"Great," Anderson said. "So basically, what you're telling me is I'm on my own for the foreseeable fut-"
Suddenly, as she drew closer to the building, it hit her. Darkness, pouring out through every window, door and crack of the Sector House in great black waves. Spreading towards her. Engulfing her. Soon, it was just like it had been when the futsie Jeffrey Queeg had died. Anderson found herself blinded, surrounded by darkness on every side. And, in the darkness, she heard a voice whispering to her.
Cassandra Anderson.
The sound was louder now, as though the creature making it had grown larger since last they had met.
Cassandra Anderson.
A strange voice, malign and knowing.
Cassandra Anderson
. A whisper in the darkness. It was compelling.
It is time to be...
Fighting back hard, she resisted. She raised her defences, felt the entity throw itself repeatedly at the psychic barrier she had erected around her as it tried to break through. The wall held. She kept it at bay. She heard its voice on the other side, screaming in impotent rage and frustration as it found she was a match for it. Screaming even more loudly now, its voice became an incomprehensible screech.
You think I'm scared of you?
She sharpened the thought and sent it across the barrier at the entity with the force of a knife.
You think you're the big bad wolf and you've only got to huff and puff and you'll blow my house down? You think I don't know what's really going on here?
You think I don't know that it's you who's really scared? We both know it's only a matter of time before I find out exactly what you are and where you're hiding. And when I do, you're afraid I'm going to take you apart and put you back under whatever slimy rock you first crawled out from underneath of. That's it, isn't it? You're scared of me.
Feeling the entity throw itself against the barrier again without effect, she let the thought hang in the air a moment. Then, she twisted the knife.
And you know what? I got news for you. You're right. My name's Cass Anderson. I'm a Psi-Judge. You think you're scary? I'm your worst drokking nightmare.
"Anderson?"
With a final shriek of rage, the darkness receded. Finding herself standing outside the Sector House once more, she heard the voice of Central Control calling over her radio in concern.
"Anderson?"
"Anderson receiving."
"What the drokk happened? You suddenly stopped talking in mid-sentence. Then, when I kept calling you, there was no reply. For a second there, I thought somebody must've killed you."
"Nothing as dramatic as that, Control. I had to deal with a sudden eclipse, that's all."
"Eclipse? What in the name of Grud's ass are you talking about? We've had no reports of an eclip-"
"Never mind. It'd take too long to explain." Gazing towards the Sector House, she gathered herself for a moment. Then, ready now to face whatever she would find there, Anderson began to walk purposefully towards the building's front entrance. She was going in. "I want you to get on the line to Psi Division Headquarters and tell them Sector House 12 is currently in the possession of a hostile psychic entity. Tell them I'm issuing a Priority One-Alpha request for Psi Division backup.
"Tell them I want a team of Exorcists down here. And I want them
now
."
Inside, it was every bit as bad as the scene that had greeted her on the thirty-eighth floor of Charles Whitman Block. Given that the automatic doors at the Sector House's front entrance had opened for her, it was readily apparent that the power cut had ended. With the lights on though, it simply meant she could see the bodies lying around the waiting area in front of the check-in desk all the more clearly. There were bodies everywhere: Judges, citizens, auxiliaries, all dead. She saw bullet holes, stab wounds, contusions, people who had obviously been strangled. Worst of all was the chilling similarity she found among some of the corpses before her and the corpses at the Whitman crime scene.
Some of the bodies are blank and soulless, Anderson thought, her psychic senses instinctively reaching out to the dead all around her. Empty shells, like the entity has sucked out their souls already. But I can still sense pain, fear, horror - as though the souls of some of the other victims escaped being consumed. But how? Why?
Trying to reconstruct what had happened from the evidence strewn all about her, Anderson noticed that the plasteen seating in the waiting area had been pulled up from its moorings - evidently to be used as clubs and missiles. There was probably a riot among the citizens, she decided. Then, the check-in Judges must have intervened to try and subdue the rioters. With so many different kinds of wounds here, there must have been at least half-a-dozen killers. But what happened to them? And how come the Judges weren't able to stop them?
