The man and two women were dressed in strange clothes, completely at odds with the twenty-third century that they had emerged into. The man wore a long swallow-tailed coat in rich wine-red; the women, sumptuous dresses whose skirts flared out from their waists, reaching down to hide their ankles and brush the floor with a shushing sound like autumn leaves in the wind.
The man, the same dark-haired individual whom Jake and Milo had spotted toying with a puppet, worked at the melted keyboard of the computer terminal with two fingers, gliding across its surface in a series of seemingly effortless gestures.
Antonia, with dark hair trailing halfway down her back and wearing a cream-colored dress, which had a daring cut that drew a man’s attention to her ample décolletage, used one cream-colored silk glove to wipe the charcoal smear from the exterior window and peer outside. “I am undoubtedly certain that that wasn’t there before,” she said, eyeing the edge of the Manta where one bronze wing could be seen peeking past the side of the ruined factory.
Beside her, the other woman, whose golden locks were a match in length to Antonia’s and who wore a dress of shot-silk pink and blue whose color changed as she turned her body, shook her head. “But what could it be, Antonia? I have never seen such a thing before.”
Antonia looked at the blonde woman and smiled mischievously. “Perhaps it emerged out of the ground, like us, Cecily?” she proposed. “Perhaps it wishes to be our friend?”
Cecily’s clear blue eyes searched around the smoke-damaged surfaces as though looking for something. “Well, I’m hardly dressed for company,” she remarked. “I didn’t even bring a hat.”
Antonia shook her head in despair. “Any visitor who is offended by the sight of one’s unclad head is never worth accepting as one’s friend.”
The two women began to make their way to the door, which hung from its hinges, the frame splintered and blackened from the fire.
The man at the terminal peered over his shoulder and called them back. “Antonia? Let Silly go exploring. I’ve discovered something here that may require your skills.”
Antonia placed one creamy glove to her breast as if her heart fluttered beneath it. “Oh! To hear such words from you, a man so capable as to shame Great Alexander himself.”
“How you mock me, Antonia,” the dark-haired man said, a twinkle in his eye, “with your rapier tongue and turn of hip. And yet, I find myself bemused by this information machine. You were always so good with the WarCreche, and this slow-thinking device seems of similar pedigree.”
The dark-haired man gave Cecily a firm look. “Silly—find Algie before you go exploring. He’s downstairs somewhere, fiddling with something—I forget what.”
Cecily nodded. “Of course, dear Hugh. It wouldn’t do for a lady to be found exploring unescorted.”
So while Cecily went to find Algernon and investigate the Manta, Antonia remained with dark-haired Hugh, teasing the damaged terminal back to life. They were geniuses all, and doing the near-impossible came as easily as taking a breath.
On screen, a blueprint flashed to life, showing the cylindrical shape of a bomb with fins jutting from the rear and a nose cone sharp as a tack. The design showed how the bomb was constructed, how it could be powered and where the nuclear payload was to be placed. It was a design that fascinated Hugh Danner, first superman of the British Empire, as it materialized before his eyes.
Chapter 4
Muties.
Kane stood in the claustrophobic room and stared at the stacked cages, doing a swift count in his head. Two rows of three-by-three cages, plus six more by the far door—twenty-four cells in all, all but two of them occupied.
Stripped naked and locked in tiny cages so small that they had to crouch because there was no room either to stand or to lie down, each figure was the size and shape of a human. Hell, they were human, only not quite; something in their genetic makeup had gone awry. Their skin was pink, the same dark shade of pink that Kane went if he caught too much sun, and it glistened with sweat, thick beads of it like saliva on their arms and legs and chests, the way a horse sweats. Some had hair on their heads or protruding from their bodies, but it was straggly, a few long strands budding from their skulls like those of an old man or someone after chemo. Kane had no doubt that there were males and females here, but it was hard to tell the difference, even stripped naked as they were. Under the orange glow of the lights, their naked bodies looked stark, the shadows sharp and abrupt, nowhere to hide, no way to cover themselves up.
Their eyes were wide as they stared at Kane, and they were human eyes with irises of green or blue or brown, whites around them just like a person’s. Only humans had eyes like that; no animals had white that way.
But they had no eyebrows, and their lips were cracked and dry. They called to Kane from those lips, crying out from throats turned raw from mistreatment or simply from lack of use. There were many different strains of muties, but these were all the same, Kane recognized—they were called “Betties” on the streets, among people who knew about muties and what they could do.
The cages featured big bottles on the sides, locked to the outside and upturned with a hard plastic straw that bent inside the cage so that the sweating muties could drink. The straw worked by a simple valve to ensure that the prisoner had to suck at it to get any water—or more likely a glucose solution to keep them healthy, Kane suspected. He’d seen this kind of setup before.
Around him, the muties shrieked for attention, their raised voices sounding like wild animals fearing for their lives. In a way, Kane guessed, they were.
