Truth Engine (13 page)

 

F
ARTHER BACK ALONG THE TUNNEL
, unseen by either of the combatants, Rosalia emerged from the stairwell, her face half-hidden within the folds of her hooded robe. The noise of the battle drew her, and she hunkered in the open doorway, her hand on the dog's neck, both of them peering out at the incredible fight that raged forty feet away.

“Kane,” Rosalia said, the word barely louder than her breath. “Magistrate man Kane.”

She knew Kane from before, from back when they had encountered one another in the coastal village of Hope. For all his irritating morality, Kane was an adept fighter,
she knew, and he would stand up to protect others. When they first met, he had even recruited her into helping save the victims of a tidal wave that had crashed into the fishing village from the Pacific. Yes, Kane could be annoying, but he would stop at nothing to achieve the things he believed in. And if she played him right, one of those things might just be her freedom.

Beneath the shadows of her hood, Rosalia smiled. “Things have just taken a turn for the
very
interesting,” she murmured to herself.

 

B
ULLETS SLAMMED AGAINST
Ullikummis's smoldering features as he rocketed toward Kane like an enraged bull. Kane saw the giant's stone arm sweep through the air at him, and he leaped aside, springing high and kicking out, his feet slamming against the stone monster's chest and flipping him over Ullikummis's shoulder, drilling bullets into his face from just inches away.

Then Kane was landing on the far side of the monstrous would-be god, rolling over to disperse the momentum he had built up in those brief instants of furious movement.

Ullikummis turned, sweeping a hand across his face where the bullets had struck. Kane watched as the monstrous, malformed figure used his rugged fingers to pluck a bullet from his acid-damaged cheek, flicking it to the floor. Five more followed, a tinkling of misshapen titanium shells smattering against the tiles.

Kane stood his ground, the Sin Eater poised before him. The weapon was having some effect, he could see, but would it be enough?

Kane turned, looking around him for something else to hit the monster with, something more powerful. Ul
likummis's troops seemed to have stopped in place, stunned spectators to this battle between man and god.

Frantically, Kane scanned the scene as the great stone figure took another stride toward him, his rough, rocky hide lit in staccato bursts by the flickering lights. In that instant, Kane shifted his aim, pointing the Sin Eater directly above his head and unleashing a triple burst of bullets as Ullikummis gathered his pace. Twenty feet above the combatants' heads, Kane's bullets smacked into the lighting rig that flickered there, bursting one of the cylindrical tube bulbs before catching the chains that secured it in place, riveted to a scaffold that spanned the width of the tunnel. The long metal light fixture swung free, dangling for a moment from its remaining chain link before its own weight, coupled with one of Kane's perfectly placed bullets, broke that fragile link and it plummeted to the floor.

Kane dived backward as Ullikummis charged at him, just as the fixture dropped from the high ceiling. The light crashed down onto the stone colossus in a shower of sparks, and Ullikummis dropped to his knees, bellowing in pain.

In the wake of that explosion, the tunnel-like corridor seemed to go silent. Kane crouched, his breathing heavy as he watched the motionless figure of Ullikummis sprawled on the floor, like the wake of an avalanche.

Kane stared for a long moment, feeling slightly unreal. His breathing chugged from his open mouth like a steam engine, and he struggled to bring it back under control, feeling the cooling beads of sweat on his brow.

It was over.

Reluctantly, Kane turned, bringing his Sin Eater up to cover the handful of hooded figures who stood in stunned silence barely two dozen feet from the wreckage
of the battle. Brigid Baptiste lay among the debris there, the floor ripped apart beside her in what looked like an open fault line in the mountain itself.

With effort, Kane stood, feeling his strained muscles threatening to rebel. Using his left hand to steady the Sin Eater, which shook in his exhausted grip, Kane drew the silent pistol across each of the stunned hooded figures in turn.

“Your god is dead,” he snarled. “You can either stand down or I'll make sure you follow him into the pits of Hades.”

For a moment, no one spoke, and the only noise in the wide artery that spanned the redoubt came from the tinkling overhead bulbs as they flickered and sparked. Then a voice shouted from behind Kane, calling out his name. It was Domi, issuing a desperate warning.

Kane half turned even as he heard heavy footsteps behind him, and Ullikummis rushed toward him once again. Then the stone monster swept out one of his long arms, striking Kane in the back of his neck. It was like being hit with a boulder.

Kane was shoved forward, his boots skidding across the floor. At the same time, Domi's blaster boomed, drilling a bullet into Ullikummis's flesh. Then he was falling down, striking the tiled floor with his chin as he skidded across it toward the robed figures.

