Chapter 21
“You ever hear of a Baron Trevelyan?” Brigid asked as she and Kane descended the stairwell of the office block. She was holding a small radio communications unit, something like a car radio with a microphone hookup.
“Me?” Kane responded, boots splashing in the pooled water on the concrete steps. “No. Why?”
“The footage in that media suite included a newscast featuring a speech from him,” Brigid explained. “I never heard of him, either. Nor this Quocruft ville.”
“He a hybrid?” Kane asked, taking the radio unit.
Brigid nodded. “Yes, looks just like Baron Cobalt or any one of the others,” she explained.
Kane slowed and turned to face Brigid. “You’re figuring something out,” he said. “Want to clue me in?”
“It’s hard to rationalize,” Brigid admitted, “but I don’t think we’re on Earth. Or at least not our Earth.”
“We got here via mat-trans,” Kane pointed out. “Some kind of glitch sent us to the wrong destination. Could be we skipped a planet.”
Brigid shook her head. “People speaking English, a recognizable ville structure—it doesn’t add up.”
“The Annunaki came from outer space,” Kane reminded her. “Could be they colonized more than one planet, seeding them with hybrids just like the barons we knew.”
Brigid’s hand ran along the metal bar that served as a banister, the dark paint there feeling cold against her palm. “Same gravity, same atmosphere, same...paint on the banisters. No, this is Earth—I’d stake my life on that.”
“Then what?” Kane asked.
They were seven flights down now, almost to the first floor, where Kane had left his prisoner.
“What if we skipped dimensions when we entered the mat-trans?” Brigid proposed.
“Is that possible?”
“The mat-trans is simply a transportation system, Kane,” Brigid explained. “At its heart, it’s no different from an automobile or an aircraft. We just took a wrong turn, landed in the wrong place.”
“Right off the map,” Kane said sourly. “If that is the case, and I’m not saying you’re right, then we can use the same process to get back to Cerberus, right?”
Brigid was silent as she thought this over. They had reached the bottom of the staircase, and she was doing her utmost to ignore the shade of Daryl Morganstern who had reappeared at the edge of her vision and was beckoning her.
Reaching for the heavy fire door, Kane prompted again, “Right, Baptiste?”
“We don’t know why we jumped the way we did,” Brigid replied, her cool emerald eyes meeting Kane’s stare. “If something’s tapping into the quantum ether, utilizing a similar process or sending a pulse through it, then that would potentially disrupt the mat-trans flow.”
Kane glared at her. “Wait a minute. You think someone’s tapping into the mat-trans?
Our
mat-trans?”
“Might not be intentional,” Brigid told him. “It would take an enormous amount of energy to bridge between dimensional planes. A release of such energy—like a nuclear reactor going into meltdown—might have that effect. I stress
might.
”
Depressing the safety bar on the fire door, Kane pushed through it and back into the lobby of the office building. The lobby was as he had left it: charred marks across the ceiling, walls and furniture, much of the equipment damaged or melted. The same as every other building they had seen in this strange, abandoned city. He gestured to the despoiled lobby area. “Seems to me, we’ve been staring at the result of some almighty outpouring of energy ever since we got here,” he said. “What do you think?”
Brigid gasped. “The sun shield,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s utilized solar energy to generate the power to...”
“To what?” Kane asked.
“Bridge dimensions,” Brigid told him gravely. “But if he’s done that deliberately, then...”
“Cerberus is in trouble,” Kane finished.
“Not just Cerberus,” Brigid told him. “Earth and everyone on it.”
* * *
“I’
M
THE
MAN
WHO
KILLED
Earth,” Roger Burton told Grant earnestly.
They sat together on the bare cot in the grim cell, its light fixture buzzing in a cage above their heads. Grant watched the way the light played along the hose that was attached to Burton’s head, studying the attachment without touching it.
