Genesis Sinister

The crowd numbered close to fifty, and they came from all walks of life, all ages and ethnicities. But there was a definite atmosphere in the room. Kane could sense an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and mistrust, the belief that some great betrayal had occurred. Their god was dead.

Kane and his team continued moving through the crowd, splitting up with assured casualness as they lost themselves amid the ragtag congregation.

“...brother died,” Kane heard one of the crowd complain as he walked past. “Disappeared in a warp and never came back.”

“Yeah,” his companion agreed. “Same thing happened to my cousin. Ain’t seen him since Sunday.”

Kane moved on, gently pushing the occasional crowd member aside as he found a good vantage point to view the raised stage that dominated one end of the room.

Elsewhere within the crowd, Grant and Edwards made similar progress, making their way through the throng without drawing attention to themselves. All three men were trained Magistrates and they knew how to work through a crowd, walking with that inherent authority and challenge to their step that made others move aside.

A simple podium had been erected at one end of the hangar, just boards raised on piled blocks, and Kane, Grant and Edwards took their places as a woman stepped up onto it with the help of a man in a hooded robe. The robe was made of rough hessian material, and it featured a red shield insignia over the left breast. Kane winced as he recognized the design. Just a few years before, he and his colleagues had worn something similar in their roles as Magistrates; this new religion had appropriated much of the iconography of the dying villes in its manipulation of the populace. The woman looked to be in her late twenties, with mouse-brown hair to which she had added streaks of purple like an anarchic road map. She walked with a shuffle to her step, and Kane saw she carried a little extra weight around her middle beneath the loose, floaty dress she wore. The dress was white, and it billowed around her as it caught the drafts from the broken windows, clinging to her legs as she took each step.

To the side of the podium, two more of the robed Magistrate stand-ins waited, their hoods down revealing their emotionless expressions. They were watching the crowd warily.

The crowd came to a hush as the woman stood astride the podium, casting her eyes slowly over them, an appreciative smile forming on her lips. The woman raised her arms and, once the crowd was silent, she spoke.

“I was made a promise by Lord Ullikummis,” she announced in a clear voice, “that stone would be the future. That stone would be our future.”

A little rumble went through the crowd, and voices were raised in dissent.

“I heard it was over.”

“Yeah, Lord Ullikummis abandoned us.”

“He died.”

The woman raised her hands for silence. “Please, people. Please.”

Gradually, with a palpable sense of reluctance, the crowd quietened.

“Ullikummis is dead,” the woman on the podium announced. “The rumors are true.”

Someone in the crowd cried out, and others raised their voices in shock once again, taking a minute to finally quieten once more.

“Ullikummis ascended,” the woman continued, “to watch over all of us, to better guarantee his utopia would come to pass. And he left us a gift.”

The woman pulled at her waist then, and Kane saw that what she wore was not a dress after all but a skirt and top of the same shimmering material. She raised the top, lifting it up and over her belly until it cinched just below her breasts. Her pink belly was swollen, a little bump showing in line with her hips. At first, Kane had taken the bump for fat, but now he realized his mistake.

“He planted his seed in me before he ascended,” the woman announced to the stunned crowd. “I am the Stone Widow, and Ullikummis’s child grows within me. Our lord has departed, but his flesh shall live on.”

Once again, the crowd began to talk, raising questions and surging forward to see and to touch the swollen belly of the pregnant woman who called herself the Stone Widow.

Careful not to draw attention to himself, Kane engaged the hidden receiver of his Commtact and subvocalized, “Edwards, what are you making of this?”

A moment later, Edwards responded, his voice crystal clear in Kane’s head. “I need to be closer to be sure, Kane.”

Commtacts were communications devices that were hidden beneath the skin of the Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit whose designs 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. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

Kane bit back a curse as he saw Edwards’s tall form pushing farther toward the very front of the crowd. The man’s height made him conspicuous and, unlike himself and Grant, Edwards had never had much experience working in low-key ops like this one. Instead, he just barreled on, eyes on the prize.

