Judgment Plague

Still crouching atop the rock, DePaul turned, scanning the area all the way back to the ranch. The gunfire was easing now, the constant blasts replaced by occasional bursts of sound as Irons and Bellevue mopped up the last of the farmhands. There was no one else about. Whatever other security the farm had employed had been drawn into the firefight and killed.

DePaul scrambled back down the rock, marching around to its far side and checking on his target. The man was dead, eyes open but unfocused, blood pooling beneath his head. DePaul took the man’s rifle and checked him over, swiftly and professionally, for other weapons, finding a hand pistol and a knife. He stripped him of these before making his way back down to the farm compound, by which time the senior magistrates had finished containing the farmers.

“You did good today, rookie,” Irons told DePaul as he saw him approach. He was disarming the dead ranchers, tossing their guns behind him into the open door of the Sandcat. Bellevue sat on the lip of the seat, taking stock of the illegal weapons.

“Thanks,” DePaul said. “Sorry I missed the main action.”

“You got the main action,” Irons corrected. “Nailed it. That sniper woulda had both our heads if you hadn’t moved so quickly. You did yourself proud.”

“What happens now?” he asked, gazing around at the farm and the dead bodies left in the wake of the firefight. There was a scent in the air this close to the pen, sweet like refined sugar. It was mutie sweat, buckets of it, waiting to be processed and sold.

“We’ll free the muties,” Irons told him, “and leave for the birds and wolves these poor saps who thought they could take on magistrates.”

DePaul nodded. His first patrol of the Outlands had been a success.

Chapter 2

Ten years later

“Well, this royally stinks,” Kane said as he pulled the rebreather mask from his face. Barely covering his mouth and nostrils, the mask fed oxygen in the same way a diver’s breath mask does.

Kane waded through the murky, knee-deep water that covered the floor outside the mat-trans chamber, a scowl on his face as he looked around. He had expected trouble, hence the rebreather, but it was still grim seeing the place in person. He lit the way with a compact but powerful xenon flashlight that bathed the mold-scarred walls of the control room in stark brilliance.

Kane was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, with long, rangy limbs and a sleek, muscular torso hidden beneath the second skin of his shadow suit. He was handsome, with a square jaw, and had dark, cropped hair and gray-blue eyes that seemed to take in every detail and could look right through you.

There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his alertness and the way he held himself, and personalitywise, too, for he could be both loner and pack leader.

The shadow suit’s dark weave clung to his taut body, made from an incredible fabric that acted like armor and was capable of deflecting a blade and redistributing blunt trauma. The shadow suit had other capabilities, too, providing a regulated environment for its wearer, allowing Kane to survive in extremes of temperature without breaking a sweat or catching a chill. He had augmented his shadow suit with a denim jacket with enough pockets to hide crucial supplies for a scouting mission like this one, dark pants and scuffed leather boots with age-old creases in them. The boots were a legacy from his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate, copies of the boots he had worn on shift before he had crossed Baron Cobalt and fled from the ville along with his partner and best friend, Grant, and a remarkable woman called Brigid Baptiste.

Both Grant and Brigid accompanied Kane now. They were also wearing rebreathers and were wading along behind him as he exited the mat-trans chamber and made his way through the flooded control room of the redoubt. The trio was the exploration team for an outlawed group called Cerberus, based in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and dedicated to the protection of humankind.

Brigid pocketed her rebreather. “Everyone be careful. That water smells stagnant,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Don’t drink it,” Kane said. “Gotcha.”

Brigid shook her head in despair at his flippant attitude. Typical Kane.

Brigid was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with pale skin, emerald eyes and long red hair the color of sunset, tied back for the mission today. Her high forehead suggested intelligence, while her full lips spoke of a more passionate side. In reality she exhibited both these facets and many more besides. Like Kane, Brigid wore a shadow suit. In her case, she had augmented it with a short dark jacket that did nothing to disguise the swell of her breasts, and she wore a low-slung holster at her hip holding her trusted TP-9 semiautomatic pistol.

