Cosmic Rift (22 page)

The remaining Gene-ager had followed Kane where he had dropped. Kane had hit the floor hard, and for a moment the whole room seemed to be spinning. The shadow was the only alert he had that the Gene-ager had followed him, but he whipped his gun up, instinct-swift, and pulled the trigger. The Gene-ager swung back in a blur, and Kane’s bullets shot past him with a cacophony of noise.

“Kane?” he heard Grant calling to him from his hiding place. “Kane? You okay?”

“Get the chief out of here,” Kane shouted back, regretting once more how their Commtacts had failed once they had passed into the cosmic rift. Still, the old man was important, and if he didn’t survive, then Kane figured it was even money that none of them would.

Kane watched from the corner of his eye as Grant seized the opportunity to run, ushering King Jack toward a door set within the wall beneath the windows. Kane’s attacker turned, hearing the sound as King Jack ran the God Rod across the door’s sensor plate, commanding it to open for the first time in years.

Without targeting, Kane sent a cluster of bullets at the Gene-ager, rattling the floor at his feet. The Gene-ager turned back to face him.

“Uh-uh,” Kane said. “You’re not done with me yet, pretty boy.”

As Grant and King Jack disappeared through the unsealed door, the fast-moving Gene-ager came at Kane again, stomping toward him as the ex-Mag struggled back to his feet. Through the miraculous lenses, Kane saw a second figure moving amid the forgotten storeroom—one of the Gene-agers he had thought he had already dropped. Damn, these guys weren’t just fast, they could also take a good pounding before they went down.

Kane darted aside as the nearest Gene-ager threw a punch at his face. The movement was eye-blink fast, and the balled fist cut through the air with an audible whistle.

Then the other one blurred across the room, some kind of metal bar in his hands. Grim-faced, the Gene-ager swung the bar at Kane. The ex-Magistrate ducked, and the bar whipped just inches above his head. Kane didn’t know what the weapon was. It looked something like a crowbar or maybe a long-handled wrench, but he was pretty sure that with enough force it could still bash his brains in or maybe even take his head clean off his shoulders. Time to end this, then.

Kane ducked as the armed attacker took another swing, but he realized he was backing into a corner as the first Gene-ager rounded on him. All of a sudden Kane had run out of options and his backup was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 28

Brigid had lost Wertham.

But the sensor-ware of the steed hadn’t. Under her mental instruction, it shot across the sky, weaving between the tallest buildings of Authentiville as it sought its prey.

Wertham’s vehicle was faster, and he had had a head start, but the steed tracked his path unerringly, displaying his route on the heads-up grid that flashed across Brigid’s retinas.

“Just incredible,” Brigid muttered as the steed hooked around another golden tower a hundred stories above the street.

As they passed the tower, Brigid saw their destination for the first time. It looked like the inside of an automobile engine had been enlarged and sunk into the ground, existing now in a great hole drilled beneath the city. The pit glowed with a soft orange radiance, the color of smelting metal.

Brigid had passed here before, she recalled, her eidetic memory filling in the details as the steed swooped lower, angling toward the ground. But it hadn’t been a pit then; it had been a park or field, a great swath of grass imprinted on her memory.

“What did he do?” Brigid wondered as the steed dropped toward a landing platform. There was one other vehicle there—Wertham’s two-seater mule. It was time to finish this.

* * *

K
ING
J
ACK
STEPPED
from the storeroom and stopped so suddenly that Grant almost crashed into him.

“Your Highness?” Grant asked.

They were outside, a little above street level on a balcony wide enough to be used as a turning circle for a Sandcat. The city was dark, the sky reflected from the shiny towers but their internal illumination dimmed. The phenomenon encompassed the whole city, Grant saw as he took in the view. But out there, somewhere between those now-dark towers, there came a glow like a volcano.

“It...can’t be,” Jack said, shaking his head.

Grant peered behind him, checking that nothing was following them through the door. He just hoped Kane was okay in there. When he turned back to Jack, he saw the look of consternation on the old man’s face.

“That glow,” Jack explained. “Someone’s lit the Doom Furnace.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Grant asked.

Jack’s eyes widened in horror. “The Doom Furnace is a maternity ward for weapons, Grant. If it’s active again, then it means someone plans to take us into war.”

“With whom?” Grant asked. “I got the impression you were safe here in this...rift.”

“The only war would be with the surface people,” Jack told him. “Your people. Earth.”

* * *

K
ANE
WAS
TRAPPED
in a corner between two walls of the storeroom, the massive crates hanging overhead on their leather thongs. The Sin Eater bucked in his hand, unleashing a stream of 9 mm bullets. The bullets whined in the air, but the Gene-agers merely swept them aside, arms moving in a blur as they sped up. They had got the speed of Kane’s shots now.

