diagonally across the Mantas’ windshields, painting everything the same shade of white. People wear black at funerals, thought Brigid, but white is more somber, more chilling. When seen like this, a great expanse of nothing but white and cold, that is the picture of death, the way it overwhelms and demolishes and rewrites.

The Mantas hurtled on, crossing the vast expanse of land hidden by the blizzard, their sensor displays showing the flat terrain stretching out before them.

“There’s nothing here,” Kane muttered, triggering his Commtact automatically.

“Nothing on my side, either,” Grant confirmed. “Just snow.”

The Mantas hurtled onward, crossing the dull white landscape, ice thrown against their wings and bodies. Below, the land seemed unchanging. Whatever it had once been was hidden beneath the blanket of masking white.

“Kane,” Grant radioed, “I’m picking up a heat signature on our ten.”

Kane had seen the same heat signature appear on his own heads-up display even as Grant began to speak. “I see it,” he confirmed. “You want to give it a closer look?”

“You know I do,” Grant replied.

“Yeah, anything to break the monotony,” Kane agreed.

Without breaking formation, the two Mantas vectored toward the ten o’clock, chasing the mysterious heat signature amid the falling snow.

* * *

THE SOURCE OF the heat signature proved hard to pinpoint—not least because it was hidden by the curtain of falling snow. After a few sweeps across the general area of the source, Kane proposed landing and checking the area on foot to verify whatever it was that was pumping out warmth. His colleagues agreed and within a couple of minutes the Cerberus team had brought their sleek Mantas down in the vertical landings that the incredible vehicles were geared for, dropping out of the sky like stones.

Kane drew back the hatch of his Manta and took a breath of the cold air. The cold burned against the back of his throat as he breathed in, and he had to blink back tears. While the shadow suit would regulate his body temperature, there was only so much it could cover, and inhaling freezing-cold air is still inhaling freezing-cold air.

The snow was falling thickly, cutting vision down to just a few feet.

“Brisk day for a walk,” Grant called as he strode across the snow from his own Manta toward Kane’s. He materialized through the white curtain of snow like a shadow coming suddenly to life. He had dressed in a long leather-style coat over his shadow suit, with thick-soled combat boots to augment the shadow suit’s built-in foot molds that were more like hard socks. The top of the boots could barely be seen, for the snow here was compact but deep. Grant’s coat was made from a Kevlar/Nomex mix, making it both flame retardant and able to repel bullets. It didn’t make Grant invulnerable, but it gave him an edge at least. The last item that Grant wore was a woollen hat to cover his shaved head. The hat was black, matching the rest of his outfit.

“Damn brisk,” Kane agreed as he and Brigid exited the cockpit, sealing the hatch behind him.

Consulting the tablet’s portable scanner, the three Cerberus warriors trudged through the snow toward the heat source. Brigid’s hair fluttered wildly in the wind, as did the tails of Grant’s duster. Kane had dressed in a shorter jacket over his shadow suit, its pockets giving him extra storage space, along with a belt, which contained a half-dozen pouches within which he had stored his usual armory of flashbangs and miniexplosives.

“Could be under the snow,” Kane suggested as they looked around, mystified, for the heat source.

“No,” Brigid said, checking the details on her scanner. “Whatever’s emanating heat is moving...slowly, but it’s moving.”

Kane looked at the tablet screen, swiftly making sense of the icons. “There,” he said, pointing a little way to their right.

Before Kane had lowered his hand, something large and white came barreling out of the snow curtain toward them from the right. It was like a curved wall, wider than a house, and was accompanied by the growl of a mighty engine.

Designated Task #007: Food Preparation

I am assigned to Delta Level for two days every week once my shift at Designated Task #004 has finished. There, I am tasked to prepare meals for the ville, specifically for my tower. This involves cleaning, peeling and chopping vegetables and fruit before they are mulched together in a nutritious paste-like gruel. The gruel smells strongly during preparation. On my first occasion I waited forty minutes until my allocated break, at which point I left the room and vomited, the smell too much. I have trained myself to be better now, but it is all I can do to keep myself from vomiting while I wash and chop and peel, such is the sweet malodor of the mashed components.

