Cosmic Rift (20 page)

Saladin, middle-aged and feeling the weight of years and rich food, repressed a sigh and repeated what the lackey had said in a tone of disdain. “‘Armor of purest sunlight’?” He stroked thoughtfully at his long, thick beard. The beard seemed to be more gray each time he looked in a mirror; so much so, he wondered if he should invest some of the wealth that being sultan of Egypt and Syria had granted him in a better class of mirror. “You make it sound as though this warrior was being bathed in the light of Allah himself.”

“He fought as though he was,” the lackey said, spitting on the floor to emphasize his point. “Killed fourteen of my men, two of my own brothers.”

Saladin didn’t bother to repress his sigh that time. He appreciated that these fanatics could get so very worked up, but it was beyond the pale when they started to be unhygienic merely to add emphasis to a statement. Where had all that started, anyway?

“We stopped him,” the fanatic continued without noticing his commander’s disgust. “Netted him like a fish. He struggles but he cannot get free.”

“And does this glorious sun-clad warrior have a name?” Saladin asked.

“Better than that,” the fanatic said, his smile revealing crooked front teeth, one of which was missing entirely. “He has a grave waiting. By your command, of course.”

Saladin rolled his eyes, repressing a sigh. “Of course.”

* * *

S
ALADIN
TOOK
NO
pleasure in overseeing the execution of the man in the golden armor. The captive looked young, and he was handsome in his way, with sun-bronzed skin and a chestnut beard. But his skin and his beard and his armor were all marred with blood, and there was a black stain across the fantastic armor where it had been burned.

However, it was his eyes that drew Saladin’s attention. They were like an animal’s eyes now, the wild look of someone who was losing more blood than a man could endure. He was tied by the wrists to a post in the courtyard, and he had been forced—or perhaps had chosen—to stand as the sun set over the walls of the fort.

Saladin stood close and pitched his voice at a low level. “What did they do to you?” he asked with genuine concern.

“Everything,” the prisoner replied. He spoke with an accent, though he had mastered their tongue. “They’re afraid of me.”

“Yes,” Saladin agreed. “Already you have become a figure of mythology—the hunter in gold.”

The enemy looked at Saladin with fierce defiance in his eyes. “You’re making a huge miscalculation,” he said. “If you kill me—if you are able—more will come, and they will wipe you from the face of the earth.”

Feet together, Saladin bowed respectfully to the hunter in gold, little more than the slightest nod of his turbaned head. “I have heard such threats before,” he said, “and have no doubt I shall hear them again. If I do not—if you are right—then perhaps we shall meet again on another battlefield and laugh at how foolish I must have seemed at this moment to you.”

The hunter in gold looked defiant. “Perhaps.”

“You have suffered enough,” Saladin told him. “Death is never kind, but it can be quick. I will insist upon that.”

“You will try,” the starman said. “But your men will fail. They cannot remove my armor. It’s genetically tuned to my skin, there’s no way for you to release me from it.”

Wearily, Saladin shook his head. “Then you make it hard on yourself,” he said regretfully. “Tell me, hunter in gold—what do your people call you?”

“Some call me starman,” the prisoner replied. “My father named me Neal.”

Saying nothing, Saladin bowed respectfully before turning away from the prisoner. What he told his lieutenants and what they chose to do, with the eyes of the fanatics watching, were two different things. But war makes monsters of the most humble of men sometimes.

Authentiville, Cosmic Rift

“W
HEN
N
EAL
’
S
REPORTS
ceased entirely, I took a scouting party planet-side. When we found him, my son was in pieces,” King Jack finished sorrowfully. “Unable to remove his armor, those animals had starved him and let him die under the heat of the sun. They had pulled apart his dried body using horses, one tied to each limb while his body was nailed to the spot.”

Grant swallowed hard while Kane let out an audible gasp.

“I can only hope he was dead by then,” the old king said. “To think otherwise... Well, who can contemplate such a thing about their own child?”

Jack took a deep breath before continuing, and it was clear he was visibly shaken. “I wanted to bury him, but parts of his body were missing,” he said. “
They
had taken them—perhaps as trophies. Damned surface men. When I realized, I admit I lost my perspective.”

Kane nodded. “Understandable. We’re both sorry for your bereavement.”