Where Kane had been a magistrate, Brigid was once an archivist, and while she could hold her own in a fight, she was equally at home poring over books and data. She had one particular quality that made this a weapon in its own right—an eidetic memory that meant she could retain information in the manner of a photograph in her mind’s eye. Her incredible bank of knowledge had helped herself and her companions out of more than one tight corner.

The final member of the team was Grant, an ominous, hulking figure with skin dark as mahogany. Like Kane, he was an ex-magistrate who had been caught up in the same conspiracy and forced to flee from Cobaltville to roam the Outlands. In his mid-thirties, Grant had recently taken to shaving his head, and sported a gunslinger’s mustache. Like his companions, he wore a shadow suit, over which he had added his favored duster coat. The garment appeared to be made of black leather, though in truth the fabric was a fireproof Kevlar-Nomex weave capable of deflecting bullets. Neither he nor Kane appeared armed, but they were; their blasters were hidden in quick-release holsters strapped to their wrists, the same sin eater weapons they had worn as magistrates years before.

Grant sniffed the air but could not really detect the stagnant, musty smell the others spoke of. His nose had been broken multiple times, which had affected its sensitivity. “Shouldn’t be wet like this,” he grumbled in a voice like rumbling thunder. “Something must’ve sprung a leak.”

“Great deduction, Detective,” Kane deadpanned as he led the way through the room and out to the twin aisles of monitoring desks that faced the mat-trans chamber.

Together, the trio scouted the control room, assuring themselves that they were alone and not being observed. The room was large, roughly thirty feet square, with rows of computers that dominated the space and had once been used, two hundred years ago, to monitor and program the comings and goings via the mat-trans unit. There were other desks here, too, one housing a half dozen telephone receivers, each one a different color. A couch and two easy chairs were set around a low coffee table in the farthest corner. Ancient magazines rested atop the table, while the water lapped just inches below.

There were also several large computer banks lining one of the walls, a massive CPU held in a metal cabinet with armaglass front, and a whole row of printers with paper still spooling from them as if the site had been abandoned two minutes ago and not two centuries. The paper in the bottom-most printer had come free, however, and its slowly disintegrating remains floated on the dirty water that had filled the room. Beside the farthest bank of printers was a reinforced steel door rolled back on its tracks. Water sloshed in the corridor beyond, level with that in the control room.

Everything here had been dedicated to one thing: the operation of the mat-trans, a system of transport dating back to the late twentieth century, where it had been the sole province of the United States military. Similar projects existed worldwide, but the U.S. system had been retained solely for the military in a series of hidden redoubts, protected bases that could withstand a nuclear assault. The redoubts had been devised as backup should the worst happen, and when it had, on that fateful January day in 2001, and nuclear missiles had rained down on the United States and across the world, the redoubts had stood firm as safe havens for anyone who could gain access to them. However, hidden and secret as they were, plus being locked, and heavily protected with military codes, they had by and large proved to be impregnable and often impossible to find. Which was why so many of them survived two centuries on, like the buried tombs of ancient Pharaohs.

This redoubt, however, had highlighted a problem less than twenty-four hours ago, which had been picked up by the powerful monitoring equipment of the Cerberus facility.

Grant made his way through the doors and into the corridor beyond. “I’ll check out the local amenities,” he joked, though his face was deadly serious. The team had done these kinds of missions before, and knew it didn’t pay to be anything less than careful when entering unknown territory.

Wading back through the murky water that swished almost to her knees, Brigid engaged her commtact and reported in. “Cerberus, we’re in. Mat-trans is clear. Automatic lights have failed, and the control room is waterlogged.”

The commtacts were small implanted communications devices worn by 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 embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalisation. In theory, even if a user went deaf, he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, courtesy of the commtact device.

A voice came back over Brigid’s commtact a moment later, broadcast from the Cerberus redoubt many miles away in Montana. It was Brewster Philboyd, one of the operators who helped run the base, including its communications desk. “Any signs of damage?” he asked.