The food is portioned into small trays, which are then distributed to the canteens around the ville. The serving of the food is a separate Designated Task, #008.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 7

Twenty feet wide and painted white, the unit was perfectly camouflaged for the environment. The noise of the engine should have given the behemoth’s approach away, but the thick snow had muffled it almost entirely until it had reached within a dozen feet of the Cerberus warriors.

Kane leaped one way, Grant and Brigid the other as the massive unit came barreling at them, accompanied by a churning engine noise that boomed like thunder in the mountains.

Kane rolled and brought himself back up as the vehicle passed, his Sin Eater appearing without conscious thought in the palm of his hand. He was tracking the monster machine as it trundled away, automatically activating his Commtact as he watched it disappear behind the camouflaging curtain of falling snow. “Check in—everyone okay?” he asked.

* * *

“ALIVE,” GRANT WHUFFED, his voice coming in a breathless growl as he skittered across the snow. He was scrambling forward in a tumble of dislodged snow, out of control.

Grant was thirty feet away from Kane and still moving, having leaped in the opposite direction to his partner. There had been no time to plan the maneuver—Grant had simply leaped out of the behemoth’s path. When he did so, Grant had been surprised by breaking ice and a dip in the snow and had suddenly found himself scrambling down a steep slope, not quite balanced or in control of his descent. A dark copse of leafless trees loomed up ahead like grave markers in the whiteness. Grant felt his feet lift off the ground as he bumped over something hidden by the snow, and for a moment he was in the air. Then he crashed into the foremost tree with a yelp of pain, and a shower of snow came tumbling over him, dislodged from the tree’s splayed branches.

Grant muttered something unintelligible as he sagged to the ground, his descent curtailed in an instant.

* * *

BRIGID HAD BEEN more successful, diving out of the path of the artificial monster, tucking and rolling as the thing roared past. “Me, too,” she chimed in, responding to Kane’s query from where she now lay sprawled on the freezing white blanket of snow.

But she had become temporarily confused, lost on the white blanket, snow-blind.

* * *

REASSURED BY HIS partners’ responses, Kane watched the vehicle lumber past him in a descending hum of growling engine. The noise was almost obliterated by the muffling effect of the snow, and after barely a dozen feet it had—incredibly—all but fallen into silence.

Kane pulled himself up from the ground and started after the disappearing vehicle, the Sin Eater clenched in his right hand. It was traveling slowly—Kane estimated it was moving at no more than ten miles an hour—but it was big and heavy and the environment had perfectly masked its approach until almost too late.

It wasn’t just wide—it was long, too; fifty feet of towering vehicle, like a double-stack train carriage bumping over the alabaster environment like a skipping stone on a lake.

Twin funnels or chimneys were located on its roof, one on each end, wide as a Manta’s wing and all but obscured by the falling snow. Kane could barely see them through the thick snow—thicker than before, in fact.

In a split-second decision, Kane sent the Sin Eater back to its hidden holster and began hurrying after the vehicle. “I’m going after it,” Kane said into the Commtact pickup.

“Kane—wait!” Brigid urged, but Kane ignored her.

The thick snow slowed his movements—it was more like wading than running—but Kane was close enough that he should be able to reach the mysterious vehicle in a dozen paces at the speed it was traveling. Through the there-again-gone-again curtain of snow, he saw bars lining the back vertical and horizontal pipes that presumably carried some kind of warming fluid to keep the vehicle running in the extreme cold. Kane reached for one, kicking his legs high to pull himself over the thick snow. It was like hurdling, keeping up with the slow-moving machine through the dense carpet of snow, the blasted thing frustratingly just out of reach, like something chased in a dream.

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