Jack thanked the man. “Wertham had been my trusted engineer for almost as long as the Authentiville concept had existed,” he explained. “In Neal’s death, he saw justification to push his exploration of the uses of the materiel we had discovered. And I didn’t stop him. He believed—perhaps correctly—that the surface people we had left behind were jealous of what we had, and that they would one day come to take it from us. I should have stopped him sooner, but a part of me wanted vengeance on those who had murdered my son.”

“What did Wertham do?” Kane asked gently.

“His experiments had taken him in so many different directions,” the monarch in gold replied. “Where my son explored the world, Wertham chose to explore the plane of thought. He used combinations of alien nutrients to force his mind wide-open. When he came back from that vision quest, he had ideas for a thousand devices, each one almost beyond description. But there was one such device that he called the World Armor—a Target Invasion, Total Annihilation and Negation suit.”

“What did it do?” asked Kane.

“Exactly what it says,” King Jack said grimly. “The suit is worked by a remote operator and dropped in hostile territory. It sets a target to invade and proceeds to annihilate everything in its path.”

“Sounds like a nuclear bomb,” Grant muttered, and Kane nodded.

“You said this thing was built?” Kane confirmed.

“Built, yes, but never launched,” King Jack replied. “At least, not to date.”

“Yeah,” Kane said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

Chapter 26

“I still want to obey him,” Brigid said, rubbing at her temples. She and Domi were prowling the street close to the palace. The citizens of Authentiville paid them no attention, going almost trancelike about their business, as if nothing had changed.

“Think past it,” Domi said, snarling like a wolf. “We need to stop this...pretend-king man.”

“Yes, we do,” Brigid agreed, eyeing the palace entrance. It was dark there, like the alleyway where they had hidden, all power shut down. Brigid’s brow furrowed. “Why would he do that?” she asked, speaking to herself.

“What?” Domi queried.

“The power,” Brigid said. “The first thing Wertham did was shut down the power. Why would he do that?”

Domi shrugged. “Put people in the dark? Unsettle them?”

“Maybe,” Brigid said. “Or maybe he didn’t shut down the power. Maybe he diverted it for something.”

“Like what?” Domi asked.

“The only way to find out the answer to that is to speak to Wertham himself,” Brigid proposed. “Which means we need to get back in the palace.”

“No problem, right?”

“Right.”

Together, the two women slipped inside the towering doorway of the enormous building.

It was unguarded. Within, everything was dark. Echoes drifted to them from the distance, filtering through the vast palace corridors and creating a sense of tension.

They were in the reception room where Brigid, Kane and Grant had admired the magnificent statues. Like the rest of the palace, it had been plunged into shadow, turning its towering guardians into ominous giants, not quite alive but still too close for comfort, as if they might come to life at any moment. Domi eyed them warily while Brigid replaced the night lenses on the bridge of her nose. For Brigid, the lobby came into stark contrast once more, as if someone had switched on the lights.

“It’s clear,” Brigid said, stepping into the room. “We’re all alone.”

Domi nodded, and Brigid watched as she reached around and opened a pouch along the armor’s seam at the small of her back, pulling out a familiar item. It was the Detonics Combat Master that had become Domi’s signature weapon. The albino girl checked the clip before flipping off the safety.

“Where now?” she asked.

“The royal court, I guess...” Brigid proposed uncertainly.

Together, the two women strode through the reception room, alert to any danger. Before they had gotten halfway, the distinct sound of raised voices filtered through the air toward them. Someone was shouting.

* * *

“W
HY
DID
THEY
listen to you?” Rosalind demanded.

Wertham pounded through the golden palace like a hurricane, with Ronald and Queen Rosalind following in his wake.

“Why would Jack’s people do that?” the queen pressed.

Wertham turned on her, and she saw that his face was drawn in a cruel mask of concentration. “He who controls the God Rod controls the world,” he snapped. “Did you never realize that, Rosalind dear? That that was the source of your husband’s popularity?”

“No!” the queen insisted. “Jack’s a good man. His people would not turn like this. You did something...”

“Yes!” Wertham screamed. “I fixed everything, repaired the stagnant mess this city has been left in. We should have been kings of Earth, not cowering here in this quantum cupboard, afraid to show our faces to the very people we left behind.”

“No good comes of war,” Roz said, struggling to keep up with Wertham’s furious pace.

“
All
good comes of war,” Wertham bellowed. “Everything you see here, everything in this whole wonderful city, is the by-product of war, Roz. Don’t you realize that? Does it take my Devil Rod to make you see how much Jack has been holding us all back?”

“Devil Rod...?” Roz repeated fearfully.

