Planet Hate

Kane had heard the phrase before. It was something of a battle chant for an expanding class of warriors who fought in the name of a sinister being called Ullikummis. In speaking the phrase, the hooded figure had not merely confirmed his allegiance, but he had also entered a meditative state whereby his physical attributes would change.

Kane’s eyes darted to the subtle movement as the man unclenched his right fist and a simple cord of leather with a cuplike design at the farthest extension of its loop sagged from his hand.

“And you are an enemy of stone,” the hooded figure said. Even as he spoke, the leather cup whirled around the man’s arm as he launched a cluster of lethal projectiles at Kane and his teammates.

Chapter 2

“Get down!” Kane shouted as he dived out of the path of the hurtling missiles.

A handful of sharpened pebbles had been flung from the simple slingshot that the robed man had hidden in his fist, and the rocks picked up speed as they whipped through the fifteen-foot distance separating the man and Kane’s team. The stones cut through the air and, by the time they reached the space where Kane had been standing, the half dozen pebbles had taken on a lethal velocity similar to bullets fired from a gun. The projectiles had been aimed at Kane’s face, but by then Kane had dropped out of their path, his left palm slapping against the dirt even as he called his Sin Eater pistol to his right hand with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons.

To either side of the dark-haired ex-Mag, Grant and Rosalia also flung themselves out of the path of those vicious rocks, and Grant snarled as one of them clipped against the swishing tail of his Kevlar-lined duster as it leaped high in the air.

Across from Grant, Rosalia kicked out as she ran at the high, curving wall of the silo. Suddenly she was running up the side of the silo, her skirt tearing as she kicked out again and flipped herself high into the air, over the path of the hurtling stones and onto the low roof of the lean-to beside it, her back to the man in the robes. She landed with catlike grace, looking out at the gathering crowd on the main street, two short blades appearing in her hands from their hiding places in the ragged sleeves of her denim jacket.

As Rosalia landed, Kane’s index finger tightened on the Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm bullets cut through the air toward their mysterious attacker. The red badge at the robed man’s breast caught the light once more as the bullets streamed toward him. Kane realized what the badge meant: it was a symbol of authority, a mockery of the Magistrate badge that he and Grant had worn when they were in service.

Kane was moving for cover as he unleashed that flurry of bullets, but he watched as the robed man held up his free hand. The bullets struck against the man’s outstretched arm but incredibly—impossibly—the man let out no sound of pain; he just stood there, jaw set as four bullets cut through the hemp sleeve of his robe and rattled against his flesh. His other arm arced behind him and he launched a second salvo of stones from his slingshot as Kane’s admirable figure disappeared behind the wall of the lean-to.

Kane looked down for a moment as he almost tripped over something. Rosalia’s mongrel was there, lips peeled back in a fearsome snarl as it looked at the approaching crowd of townsfolk. A bearded man wielding a claw hammer was leading the charge at the strangers, drawing the hammer back in a vicious arc. The dog jumped then, jaw snagging around the man’s arm and pulling him to the ground in a cloud of disturbed earth.

Grant meanwhile had spun to his right, slapping his back against the curved wall of the silo as the bullet-like stones cut toward his companions. They had met these hooded figures before, and Grant knew that they could be tenacious opponents. They’d need something with a little more stopping power than the Sin Eater, and Grant had just the thing. While stones clashed against the clay wall of the silo and the sound of Kane’s bullets cut through the air, Grant had reached into his long coat and pulled loose the Copperhead assault subgun from its hiding place strapped to the lining of the coat. The barrel of the subgun was almost two feet long. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. An optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per- minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Sin Eater, the Copperhead was Grant’s favored field weapon, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create in short measure.

Gun in hand, Grant dodged from cover and unleashed a firestorm of shots at the robed figure at the far end of the alley between the buildings. The hooded figure staggered for a moment under that vicious assault, before finally toppling backward into the silo wall. Grant depressed the trigger again, unleashing a second burst of fire as the robed figure began to pull himself up off the ground.