“Negative,” Brigid confirmed. She was already eyeing the mat-trans using the powerful illumination of her xenon beam. The octagonal chamber took up fully one-third of the control room, featuring a sealed door like an airlock, and armaglass walls that could repel a bullet. The glass was tinted a muddy shade of brown, much like the water that had seeped into the redoubt. There were some scuff marks here and there, and the base was hidden beneath the murky water, but nothing looked broken, and the monitoring desks that served the mat-trans were undamaged.

“Remote reports flagged a reengaging of the power cores,” Philboyd reminded Brigid, as if she of all people would ever need reminding.

“Well, I can’t see any signs of...” She paused as Kane indicated something with the toe of his boot. It was hard to see with the swirl of dirty water masking it, but several panels at the base of the mat-trans chamber’s exterior had been pulled away, bent back with considerable force. The affected panels were located in line with the lone door. “What is that?” Brigid muttered.

“Please repeat,” Philboyd responded.

She ignored him, ducking down to get a closer look.

“Seems like someone took a crowbar to it,” Kane said, tapping one of the bent grilles with his toe. “Went at it pretty hard, too—these things are built sturdy.”

Brigid examined the submerged, damaged plate, reaching in and wiggling it a little this way and that. The water was ice-cold, smarting like a bite. The panel was a covering for the circuitry that controlled the functionality of the mat-trans, with a slatted section to allow for excess heat to be expelled in times of high traffic. The plate was made of burnished steel and was still connected—in a fashion—to the mat-trans chamber itself, albeit by just one rivet that was barely clinging to its drill hole. “Looks like someone’s tried to gain access,” Brigid summarized over the commtact link.

“’Nother one here.” Kane indicated another panel around the side of the chamber’s base. This one had been removed entirely. “Got some marks here, too,” he added, shining the fierce beam of his flashlight on the armaglass beside the door.

When Brigid looked she saw triple scrapes marking the surface, running quite low down—hip and knee level—both left and right of the door. The gashes looked like...

“Claws,” she said, relaying the observation to Philboyd back at home base. “Someone’s definitely been trying to get inside.”

“Or something,” Kane remarked poignantly.

Cerberus was at the center of the mat-trans network, and its personnel monitored the system for any potential problems or threats. With the instantaneous nature of travel via its system, the mat-trans was, potentially, a very powerful resource to any group. However, it was largely unknown to the general public—and Cerberus intended to keep it that way. When a standard monitoring query had resulted in an error code response from this particular mat-trans unit, the CAT Alpha exploration team, made up of Kane, Grant and Brigid, had been sent to investigate. This unit was located about eighty miles east of Cobaltville, the old stomping ground of Kane and his partners. A mile underground and taking water from who knew where, it felt a long way from home.

A new voice spoke over the linked commtacts as Brigid examined the indentations in the mat-trans wall. “Can you elaborate on that, dear Brigid?” It was Mohandas Lakesh Singh, popularly known as Lakesh, the leader of the Cerberus operation and a man with an incredible history with the mat-trans project. A theoretical physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh had been born in the twentieth century, where his expertise had been applied to the original development of the mat-trans process. A combination of cryogenic hibernation and organ replacement had seen him emerge in the twenty-third century as the leader of what had begun as a covert rebellion against Baron Cobalt, but had ultimately developed into something even more noble—the Cerberus organization.

Brigid ran her fingers along the indentations in the armaglass. “Regular relative placement, three score marks each time,” she said, thoughtfully. “These are claw marks.”

Kane looked at her and nodded grimly. “Same thing I was thinking, Baptiste.”

Lakesh sounded thoughtful as he spoke over their commtacts. “A wild animal would not have the intelligence to break into a redoubt, nor the motivation to try to access the mat-trans.”

“Maybe no one broke in,” Kane said. “The place is waterlogged—could be a wall breach somewhere.”