Wertham waved his silver-shelled replacement God Rod before her face. “This!” he yelled. “The Domination Executive, Vanquish and Immobilisation Link—a God Rod to override everything Jack’s can do.

“I designed his. Improving upon it was no trouble, although finding parts while trapped in that prison wasn’t easy. Still, I wasn’t going anywhere, was I? I could take my time getting it right.”

They had reached the end of the corridor. Wertham turned back to Ronald, handing him the Devil Rod. “Take care of this,” he said. “You’ll need it...Your Majesty.”

Ronald took the baton, and for a moment he was staring into its depths, transfixed by the coruscating energies that endlessly played across its surface in the colors of a bruise. “Wertham,” he said, thanking the man with a nod.

“We all have our roles to play,” Wertham told him. “Remember that.”

Then, Wertham strode away, hurrying down a side corridor.

“Where is he going now?” Rosalind asked as she watched Wertham retreat from view.

“Where do you think?” Ronald taunted, slipping the Devil Rod into a recess of his motion chair. “He promised the people a war.”

Rosalind gasped as realization began to dawn. “He wouldn’t...”

Ronald gestured to one of the nearby windows. “Look,” he said.

The high window gave an enviable view of the city, plunged now into darkness by the power drain. The blue-haired queen scanned the view, searching for the thing she dreaded, but she hardly needed to strain. In the darkness, the glow of the Doom Furnace was even more pronounced. It sat at the center of Authentiville like an underground stream of lava, its brilliance lighting the buildings around it in a warm glow.

“He’s relit the Doom Furnace,” Rosalind said. “But how...?”

“The war machine trundles on,” Ronald told her, “consuming everything in its path. But don’t worry—we’ll have power back soon enough.”

Queen Rosalind realized then what it was that Wertham had done. When he had taken command of the palace, setting his false God Rod—or Devil Rod—in place, he had channeled all the power of the city to the Doom Furnace. No wonder the streets were dark and the palace lights flickered.

Roz turned from the window. “You don’t need to do this, Ronald,” she said. “We would forgive you.”

“I don’t want your forgiveness,” Ronald retorted. “I want your love. Did you never realize that?”

Roz shook her head. “That’s impossible,” she said. “Don’t you see?”

Ronald grabbed her by the wrist and sent power to the motion chair’s mechanisms, hurrying back down the corridor toward the throne room, dragging the queen behind him. “Tunes change,” he told her, “in time.”

* * *

B
RIGID
AND
D
OMI
watched the scene play out from a doorway recess, hidden by the long shadows that now dominated the palace. They had been drawn by the sound of the raised voices, and Domi had found a quick route here, utilizing the pegasuit’s wings to glide the two of them through vast stretches of now-abandoned corridors.

“I’ll stay on Wertham,” Brigid whispered as the man in green stormed off. “You see if you can get that Devil Rod away from Ronald.”

In response, Domi flashed a smile at her partner. There was no warmth in that smile.

The corridors of the palace were of colossal proportions, stretching through its depths like train tunnels. The darkness played to the advantage of the Cerberus women now, allowing them to move quite freely and to, by and large, hide in plain sight.

Brigid had no idea where she was. Having an eidetic memory could not magically conjure up the floor plans to the palace or give her the foresight to guess where it was Wertham was leading her. All she could do was follow and hope that Wertham didn’t lead her into a dead end. At least he was easy to spot with the night lenses, the green-grass color of his prison uniform vibrant in the tans and browns of the capacious corridors. That advantage allowed Brigid to hang back, keeping the distance between them.

Brigid followed for fully two minutes as Wertham continued his erratic path through the darkened palace. There appeared to be almost no one about, just a few of the Gene-agers who appeared to be acting in some guard role now, making their own rounds through the palace. The Gene-agers showed no capacity for innovative thought, trudging their assigned routes without deviation, walking in perfectly straight lines and making right-angle turns. Brigid found that hanging back at impromptu moments allowed her to bypass these sentries, and she traveled through the corridors unmolested.

Wertham slipped down a side corridor, striding swiftly. Brigid waited at the end of the corridor, watching as his narrow-shouldered figure hurried past two more of the waiting servants, who remained statue-still by the walls. The Gene-agers acknowledged him with the slightest inclines of their heads, but Wertham paid them no attention, disappearing through an open door that was as wide as two Mantas placed end to end.