“Stay the hell down,” Grant said as the Copperhead drilled another burst of lead into the robed assailant.

Just a few feet away, Kane was moving among the mob beside the lean-to when Rosalia’s voice rang out.

“Kane, watch your six!”

Kane dodged and turned even as something whizzed through the air toward his head. The object glowed white and orange as it cut the air, missing Kane’s head by the narrowest of margins. Heart thudding against his rib cage, Kane glanced behind him where the projectile clanged against the wall of the lean-to—it was a horseshoe, red-hot and launched with a flick of the blacksmith’s tongs. The burning-hot horseshoe left a smoking indentation in the wooden wall even as it tumbled to the ground.

Overhead, Rosalia leaped from the roof of the lean-to like some graceful bird of prey, knives slashing the air as she dived at the blacksmith. With a vicious sweep of a blade, Rosalia cut through the man’s throat in an explosion of blood as she barreled into him. The blacksmith let out a howl of pain as he toppled backward under the weight of the hurtling woman, but his scream was cut short as the knife sliced through his vocal cords.

Then the blacksmith slammed against the hard-packed soil of the roadway and Rosalia used her momentum to leap away, bringing her knives up to face their next challenger. Her mongrel hound was already at her side, letting out a savage bark as the townsfolk crowded around them. The townspeople had armed themselves with makeshift weapons, sticks and loose bricks, here a large ax made for chopping logs.

Rosalia smiled. “Come on, then,” she goaded, “let’s see what you’re made of.”

The man with the hammer brushed himself down as he regained his footing, snarling back at the dog that had felled him. Then he was rushing at Rosalia, brandishing the long-handled hammer like a club as he swung it at her head. Her dark eyes fixed on the hammer’s arc, Rosalia ducked, allowing the metal head to whisk through the air just inches above her head. Then her left arm snapped up, forearm meeting forearm and using the hammer wielder’s own momentum to knock him away. The bearded man staggered a little in place, surprised that this slender girl had struck him with such precision. As he did so, Rosalia spun on the spot, bringing her left leg up and around, delivering a beautifully executed roundhouse kick that ended when her foot connected with the man’s face. The bearded hammer man was flipped over by the force of Rosalia’s brutal blow, but she was already leaping away to face the next crowd member who dared attack the Cerberus companions. Rosalia’s confrontation with the hammer wielder had lasted all of three seconds, start to finish.

As Rosalia leaped, Kane rolled forward, Sin Eater raised as he assessed the threat level that the crowd posed. There were perhaps sixteen people here, with more rushing to join them from the buildings all around. These people were in the eerie grip of the false religion, the promised utopia that Ullikummis had drummed into his loyal subjects. It was as if they were brainwashed.

A broad-shouldered man came at Kane from his left, swinging a two-by-four plank from some nearby construction project. Though renowned for his combat sense, Kane almost didn’t see the man approach, ducking only at the very last second as his attacker lunged at him with the length of wood. The board hurtled overhead as Kane snapped off a quick burst from his blaster, sweeping his attacker’s legs out from under him. The man cried out in agony as he crashed into the soil, a bullet shattering his right kneecap. These outlanders were innocents mixed up in a sinister cult created by a being far more powerful than themselves, and Kane would rather not kill them if he didn’t have to.

Then Kane was standing, the black muzzle of the Sin Eater stretched out in front of him like a warning. “I’m asking all of you to back off,” he commanded, “so no one else gets hurt.”

“Enemy of stone,” one of the crowd facing Kane cried in reply. “Enemy Kane!”

That was the second time in less than three minutes that a stranger had called him by name, Kane realized. Whatever was going on with these cultists, they seemed to recognize him.

“When the hell did I become public enemy number one?” Kane muttered under his breath as the foremost members of the crowd rushed at him, their mismatched weapons raised. With a sigh of resignation, Kane began selecting targets and squeezing the trigger of the Sin Eater. Four perfectly placed rounds blew out the kneecaps of the nearest of the approaching crowd before they swarmed on Kane.

