Planet Hate

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.

“You concentrate on getting our gateway open,” Rosalia instructed, dropping low and felling both of the young farmers with a leg sweep. “We’ll get him.”

With that, Rosalia pointed toward the gap between the buildings, and her mongrel hound scampered ahead to where she indicated. “Get Kane,” she told the dog. “Go find him, boy.” The dog yipped excitedly as it rushed back down the alley.

Though it seemed to spend most of its time in a dreamworld, the dog was able to follow commands without any encouragement. Rosalia suspected that the dog had previously been owned by a now dead dirt farmer out in the Mojave Desert, but beyond that she knew little about it.

As the dog wended through the legs of another of the farmers, Rosalia’s second knife blade glinted and she leaped from the alley with all the fury of a wildcat.

KANE KICKED and struggled as his own opponent shoved his face down into the silt at the bottom of the shallow stream. Though the water barely came over the back of his head, Kane was reminded of that adage that a man could drown in an inch of water—curse it all, if it wasn’t just the kind of random fact that Brigid Baptiste would have spouted by way of reassurance as Kane struggled for his very life. His eyes were wide open and he saw the big bloated bubbles pass by his face as another blurt of breath was forced from his aching lungs. He renewed his struggles, trying desperately to flip his attacker from him as the man held his head under the water with a viselike grip.

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.