Terminal White

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.