TO THE SIDE of the silo, Grant was having his own problems. He hurried along the alleyway between buildings toward the stone marker half buried in the dust. Two feet away, the hooded figure who had attacked them was lying on his back, limbs flailing like a bug where Grant’s shots had taken him down once more. Yet already the man seemed to be recovering. These cultists—“firewalkers” was one term that had been popularized among the Cerberus personnel—could miraculously change the density of their flesh in some way that Grant and his teammates had yet to fully comprehend. The trick required fierce concentration, and all of these firewalkers had to keep their minds still to reach the condition of stonelike flesh. One way to stop them retaining such a degree of meditation had been to use concentrated sound, which irritated the firewalkers so that they could not achieve proper concentration.

Grant shrugged out of his rucksack as he knelt by the stone block poking up out of the ground. Swiftly he undid the straps on the cloth backpack and reached inside, pulling out a metal pyramidal device of roughly one foot in height, its protective cloth sleeve dropping free and wrapping over itself as the wind dragged it a few feet across the ground. Grant ignored it, his attention fixed on the chrome pyramid itself. The metal was scuffed and marred from where it had been hurriedly stored, and Grant brushed dirt from its surface as he flipped down a control panel close to the base of the interphaser unit. Grant watched as the tiny display came to life, a series of lights flickering on in quick succession.

Suddenly, Grant saw movement from the corner of his eye and turned his head in time to see the robed man leap off the ground and spiral toward him like some vicious ballerino. Leaving the interphaser in place by the stone marker, Grant rolled aside, and the robed man’s kicking feet slapped against the ground where Grant’s hand had been just a second before.

From his crouched position on the ground, Grant swung the Copperhead up one-handed, the bullpup design ideal for such a move. But even as he depressed the trigger, his robed assailant shoved the muzzle aside with a violent flick of his wrist. Grant’s shots went wild, slamming against the grain silo and drilling through the brickwork with powdery little orange bursts of dried clay.

Then the robed man’s fist struck Grant across the jaw with the force of a thrown brick, and the huge ex-Magistrate blinked back hot tears as his vision blurred. Blindly, Grant lashed out with his left palm, slapping the robed figure away with a mighty sweep of his limb. Grant felt more than saw the figure fall from him, heard as he struck against something hard with the sound of breaking wood.

Wiping a hand across his eyes, Grant pushed himself to his feet, bringing the Copperhead to bear once more as he searched for his target. Before Grant could react, the robed figure came leaping out of the shadows of the lean-to, barreling into the ex-Mag like a cannonball. The pair of combatants crashed back to the ground once more, and Grant’s breath was driven out of him in a loud gasp. To the side of his head, Grant saw the flickering lights of the interphaser as it tried to lock on to the parallax point. Come on, good buddy, he thought, let’s make us a door out of here, already.

Then the robed figure’s hands clamped around Grant’s throat, exerting tremendous pressure as he attempted to snap the ex-Mag’s neck.

KANE FOUND HIMSELF struggling under the pressure of the mob, a heavy man clinging to his back and weighing him down. It reminded him of the worst moments of the obligatory Pit patrol, back in his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate. Each time he shoved one person aside, another rushed to take his place, kicking and clawing at him—ineffective against his shadow suit but still enough to wear him down so he couldn’t get back to the interphaser. With one determined shove, Kane wrenched the man from his back, tossing him over one shoulder in an urgent flexing of muscles. The heavyset man rolled away across the ground, tumbling over and over until he splashed into the shallow stream.

Before Kane could extricate himself from the angry mob, he felt someone clutch at his Sin Eater, a pair of hands yanking at his right arm. He pulled his hand free, then swung the blaster around to shoot his attacker. Kane’s finger depressed the guardless trigger, but he whipped the pistol aside with just a fraction of an inch to spare. His attacker—attackers, in fact—were two children, a blond-haired boy and his sister, the elder of them perhaps eight years old.

