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Beside Kane, Brigid was sprawled on the floor, her head spinning where it had struck the hard slate there, trying to shake the muzziness that occluded her thoughts. Wake up, she told herself. Wake up and act. If her body understood the words, then it didn’t seem inclined to play along.
All around Kane, people were dropping as the life force was sucked out of them by the stone abomination. Pregnant woman; bald man; teen with acne and dyed hair; overweight farmhand with a beard that touched his belly—all of them fell as the stone monster touched them with its distended fingers, exchanging their lives and strength for its own. The stone thing was buoyed with every touch, rising taller, each step more determined, and all the while its gaping wound of a mouth shrieked its hideous ululation.
“Time to put this stone wannabe out to pasture,” Kane grumbled as he stroked the trigger of the Sin Eater and sent a stream of bullets at the rough-hewn abomination.
Designated Task #009: Food Harvesting
Food is grown in massive hydroponics labs located in the west and north corners of Delta Level. Vast artificial fields have been sown with seeds which grow various crops—tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, etc.—in uniform lines. The crop is tested thoroughly throughout its lifespan to ensure it is growing in the correct manner: size, shape, color. Any imperfect crop is removed and recycled as feed for the animals in one of the other areas of Delta Level.
Picking the crops is partially automated, but the amount of moisture coupled with the gentle touch required means that humans are considered superior and more efficient with much of the menial work. As such, I have been assigned to work here two days a week as a rest from the construction of war machines on Epsilon Level. My first assignment is to tend to the pears which grow with resilience from a line of trees in room D41977. The crop is hard-skinned and tasteless, but it holds nutrients enough to sustain life. Most of it will be turned to pulp which is then added to the daily meal ration each citizen is allocated, wherein its lack of a distinctive taste will be rendered irrelevant.
My crop picking is slow because I am still new to the task and have yet to get used to the automated ladders used by the pickers. These ladders stand at a thirty-degree angle with a wheeled base, and they follow the instructions of a computer brain. The brain analyzes the optimum speed for fruit picking based on a scan of each tree and its crop, then follows that calculation to provide a window within which the tree must be stripped of its bounty. The speed seems fast to me, and it becomes inevitable that many of the crop which I pick are bruised. The supervisors show no concern for the bruised fruit, and merely chastise me for my inadequacy in stripping every pear tree in my designated batch.
“Your deficiency will be taken out of your food allowance next week,” a supervisor informs me without looking up from her tally sheets. I stare at the gray peaked cap she wears for a long moment, wondering if she might meet my eyes and perhaps explain how I am to increase productivity, but she never looks up.
The conclusion of my shift is accompanied by a very real sense of disappointment, the knowledge that I have failed to live up to the expectations that the barons have in me as a citizen of Ioville. My back aches from stretching, my arms, too, from constantly reaching above me. I vow to try harder tomorrow.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_42e162e1-50fb-5d57-af43-b78b522ec33c)
A stream of 9 mm bullets zipped across the temple at the wretched stone monster that had emerged from the fire. Kane watched as the bullets trailed from his Sin Eater, while around him two dozen of the faithful who had joined him on this pilgrimage looked horrified at the sudden turn of events. They believed they were there to give of themselves whatever their god required, even if it was their lives. But Kane didn’t believe—he knew better. He knew that this stone monstrosity was nothing more than a trick. The iron content in the blood it was being fed combined with the trigger inside those stone seeds, bringing it to nothing more than a cruel imitation of life. At least that’s what Kane guessed was happening as he squeezed the Sin Eater’s trigger.
Bullets hurtled toward the stone menace. The first bullets struck its rocky, mismatched hide and the creature let loose a surprised shriek, its distended fingers pulling free from two more sacrifices—a dark-skinned woman with a mop of braided hair and one of the robed acolytes who was ministering the proceedings. The stone monster’s fingers rattled back into the hands, the wrists pulling back and the overlong limbs retracting to a more normal length, returning to the stone figure’s shoulders. In their wake, its two victims sagged to the floor, visibly shaking, neither fully awake nor truly asleep.