A lot of people thought muties were dead by the twenty-third century. Most, even. The world had been transformed by the Program of Unification by then, people resettled within the mighty towering villes that divided the old territories of the United States of America. As such, they had lost touch with what the nukecaust had wrought two hundred years before—with its brood of radioactive children, each turned from man to beast or beast to something worse in the era that had become known colloquially as the Deathlands.
Mutants—or “muties”—had been the consequence of the nuclear fallout that had swept across the globe, new products of the old weave of DNA. But while the muties had been hunted down and culled, they yet survived as loners or in small enclaves of hideous, godless things with extra eyes or scaled flesh, rogue limbs and razor teeth. Some mutations had helped them to survive.
In his role as a magistrate, Kane had crossed paths with a few muties. Not many. They kept to themselves these days, hiding in the shadows, well away from man. Seeing a load of muties here like this, twenty-two of them in all, was likely the result of a raid on a single settlement out in the desert, well away from human eyes where the muties had felt they were safe.
There were sodium-orange strip lights arranged in double rows close to the floor. No, not lights, Kane realized as he took a closer step—they were portable heaters. There were a dozen or more of the heaters arrayed in close succession, warming the cages and their occupants, forcing them to sweat and to keep sweating. It was sweltering hot in here, like noon in the desert, but Kane’s shadow suit had automatically compensated, cooling his body without preamble.
The people who had put the muties here wanted them to sweat.
Little wonder, since it was that sweat that created the glist, a potent hallucinogen that could trigger powerful visions in anyone who imbibed it. Anyone human, that was. The drug naturally had no effect on the muties themselves, although it had inspired one of their crueller nicknames in the outlander communities—Sweaties. They were known by a few names, some more respectful than others. Sweaty Betties, or more simply Betties, was most popular, especially among the drug-using community. Kane was an ex-magistrate, so he didn’t dabble in things like that, but he had had experiences with the kind of lowlifes who did, knew the way they spoke, the slang they used. You couldn’t be an effective mag without knowing your enemy—a truism of all law-enforcement was that the law’s enforcers and the people who broke laws were always trying to stay one step ahead of each other.
The room stank of the sweat, that thick, viscous sweat that poured from their bodies in great rivers to be collected by drain channels that ran across the bottom of each cage, gathering the liquid and sending it to a collection tank that stood poised by the wall closest to the door through which Kane had entered. There were two collection tanks there, in fact, wide as barrels, taller than a man and covered over without being properly sealed. Each had a gauge on its side, a little needle residing on a white crescent behind a tiny pane of clear glass or plastic, indicating the volume contained in the tank.
Kane strode over to the two barrels, stood on tiptoe and lifted the cover of the nearest to peek inside. A pungent stink assaulted his nostrils, so strong it made him flutter-blink for a couple of seconds. It smelled of candy or rotting fruit, the sweetness almost too much to process in one hit, the way gasoline can smell fruit-sweet. It was glist. Kane recognized it, wasn’t surprised in the slightest. This room was a glist farm; that much was obvious. Dealers would take the muties, incarcerate them and then subject them to high temperatures, not enough to really hurt them but just enough to make them continually sweat.
The room was a collection center for the operation next door, the building that Kane had viewed with the cloud symbol on its door. That place was a dream factory, outlawed by all baronies, but the sort of thing that was hard to keep tabs on. Dream factories created and sold dreams, either as group experiences or, as with the more high-scale ones, on a case-by-case basis. The dreams were tailor-made to generate a mental thrill in the dreamer, who would plug him- or herself into some kind of virtual-reality tech that had been spliced by a tech genius so it could be pumped directly into the brain. The trouble with the setup was that the human brain doesn’t fool easily and can usually tell when something isn’t real. Which was where glist came in.
Glist was the by-product of a particular sweat reaction in a subspecies of muties who had, for reasons of survival, developed the ability to produce toxin-filled sweat when scared, presumably either to scare away or, in extreme circumstances, poison any predator who came near. The effect of these toxins on the human bloodstream in carefully administered dosages, however, was to fuel elaborate hallucinations.
Coupling glist with the VR tech in a dream factory helped solidify the illusion of the dream being real. In fact, the effect was so absolute that it was not unheard-of for a user to become lost in his or her dream and never reawaken.
Long-term glist abusers had other problems, too. Frequently, their desire centers would get unraveled and they’d begin to show strange sexual tendencies, or to hunger for poisonous foodstuffs. In short, for the users, sometimes the dreams became real.
It burned Kane, seeing people—even muties like these—imprisoned this way. In his role as a Cerberus agent, he fought against such things on a daily basis and on a far grander scale. But right now, he couldn’t take the risk of freeing the prisoners. He needed to keep moving; speed was his only advantage.
Kane moved toward the interior door, tensing his wrist tendons in a practised flinch. In less than a second, a weapon had dropped into the palm of his right hand, a compact handblaster that unfurled to a barrel length of approximately fourteen inches as it met with his hand. This was the Sin Eater, a 9 mm semiautomatic that had once served as the official sidearm of the magistrate division. The trigger did not have a guard. Its necessity had never been foreseen, since the magistrates were believed to be above question or error. As such, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a magistrate, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service at Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand. It was a natural weight to him, like an extension of his body, the way a wristwatch seems natural to the wearer.