“Cool off, Edwards,” Kane subvocalized. “You’re drawing too much attention.”

“Well, shit, Kane,” Edwards’s voice came back. “Whatever’s left inside me from that monster needs to get close to sense things. So, I’m getting close. You got a better idea, I’m all ears.” As he spoke, Edwards peered across the heads of the crowd, fixing Kane with a challenging stare.

Kane looked away, his eyes automatically playing over the rest of the crowd. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it should play out. Edwards had been turned into a traitor against his will, and now that he was back on side he felt like he had something to prove. If they weren’t careful, that desire to prove himself was going to land them all in very hot water.

* * *

MEANWHILE, CLOSE TO the rear wall of the hangar, the fourth agent of the Cerberus team had slipped past the celebrants and was making her way along the length of the room behind the stage. Domi was an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair that was cut into a short, pixie-style bob. Barely five feet in height with eyes a fearsome red, Domi had the figure of a teenage girl, with tiny, bird-thin limbs and small, high breasts. Right now, she was wearing a simple, airy ensemble, a light dress that left much of her pale skin uncovered. Given her choice, Domi would prefer to wear less and perhaps nothing at all. A child of the Outlands, Domi found the feel of clothing on her skin restrictive.

She had been tracking this group for several days, and had already witnessed two of their “performances,” for want of a better word. She balked at calling them sermons; there was nothing holy or reverent here that she could see. The group had come to recognize her, not in the least since her appearance was so distinctive, and she had told them her name was Mitra, a preferred alias she had used a few times while infiltrating similar pseudo religious groups. As “Mitra” she was trusted, a gentle-hearted innocent with a sickly parent who was looking for a new family in the form of this congregation. The story gave her enough credibility to pass herself off unnoticed as the false sermon continued.

While the crowd’s attention was on the preaching Stone Widow, Domi ducked under the stage and peered at what lay beneath. The stage had been constructed of several sheets of wood, placed end to end and held aloft by piled cinder blocks at regular intervals. Visibility was poor underneath, but Domi could see that the area was being used for storage. She wanted to know what was being stored.

The woman speaker’s coat was under there, neatly folded and placed by the open end of the stage. Other than that, the usual kind of things one would expect from travelers—several canteens filled with water along with some travel bags. Domi crouch-walked toward the bags—one of which was unbuckled at the top—and peered inside, spying a change of underwear along with some dried strips of cured meat in a separate bag with a clasp tie at its top. She sniffed the latter bag for a moment before moving on, head ducked beneath the stage. The height of the stage was about three feet, and Domi had to move slowly to find her way around.

Above her, the woman continued her proclamations about being the mother of the god’s child, and the crowd oohed and aahed as prompted. Through the medium of the low stage, the voices sounded hollow and eerie, as if coming from a great length of tunnel.

Up ahead, Domi spotted a wooden box that had been pushed a little more than arm’s length from the stage’s edge and against the side wall, just enough to keep it safe. The box was about fourteen inches in height and roughly square.

Checking the edges of the stage for movement and confirming there was none, Domi made her way slowly toward the crate on silent tread.

* * *

UP AT THE FRONT OF THE crowd, the Stone Widow was continuing to explain her role in the New Order. Words like messiah were being bandied about, child of god, saviour. The audience was lapping it up. The sense of relief was palpable; these people craved something to believe in now that their god was gone.

“When this child is born,” the woman continued, “he will be the first step in the evolution of our new world. A child born of god and woman. A force to lead us all.”

Edwards had reached the front of the group now, and he stared at the woman, eyeing her belly. Edwards had been seeded with one of the semisentient stones that came from Ullikummis to fulfill his will. While most of the stone growth had now been removed from his skull, parts of it tenaciously remained—not enough to do any damage to Edwards, but enough that he could sense other obedience stones and their ilk. He sure as hell could detect something here, but it was dull, like a niggling itch.