Whatever happened next, Kane couldn't recall.

 

K
ANE OPENED HIS EYES
, looking around the now familiar rock-walled, eight-by-six cell. The faintest glow of orange lava came from a tiny circular rent where the rough wall met the ceiling. His breathing was labored and he released a sigh through gritted teeth as he tried to calm himself down.

Kane didn't remember it all even now. But he remembered enough, and he had pieced the rest together in his mind. He had taken on a god and had come up wanting.

As he lay there in the semidarkness, his back resting against the rough stone floor, he muttered to the ceiling above him, “Baptiste, where the hell are you when I need you?”

For the moment at least, the ceiling chose not to respond.

“Stupid dog, take your shit already,” Rosalia muttered, watching Belly-on-legs running around the windy little rock ridge outside the prison.

Not a prison, she reminded herself. A life camp. That's how they referred to it. A place where people came to be reeducated, to open their eyes to the joy of the future. How had Ullikummis explained it to his supposedly loyal troops?

“A death camp is a place people are brought to die, but a life camp is where they come to be born.”

“Ptah,” Rosalia muttered. Mumbo jumbo, that's all it was. Semantics and bullshit, that's all this Ullikummis creature fed them, a steady stream of lies dressed up as philosophy.

She had met with him out in the old province of Mandeville, heard him speak briefly as he addressed a thousand of his followers, every last one called Stone. Some idiot rally, like the others that First Priest Dylan had hosted, where he had told people all about heaven and utopia and some fairy-tale future where he was a big man and Ullikummis would be their benevolent god. A baron by any other name, Rosalia recognized. Bullshit, all of it.

“Bullshit-flavored bullshit,” she muttered as she thought back, brushing the loose strands of hair from her windswept face.

Before her, the dog was hurrying down the slope as the wind blew through the leaves around him. It was May, and spring was turning to summer, the blossoms giving way to green leaves, berries and cones. Rosalia wasn't supposed to be out here, not officially. But the dog needed to run, and she wasn't going to hurry behind it inside the prison caverns, picking up after it as it urinated and defecated when it felt the need. Nature didn't like being caged.

The main entrance was well guarded, of course. Despite the security of the sealed cells, there was always the risk of their guests escaping—indeed, rumor was that one of them had tried, the Magistrate man called Grant, and that Dylan was sore as hell about it, concerned that this lapse would be fed back to Ullikummis and that his priesthood might be stripped away.

Turned away by the guards at the main entrance, Rosalia had explored the facility on her first day here, mutt in tow, until she'd located an area set aside for vehicles. The vehicle bay featured a huge rollback door, and a smaller side entrance presumably used for scouts or sentries. The door was sealed with rock, but Rosalia's obedience stone had opened it, the same way it could open the cells. With Belly-on-legs running back and forth at her heels, she had led the way out the door, onto a steep slope where the forest grew thick. The tree cover was cleared only around the rollback door itself, enough to allow vehicles free passage should the hangar bay be used. Beyond that, the area was given over to trees, a perfect place for her dog to exhaust itself with its silly dog games.

She had smiled when she had found it, this little secret area that no one else visited, remembering a childhood story that the nuns had told her. A secret garden, right here in the shadow of the life camp.

On the rocky slope now, Rosalia's dog was scampering around, hurrying between the trees, sniffing at a burrow it had found among the foliage. It was a mongrel, Rosalia figured, half coyote, half something more soppy, all stupid. The beast had no common sense, got scared at the silliest things, and had the palest eyes she had ever seen in a dog, so pale they looked almost white. She had found the hound in the desert, or maybe it had found her—she wasn't sure. It had been following her ever since, keeping watch sometimes when she slept, sharing her food without greed. Calling it a good dog was being too generous, she thought, but it was a companion in a harsh world where everyone else was geared to screwing their fellow man over, or indoctrinating him into this growing cult religion of Ullikummis the savior.

Savior? What kind of savior was he, to come and terrify people, brainwash them, break their necks? Rosalia thought back to her schooling, out in the nunnery at the Mexican border. Less than two centuries ago, the whole of this country had been devastated, a so-called death-land, its people eking out a meager subsistence amid the radioactive debris of nuclear apocalypse. In that context, Ullikummis as savior made sense, Rosalia thought. In his harsh way, he had vowed to change the world for the better. Their world now was the product of the Deathlands, a struggling emergence from the end of the world, where civilization sat side by side with the pioneer spirit, where survival still came at a price.