Kane’s bullets sparked as they struck the creature’s rough hide, sounding like cymbals being clashed together with every rebound. But the monster only turned, fixing Kane with its dark, shadowy glare.
“You recognize me?” Kane challenged the creature as around him pilgrims ducked out of the way of the fight.
The stone creature tilted its head in the semblance of a nod.
“Yeah, I think you do,” Kane snarled. “I’m the guy who killed your daddy.”
The bastard child of a thousand deluded devotees hurtled toward Kane then, charging across the flame-lit temple floor, screaming an unearthly howl from its gaping wound of a mouth.
Kane’s Sin Eater pistol blasted again, a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets catching in the light of the flames like fireflies in the dusk.
The monster’s composite arms reached out and batted Kane’s bullets aside, like twin landslides waving impossibly through the air, lines of warm blood rippling between each loose stone.
Kane leaped back but he was too late. The creature grabbed him, shooting one of its extending arms toward him and snagging his Sin Eater out of his hand.
How do I get myself into these jams? Kane wondered as that inhuman arm flicked the Sin Eater aside.
But there was no time to think—only to act. As the stone monster hurtled closer, charging for all the world like a runaway steam train, Kane began running at it. The two figures met in a crash of breaking shale amid the firelit chamber, and suddenly Kane was running up the monster’s body, using its rocky crags as steps before driving his booted foot into the abomination’s face.
The monster wavered in place, great chunks of its still-forming body spilling to the floor like so much thrown sand.
All around the temple, the pilgrims were reacting with horror, calling for it to stop, asking who this man was who would dare violate their god. Kane ignored them as he leaped from the stone edifice that walked like a man, ducking and rolling to the slate floor even as the nightmare figure reached for him with one of its extending, pendulous arms. He recognized it—kind of. It was a pale imitation of Ullikummis, a memory only half-remembered, the details blurry, forgotten.
How do you break a thing that’s already broken? Kane wondered as a lashing arm came sailing toward his head in a flurry of stones and blood.
Kane dropped out of the way of that swinging extendable arm, slid on his buttocks across the slate floor to where his blaster had dropped, snatched it up as he rolled.
A half-dozen pilgrims surrounded Kane as he recovered, their outraged faces glaring at him. Two men took the lead and kicked Kane while he lay on the ground, booting him in the sides. Kane groaned as he felt the first foot strike him on the ribs, followed an instant later by a second kick in the gut, forcing him to double over and expel the breath he held.
Kane could not shoot them. They were victims. Stupid, yes, but victims all the same.
Another foot sailed at Kane’s face and he reacted instinctively, left arm snapping up to block it, then grabbing his attacker’s ankle and twisting. The pilgrim shrieked as a sudden stab of pain tore through his ligaments, and then he crashed to the floor beside Kane, grasping in agony at his twisted ankle.
From across the chamber, the hulking form of the stone monstrosity stalked through the flame-lit darkness, seeking out its next victim and the blood it desperately craved.
“Stop!” It was a woman’s voice, loud enough to penetrate the rabble of panic and confusion, and it was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light and clap of thunder.
Everyone in the chamber turned, all except for an elderly man who walked with a stick who was even now having his blood drained from him by the stone thing that had come to life.
Across the chamber, Brigid Baptiste was standing before the statue of her other self, of Brigid Haight. She had stripped off her jacket and the loose shirt she had worn, revealing the tight black bodysuit she wore beneath—the shadow suit. The shadow suits had been discovered in Redoubt Yankee and were so named because they absorbed light, reducing the profile and visibility of the wearer. However, in the flickering light of the temple, the shadow suit’s similarity to the sleek black leathers, which Brigid had worn while possessed by Haight, “wrapping her body in the dead” as she had termed it then, was impossible to miss. With her grim expression and wild halo of red-gold hair, she looked for all the world like the hateful thing she had been before—Ullikummis’s hand in darkness.