“Well?” Kane asked over the Commtact. “Anything?”

“Definitely something here,” Edwards replied. “Gonna have to pinpoint the source.”

As he spoke, Edwards reached forward, hand outstretched, and slapped his palm against the speaker’s ankle, the way others of the congregation had.

The woman was surprised by the hard grip, and she stopped midspeech to stare at the shaved-headed man who had grabbed her. “Let go, you’re hurting,” she said.

“Just wanted to touch the sainted lady,” Edwards explained as the robed figures came hurrying toward him from the back of the podium.

“Get away from the glorious widow,” one of the robed goons ordered.

The woman on stage kicked out and stepped back from Edwards, leaving him stumbling forward into the stage. The buzz in his head was there, but it was slight, and touching the so-called Stone Widow didn’t seem to make any appreciable difference.

“I just wanted to,” Edwards said, “to be close to the new life that’s coming.”

“So do I,” another member of the crowd called. “Let me feel the new life.”

“Let me be close,” another shouted.

“And me!”

Suddenly, Kane and Grant found themselves being pushed forward in a human wave as the crowd surged to get closer to the Stone Widow, even as Edwards was shoved violently against the edge of the stage itself.

“Fuck, Edwards, what have you started?” Kane muttered into his Commtact link.

* * *

BENEATH THE STAGE, Domi’s crimson eyes widened as the wooden box began to throb, its contents rattling within.

* * *

CONFUSED, BLACK JOHN Jefferson peered around him, trying to figure out where he was. He was surrounded by jungle, dense foliage thick with sap and the buzzing of insects like a wall of sound on the air. Tiny black flies swarmed about his wounds, feeding on his blood.

There was no real path to speak of, and Jefferson looked behind him, trying to recall if that was the direction he had come from. He had been on board the sinking fishing scow, had dipped under the waves when it had finally disappeared. The wound on his head had felt bastard hot where the sun struck it, but the salty water of the sea had made it sting even worse, doing nothing to cool either his skin or his temperament.

He had floated there awhile, the waves rolling about him, sending him on an undulating journey to wherever they chose. He remembered a beach, golden sand, a jungle running along its edge, palm trees and rubber plants. He had to have blacked out somewhere and had since been running on instinct.

He could recall nights like that when he’d been drunk, and his body had continued functioning anyway, whether his mind was really awake or not. Instinct could do that to a person—the deep-rooted instinct to survive.

Black John pushed the stem of a plant away as it tickled at his nose, shoving it aside with a groan of pain. His body ached and the wounds on his chest were still weeping, a clear pus coming from the broken skin where the bullets had struck, along with tiny slivers of congealing blood like red splinters. He’d kill them; that’s what he’d do. Salt, Six, all of them. They should have followed his number-one creed—to leave no witnesses. Leaving him alive would be the last mistake those ungrateful sea dogs would make.

He battled on, fighting with the foliage, seeking something to vent his anger upon. Then, as he shoved the low branches of a towering palm out of the way, he saw the building. It sat there, nestled in the jungle’s green embrace, as big as a cathedral. Constructed of stone the color of sand, the building had grand, sloping sides and a wide expanse of steps running up its center to a smaller structure that rested at its apex. The walls were notched with carvings, shadowed crevices in some script that the pirate couldn’t recognize but assumed to be written words.

Black John eyed the building, estimating it to be more than three stories in height, but still shorter than the tallest of the palm trees surrounding it.

With nowhere left to turn, Black John trudged toward the structure, wondering if anyone was inside. He was in need of medical attention, he knew, and the blood-spot trail he left on the jungle floor informed him he likely didn’t have that much time left. He reached down for the gun in his holster only to find it was gone. It didn’t matter—whoever lived there would either help him or he’d execute them and then he’d help himself with whatever he could find. In the end, it was always that simple.