“I always had a talent for making things, even when I was very young,” Burton continued. “Even here, he’s given me a rudimentary lab so I can keep working, as if I’m something other than his prisoner. After I graduated, I was placed in the research labs doing design work, engineering mostly, with some applied physics, a little chemistry. While I was there, I kept tinkering with things, improving them, coming up with new ways of doing stuff. Guess it drew someone’s interest.” He smiled in a self-deprecating manner. “One day I got called into the super’s office and she told me I would be working on a special project, something to harness energy in new ways. So I did, worked diligently and without question. Why would I question anything?”
Grant nodded in agreement. “Easy to get caught up in the system when you’re stuck inside it,” he said, speaking from his own experience as an ex-Magistrate.
“One day the baron came to visit,” Roger Burton said. “Heck of an honor that, like meeting something from one of them old ’ligious books. You read any of those?”
Grant nodded, encouraging the man to continue. He was still looking at the tube pipe. It seemed to be permanently attached to the back of the older man’s skull, pressed through his messy hair and into his skin. The tube was three inches in diameter and made of some kind of flexible metal links, stained with the grease and oil that kept them mobile. The tube was attached to the base of Burton’s skull, where it bulged out from the stem of his neck, connected via a sturdy metal band. The flesh around the circular attachment was an angry red, with old scar tissue around its edges that had never completely healed. The skin and hair had grown over parts of the metal attachment, tying it more fully to the man.
“Baron Trevelyan spoke to me, said he was aware of my work,” Burton said. “Wanted me to head up a special project, funding no issue. He wanted to explore the limits of knowledge, he said, and that appealed to me. I’m a scientist. I’d been trying to figure new ways to apply engineering my whole life. Now my baron commanded and I obeyed.” He paused, looking around the room as if for inspiration.
“I didn’t invent stuff because there was a need for it,” Burton explained sadly. “They didn’t give me these projects and say ‘There, make this better,’ you understand? I just came up with ideas, ways of doing things, new applications for old processes.
“You know, it’s been so long since I actually spoke to someone like this,” Burton lamented. “It’s almost hard to believe I’m doing it. Maybe the baron thought it would be ironic, putting us together. The last two men on Earth.”
Grant watched as the scientist shifted restlessly on the cot, pulling the tube that fed into the back of his skull around to get it more comfortable. Grant knew the body language from his days as a Magistrate, knew to recognize the man’s movements. He was regretful, ashamed, guilty.
“What did you make?” Grant asked gently.
“The regen suits,” Burton explained. “They’re what keep the Magistrates active.”
* * *
B
RIGID
FOLLOWED
K
ANE
through the lobby and into the cloak room behind the reception desk where he had hidden the tied body of the Magistrate, leaving the little radio unit on the desk. The figure still lay there amid the fallen coats, hands and legs bound, helmet missing.
“While you were busy upstairs, I picked us up someone to question,” Kane explained. “Get some answers.”
Brigid took another step into the room, examining the figure lying there in the darkness. Finally she looked up at Kane and her brow furrowed. “Was he alive when you brought him in?” she asked gently.
“Sure he was al—” Kane began angrily, hurrying forward to check.
Just as Brigid had implied, the Magistrate was dead. He lay completely still, his chest unmoving, and when Kane held his hand beneath the man’s nose no breath came out. “What the hell? He was alive—I swear it. I wouldn’t kill a fellow Mag, unless I had no choice.”
“I believe you,” Brigid said to placate him. Crouched over the Magistrate’s supine form, she rolled his body and checked for any evidence of tampering. The face looked ghastly, the skin rotten and the bulging eyes staring out into the darkness of the cupboard. But it was a level of rot that should have taken several days to reach, longer still in a cold climate. “Kane, did he look like this when you brought him in?”
Kane nodded. “Ugly mother. Helmet came loose during the scuffle. I figure he was a carrier for something nasty, plague or some shit. You’d said something about a virus maybe doing this to the ville, right?”