“But look, Kane,” Brigid interrupted. “The claw marks around the door, the removed panels—this is a deliberate attempt to gain entry into the mat-trans. And Lakesh is right—no wild animal would do that.”

“Then it’s one that’s not so wild,” Kane retorted defiantly. “I swear, you brain-boxes and your logic—”

Before he could finish the insult, Grant came stomping in from the corridor where he had been scouting, a worried look on his face. “Wake up, guys—there’s something alive out there.”

“Something—?” Kane began, jogging across the room to the open door.

Brigid activated her commtact and signed off. “Lakesh, Brewster, we’ll have to get back to you shortly. Looks like we may have a situation here.” She cut the communication before either man could reply.

Kane and she followed Grant through the open door.

* * *

OUTSIDE, THE CORRIDOR was knee deep in water and its walls were streaked with mold. Its proportions were large, wide enough to drive a SandCat through without touching.

“Down there,” Grant said, pointing to his left.

Kane followed him, both men sloshing through the dark water, while Brigid followed more slowly.

“What did you see?” Kane asked, keeping his voice low.

“Can’t be sure,” Grant replied. “Looked big, though—either a leg or a tail moving just beneath the water. When it crossed into the circle of light it turned real fast and scooted back the way it came.”

“So it’s not blind, then,” Kane reasoned. “Just shy.”

“It could be whatever’s been tampering with the mat-trans,” Brigid proposed in a whisper.

“Could be,” Kane agreed as the group continued making slow progress along the corridor.

There was nothing there, just that knee-deep water and the mold, the sense of cold palpable all around them despite the environmental stability granted by their shadow suits.

The Cerberus crew trudged onward, sloshing slowly through the murky waters. The light of their xenon beams lit the dark walls and cloudy depths.

“I don’t like this,” Kane muttered, his nose twitching as he took the lead. Back in his days as a hard-contact magistrate, he had been known for his point-man sense, an indefinable ability to detect danger in what seemed to be the most harmless of situations. The gift seemed uncanny, but was in fact a combination of the same five senses anyone else had, but so acute it seemed incredible.

“What do you sense?” Brigid asked.

“Not sure,” Kane said, running the beam of his flashlight over the tunnel-like walls before them. He cocked his head, listening. “There’s something moving out that way,” he murmured, taking another step.

Without warning, he disappeared, sinking beneath the waters in a rush of movement.

Chapter 3

“What th—!” Grant spit as he waded through the water after Kane’s disappearing form.

“Grant, wait!” Brigid called, reaching for the big man’s arm.

Although her strength was nothing compared to his own, he stopped when he felt her hand touch him. “Kane’s in there....” he began.

“I saw,” Brigid confirmed, “but we have to be logical about this or we’ll all get dragged under.”

Grant knew she was right.

“Kane, do you copy?” she called, activating the subdermal commtact. “Kane, I repeat—do you copy?”

Grant frowned as he looked at her.

“Nothing,” she admitted. She looked at the dark water in the harsh beam of her xenon flashlight. “I’d estimate this is less than two feet deep,” she reasoned.

“Maybe eighteen inches,” Grant agreed.

“Where we stand,” Brigid continued. “But Kane dropped, which means it’s deeper ahead.”

Grant nodded, passing her his flashlight. “Here, hold this,” he said. Then, following her logic, he sank down on his knees and crawled forward, hands sluicing through the water as he felt his way. “Hard floor,” he reported, “with a little give, like carpet maybe.” He reached forward, moving slowly. “Still floor, still floor...there!” He turned back to Brigid, smiling. “There’s a drop here, stairs maybe.”

She watched as he dipped lower, still reaching forward, testing the terrain. “Careful,” she said, when his face came close to the water.

“It’s all right,” Grant assured her. “I think I feel somethi—”

At that moment, Grant felt something wrap around his arm, and in an instant he, too, was dragged under.

Brigid splashed forward, playing the beam of the flashlight over the dark surface. “Didn’t I just say to be careful?” she muttered, gazing into the murk.