“Stop this, all of you,” Brigid shouted, her narrowed eyes scanning across every face in the room.
For a moment there was silence—shocked silence at this vision of the woman whose statue dominated one wall of the temple chamber. Then, the leader of the robed acolytes cried, “The demigoddess has returned!” He dropped to his knees, arms outthrust in praise.
Beside him, two more acolytes fell immediately to their knees, bending low until they touched the floor with their foreheads, muttering confused praises for the glorious return they were blessed to witness. In a few moments, it seemed that everyone in the temple had fallen to their knees to worship Brigid—all except for Kane, who lay sprawled and bloodied on the floor, and the stone monster that loomed over its latest victim.
Still surrounded, Kane peered between the kneeling bodies of his attackers, and his brow furrowed. “Baptiste?” he muttered incredulously. “Don’t tell me this has all got to you.”
“Hear me now and hear me well,” Brigid announced, pitching her voice in a low timbre of command. “This monster—” she pointed to the stone creature that had been brought to life in the flaming pit “—is a false god. He is not the great one. He is nothing but simple puppetry, brought to life to test your faith.”
A stunned buzz burbled through the worshippers, and one pilgrim loudly cried, “We’ve been tricked!”
“Yes, you have been tricked,” Brigid assured the crowd, striding toward them on her booted heels. “I walk among you now because such heresy cannot be allowed to flourish.”
As she passed Kane, Brigid caught his eye and he detected just the slightest wink of one narrowed eye. Relief sang through him, bolstering his tired limbs and aching body.
“B-but what should we...?” an elderly woman asked, confused by the direction her pilgrimage had turned.
“Leave this place,” Brigid told her, addressing everyone in the room. “Feed not this false idol. Let it wither and die, struck from your very minds in disgust.”
“Oh, brother,” Kane muttered. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we?” But no one heard him.
The pilgrims and the acolytes were stunned, and for a moment they all just knelt there, watching the demigoddess Brigid Haight walk among them, a vision from legend come back to life.
“Go now!” Brigid commanded. “Swiftly. While I deal with this pretender!” And she stomped with a determined swagger toward the stone monster that loomed by the fire pit.
There came a mass exodus from the temple then, pilgrims and acolytes hurrying out into the rain. Kane joined the crowd, slipping behind a pillar as sixty-something people hurried from the temple, which was alive with more flashes and bright bangs, as if a thunderstorm were occurring within its hallowed walls. Kane knew it wasn’t a thunderstorm, of course, or any other kind of godly, supernatural show. No, he had recognized the thing Brigid had used when she had made her first dramatic reappearance as “Brigid Haight.” She had employed a man-made device called a flashbang, similar in shape and size to a palm-sized ball bearing and designed as a nonlethal part of the standard Cerberus field mission arsenal. Once triggered, the flashbang brought an almighty flash of light and noise. It was similar to an explosive being set off, only the flashbang did no damage, as such. Instead, it was used by the Cerberus personnel to confuse and disorient opponents—and, just once, to pose as demigods, it seemed.
Once the temple was clear, Kane made his way across to Brigid, who was standing a good distance away from the other standing figure in the room—the stone monster—watching it warily as they slowly circled one another. Around them, the fallen bodies of almost a dozen pilgrims and one robed acolyte lay, their skin pale where the blood had been drained.
“So, what do we do now,” Kane asked, “your goddess-ness?”
Brigid shot him a look. “Worked, didn’t it?”
“I had things in hand,” Kane assured her.
“You were getting your ass handed to you by three hick farmers and an old woman who walked with a stick,” Brigid shot back.
Kane shrugged, knowing that now was not the time to argue. “Plan?”
Brigid eyed the stalking stone figure across the temple. It was moving slowly, its limbs breaking apart, chips of stone trailing behind the main body.
“It needs blood,” Brigid said. “Its body is made up of stone seeds—the obedience stones Ullikummis generated from his body.”
“Yeah, he’s a regular chip off the old block,” Kane agreed, as the stone monster lunged at him and Brigid.
