Planet Hate, page 4
As Kane struggled, the Sin Eater in his right hand kicked as a random shot blasted from the barrel. Through wide eyes, Kane watched as the bullet cut through the water beneath the surface of the little stream, burying itself in the far bank with a puff of silty debris. I need air, dammit, and I need it now.
Then the weight on Kane’s back became heavier for a moment, and rather than freeing himself he was forced farther into the water, his chin scratching against the tiny flecks of stone at the bottom of the stream.
But almost as soon as it started, it was over, the weight disappearing as the man above him was wrenched aside. Kane pushed himself up, taking an urgent breath as he broke the surface. An instant later something came splashing into the water beside him, and Kane saw a dull-faced man rolling over in the silt, red trails of blood immediately clouding the water around his throat.
Kane turned and was shocked to find himself face-to-face with Rosalia’s mongrel dog. The mutt had blood on its teeth as it pulled its lips back in a wolfish snarl.
“Good boy,” Kane reassured the dog, realizing it had been his savior.
Water streamed down the ex-Magistrate’s face and he brushed his hair back in irritation. His face felt cold from his brief dip in the water, the bone chilled at his left cheek, and he winced as the sensation bit against his eyetooth.
Behind the hound, more of the villagers were waiting, warily watching as Kane pulled himself out of the crystal-clear water of the stream that ran through their ramshackle hamlet, their eyes fixed on him, pure hatred burning in their glare. These people had been converted, a whole community pledging allegiance to Ullikummis, even the children. Some had marks on their wrists where the obedience stones had been inserted beneath their flesh, forcing them to submit to the faux god’s will, but not all of them. Perhaps—Kane realized with indignation—some had chosen this religion.
Kane’s eyes darted across the crowd as, from somewhere among them, spoken words drifted to his ears. “I am stone,” a woman said.
“I am stone.” This time it was a man’s voice.
Then an elderly man stepped forward, shuffling his feet like a clockwork thing. “I am stone,” he said proudly, his watery blue eyes meeting with Kane’s in grim determination.
Then Kane was running at the crowd, the dog issuing a low growl from deep in its throat as it rushed ahead of him on its four shaggy legs.
Kane shunted the old man aside, ducked a driving fist from a younger-looking man, before kicking his leg out and knocking that man in the gut with such force that he doubled over and rolled to the ground in pain.
Concentrating on the battle, Kane was only peripherally aware of what Rosalia’s dog was doing. The mongrel moved with such speed that, for a few moments, that ragged-looking mutt seemed more like something ethereal, a ghost-thing not fully of this world. The dog leaped at the massing crowd, batting people to the ground with its weight. It barked once, and for just a second it seemed that the hound expanded, became somehow more in front of the startled eyes of the crowd, like a swelling cloud of steam.
KNEELING AT THE EDGE of the silo, Grant played his fingers across the control console of the interphaser, inputting the coordinates that Lakesh had forwarded. A few paces away, Rosalia drove the sharp point of her stiletto blade into the gut of another would-be attacker, snarling as the blade pierced his clothes and flesh. At least this one had not assumed the properties of stone. That seemed to be a quality reserved only for the hooded figures that she had met over the past two months.
“Come on, Grant,” Rosalia urged, flipping the bloody farmer’s body to the ground. “Hurry it up.”
“It’ll be ready in a moment,” Grant said without looking up. “Just finding a suitable destination…”
“Screw that.” Rosalia glared at Grant. “Just get us out of here already.”
Grant’s thumb brushed the final key in the sequence he had been programming into the unit, and the interphaser seemed to move without truly moving, as if in the grip of an earth tremor. “Gateway’s opening now,” Grant said calmly, a grin appearing beneath the drooping crescent of his gunslinger’s mustache.
Beside Grant, the pyramid shape of the interphaser remained static yet the world seemed to swirl around it as a lotus blossom of inky rainbow light surged forth, twin cones of color bursting from above and below. Lightning played without those impossible cones of light like witch fire, tendrils sparking like clawing fingers reaching out from the mists.