These people are human tractors, Kane realized. Grant’s Copperhead had enough punch to knock these maniacs down but not the Sin Eater—all its 9 mm discharge could hope to do was slow them for a moment. Worse still, these particular vat-grown men were so durable that they could recover from a few shots—maybe not indefinitely, but that was little comfort when one of them was swinging a steel bar at your head, Kane thought.

Kane rolled, ducking under the metal bar as the Gene-ager on his right swung for his head like a baseball pitcher. He had nowhere to run now, trapped in a corner like this. It was all he could do to avoid that swinging hunk of metal.

But before Kane could recover, the other Gene-ager—this one unarmed—came at him, delivering a powerful knee to the side of his leg. The blow seemed to reverberate though Kane’s leg bone, and he toppled to the deck, his right flank slamming against the wall as he sank. Kane gritted his teeth against the sharp pain in his leg. It would pass—he just had to stay alive long enough for that to happen.

When he looked up, they were headed toward him, two of them, dull expressions like the simpleminded. They were feet away, coming at him with murder in mind. They could move faster, they were stronger and they were utterly fearless in their mission. If he didn’t stop them now...

Kane’s mind raced, the experience of a thousand altercations running through his brain, a hundred different combat scenarios, a dozen different moves he might employ pared down in an instant to one option. Kane took careful aim with his Sin Eater and squeezed the trigger. A burst of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets blasted from the muzzle, whipping past Kane’s attackers, up toward the roof above them, and drilling through one of the leather thongs that held the crate above them in place.

The crate was the size of a two-car garage, and it was held aloft by the application of perfect balance, two thongs keeping it high above the floor. Kane’s bullets clipped one of those tethers, fraying it as they passed through the material. Kane drove himself backward, pressing his back against the wall and drawing his legs toward him as the tether gave with a sound like a tree trunk splitting. The crate swung like a pendulum, sweeping in a swift parabola and knocking Kane’s attackers off their feet like bowling pins.

The crate came to an abrupt stop as its leading edge met the floor, ripping into the decking there with a screech of metal on wood.

Kane stood, breathing heavily. The crate had missed him by six inches. Maybe. Two figures lay mangled beneath it, slapped to the ground by the swinging box before getting their legs caught under it as it met the immovable floor. There was blood there, and flesh and bone, all of it mashed into a streak that spread across the floor where the crate had struck. Kane looked away, disgusted.

* * *

M
OMENTS
LATER
, K
ANE
joined Grant and Jack on the balcony outside the storeroom.

“Everything okay?” Grant asked as Kane appeared.

“Dandy,” Kane said, brushing a finger to his nose.

Grant smiled. Kane’s gesture was known as the one-percent salute, a kind of ironic code between them. It highlighted that no matter how well things may be going, there was always that one percent margin where just about anything could and would go wrong. Kane and Grant generally employed the old code when things seemed at their most dire. And nine times out of ten, the situation got worse before it got better.

“We have our own problem out here,” Grant explained, and he indicated the glow on the horizon. “See that? The king tells me it’s some kind of munitions plant that’s been called back into action.”

Kane listened as Grant and King Jack explained what it meant. When they had finished, he turned to Jack and asked what they could do to stop the projected war with Earth.

“I need to get back to the palace,” Jack said. “Powering up the Doom Furnace would have required the God Rod, and it can only be engaged from the throne hub. If we can get there, maybe I can turn things back somehow.”

Kane nodded. “Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I shall move the world.’ And you’ve got the big lever.”

King Jack searched the street, getting his bearings. “But my sky disk is right across the other side of the building,” he explained. “Do you think you boys are up to facing off against more of the rogue Gene-agers?”

Thoughtfully, Kane peered back at the building and then out across the street. There were vehicles there, some moving and some parked. As he watched them a plan started to form. “Your Highness, have you ever boosted a car?”

* * *

W
ARILY
, B
RIGID
STEPPED
from the steed and stalked across the towering walkways of the Doom Furnace. Beyond them, a sheer drop fell away to the burning pits of the forge, churning out space hardware for the first time in almost a thousand years.

From up here, the whole system looked automated, great arms moving caldrons of boiling metal into ingot molds, vast banks of cooling jets hardening the results as each armored plate was produced. A mighty tower of water fed a miniature lake that was used for cooling, hanging high above the forge in a gigantic bowl.

To one edge of the pit, a sunken platform ran almost the whole length of the underground factory. The platform contained finished items—gigantic gun emplacements, huge beam weapons like radar dishes, each one made mobile by a single, ball-like device locked to its base, and each as tall as ten men. There were vehicles there, too, two vast land tanks as long as battleships, gigantic caterpillar treads running the length of their bodies. And there were other, smaller vehicles that still dwarfed a baronial Sandcat. Figures were marching in file around the platform, priming the weapons and manning the hulking vehicles as they prepared for the first wave of Wertham’s assault.