Questions. Again, frustratingly, it was just like Whitman. There were murder victims lying on the floor around her in heaps and piles, and all she had was more questions in need of answers.
Bodies in heaps and piles, she thought, a tingling at the back of her scalp. Just like Whitman.
Just like Whitman...
The perp's using them for cover!
She heard a sound behind her, but Anderson was already dodging out of the way. Shots were fired and she saw a figure rising swiftly from among the corpses through the corner of her eye. Anderson returned fire, three shots, a triple tap, hitting her would-be assailant in a tight group in the centre of his chest. Catching clear sight of him at last, Anderson saw something that horrified her.
She had just shot a Judge.
"Sinner." The Judge looked at her, his eyes glazing over, his Lawgiver falling from nerveless fingers as he slid towards the ground. "You're a sinner. You must be judged..."
He hit the ground, dead. Appalled, Anderson looked down at him in disbelief. She had killed a Judge. As the remains of his life left his body, she heard the Judge give out a last despairing psychic scream. The sound seemed to act as a kind of summoning. She heard a shrill sound like a rush of air moving past her, recognising it as the screams of a dozen terrified human souls as they were sucked to oblivion. It was the same as when the futsie Jeffrey Queeg had died. Briefly, Anderson found herself standing on the edge of a psychic maelstrom centred on the dead Judge's body, as wailing souls were pulled inward to feed the unspeakable appetites of the entity that held Sector House 12 in its thrall. Just as quickly, it was over. The screams died away. In the aftermath, there was only silence.
Judges, Anderson thought. The entity's using Judges now to do his dirty work and each time one of the killers dies, the entity absorbs the souls of all the killer's victims.
She moved around the waiting area, opening her mind to the Psi-flux, and found her fears were confirmed. All the bodies read as blank. With the death of the Judge, the entity had consumed the remaining souls in the waiting area. At last Anderson had the answers to her earlier questions.
Given what had had to happen for her to learn them, it seemed a hollow victory.
Check-In. The Roll Call and Briefing Rooms. The Central Assignment Desk. Area by area, room by room, Anderson moved through the ominously quiet stillness of Sector House 12 and found the same scene of horror greeting her at every turn. Bodies lying across floors, slumped against walls, fallen beside desks and chairs. Judges, perps, auxiliaries, citizens: the carnage that had engulfed the Sector House seemed to encompass every division and rank of humanity inside it. Anderson found dead Tek-Judges, Street Judges, station Judges. There were dead perps in handcuffs, citizens and auxiliaries shot to death, beaten, stabbed, strangled, mutilated, even beheaded. The dead were all around her, their psychic signatures gone, their bodies blank and empty. Here and there, she found corpses whose lingering psychic traces had not yet been annihilated, as though their killers were at large somewhere, the souls they had gathered still waiting to be collected. But they were in the minority. By now she realised the entity might well have absorbed hundreds of souls, growing stronger with each one.
Keep it sharp and tight, Cass, she told herself as she rounded another corner and saw a fresh scene of slaughter in the foyer leading to the Sector House's elevators. You've worked enough crimes scenes in the past, and Grud knows, you've seen plenty of bodies. Sharp and tight. The words had almost become a mantra. Sharp and tight. You've got to stay focussed if you're going to find a way to stop this.
By her best reckoning she had been in the Sector House for at least half-an-hour. So far the only other living beings she had seen in that time were two maniacal Judges who had tried to kill her. Having learned that killing them would give the entity more victims and thus more strength, she had used the Stun-Shot Energy Pulse on her Lawgiver to knock them unconscious, then chained them to holding posts with their own handcuffs while they were still stunned. Maybe if I can keep it from feeding I can starve the thing to death, she thought, but she dismissed the idea. Considering how many dead she had seen already in the Sector House, Grud only knew how long the entity could keep on going with that much stolen power.
"Hey! Over here, I could do with some help."