At the entryway of the alley beside the silo, Rosalia put her finger and thumb to her lips and let out another piercing whistle. Her dog cocked its head at the call, and the ghostly apparition that it seemed to have become evaporated as if it had never been, and it was just a scruffy-looking mongrel once more. Perhaps that strange ghostlike form had never really existed at all; perhaps it had just been a trick of the light.
“Come on, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia hollered, “our ride’s here.”
Kane’s fist snapped out as he punched another of the villagers on the jaw. The woman’s head snapped back with an audible crack as something broke in her neck. Then he was leaping up into the air, booted feet kicking out to connect with the chest of a man wielding a pitchfork. The man toppled back into the dirt, and finally Kane could see a clear path to where Rosalia, her dog and Grant were waiting. Behind the beautiful Mexican woman, Kane saw that familiar blossom of colors as the interphaser carved a door in the quantum ether, opening an impossible corridor through space.
Kane’s empty left hand lashed out, slapping into the head of another grizzled local and casting the man aside in a tumble of flailing limbs. Then Kane was clear, ducking beneath a swinging length of hose pipe as he made for the alleyway.
Up ahead, Rosalia walked gradually backward, making her way to where Grant was waiting by the functioning interphaser.
“Damn unfriendly locals,” she said with irritation.
Grant shook his head. “Whole bunch of them are stoned,” he told her. “This Ullikummis thing is way, way out of control.”
“You two always attract this much trouble?” Rosalia asked as a breathless Kane appeared at the end of the alleyway, blasting shots from his Sin Eater behind him to force the angry locals to retain their distance.
“Kane has a knack for it,” Grant admitted, with a hint of reluctance in his tone. “Still, it does kinda look like we’ve been promoted to the New World Order’s most wanted list.”
“Let’s move,” Kane said breathlessly as he hurried down the short length of alleyway toward the burgeoning lotus blossom of light. A moment later he had leaped into the upward-facing cone of light, with Grant, Rosalia and Rosalia’s dog stepping to follow him.
An instant later the twin cones of light collapsed and the triangular interphaser unit disappeared along with Kane and his companions. The angry locals were left scratching their heads as they found themselves alone in the alleyway, finding no trace of the targets of their hostility other than the fallen forms of the hooded figure and three farmhands. It was as if Kane’s team had never existed.
Chapter 3
Snakefishville smelled of flowers. Their heady, luscious scents swirled through the air like urgent whispers in a hospital ward.
“Name and purpose of visit?” the Magistrate on the south gate asked, sounding bored. He wore a hooded robe of coarse material with a simple belt around his waist from which a small bag hung, bulging but no larger than a man’s fist. A small red-shield insignia, the familiar symbol of Magistrate office, shone at his left breast as it reflected the morning sunlight.
A petite woman stood in front of him, head down in supplication. She had white hair and a chalk-white face, and she wore a loose summer dress whose hem shimmered just above her bone-pale ankles. “Mitra,” the chalk-white woman said, “here to give thanks to our lord and master, as is his holy right.” Her name was not Mitra, and while she planned to visit the newly built cathedral in the center of the ville, she had no intention of giving thanks, holy right or not.
The Magistrate nodded, barely glancing at the woman who had called herself Mitra. He gave a brief, formal smile as he ushered her through the wide gate and into the vast compound that made up the walled ville. The south gate was wide enough to accommodate three or four of the Magistrates’ tanklike Sandcat vehicles driving side by side, a huge opening in the high-walled city of the ville. The white-skinned woman was just the latest of a whole crowd of refugees who had been made to wait at the gate while the Mags processed them. She’d waited two full hours in the warming June sun, beads of sweat forming at the back of her neck where her pixie-short hair brushed at its nape, but curiously she had not seen a single person rejected from entering the ville.
