Loe raamatut: «Terminal White»

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.