The man's voice came from a pile of bodies lying next to a nearby wall. Anderson moved cautiously towards it. Carefully, her finger on the trigger of her Lawgiver, she put her foot underneath the uppermost body and shifted it to one side. Buried beneath the corpses she saw the face of a Tek-Judge blinking nervously back at her, his hand incongruously caught inside an access panel in the wall beside him.
"Thank Grud," the Tek-Judge said. He was thin and looked to be in his thirties. "I was beginning to think I was never going to get out of this. I'm Symonds, from Tek-Bay Two. Hey, you're the Psi-Judge, aren't you? Anderson, right?"
"Uh-huh." Half-expecting him to attack her at any second, she kept her Lawgiver trained on him. "Before we go any further with the introductions, you got anything in particular you want to tell me? Like you've been hearing voices talking to you about sin and damnation?"
"Uh... No." For a moment he looked at her in confusion, then his expression grew frightened as he tried to squirm away from her. "Oh, sweet Grud! You're one of them. Another psycho."
"Relax, Symonds." Her own fears allayed, she holstered her Lawgiver and shifted the rest of the bodies away from him. "You want to tell me how come you're lying here like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar?"
"Oh, that." Reassured she wasn't about to kill him, Symonds breathed a sigh of relief. "I was checking the power conduits, trying to track down what's been causing all these power cuts. Then, from out of nowhere, things went nuts and everybody started trying to kill each other. Three Judges got shot right next to me and the only reason I wasn't hit was because I was already on my knees." Seeming suddenly embarrassed by the admission, he tried to explain himself hurriedly. "Because of the power conduits, I mean. They always put the access panels for these things way too low on the walls so you've got to get right down there if you want to see inside them. I've written memos about it to the Chief Tek, but he says-"
"You were telling me about the shooting, Symonds." Moving to pull the last of the bodies away, she noticed the dead man had fallen against the access panel, the weight of his body forcing the panel shut on Symonds's hand. "Wait a minute, let me guess. You were kneeling down when the shooting started, then you were caught under the three dead Judges when they fell on top of you and you couldn't get up. You couldn't free yourself or reach your Lawgiver, so you decided to play dead until the cavalry arrived."
"Wow!" He looked at her in amazement. "How did you know all that?"
"I'm psychic. Go figure." She sighed. Great, here was the first person she had run into in the last half-hour who wasn't dead or trying to kill her, and he seemed to be an idiot. She noticed Symonds gingerly rubbing at his wrist now that his hand was released from the grip of the access panel. "You still able to shoot?"
"Uh... Yeah, sure." Checking his Lawgiver was still in his boot holster, Symonds stood up. "There's still more crazies running about then?" He turned his head and scanned their surroundings in apprehension. "I keep hearing shots."
"You will until we can get things under control here. They're supposed to be sending backup to us from other sectors, but so far there's no sign of them. Can't check on their ETA either because my radio's been out ever since I came into the Sector House."
"Yeah, it would be." Symonds's expression was matter-of-fact. "I'm guessing it was working okay so long as you were near your Lawmaster, right? You see, the range on these handheld units is pretty limited, same as with helmet radios, so they're designed to patch into the nearest available relay to boost their signal. When you came into the Sector House, your radio would've automatically switched from using the GS 4T on your bike to trying to use the comms-array on the roof, and the comms-array is out, so no signal. If you let me have the unit a minute, I'll see what I can do."
"You can fix it?" This time it was Anderson's turn to be vaguely amazed.
"Sure," Symonds said, taking the radio unit from her as she handed it towards him. "I just have to disable the switching chip here..." Pulling the back of the unit open, he put his fingers inside and made an adjustment. "There. As long as you stay in range of your Lawmaster and don't go underground, you'll find your radio should work all right." Closing it, he handed the radio back to her before looking over her shoulder. "Hey, look. Somebody's using the elevators."
The numbers on the digital display above one of the elevators was counting down floor by floor as the elevator came closer. Sprinting towards it, Anderson hit the elevator button to make sure it would stop at their floor, then retreated to a safe distance to face it with her Lawgiver.
"Get ready," she said, realising Symonds was still standing dumbly in the same location. "Safeties off. There's no way of knowing whether they're going to be friendlies or hostiles."