Chapter 4

Lakesh stared at the Mercator relief map that stretched across one wall of the operations room, narrowing his eyes to pick out the trails of lights that were currently dark. Like everything else in the ops room, the map had been covered by tendrils of stone during Ullikummis’s violent assault on the redoubt. A tech on a stepladder was working at one side of the map, to the east, chipping away at the stone that had once overwhelmed it, removing its crust sliver by sliver. According to the map, there were plenty of pathways into the old states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, but there were no mat-trans-ready redoubts in the particular area that Rosalia had indicated. Lakesh shook his head with incredulity; it was almost as though military operations had been warned away from the region, deliberately kept at arm’s length.

Swiveling his chair, Lakesh turned back to his computer, tapping at a key to reengage the darkened screen. While the Cerberus redoubt had been designed to manage the mat-trans system, it was not the only mode of transportation that Lakesh and his people had access to. The interphaser could also tap the quantum pathways and move people through space to specific locations.

While more amenable than the stationary mat-trans, the technology of the interphaser was limited by certain esoteric factors. The full gamut of those limitations had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful, hidden lines stretching across the globe and beyond. This network of geomantic energy followed old ley lines and supported a powerful technology so far beyond human comprehension as to appear magical. Though fixed, the interphaser’s destination points often corresponded with the locations of temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious value. Clearly, ancient man had recognized the incredible power that was concentrated at such vortex points, which had been cataloged in the Parallax Points Program. These coordinates had been input into the interphaser.

Lakesh brought up a computer database of the known interphaser destinations; like most of the Cerberus endeavors, one of the IT experts had come up with a computer program that explored its properties.

Lakesh was still working at the problem when Brigid Baptiste and Mariah Falk returned, materializing in the mat-trans chamber like participants in a magic trick. Deep in his calculations, Lakesh had not heard the unit power up in the corner of the room, but when its door opened he looked up from his desk and watched Mariah and Brigid exit the chamber, returning home from their brief excursion to India. Mariah looked buoyant, smiling radiantly and—Lakesh fancied—walking with a skip in her step. A pace behind her, Brigid was solemn, her dour expression fixed. Lakesh had been Brigid’s supervisor back when they had both been archivists in Cobaltville, and they had been colleagues—and friends—for a very long time. Right now, Lakesh was worried about her. What had happened with Ullikummis had put all of them through metaphorical hell, but Brigid had taken it worse than anyone, being turned so absolutely against her own will.

“Brigid, a word?” Lakesh called, raising his hand as the two women paced through the room.

Brigid turned to him, fixing Lakesh with dead eyes. “Yes?”

“I have spoken to Reba,” Lakesh explained soberly once Mariah had left and Brigid had sat beside his desk. “She has agreed to speak with you about what you went through. She’s been doing this with a number of our people. A lot of them are still quite understandably traumatized. We feel it might be of some help to you, as well. Do you understand?”

Reba DeFore was the facility’s physician. Brigid had known her a long time, too.

“You mean a psych evaluation?” Brigid challenged.

Lakesh nodded. “You have been through a terrible ordeal,” he said, “one we fear you are perhaps struggling to cope with. The sessions would be open-ended—and voluntary of course. I feel it would be for your own good.”

Brigid glared at him, her brilliant emerald eyes piercing his. “No,” she said.

Lakesh watched openmouthed as she rose to leave. Finally, he recovered his composure before she reached the doors. “Please, Brigid, there are so many questions that need to be addr—”

“No,” she shrieked, turning on him. “I’m sick of questions. Sick, sick, sick. Do you hear me?”

Lakesh balked at the outburst, apologizing and defusing the situation by backtracking as quickly as he had suggested it. He watched as Brigid left the room, still mad.