Brigid stared up at Kane in wonder. “And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Back when we were in Cobaltville we were regularly vaccinated against everything from radiation sickness to the black death,” Kane replied nonchalantly. “If what he’s got is catching, and if I’m not immunized, then—one—I’ve got it and—two—we’re still stuck here with no way home.”
Brigid shrugged, accepting Kane’s explanation without too much bother, aware they had bigger problems right now. “On the physical evidence alone I’d say this man’s been dead four days minimum,” she explained.
“Impossible,” Kane spit. “He was up and walking a half hour ago. I was fighting with him. He fought back. He shot at me.”
“Well, he isn’t shooting now,” Brigid told him.
* * *
“T
HE
REGEN
SUITS
ARE
WHAT
keep the Mags active,” Burton told Grant. “I almost said ‘alive,’ but it’s not that. ‘Active’ is the polite term for it, you get me?”
“You mean they’re dead?” Grant asked. He thought back to the Dark Magistrates he had seen since he emerged from the mat-trans, the ones who had chased him through the hospital, the ones who had dunked his head in the basin of water until he could no longer hold his breath.
“I didn’t invent it for that, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Burton blurted. “The design was intended to prolong life for the terminally ill. Baron Trevelyan insisted it be tested to the limit. He wanted to see whether you could take a fresh corpse, bring it back and make it remain alive, on the verge of death. I saw the Magistrates kill test subjects on the baron’s instructions, just so that they could test it.”
“It worked,” Grant said sourly. “But why would anyone want to animate the dead like that?”
“Nearest I can figure,” Burton told him, “Baron Trevelyan is what they call a control freak. He wants absolute loyalty—demands it.”
“Sounds like a baron,” Grant lamented.
“The dead don’t answer back,” Burton reasoned.
Grant nodded, accepting this without cheer. “Why are you hooked up like that?” he asked, indicating the hose going up to the ceiling.
“This? Little of my own medicine. I got exposed,” Burton explained, “to one of my own inventions. Now I have to keep being fed with it or I start...well, the reaction isn’t good.”
“What’s the invention?” Grant asked.
“The Guilt Bomb,” Burton said.
“Guilt Bomb?”
“Yes, well, that’s what they called it anyhow,” Burton explained, embarrassed. “Not my name, you understand. For one thing, it wasn’t a bomb. It was a chemical agent that required a dispersal method, but there was no explosive involved. It went in the water, that’s how they transmitted it.”
“Doesn’t sound like engineering,” Grant pointed out.
“Chemistry plus a little applied physics,” Burton agreed. “How it worked didn’t matter so much as how they spread it. The Magistrates needed a docile population, baron’s orders. People were becoming restless. He wanted us to submit, to give ourselves to him.”
“But you said it wasn’t a bomb,” Grant prompted in a querying tone.
“No,” Burton agreed, “it was disseminated through water, like I said. In small quantities it works like a tranquilizer.”
“What about larger quantities?” Grant asked.
“Repeated exposure brings about morose paranoia. More than that and...” Burton paused, jabbing his thumb in the direction of the hose in his skull.
“It’s addictive?” Grant queried.
“The constant supply keeps my head clear,” Burton told him. “Relatively. Sin is a knowledge that we cannot lose, Mr. Grant.”
Chapter 22
Brewster Philboyd came to Lakesh’s desk in the Cerberus operations room with a sheaf of notes in his hand.
“Mr. Philboyd?” Lakesh said encouragingly, peering up from the data screen he had been analyzing.
All around them, the operations room was buzzing with activity. Personnel were checking the rolling data from the satellites; Donald Bry and his programming team were strengthening the security protocols of the computer aspect of the mat-trans; physician Reba DeFore had accompanied Farrell as they checked the interior of the mat-trans chamber itself. She was looking for biological residue, while he searched for any physical weak points that may have been created with the arrival and rapid demise of their mysterious visitor. Domi, meanwhile, had joined Edwards at a group of desks arranged before the mat-trans entrance, where they discussed possible response to any further infiltrators.