* * *

GRANT WAS SINKING. There was something dragging on his right arm, using its weight to pull him down in the water, deep down into the gloom. He had at least had foresight enough to take a breath as he’d felt the thing grab him, wrap around him, pull him down. Now he circulated that breath in his lungs as he was dragged ever onward.

He couldn’t see a thing, it was so dark. The only light was back up at the surface: Brigid using the xenon flashlight.

He would drown. That’s what was going to happen.

Forget about finding Kane for a moment, just save yourself, Grant told himself. You ain’t no good to Kane dead.

The thing held tightly to his right wrist like a manacle, a dark shape dragging him down and down and down. For a moment Grant saw something flash in the darkness, a row of teeth wide as his forearm.

As the creature opened its mouth for a better grip, Grant pulled his arm away, then kicked as hard as he could, simultaneously stunning whatever it was and propelling himself away, back toward the surface.

* * *

TOPSIDE, BRIGID BAPTISTE was standing at the edge of the deep well beneath the redoubt floor. It should not be there, she knew—redoubts were designed to be impregnable, and the mat-trans located at the base.

She wondered how big the gap was. Could she step over it, if she managed to locate the far rim? And how deep was it? A few feet, or a quarter mile or more? Most importantly, where did it lead?

She tried her commtact again, desperately hoping for an answer from Kane or from Grant, wishing that one of them could hear her and respond.

“Come on, Kane, come on, Grant—one of you say something already,” she hissed into the hidden mic.

Then she spotted a dark shape materializing beneath her in the depths, and a moment later the waters surged and Grant came lunging to the surface, gasping for air.

“Grant, you’re okay,” she called, wading over to him.

He winced as she shone the light over his face, one thousand candles of wattage blasting into his eyes like a nuclear explosion.

“Sorry...sorry,” Brigid began, turning the beam away. As she did so, she saw the figure looming behind her, also emerging from the water, twin rows of teeth gleaming as they caught the flashlight’s ray. The creature’s skin looked dark and rippled in the harsh glare of the xenon light, almost like armor, and for a moment Brigid’s mind whirled, fearing that this was another Annunaki overlord, reemerged on Earth to enslave mankind. But it wasn’t Annunaki; it seemed more animal than human, a wild thing.

The creature pulled itself out of the water into a position that Brigid guessed was a close approximation of standing upright. It was unclothed and taller than a man, about seven feet at full extension, with a long snout like a dog and lips pulled back from vicious pointed teeth. The teeth followed the jaw around from sides to front, each one the length of Brigid’s pinkie finger. The being had a thick, muscular tail, as long again as its height, curling across the floor, just visible in the water. Brigid figured it had been a crocodile once, a few iterations of DNA ago. It was a mutie now.

“Brigid,” Grant gasped from behind her, “get down.”

She responded automatically, ducking low as Grant began firing on the emerging creature. Two bullets flew, racing to the target, drilling against the chest of the croc-like mutie. The sin eater sounded loud in the confines of the corridor, echoes reverberating with the swish of the water. In the aftermath, the croc staggered back a step, then plunged back down, disappearing with a splash of its enormous tail.

Brigid spoke angrily, still watching the location where the creature had disappeared. “What are you thinking? We don’t know if that thing’s a friend or foe.”

“Yeah, we do. One of them just pulled me down under the surface,” Grant declared. “I’m calling it.”

Brigid flashed him a look before scanning the vicinity. “Any sign of Kane?” she asked.

“I couldn’t see shit down there,” Grant told her. “But I can tell you this much—it’s a bastard long drop.”

“What is it?” Brigid asked. “A well? Sinkhole?”

He glared at her. “I was too busy fighting for my life to check.”

“Humph. It happens,” she retorted, playing the xenon beam about once more.

Suddenly there was movement all around the two Cerberus warriors. They sensed it as much as saw it, and then five more of the croc-like creatures emerged from the water—two from the corridor leading back to the mat-trans, three more from the deeper space behind Grant.

“We could be in trouble,” he muttered, raising his blaster again.