Kane’s bullets went wide, blasting harmlessly into the sky as he cursed under his breath. Bad enough that the adults had become indoctrinated into this cult of stone worship, but Kane wouldn’t forgive himself if he went and shot an indoctrinated child.

With the echo of his wasted shots still fresh in his ears, Kane crashed forward as someone tackled him from behind, sacking him like a quarterback. Again Kane hadn’t noticed the attacker coming at him from his left; he had somehow been blindsided. Kane flailed for several steps before slamming into the ground with bone-shaking force. And suddenly he was breathing nothing but water, the clear stream washing into his mouth and nose. Kane choked as someone slammed him with a savage punch to the back of his head.

Just a few steps away, Rosalia spun on her heel as a young woman came at her, slashing something at her face. It was the same woman whom Grant had noticed on their walk through the village, thirty-something years old with a weather tan to her features. Rosalia dipped out of reach as the woman slashed at her, recognizing the nine-inch knitting needles in the woman’s hands.

Off to Rosalia’s left side, a man was rushing at her with a cosh in his hand, raising it overhead to bring down on her head. There was a blur of motion, and something leaped at the man. When Rosalia looked again she saw her faithful dog had clamped its jaws around the man’s arm, wrenching him around and around as it snarled angrily.

Rosalia ducked again as the woman with the knitting needles whipped one of them at her face. Then Rosalia’s left leg stretched out and whipped back in a blur, catching the other woman’s ankle and tripping her off balance. The woman cried out as she slammed against the ground, but Rosalia was already moving, turning back toward the alleyway beside the silo.

“Come on, you slow poke,” she snapped at her dog as she rushed toward where Grant had set up the interphaser. “¡Vamanos!”

As she ran down the alleyway with her scruffy- looking dog at her heels, Rosalia saw Grant struggling beneath the pressure that the robed figure was exerting on his throat. Grant was urgently raising the Copperhead, but he was unable to bring it around enough.

In a blur of movement Rosalia brought the fingers of her left hand up to her lips and blew, unleashing a piercing whistle that caused her dog to whine even as she drew her right arm behind her in a graceful arc.

The robed figure turned at the noise, and Rosalia saw his lips were pulled back in an animal snarl. The knife shot from Rosalia’s right hand like a dart, cutting through the air and embedding itself beneath the robed figure’s hood. The robed man cried out in a splutter of pain, falling away from Grant as he reached for the thing embedded in his face.

As his assailant’s hood fell back, Grant saw that Rosalia’s knife had pierced his left eyeball, burying its point there to an inch or more of its shining length. “Nice aim,” Grant acknowledged as he rolled out from under the hooded man.

“There’s always a chink in an opponent’s armor,” Rosalia said, “if you know where to look.”

Kane had done something similar to this before, using the piercing noise of a warning alarm to break the concentration of these so-called firewalkers. For a moment, the sound had caused the faux-Magistrate to lose his stonelike powers.

The hooded figure was screaming in agony now, his meditative calm already a distant memory. Grant knew that if these firewalkers lost their concentration, even for just a second, they became vulnerable. With a wrench of his mighty arm muscles, Grant hefted the robed figure aside, plucking him from the ground like a toddler before whirling him around and finally slamming him into the solid wall of the silo before letting go. The figure sagged down the wall, head swaying in semiconsciousness. Grant glanced at the figure for a moment, confirming the thing he already knew: the man had a tiny ridge in the center of his forehead, a puckering of the skin where many religions believed the third eye was located. Beneath that ridge, the ex-Mag knew, lurked a stone, subtly altering the man’s thoughts and granting him his superhuman powers.

“Where’s Kane?” Grant snapped, his eyes scanning the crowd massing at the end of the alleyway. Two sturdy young men rushed down the alley, farming tools raised in their hands like clubs.