There was a bark then, and Rosalia looked up as the mountainous wind whipped around her. Twenty feet ahead, the dog was gazing into the dense branches of a tree, yapping at something it could smell there, running back and forth trying to see what it was. Squirrel probably, Rosalia knew; there were no people living close to
Life Camp Zero. The camp was high in the mountains, surrounded by trees and seemingly bottomless ravines, but the forest that surrounded it held plenty of wildlife, groundhogs and timberwolves and the like. All these things fascinated Belly-on-legs; the stupid mutt would chase after anything once it got the scent. Rosalia had heard that the nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, leaving this rocky prison facility utterly undisturbed. Even so, Life Camp Zero remained well guarded. People could live without fresh air, perhaps, but dogs—got stir-crazy quicker than human prisoners. However stupid the mutt might seem, Rosalia knew it packed a savage bite if it was roused. She had seen it defend her back when they had been sleeping in the fishing ville of Hope.

The dog barked again, turned its head briskly as something scampered across the branches above and leaped to a nearby tree. The dog scurried after it, running farther down the slope.

“No,” Rosalia called, stepping sideways down the steep slope to stop the canine. Its yapping could be mistaken for a wild animal, but if the guards above her spotted the dog it might draw attention; and neither of them should be out here, anyway.

Stupid men and their stupid rules. The guards were as much prisoners as the prisoners.

Rosalia caught up to the dog, speaking softly to keep it from panicking so she could grab it by the scruff of its neck.

“You do your business,” she encouraged, “and then we go inside. Won't do for either of us to be missed. They put another one of those stones in me and I'll forget to feed you.”

The dog pulled back its lips from big teeth, yipped once in delight, tail wagging.

“Come on, stupid mutt,” Rosalia urged. “We're getting out of here soon enough. You just play along for now, okay? For me?”

The dog opened its mouth, made to bark again, and Rosalia stroked it, tickling it behind the ears. As if understanding her, the dog pulled away and headed back up the slope toward the hidden door, stopping once to urinate on the side of a tree.

Back at the doorway, Rosalia pushed her dark hair behind her and brought the hood of her robe up to cover it once more. She took one last look at the mountainous vista as the wind shook the branches of the trees. Soon she would be out of here. Things had turned so hostile that she might not last out there on her own, but with the Magistrate man at her side…? She would have to convince him, and convince him it was his idea.

To Mariah Falk, it seemed that she had been crying forever. For the past several hours she knew she had been lying in this sealed cavern, neither asleep nor truly awake, just dwelling on what had happened to Clem in some twilight dream state. How long, Mariah couldn't be certain. But ultimately, something within her seemed to snap to attention, and she rolled off the hard, unforgiving floor and sat up, opening her tear-hot eyes for the first time in what seemed a lifetime.

She had paid scant attention to the cell when she had been placed inside, but now she looked at it,
really
looked at it, for the first time. It was rock; the whole cell was rock. The walls, the floor beneath her, the ceiling above.

In her day, Mariah had been a renowned geologist; her area of expertise was rock. When she had been assigned to the Manitius Moon Base along with numerous other valuable military and scientific personnel, and cryogenically frozen as some kind of gift to the future, Mariah had never really thought much of her specific role. She had volunteered, feeling that it was her patriotic duty, her personal responsibility, one of those nebulous concepts that speak of morality and selflessness. But in all honesty Mariah knew she had mostly taken up the opportunity because it promised adventure. How many people got the chance to see the world two hundred years after their birth? Even if it wasn't the plan, Mariah felt like—who
was that guy?—Buck Rogers, zipping off to the future and finding out how wonderful everything had turned out.

Except the future hadn't turned out to be very wonderful at all. In fact, she had woken to a society just barely storing the concept of civilization, the memory of the brutal era known as the Deathlands still fresh in people's minds. The establishment of the Program of Unification was a threshold in the recent past that spoke of withdrawing from the brink of apocalypse, and it had come at a terrible price: the subtle subjugation of humankind under the all-powerful alien race called the Annunaki, then disguised as allies.

Like her fellow Manitius refugees, Mariah had been adopted into the Cerberus operation, which was led by another man from the twentieth century—Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh. But while her fellows had been doctors, physicists, cybernetics engineers and other explorers at the very edge of scientific discovery, Mariah had never felt her contribution matched up. She was a geologist, an expert on rocks. Rocks weren't at the cutting edge of scientific invention. Rocks were those things people stood on while they invented, and then they got carved into statues to celebrate the discoveries.