“Kane’s squad definitely reached the mat-trans outside of Panamint,” Philboyd confirmed solemnly as Lakesh listened. “Accessing the records remotely, the mat-trans there shows activation at 14.07, which tabulates perfectly with their arrival time, factoring in the additional time it would have taken them to reach the mat-trans itself. We can assume they used the mat-trans.”
“I don’t like this word—assume,” Lakesh said. “It suggests a margin of error.”
“There are no visual recordings, but the mat-trans data log shows a transferral jump sufficient for three bodies,” Brewster explained. “Their transponder signals are logged as reaching the redoubt at that time, and our live satellite imagery shows the chopper they traveled in is still there, close to the redoubt entrance. Short of a time machine to check on them, this is as close as we can get to a categorical confirmation that they used the mat-trans.”
“Short of Kane and his team telling us themselves, of course,” Lakesh pointed out and Philboyd inclined his head, accepting the man’s point.
“Of course,” Philboyd agreed.
“What about this redoubt?” Lakesh asked. “What do we know about it? Could someone else have been there?”
Checking through his notes, Philboyd shook his head. “Security seals were still in place when Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived early this morning,” he said. “Pulling up the data log, the locks had not been tampered with in the past six months. I can take the log back further if we need to, but I’m confident in saying no one was there. Or, if they were, they’ve been drinking their own urine for the past six months.”
“Redoubts were designed to be self-sustaining,” Lakesh reminded him.
“I take your point,” the astrophysicist said, “but the nukecaust is a distant memory. There’s no reason for anyone to still be hiding in this one.”
Lakesh nodded in sage agreement. “So what else do we have?”
“Kane’s team reached their initial destination intact at 11:59,” Philboyd read from his sheet. “Their Commtacts died at 12:03. We can backtrack the data and show that no signal was being broadcast from then. Looks like a jammer of some kind was in operation.”
“Weapons dealers,” Lakesh said witheringly. “Always so wretchedly cautious. So, could the jammed signal be a part of our mystery?”
“Hard to say,” Philboyd said, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “The mat-trans seems to be where the problems really start. Up until then we simply have a communications fail.”
“Fine,” Lakesh accepted. “What else do you have?”
“I did a system-wide check,” Philboyd told his boss, thumbing through several sheets of data to a page showing a graph. “There’s something odd in the mat-trans records. A power spike that runs through everything at 14:07. That’s the exact same time that Kane’s team was preparing to jump.”
“The system was designed to accommodate fluctuations in power,” Lakesh stated.
“Maybe not this one,” Brewster argued. “It looks to be external, but I can’t locate a source.”
“And it affected the mat-trans in the redoubt in Panamint?” Lakesh asked, looking for clarification.
“No, Dr. Singh,” Brewster said. “It touched the whole network. If we trace back through our records here, we can see our own feed spikes for just a few seconds. The same is true of six others I checked at random. It’s line wide.”
Lakesh stroked his chin in thought. “With no source,” he mused.
“I had to go into a quantum analysis to even locate it,” Brewster told him. “This is on the scale of a solar flare or a change in the magnetic fields.”
“Natural...?” Lakesh asked.
Brewster pushed back his hair uncomfortably. “You’re really putting me on the spot with that, Doctor,” he said. “It’s hard for me to confirm or deny. I simply can’t find an obvious source for it.”
Lakesh nodded his appreciation. “So we have a power spike in the mat-trans system at the same exact moment that CAT Alpha team began their jump home,” he concluded. “External source, powerful enough to affect the whole network. And our team disappeared during this spike.”
“It lasted just four seconds,” Philboyd added.
“One obvious conclusion is that the power spike killed them,” Lakesh said. “Though it’s a conclusion I am reluctant to entertain. If the power spike came from a source, then we need to find the source.”
“Data’s all over the place,” Philboyd told him, flipping another page and showing Lakesh the printout there. The printed sheet showed a lined grid within which was a smattering of specks with no discernable pattern. Lakesh pondered it for a moment.