Lakesh regretted that, but he was worried about her. They all were. He had known Brigid for a long time, and in all that time he had never known her like this. Her biolink transponder, the device that was injected into all Cerberus personnel so they could be monitored and tracked, had been shut off by Ullikummis, and without it she had been lost to them for almost two months. She had come back broken, no longer herself. And there didn’t seem to be anything that Lakesh or anyone else could do about it.

* * *

BRIGID STORMED DOWN the main corridor that ran the length of the redoubt, the heels of her boots clumping against the hard stone floor. Wide enough to fit two ground vehicles side by side with ease, the corridor featured a high arched ceiling. It was always cold, like a cave at night, and always busy, running as it did the length of the redoubt mountain complex.

There was something about the feel of the corridor that was reassuring to Brigid right then, and she slowed her pace as she weaved over to the right-hand wall before pressing her hand against the rock. The wall was cold, the kind of cold that emanated just a little way beyond a thing’s surface, that one could feel before touching. It felt real to her.

When Ullikummis had attacked her, overwhelmed her, destroyed her, Brigid had hidden her true mind away in a secret place that he couldn’t reach. It was a higher plane of consciousness, accessible only via meditation. Its walls had been as white as lightning, and it had a sterile quality, with not so much as the hint of a breeze anywhere within it no matter how far she traveled.

Here, back in the redoubt with its rocky ceiling and cold walls, Brigid couldn’t help but notice the difference. It was real here. Everything was real. Wasn’t it?

* * *

BLACK JOHN JEFFERSON had reached the top of the stone steps that ran up the outside of the building, and spatters of his blood now daubed each stair. It was a rectangular construction, the sloping sides reminiscent of a pyramid, although they failed to meet at the apex. Instead, there was a small covered area, fourteen feet by twelve, its flat stone roof marked with carvings. Black John examined those carvings for a moment, trying to make sense of them. The elements had not been kind to them, and much of the definition had worn away over time. Still, he saw geometric shapes and something that looked like a bird carved into the stone, but he didn’t know what any of it meant.

Beneath the stone roof, there was another staircase, this one leading down into the building itself. The steps were dark and grimy, the detritus of dead leaves and dried insect shells lying amid swollen lines of moss.

Black John poked his head closer to the staircase and called out, “Hello? Anybody there?”

His own words echoed back to him after a moment, sounding hollow as they reverberated from the walls.

Jefferson clutched at his belly as another spark of searing pain ran through his guts where the bullets had struck, and when he brought his hand away it was slick with blood. The blood was thick, congealed with rough flecks in it from the edges of a forming scab.

Behind him, the jungle waited, bird caws and animal cries sounding distant and lonesome. Black John looked around him, searching the area. The tree cover was high, and the jungle was so overgrown that he could barely see ten feet beyond the edge of the stone structure. It would not surprise him to learn that this temple had stood here, unnoticed, for thousands of years, utterly lost to the eyes of man.

Warily, the blood dripping from his stomach wound with each step, Black John followed the stone steps into the darkness of the forgotten temple.

* * *

STILL CONCERNED ABOUT Brigid’s reaction, Lakesh threw himself back into his work, unable to put the incident out of his mind. The map of the Mexico border glowed on the flickering computer screen, with several destination points highlighted that the interphaser would be able to access. That posed a problem, too. While Lakesh was willing to help Rosalia, the interphaser would need to travel to the destination point, too, and it was simply too valuable a unit for Lakesh to rely on the feature that would return the device to the Cerberus redoubt. Lakesh took a pen from his rock-scarred desk and began to tap it against his teeth absently, wondering what his best course of action was. Brigid could only be helped if she would let them. And Rosalia needed to go home.

Lakesh was still pondering those problems when Donald Bry came over to speak with him. With an unruly mop of copper curls and an expression of permanent worry, Bry was second in command at the Cerberus ops center, and was also Lakesh’s closest confidant. Many hours of experience had taught him to pick up on the signs when Lakesh was worrying, and seeing the man absentmindedly tapping at his teeth with a pen was one sure giveaway.