The two Cerberus warriors danced out of the way—which was far easier now that the temple wasn’t crowded with other people—and they sprinted across the empty room until they were behind the fallen meteor, placing it between them and the monster.
“Those stone seeds require the iron content in human blood to power them, remember?” Brigid told Kane. “Without blood, they revert to a dormant state.”
“But Junior there just got a big feast of blood,” Kane reminded Brigid. “Enough to bring him to life.”
“Yes, enough to bring him to life,” Brigid agreed, “but not enough to sustain him. That’s why he needs to absorb the blood from his victims.”
The stone monster emerged from behind the meteor rock, unleashing a gurgled cry as it reached for Kane and Brigid. Brigid spun out of its reach while Kane dropped back and blasted a burst of fire from his Sin Eater. The monster swayed in place, recoiling from the impact of 9 mm bullets peppering its disjointed stone body.
“How long do you estimate before the kid needs his next feed?” Kane asked Brigid in a breathless voice as he hurried across the temple to join her.
“Hard to say,” Brigid answered, “but I think he’s moving slower than he was. Don’t you?”
Kane watched the stalking figure emerge from behind the rock prison. It was moving slower; Brigid was right. It seemed to lurch more now, and barely remained upright as it searched for the two Cerberus warriors—the only sources of blood left in the temple chamber.
“So, what—we keep out of that thing’s way until it burns through its energy source?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Brigid said with a smile. Kane looked down and saw what she held in her open hand. It was a metal sphere, similar to the flashbangs she had used to shock and awe the pilgrims in the temple—only this one was primed with a full explosive load.
The stone monster charged at them again, but this time Brigid was ready. As it came within a dozen feet of the Cerberus duo, she primed and tossed the explosive, then she and Kane ducked and turned away. A moment later, an explosion rocked the temple, and tiny chips of stone hurtled across the room as the monster’s body was split into a thousand pieces.
“I thought you came on this mission unarmed?” Kane challenged Brigid as they drew themselves up from the slate floor.
“No blaster,” Brigid agreed, “but I still sneaked a few things into my pockets. Just in case.”
“You sweet, sweet demigoddess,” Kane replied with a smirk. “No wonder your people love you so.”
Designated Task #015: Fitness
Twice a week, I have been assigned to a training facility on Cappa Level where I am instructed in basic protection. “A ville is only as safe as its weakest member,” we are told, and so each member is rigorously trained to remain in the peak of physical health.
The training is threefold. Emphasis is placed on the basic strengthening of the body—something I have been informed is unnecessary in my case as I entered Ioville in prime physical condition.
When this entry occurred I cannot say. However I have been led to understand it was recently.
The second task is combat, which takes the form of hand-to-hand defence along with instructions on how to initiate a successful attack. Once again, it appears that I am competent at these tasks, despite having no specific memory of training for them.
The third task involves the familiarity, usage and maintenance of weapons including firearms. Most of this training concentrates on the use of small arms. However, I have also been shown how to operate the USMG-73 heavy machine guns which arm the Sandcats I build in the workshop at Designated Task #004, the standard weapons arrays on Deathbird helicopters, and have been shown how to use and sharpen a combat knife.
Fitness strikes me as a strange task, because it is the only place in the ville where one hears talking between the participants. The instructors are all Magistrates and it seems that they are determined to make the citizens as proficient as they are.
The older citizens of Ioville struggle with the tasks.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_717834f6-cd8b-51ca-8e7a-9e60b74f869f)
Kane and Brigid exited the temple shortly after, taking a few sample stones with them for full analysis back at Cerberus headquarters. Brigid pulled her jacket back on over her shadow suit, and used the shirt she had removed to tie her hair up like a scarf, wrapping her red-gold locks in the light cloth to disguise her most eye-catching feature and enable her to pass among pilgrims without comment. They left the temple amid another explosion from a flashbang, ensuring that no one saw them exit.