Within, garlands of flowers had been strung across the high walls and on the facades of the towering buildings that lined the ville’s central thoroughfare, their pink-and-white petals fluttering in the warm summer breeze. The woman who had given her name as Mitra peered at them as she strode through the main gates and entered the busy street, letting the bustling crowd flow around her as she admired the pleasant juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial. Behind her, the two Magistrates continued their work at the surveillance booth by the gate, wearing fustian robes over the black armor of their office, smiling as they welcomed newcomers to the ville on this day of worship. Buzzing honeybees flitted from flower to flower along the decorative garlands, delving lustily at their sweet contents before moving on in their restless dance through the warm air. There were other people on the street, dressed in light summer clothes, hurrying to and fro just like the bees, their clothing bright and clean in the midmorning sunlight.
The white-faced woman stood still for a moment, feeling out of place as she watched the people hurrying by all around her, each with a purpose, a destination. Her name was Domi and she didn’t belong here.
The last time Domi had been in Snakefishville—the last time it had been called Snakefishville—it had all been very different. As one of nine magnificent walled cities dotted across North America, Snakefishville had lost its ruler when the hybrid barons had evolved into the Annunaki Roverlords two years ago. Baron Snakefish himself had transformed into cruel Lord Utu. Without the baron’s influence, the ville had fallen into confusion and, most recently, it had been all but destroyed by a subterrene, an underground engineering device that replicated the effects of an earthquake and sent the towers of Snakefish crashing down into a crater. When Domi had last visited here four months ago, what little remained of the ville itself looked like something from a nightmare. All that had remained of its once-majestic buildings were a few rotten struts clawing the skies at awful angles, and the wrecked streets were filled with the decaying bodies of the dead.
Yet now, just a few months on, the ville was miraculously reinvigorated. And not just reinvigorated, Domi reminded herself—renamed. Like all things Annunaki, Snakefishville had been reborn, this time as Luilekkerville where freedom was everything and its citizenry considered themselves carefree.
Domi didn’t like it. When things changed rapidly like this it was seldom for the better, she knew. The guards on the gate were all too friendly, far too welcoming for Magistrates, and Domi could tell with a glance that neither was combat-ready.
Luilekkerville’s buildings were universally lower than those of Snakefishville, and the towering Administrative Monolith that had dominated the center had been replaced by a two-story cathedral. But the cathedral’s tower strove higher, reaching up over the new-built city, a circular stained-glass window dominating its front like some all-seeing eye, its panes made up of reds and oranges and purples, just like the old disk on the Administrative Monoliths.
Different but the same, then, still following the old street map that had been created during the Program of Unification, the same regimented plan on which each of the nine villes had been based. A child of the Outlands, Domi had never felt comfortable caged inside the high walls of the villes. They did something to people, she felt sure, muddled their senses and made them susceptible and docile—gave them “tanglebrain,” as she called it. Recently, her friends in Cerberus had begun to suspect that there was more to the ville blueprints than met the eye, that the symmetrical design of the cities—with their towering structures that peaked at the center—created some kind of sigil, a magical symbol that could genuinely affect a person’s thinking. Cerberus archivist Brigid Baptiste had told Domi that such symbols were commonplace back before the nukecaust, that an ancient political organization called the Nazi Party had used one as a rallying point to recruit their members, a symbol called the swastika.
Domi shivered for a moment despite the warmth of the sun, recalling that excited look in Brigid’s eye as she explained this over dinner back in the Cerberus redoubt. Domi had been sitting at the edge of the cafeteria table, while Kane, Grant and Lakesh had all been discussing the implications of what Brigid’s discovery might mean in the seats beside her. Domi missed Brigid; she had been her friend, and Domi found friends hard to come by. But Brigid had disappeared during a raid on the Cerberus redoubt, and now she was numbered among the missing while the mountain headquarters itself had been abandoned until it could be rebuilt and made secure.
Domi peered around, watching the smiling faces of the passersby as they made their way to their destinations. Everyone was dressed in light clothes, simple but elegant, the women in long skirts or summer dresses, the men in loose cotton shirts and slacks and shorts. Many of the men wore flowers in their shirt pockets, and some of the younger women had flowers in their hair, here and there in a complete ring like a fairy’s crown.