Brigid stood at the far end of that corridor, eyeing the Gene-agers through her night lenses. Avoiding the patrolling sentries was one thing; sneaking past posted guards was a different matter entirely. Brigid’s hand played nervously across the gun holstered at her thigh as she wondered what to do.

* * *

D
OMI
WATCHED
R
ONALD
drag Queen Rosalind in the opposite direction to the one Brigid had taken. The queen was complaining and Domi could see she was struggling to free herself from the wheelchair-bound man’s grip, but it was no use.

“Please Ronald,” Roz cried, her words echoing back down the corridor. “Stop this madness before anyone else gets hurt.”

Domi watched them from her hiding place, seeing them silhouetted against the windows as they disappeared down the huge corridor. They were heading in the same direction that she and Brigid had come from, back toward the royal court and its magnificent golden thrones.

Domi had spent a little time in the palace since her arrival a day ago, and she already knew enough to make her way around. Instinctively, Domi turned back, retreating farther into the shadows and making her own way to the royal court. If that’s where the showdown was to be, then so be it. Domi figured she could take one crippled man; heck, she might not even need her gun, after all.

* * *

T
HE
SOUND
OF
Wertham’s boot heels echoed through the vast vehicle store. The huge room dominated the whole south wing of the incredible palace. Within, it housed almost three dozen different vehicles, from the small two-man mules to their larger buslike brethren, the steeds. There were also several variations of sky disk, like the one Jack had taken to show Kane and Grant the city, alongside snail-like road shells, single-wheeled unicarts, levisticks, skycles, lightracers and blissiles.

Twin roads led from the hangarlike room, disappearing into huge, arched tunnels that sat against one of the walls. A farther wall was entirely open to the outside so that those craft with aerial capacity could launch in an instant, rocketing into the skies above Authentiville. This was where King Jack had taken Kane and Grant when they had left the others, and it was from this room that the group had launched in the sky disk.

Wertham surveyed the selection of vehicles that were docked here. He recognized some, while others seemed to be modified versions of craft he had been familiar with before his extended period of incarceration. Some vehicles were entirely new to him, and he eyed them curiously, his mission momentarily forgotten. The two-man mule was reliable and fast, he concluded, making his way to a bay toward the rear of the room.

* * *

I
N
THE
CORRIDOR
leading to the palace garage, Brigid was striding purposefully toward the open doorway. She could see the garage itself, and as she got closer she recognized the basic shapes of aircraft and starcraft, similar to designs she had encountered in her adventures with the Cerberus team.

It’s a hangar of some kind, she realized. Which likely means Wertham’s about to rabbit. Damn
.

She needed a plan, and real quick, if she was not to lose track of Wertham. She hurried faster down the corridor, hand on the butt of the holstered TP-9 semiautomatic.

The two Gene-ager guards at the doorway of the garage looked up, alerted to Brigid’s presence. They looked monstrous in the harsh glare of the night lenses, their faces not quite human, Frankenstein children plucked from a vat. The Gene-agers that Brigid had met so far had shown little in the way of innovation or independent thought, and she was banking on that lack of insight now to allow her to bluff her way past these two.

“Halt,” the left guard pronounced.

Brigid halted.

“State your purpose,” the guard demanded.

“Just passing through,” Brigid replied.

The dull-faced Gene-ager looked her up and down for a moment while he processed her statement. “No one may pass but Wertham and Dr. Ronald.”

“I’m on an assignment for them,” Brigid replied instantly.

The dull-faced Gene-ager looked at her again, weighing her answer against his orders. “For whom?” he questioned.

“Wertham the First,” Brigid said. “May he rule us through eternity.”

“State your assignment parameters,” the second guard said, coming alert. He had moved closer to his companion, effectively blocking the corridor and the room that lay behind.

This was not going well, Brigid realized.

“I’m to bring him something,” Brigid said. “It’s urgent.”

The two dead-eyed guards looked at her querulously, processing her responses. “What are you delivering?” the one to the left asked. “What is urgent?”

A grim smile tugged at the corners of Brigid’s mouth as she reached to her hip and unholstered her pistol. “This,” she stated, bringing the weapon up. These closeted slaves had no comprehension of blasters, Brigid knew—she had discovered that accidentally when she had gotten into the altercation upstairs that had led to her being tossed through a window.

The Gene-ager to the right reached for the gun in Brigid’s hand, but she pulled it out of his reach.

“Uh-uh, no touchy feely,” Brigid instructed. “What I have here is for the God Emperor alone.”