The acolytes and pilgrims were still waiting outside, close to the temple, kneeling and chanting as they listened to the ominous sounds of explosions and wondering what was occurring within. Brigid had had two more charges with her while Kane was carrying four of his own and so, setting timers on the devices, they had left them to continue exploding, putting on a show that ran for another ten minutes, with a new explosion every couple of minutes to stop the curious pilgrims from reentering their sacred place too soon.
“Our love is rock and rock never breaks,” the devoted repeated as a mantra from where they knelt in the gravel outside the temple doors.
Kane shook his head in despair as he and Brigid emerged during a cacophonous explosion. “Poor deluded saps,” he muttered, disgusted by their devotion.
Some of the pilgrims appeared terrified by what they had witnessed, while a few bore tears of joy on their smiling faces as they praised the return of the demigoddess. The tears mixed with the relentless rain, washing from the heavens with disinterest.
Kane and Brigid joined the worshippers outside the temple, and when the next explosion rocked the sacred site they were ready. During the general confusion, Kane and Brigid slipped away, taking a route across the fields, staying low to the ground and hidden by the overgrown wildflowers from a casual glance. Behind them, the other pilgrims and the acolytes bowed their heads lower, imagining what must be going on inside the temple grounds. They were dumb, in Kane’s opinion, but it wasn’t their fault—the barons had kept people dumb, drummed out their curiosity. The barons hadn’t wanted people—they had wanted devoted automatons who would worship and praise them. Here was their legacy.
Brigid and Kane walked in silence for a while, just creating as much distance from the site of the temple as they could. Finally, Kane turned to Brigid, worry creasing his brow.
“You know, for a moment back there I thought you’d turned sour,” Kane admitted, the concern clear on his face.
Brigid shook her head. “Never. Never again,” she promised.
It was all they needed to say, but they had needed to say it. Brigid had been changed once by Ullikummis, possessed by her dark self, the creature called Haight. She had turned on Kane and their allies, shot Kane in the chest while he was defenceless. The wound between them would always be there, but they worked every day to get past it, to erase its memory.
Kane and Brigid were anam-charas, soul friends, their destinies entwined throughout all of time. No matter what form they took, no matter what bodies their souls wore, they were destined to always find one another, watch over one another, protect one another. It wasn’t love, not in a carnal way, anyway—it was something deeper and more transcendental than that. Their friend Domi had once asked Brigid if the anam-chara bond was like they were brother and sister, and Brigid had laughed. “If Kane were my brother he might listen to me once in a while,” she had said. Beyond that, she had never been able to explain what the bond really was; she only knew it was theirs and that it was eternal.
They trekked for an hour before reporting in to Cerberus to request their ride back home. By that time they had reached a dirt track running between two vegetable fields, carrots to one side, potatoes to the other, a distant farmhouse looking out toward them.
“Grant, this is Kane,” Kane said, activating his Commtact. The Commtact was a small radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin of 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 subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtact could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funnelled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the additional effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf they would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
The radio link molded below Kane’s ear spoke with the familiar voice of his partner. “Hey, Kane, how did it go?” Even over the Commtact relay, Grant’s voice was deep as rumbling thunder.
“We bewildered and destroyed,” Kane replied. “Just another day at the office.”
Grant’s laughter echoed through Kane’s skull from the Commtact.
“Triangulate on our position and give us a ride,” Kane said. “We’re all set to go home.”
The triangulation was easy. Kane, Brigid and all other Cerberus personnel had a biolink transponder injected into their bloodstream. The transponder used nanotechnology to relay a subject’s position and detail their current state of health to a satellite pickup station, which then delivered that information to the Cerberus redoubt in the Montana mountains. This technology along with the Commtacts allowed Cerberus to remain in constant touch with its personnel while they were in the field, and it could be accessed by the operations staff to home in on an individual to deliver aid.
In this case, that aid came in the form of a Deathbird, a modified AH-64 Apache helicopter, that arrived over the field of potatoes, shaking their fluttering leaves in its passage. The Deathbird featured a turret-mounted chain gun, as well as missile armaments—and it had been on call in case the mission went sour.