As the crowd flowed all around her like the current of a stream, Domi halted, closing her eyes and taking in the sweet scents of the flowers. Flowers decorated so much of the ville: flowering creepers wound up the ornate streetlights that lined the main street; flowers peeked from their perches in the hanging baskets that decorated the lights; flowers grew from pots lining the center of the road.
Domi relied upon her other senses as much as her eyes, and she allowed her mind to go blank in that moment, letting her impressions take over. Domi was a unique figure among the hurrying populace of Luilekkerville. Her skin and hair were the chalk-white of an albino, the hair trimmed short in a pixie-ish cut that highlighted the sharp planes of her cheekbones. She was a petite woman, barely five feet in height with bird-thin arms and legs. The floaty sundress she wore was colored burnt umber, sleeveless with its hem brushing the tops of her white ankles above bare feet, the small swell of her breasts pushing at its simple bodice. A matching ribbon of material had been wound around Domi’s left wrist, its lengths dangling down as she swung her arms. Although small, Domi was wiry, her body muscular beneath the unrestrictive flow of the material. She had secreted her favored weapon beneath the masking lines of the dress, a hunting knife in a sheath just above her left ankle. The blade was well hidden from a casual search, but she had been surprised that the Magistrates hadn’t even frisked her. With hindsight she wondered if she might have sneaked a blaster in Luilekkerville, too, but that had seemed too much risk for what should be a simple surveillance mission. She was out in the field alone here, and the last thing she wanted to do was to attract any extra attention that her ghoulish appearance didn’t already demand.
Domi breathed deeply for a moment, scenting the air and listening to the contented buzzing of insects amid the fluttering petals. The whole settlement had been rebuilt, constructed from the ashes of Snakefishville at a furious rate. Even now, behind the buzz of the honeybees and the chattering of conversation, Domi could hear hammering and sawing as construction workers continued to build the towering edifices that would dominate the skyline of Luilekkerville out here close to the Pacific coastline.
With its fresh air and happy population, the change in the ville seemed almost a bewitchment.
As Domi stood there, one of the passersby stopped in front of her. When Domi lifted her eyelids, two scarlet orbs reappeared like glistening rubies in her elfin face as she turned her attention to the stranger. The stranger was a beautiful woman of indeterminate middle years, a golden tan to her skin and smile lines around her eyes with a long lustrous mane of blond framing her pretty face. A small wicker basket depended from its hard straps under the woman’s right arm, its open bowl filled with freshly picked flowers. Domi watched in surprise as the woman reached into the basket and handed her a flower, its trimmed stem just an inch or so in length.
“For you,” the woman said, smiling brightly as she offered Domi the flower.
Domi reached out and plucked the flower from the woman’s hands, nodding in gratitude. “Thank you,” she said, surprise clear in her tone.
“Our love is solid as rock,” the woman recited with a warm smile before stepping past Domi and moving on down the street.
It was not often that a stranger approached Domi in such joyous circumstances. She had grown up a wild child of the Outlands and she was used to being singled out as a freak thanks to the albinism that distinguished her from the people around her. As Domi watched, the blonde woman continued along the street, handing out more flowers to the people crowding there, offering her chanted words before moving on to the next.
Domi peered at the flower, sniffing at its rich scent for a moment as she twisted its stem around and around between her fingers, making it spin. There was something going on here, just beneath the surface—an all-pervading attitude that seemed to have affected the populace of the born-again ville. The nine villes had always acted as a sort of safe haven, a shelter from the ravages that man had brought upon himself with the advent of the nukecaust and the Deathlands era that followed. They had grown up as a part of the Program of Unification, and had brought a much-needed regimentation to the lives of their residents. In total, forty-five thousand people had been spread equally across nine walled cities, and they had lived a harmonious existence. Yet the happiness on show here, the undercurrent of joy, was something Domi had never seen before. It was a happiness that transcended logic, a primitive happiness at simply being alive. It was sinister somehow, as if a mass brainwashing had taken place.