“This looks like a rift,” Lakesh said gravely. “We’re only seeing the peaks of the waves, which gives a false impression of the data. And that means that the source is hidden from us even on a quantum level, like something hidden beneath the surface of the ocean.”
“Assuming these are the peaks or troughs,” Philboyd said, catching on, “we could plot the basic pattern of the waves, which would reveal the source.”
Lakesh nodded. “Or we could sit here discussing it further, Mr. Philboyd,” he prompted with significant irony.
Philboyd nodded. “Understood, Doctor. I’ll get to it right away.” With that, the astrophysicist hurried back to his desk. Lakesh called after him.
“Send the data over to my computer,” Lakesh told him. “I’ll run through it, as well, and we’ll see if we come up with the same result.”
“Yes, sir,” Philboyd acknowledged with a smile.
“And, Brewster?” Lakesh called across the ops room. “Good work. Truly exemplary.”
* * *
“T
HE
BARON
WANTED
A
KNIFE
,”
Roger Burton said as he sat with Grant in the cold, dark cell. Across the room, a faucet dripped.
The engineer’s eyes were downcast, staring at the scuffed toes of his brown shoes. The shoes were dirty and worn through, and Grant could see the man’s sock through a tear above the left shoe’s heel where the stitching had come free. The discussion was accompanied by the drip-drip of water into the basin, but Grant was finally becoming used to the stench that emanated from the bucket.
“A knife?” Grant asked gently. “What kind of knife?”
Burton looked at him, and Grant could see the terror in the older man’s eyes. “One day, Baron Trevelyan came to my laboratory—that was before he incarcerated me here.” He indicated the room. “He told me about his ‘sight.’ If he looked really intensely, he told me, he could see into other worlds. Worlds like ours, only different.”
“Mars, Venus? Something like that?” Grant asked.
Burton was already shaking his head. “He told me they were the Earth,” he said. “That’s how he explained it to me. He wanted me to design a knife that could reach those other Earths. A way to carve through dimensions.”
Grant realized what the man was talking about. He had some experience of alternate Earths. Balam, a long-time ally of the Cerberus organization, had referred to these other worlds as casements, Earths contained on different dimensional frequencies, each one an altered vision of the one before. They were different realities, each one as complete and viable as the one Grant called home.
It was said that the Annunaki were multidimensional beings, that they could peer into the separate realities and even function in all of them simultaneously. Grant knew that Kane had gained some firsthand experience of that, when he had battled with these pseudo-gods on their own terms. Grant did not presume to fully understand the concept, but what he did understand was that, as a hybrid, Baron Trevelyan had dormant Annunaki DNA twisted into his genetic make-up. The hybrids had been designed to house the genetic outline of the Annunaki for when they were reborn on Earth. As such, the hybrids were nothing short of biological time bombs, containing the DNA sequencing for a superior race of aliens. All of which meant it seemed very credible to Grant that the baron could peer through the quantum veil into other dimensions and hence see other casements, other Earths.
Which led to the obvious question—what Earth had Grant and his companions landed on when they had stepped into that mat-trans unit in the Panamint Mountains? Had they somehow slipped casements? Because, assuming they had, things began to make a whole lot more sense. That would explain the abandoned ville they arrived in, a ville that none of them had ever heard of. And it also explained the presence of a hybrid baron who had never evolved into an overlord; presumably the final part of the genetic catalyst had never been employed, leaving Trevelyan as one biological time bomb that had never been detonated.
But even as he considered this, another question—one far more pressing—became paramount in Grant’s mind.
“Did Trevelyan tell you why he wanted to reach out to these other Earths?” he asked.
Burton struggled to meet Grant’s gaze. “Why does our baron do anything?” he asked rhetorically. “To own it entire. The way he owns all of us. The way he owns me.”
Grant swallowed hard as the inevitable conclusion began to dawn on him.