“Free us,” one of the muties pleaded from behind Kane as he strode past. There was desperation in his hoarse voice, a desperation that was hard to ignore.
Kane turned back, perhaps to apologize or explain to the mutie who had requested his help. As he did so, the interior door swung open and a startled figure stood there, staring into Kane’s face. “What the—?”
* * *
“R
EMEMBER
WHERE
YOU
ARE
,” Brigid told herself again as she gunned the Turbo’s engine. “Keep heading north.”
She was tearing across the skyway at 130 miles per hour, and the car showed no signs of flagging. Behind her, the pursuit vehicles were losing ground as they worked up the elevated street’s incline, their laser turrets cycling through their power-up sequences before unleashing another storm of bloodred heat across the blacktop. Brigid bumped over a ruined bit of road as a laser beam split it in two. Sure, she could outrun her pursuers in time, but only if she had a road to drive on.
Brigid wrenched the steering wheel to the right, bumping over another slab of ruined roadway and hurtling past a stalled hatchback so close that they exchanged paint in a shower of sparks.
“Come on,” Brigid urged herself. “Forget the escape route—what was your reason for nabbing the codes in the first place?”
Brigid noticed in her rearview that her pursuers were holding back a little, driving three abreast to block the raised street in its entirety. They’ve called for backup, she realized. They’re hemming me in toward it, making sure I can’t turn back
.
The Turbo 190 roared like an unchained beast as Brigid weaved through the skyway traffic, horns blaring all about her as she cut off the other users of the road. A moment later, the three tanklike pursuit vehicles followed, bumping out of their way anyone who didn’t move aside quickly enough, lasers flashing to literally cut a path through the traffic.
Then, up ahead, Brigid saw what they were forcing her toward. It was bigger than her other pursuers, covered in thick armor plate, and it hovered just above the elevated road, great rotor blades cutting the air with a heavy thrum. Painted a glossy black, the Deathbird had two great laser turrets on its underside, front and back, as well as a plethora of bullet-fed chain guns along its sides. Both lasers and chain guns worked on swiveling pivots, sufficient to cover all fields of fire between them.
Twelve seconds to impact, the lasers were cycling around to pinpoint her.
Eleven seconds. Ten.
Brigid eyed the Deathbird, estimating the clearing distance beneath its skids. There wasn’t enough. Even if she managed to somehow outlast the lasers and all that other hardware the thing was packing, she simply couldn’t make the route.
Nine seconds.
Frantically, Brigid scoured up ahead, searching for all options. The road curved back toward the main body of the island just behind the chopper, an off-ramp located tantalizingly close, less than fifty yards beyond. Brigid’s eyes flicked back to the Deathbird, then beyond, spotting the reason that the road veered back landward. There was a building there, some kind of shipyard admin building by the look of it, a great towering thing like a glass knife thrust into the earth by some almighty god.
Eight.
The lasers were starting to glow as the power began firing through them, a ruby slash cleaving through the air toward her.
There was a trick she was beginning to recall, a trick she had learned when she was just a little girl, and one she had never stopped using. It was coming back to her now. All of it.
Brigid powered the automobile toward the barrier, pulling at the steering wheel as if she was wrestling with a bear. Beneath her, the tires screamed and she felt the car begin to roll.
* * *
I
N
THE
RED
ROOM
of caged muties, Kane reacted without conscious thought. His hand came up, bringing the Sin Eater blaster in an arc that ended in the stranger’s face.
The stranger reacted almost as quickly. Indeed, Kane could only marvel at the speed of the man’s reactions. The figure was dressed in light clothes, cotton pants and shirt, the latter open to midway down his chest, revealing a tanned and muscular torso. The man’s dark hair was gelled back and he wore a long knife on a low-slung holster at his waist. Kane guessed the man was in his early twenties, hired for muscle and grunt work.
As Kane’s blaster came up, the other man threw whatever he had been balancing in both hands at him. Kane stepped aside as a box full of spare parts came flying at him. The throw was off, but it didn’t matter, it had given his opponent that precious split second to step back from the line of fire before Kane could deliver a bullet to his skull.
“Damn!” Kane cursed as the man ducked back into the next room, pulling the door back. With his free hand, Kane snatched the door’s edge before it could slam shut, automatically raising his blaster to cover the gap.
Cotton Shirt-and-Pants was already down the end of a short corridor that was little more than a cupboard, yanking at the far door and raising the alarm. “Intruder!” he called. “Back inna storeroom.”
The storeroom.
Yeah, that’s all these muties’ lives were to these people, just another “product” they stored until a customer arrived to purchase it, their lives nothing more than figures on a profit tally. Kane hated them then, hated the whole operation that existed here in the heart of the refugee camp, preying on people who had nothing left but dreams, giving them nothing but fake lives and false hope.