Now, sitting alone in the tight little cave, its walls seemingly sealed all around her, Mariah Falk peered into the gloom and laughed. Ullikummis's troops had sacked Cerberus, killed some of her friends, imprisoned the majority. And they had imprisoned them in rock.

Stretching her weary limbs, Mariah ran her fingers across the floor, feeling the thin bed of sand there. She pawed at the sand, burrowing beneath it with her fingertips. Less than one knuckle's depth below the surface she found the solid floor. She scraped at the sand, leaning
close to peer at the exposed rock. It was the same kind as the walls. The cocoon of the cell reminded her of a honeycomb.

Beneath the dim light that glowed from a small panel above her, Mariah studied the rock for a moment, checking it and comparing it to the wall before her. It was igneous rock, she suspected, formed by magma flow. Very little natural porosity, which meant it would be very solid—solid and heavy. But a corrosive could damage this, she knew.

More importantly, the suggestion that this had once been magma gave Mariah some clues about its origin. She had seen Ullikummis up close, had seen the rivers of lava that seemed to flow through his veins. Igneous rocks—the rocks around her—were formed of lava, and it didn't strain credulity to suggest there might be a link between the two.

When placed in a cave, it was only natural to assume that the cave had always been there, and not to question its structure. But what if this cave was some kind of manipulation? Mariah wondered. What if Ullikummis had created this cell, had utilized his seemingly mystical power to draw caves in place the way an artist might paint them onto a canvas?

She had seen him do it before. Ullikummis had moved rocks, drawing them from the surface of the Earth using some kind of sympathetic telekinesis. He had created a whole settlement, the stone construction called Tenth City. The number had been important, Mariah recalled. Clem Bryant had explained it to her.

The Annunaki had hidden in nine villes set across America. Nine barons, nine villes. Nine was the number of the universe, Clem had said. Nine was both creation and destruction; nine was the all.

“It is an ouroboros number,” Clem had said one day as they sat together. “It feeds upon itself. In Hindu belief, four is destruction, while five is creation. Add them together and you represent all the energy in the universe.”

Clem had been trying to explain to her why Ullikummis had chosen to call his settlement Tenth City, after Mariah had expressed her recurring nightmare of being forced to return.

“It's entirely understandable that you're worried about returning to the scene of the crime,” Clem said, indicating Mariah's wounded ankle, where she had been shot while in Ullikummis's ghost city. “But if you understand it, you can conquer your fear.”

Mariah wasn't so sure, but she listened to Clem's soothing voice, admiring the man's fortitude and his passion for reducing everything to logic and emotion. “So if nine is the number of everything,” she'd asked, “why would Ullikummis choose ten?”

“In the simplest terms,” Clem said, “to suggest superiority over the other Annunaki overlords, perhaps.”

“But…?” Mariah had pressed. She knew Clem, knew how he would be working through the problem on several different levels at the same time.

“To be greater than nine,” Clem said, “to be more powerful than creation and destruction, to be more powerful than the all—that's one ambitious godling. I daresay our godling has a god complex!”

Mariah looked at Clem for a long moment as he sipped his steeping tea. “You think there's more, though, don't you?” she asked.

“Human history,” he mused, “has been subtly dictated by the Annunaki. Their symbols underpin every development, every human endeavor. We have things, concepts, that show themselves in different ways across different
cultures, but all seem to be in tune, as if they all came from the same source. In the Kabbalah, ten is the number of kingship. Known as Malkuth, it is unlike the other nine sephirot. The tenth is considered an attribute of God that does not emanate from God directly, but rather from his creation. God's creation reflects God's glory from within itself.

“In naming his creation Tenth City,” Clem continued, “Ullikummis was building a structure to reflect his own magnificence. That city design was a sigil, a powerful magical sign that can influence the course of events, and even the rational thinking of humans. You yourself were caught in its thrall.”

Mariah blushed, her acute embarrassment at recalling the event clearly written across her face.

Clem shook his head as if to chastize her. “Few people could resist that for very long, Mariah,” he explained. “There's no shame in being trapped by its power. We—which is to say, civilized man—have these symbols indoctrinated into our thinking from a very young age. The cities of man, the great ones like Paris and New York and London—these all follow the sigil design, the same design Ullikummis used to create Tenth City. The Annunaki have been playing a very long game with mankind, one far more insidious than we first suspected.”

“So it's possible that Tenth City is calling me back,” Mariah reasoned.

“You told me that the city was destroyed,” Clem said, “leveled to the ground by explosives. I doubt even a city can call to people from beyond the grave.”