Brigid ducked as something came rushing upward from the depths of the forge pit. It was a one-man flyer, designed like a sled with a swept-back screen on the front, behind which a Gene-ager worked the controls. Brigid recognized a cannon-type nose poking from the front, and she wondered what ammunition it required. As she watched, a second flyer zoomed up out of the darkness, followed by a whole squadron, at least a dozen moving in formation up into the sky above Authentiville.

Brigid moved across the walkway, feeling decidedly under-armed for whatever was coming next. “Where the heck is Wertham?” she wondered, eyeing the network of walkways that led down into the belly of the forge. A few figures moved around there, many of them carrying materials destined for the production plant.

Then she spotted Wertham, his bright-green jumpsuit marking him out amid the sea of grays and blues of the Gene-ager workers. He was below her, striding purposefully along a wide walkway toward a boxlike unit that jutted from one wall, its proportions as large as a house. Brigid watched as he reached the box and slipped inside.

“Okay, God Emperor,” she muttered, fingering her holster. “Time to meet someone who doesn’t take so kindly to your mind manipulation.”

* * *

T
HE
WALL
LIGHTS
blinked on as Wertham entered the forgotten room on the edge of the Doom Furnace. His face broke into a giddy smile as he stepped into his old laboratory.

Even in the strip lighting, it was clear that the room was vast, big enough to house a sporting event. Every wall was carved with handwritten notes etched into the walls themselves. There was a lot of empty space here that had once held items of alien salvage, and Wertham could see the cage that had once been the focal point of the nexus area where he would test the destructive limits of a new discovery.

The lab had been located here, back when the Doom Furnace was active, to provide a place from which to test and oversee new prototypes as they were forged and put through their paces.

Now it was a shambles. Things were broken, desks overturned, paperwork singed or burned away entirely, leaving only the covers of once-bound volumes remaining. His bed, as comfortable as it was practical, had been broken apart and only the legs remained, its base torn away for scrap.

“I guess no one expected me to return,” Wertham stated archly when he saw the state of the bed.

He kicked through the dusting of debris that littered the room. “Jack should have burned this place the moment he had the chance,” he said. But he hadn’t because he was scared of what he might burn, of what might explode or be set off to do untold damage. So he had ordered the place trashed, instead, believing that locking it away like this would somehow last forever.

Wertham moved over to one of the upturned desks, searching a line of cupboards secured directly to the wall above it. The cupboards were missing their doors now, and their contents were strewn halfway across the floor, ransacked and destroyed. Wertham brushed the remaining debris aside and reached deeper into the center cupboard.

“A warp in a warp,” Wertham muttered cryptically. “A rift in a rift. There.”

As he said it, Wertham’s arm stretched beyond the back of the cupboard and disappeared into and through the wall.

Many years ago, Jack had constructed this city inside a quantum field beyond the reach of normal man. Authentiville existed in a cosmic rift, ever in flux with the real world. For Wertham, it had not taken much to switch the frequency to create his rift within the rift, a place where he could hide his most ambitious designs should anything ever happen to him. Within that quantum pocket, Wertham grasped something metallic that looked like a bunch of tangled wires.

Wertham carefully unfolded the wires until a circlet was revealed. The circlet was topped with three strips of wire, each no thicker than a man’s pinkie finger. Wertham took the strange item and placed it over his head like a crown. It felt just like he remembered from all those years ago, and already the impossible shapes were playing before his eyes.

Sitting on the fire-scarred desk, Wertham scowled in thought. “The world’s a big place,” he recalled. “I’ll have to personalize it.”

* * *

“B
EEN
A
WHILE
since I did this,” King Jack admitted as he fed power to the lightracer’s control console.

Barely wider than a man, the lightracer was shaped like a spear and stretched back to a length of fourteen feet. More than one half of that length was taken up with engine, a solar drive that fed a nuclear reaction through the vehicle’s synapses to power it. One single back wheel dominated the design, cutting through the vehicle and standing to the height of a man, two feet above the low-slung body of the lightracer itself.

The king accelerated from a standing start to 90 miles per hour in less than two seconds, cutting a path through the street outside the regeneration baths, trusting the avoidance software to keep him safe as the vehicle wove through traffic. Despite the gravity of the situation, King Jack was grinning.

Behind Jack, Kane and Grant were kneeling on the low floor, wedged into a space no larger than the pilot’s seat of the Manta. Kane peered over the king’s shoulder as the dark city whizzed past at incalculable speed, wincing and ducking as they darted around slower vehicles on their passage back to the palace. Despite their velocity, the lightracer made a sound no louder than a gnat’s wing.