* * *
“I
KIND
OF
HOPED
WE
’
D
BE
able to interrogate him,” Kane growled, staring at the dead body in the cloakroom. “Guess I shouldn’t have left him like this.”
“You weren’t to know,” Brigid told him.
Kane glared at the body of the expired Magistrate. “Damned inconvenient is what this is,” he muttered with a shake of his head.
As she got up to leave, Brigid noticed something bulging from the Mag’s coat pocket that caught the light. It was the arm of a pair of spectacles, poking up where the zipper had come loose in the earlier scuffle. She reached for it, unzipping the Magistrate’s pocket fully and pulling the glasses free. “Kane, look,” Brigid said, holding them up.
“Didn’t look like the kind of guy to wear—” Kane began jovially.
“They weren’t his,” Brigid said. “They’re Grant’s. I’m pretty sure they are, anyway.”
“Where did you find these?” Kane asked, recalling that Grant had been wearing eyeglasses as a part of his disguise while they infiltrated Pellerito’s weapons operation. “Which pocket?”
Brigid showed him. “Here.”
“Zip-up pocket,” Kane said knowingly. “Evidence from a case. Standard Mag protocol. Shit.”
“Why ‘shit’?”
“Means Grant got caught,” Kane said.
“He wasn’t wearing these when he left us,” Brigid reminded him. “Could have dropped them.”
Kane took the glasses, turned them over in his hand for a moment as he thought. To Brigid, her friend looked just the way she felt—exhausted.
“We need to find Grant,” Brigid said, rubbing at her tired eyes with the heel of one hand. “Then find us a way out of here.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed, peering up from the dead Magistrate as he pocketed the glasses. “How did that go? Anything?”
“The media operation has a communications rig,” Brigid confirmed, stepping out of the cloakroom. “So in theory we could route a message to Cerberus if we had power. But that plan falls down if it turns out we really have jumped to another dimensional plane.”
“How so?” Kane asked, following her out of the room. He pulled the door closed behind him, leaving the decomposing Magistrate in the darkness. “If we can move between these dimensions, then why can’t your signal?”
Walking out into the lobby, Brigid began to answer but she stopped herself. “I...”
“Baptiste?”
“We could send a beacon signal,” Brigid theorized. “By rewiring through a quantum capacitor we could effectively create a quantum radio that transmits its signal via tachyon waves.”
“A quantum capacitor?” Kane queried.
“The internal device that self-maps our interphasers, for example,” Brigid told him. “Whatever called us here would have one—it has to.”
“And where are we going to find that?” Kane wondered. “Back at the hospital?”
“That was the receiver unit, yes,” Brigid confirmed, though she sounded unsure.
“Problem?” Kane prompted.
“No problem,” Brigid said. “That unit had a power source of some sort, too. We’d need to go back there. I’m just figuring out the logistics.”
Kane watched the street beyond the shattered windows of the lobby while Brigid considered the problem. The bansheelike winds continued to churn through the street, but there was no sign of movement now. The patrolling Dark Magistrates were nowhere to be seen, not that that was reassuring.
“We need to split up, use our time more effectively,” Brigid announced. “I’ll return to the hospital and scavenge the parts we need from the mat-trans receiver. The radio could run through that. You go find Grant, then come find me at the hospital. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m going with you,” Kane said firmly.
Brigid shook her head. “No. Find Grant.”
Before Kane could argue, Brigid plucked up the radio unit from the desk and strode toward the main doors of the reception.
“Okay,” Kane muttered to himself, alone in the lobby. “Find Grant. Sounds easy.”
He paced across the lobby, eyeing the empty street. Brigid was gone already, just her red hair showing occasionally, a shadow among shadows.
“Magistrates,” Kane muttered, pulling Grant’s glasses from his pocket and staring at them. Idly, he worked the arms on their hinges. The glass of one lens had scratched, and the plastic coating of one arm was scuffed. “No, this is good,” he announced. “Magistrate takes the glasses as evidence. Which means he’s taking it somewhere. Mag Hall, that’s the protocol.”