In the cavelike cell now, Mariah wondered if perhaps this place was the city calling from beyond the grave, or at least clawing from it. Cerberus had been chasing after Ullikummis, bumbling into him since he had first arrived
on the planet several months ago, but they had never considered what this monster could do. Typically, Cerberus had involved itself in engagements with the rogue Annunaki as they had with his father and family before him, but if they had considered what he could be capable of, they might have stayed one step ahead of him and prevented his successful attack on their home base.

Mariah eyed the wall under the dim, flickering glow of the recessed magma light, searching for a jutting piece. There, a little to her left, she spotted just what she was looking for—a piece of the rough stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, poking out on a tiny bridge of rock, barely connected to the wall.

Mariah reached across and pulled at it, worked it for a moment, pushing against the thin splinter that joined it to the wall. Given time and a little effort, it would break away, she knew.

The stone god had made a mistake in letting Mariah live. He had pushed her about in Tenth City, tried to kill her and failed. But killing Clem—that had been something new. A line had been crossed.

Mariah ran her hand along the rocky wall, then prodded the little jutting piece again, feeling it move just a little as she put pressure on it. “I know you, don't I?” she muttered.

Sure, Mariah wasn't an ex-Magistrate fighting machine like Kane, or a hyperintelligent warrior woman like Brigid Baptiste. All Mariah Falk was—all she had ever been—was a geologist. But a geologist knows rocks.

Using the heel of her hand, she gave a final push against the little jutting piece, felt it snap away. It skittered across the floor before bouncing off the far wall and coming to rest in the sand.

“Watch out, stone face,” Mariah whispered as she picked up the tiny shard. “I've got your number now.”

 

S
ELA
S
INCLAIR THOUGHT
she could hear a marching band. The muscular, dark-skinned woman was ex-air force, and she had seen her fair share of parades and marching bands.

This music was coming from nearby, she was sure. She could hear it distinctly enough, although it seemed to be muffled, like voices from another room or music from the apartment above her own. It was at its loudest when First Priest Dylan visited her. Did she like him?

She was lying down, she realized, lying on something hard and cold, her eyes closed. She had been sleeping through the parade.

Sela opened her eyes and looked out on darkness. No, not darkness—not quite. As her eyes adjusted she became aware of a faint red glow above her, a red like blood seeping into her vision.

She rolled a little, struggling to make her muscles move. Her arms had gone numb thanks to the cold surface she had been sleeping on, and what little warmth she generated seemed to be lost in the cold place she found herself.

It was a cave, she realized, looking about her. A cave deep underground. At least, she assumed it was underground, though there was no real way of telling.

Sela pushed herself up from the cold rock, bringing her knees close and hugging them as she sat up, feeling the freezing cold of the chamber bite at her as she moved. “Where's the band?” she muttered, peering around.

The music was still coming to her, as if from close by, perhaps from another room within her old frat house.

“They don't have frat houses in caves,” Sela whispered to herself as the band played on.

She pushed herself up, finding it was a struggle, given the way her body seemed so heavy just now. It was as if she had been drugged, she felt so weary.

They don't have bands in caves, either,
Sela reminded herself as she looked around the space, still trying to fathom where the music was emanating from.

Slowly, her movements appreciably strained as if she had aged forty years in a day, Sela Sinclair walked around the little cave, searching for a doorway. There was none.

“What the hell?” she asked, rubbing her palm against her head as the music played on. She stopped suddenly, pulling her hand away. There was something there, in her head.

Tentatively this time, Sela brought her hand up and placed her fingertips on her forehead at her hairline, running them slowly down toward her eyes. On the second try she found the bump, a small calluslike thing located almost dead center of her forehead, where the mythical third eye was shown in those old trippy hippie paintings she'd seen years ago. Still standing, she bent over and ran her fingers around her forehead, reassuring herself that this was the only lump she was carrying. There were bruises and cuts on her face, and she winced once or twice as she probed at them, but the thing on her forehead was different. It seemed to sit there, a hard lump beneath the skin, moving slightly to her touch as if floating on a bed of Jell-O.

Sela pushed at the bump for a moment, using finger and thumb to trace its edges. It was quite large, about the size of her thumb joint, and it was entirely beneath her skin. She felt her head but could find no wound, no cut
where it might had entered. Yet it didn't feel like a swelling—it felt like a stone.

Sela couldn't imagine what the thing was as she ran her hands over it again and again, worrying at it with the blunt edges of her short nails.

And somewhere, distant but not
too
distant, the music played on.