Sorrow Space
DARK PASSAGE
Dedicated to the survival and protection of postapocalyptic earth and their human race, the Cerberus rebels have forced the invading alien Annunaki into retreat. But defending mankind’s freedom to exist remains daunting in a world of shifting danger from forces human, alien…and dead.
HELL’S SOLDIERS
A glitch in a quantum portal traps Kane and his team in another reality—an alternative world where evil has triumphed. On the decaying streets of Dead Earth, life itself is a crime. Legions of Dark Magistrates patrol the fetid landscape, wielding the destructive power of their Soul Eaters. They are the soldiers of a hybrid baron ready to extend his terrifying power beyond the borders of his own decaying reality. Cerberus is all that stands between the real world and the invasion of the dead.
The sylphlike figure of Helena Vaughn took another step down the stairwell toward him
Kane squeezed the trigger on his Sin Eater, unleashing a stutter of 9 mm lead bullets. The shots sounded loud in the enclosed space of the stairwell, and bullets rattled off the concrete walls and steps beside and behind the naked girl. She seemed unaware of them.
Kane gritted his teeth as his discharge passed through her pale, ethereal flesh.
“You aren't real,” he spat out. “You can't be.”
Helena Vaughn just stood there amid the barrage of bullets that pummeled her body, the dark shadows of the stairwell obscuring her sad expression, turning it into something much more haunting.
Kane eased his index finger from the blaster's trigger. The girl looked up at him through her bangs, the blond hair tangled and in disarray. Kane watched as her mouth opened and she let loose a soft sigh before drawing a tiny stutter of breathâ¦as if in pain.
Other titles in this series:
Parallax Red
Doomstar Relic
Iceblood
Hellbound Fury
Night Eternal
Outer Darkness
Armageddon Axis
Wreath of Fire
Shadow Scourge
Hell Rising
Doom Dynasty
Tigers of Heaven
Purgatory Road
Sargasso Plunder
Tomb of Time
Prodigal Chalice
Devil in the Moon
Dragoneye
Far Empire
Equinox Zero
Talon and Fang
Sea of Plague
Awakening
Mad God's Wrath
Sun Lord
Mask of the Sphinx
Uluru Destiny
Evil Abyss
Children of the Serpent
Successors
Cerberus Storm
Refuge
Rim of the World
Lords of the Deep
Hydra's Ring
Closing the Cosmic Eye
Skull Throne
Satan's Seed
Dark Goddess
Grailstone Gambit
Ghostwalk
Pantheon of Vengeance
Death Cry
Serpent's Tooth
Shadow Box
Janus Trap
Warlord of the Pit
Reality Echo
Infinity Breach
Oblivion Stone
Distortion Offensive
Cradle of Destiny
Scarlet Dream
Truth Engine
Infestation Cubed
Planet Hate
Dragon City
God War
Genesis Sinister
Savage Dawn
James Axler
Outlanders
Sorrow Space
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
âFriedrich Nietzsche,
1844â1900
The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influ-ences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
Contents
Chapter 1
It wasn’t here yet, but already Domi could feel it. Its approach played at the edge of the albino woman’s heightened senses like the half-remembered words to an old, old song. The woman’s pale nose twitched and her ruby eyes darted left and right as she searched for the source of the irritation.
“Something’s coming,” she murmured, giving voice to her thoughts.
Domi had always been sensitive to changes so subtle that others failed to detect them: changes in temperature and air pressure, changes in the electromagnetic fields. These were the signals that sent animals scurrying to their nests and burrows prior to an eclipse, that made cows lie down before a storm broke, and Domi felt them all.
Domi had grown up a child of the Outlands, and some mistook her highly tuned senses for evidence that she had more in common with animals than with civilised humans. Certainly she didn’t appear entirely human. An albino, Domi stood a little over five feet tall. Her skin was the pale alabaster of chalk, and her short-cropped hair was the creamy color of bone. Her hair was arranged in a ragged, pixie-style cut, framing the sharp planes of her face and drawing attention to her eyes, twin pools of a vibrant scarlet the color of blood.
Domi’s clothing, too, was unusual in comparison with the other people in the cavernous operations center of the redoubt. There were almost twenty personnel working diligently at the twin aisles of computer terminals that ran the length of the room. Each technician wore a standard uniform, a one-piece white jumpsuit with a vertical blue zipper running down its center. Domi, however, was dressed in cut-down denim shorts and a crop top that left her legs, arms and midriff bare. Her feet were also bare, and like the clothes she wore, showed smudges of dried earth, tree sap and berry juice, traces of some personal jaunt beyond the corridors of the Cerberus redoubt. A combat knife was strapped to Domi’s left calf just above the ankle, its wickedly serrated blade a solid nine inches of razor-sharp steel. The knife was a memento from Domi’s previous life, where she had been held as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville.
The busy operations room was the central hub of the Cerberus complex, a fully-staffed facility hidden from prying eyes in a former military redoubt high in the Bitterroot Range, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains with their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, some of whom were cryogenic “freezies” from the twentieth century who had been discovered in suspended animation in the Manitius Moon Base and many of whom were experts in their chosen field of study.
Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Now the Cerberus staff could, at any time of the day or night, draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. This arrangement gave the staff in residence a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of Earth, as well as providing almost instantaneous communication with field teams around the globe.
Domi’s eyes flickered once again, ignoring the hustle and bustle of the operations room as she felt a subtle change in the atmosphere. The room was a vast space carved out of the mountain itself, and it was dominated by the two rows of computers that were used to monitor and process the satellite feed data.
Across the back wall, a huge Mercator relief map stretched high above the operators’ heads, showing the topography of the planet prior to the nukecaust of 2001. On that fateful day, the borders had been redrawn and fault lines had been shocked into action, plunging vast chunks of the West Coast of the United States of America—and elsewhere—into the ocean.
The Mercator map was dotted with glowing points that were connected by a web of colored lights like decorations on a Christmas tree. These lights showed the available pathways of the mat-trans network, an advanced transportation system that involved shunting matter through quantum space to a chosen destination. The Cerberus redoubt had been involved, from its earliest stages, with research into the transfer of matter from one location to another. Later, the mat-trans units were involved in exploration of other planets and even alternate dimensions.
While the other Cerberus personnel continued to monitor their feeds and analyze the data they were receiving, Domi’s piercing red eyes fixed on the mat-trans unit itself, her gaze playing across the brown-tinted armaglass that surrounded it. The mat-trans was located in a separate chamber that stood as an adjunct to the ops room. Hexagonal in shape and eight feet in height, the chamber featured a locked door set within the protective armaglass structure. The device was operated by a control terminal located outside of the mat-trans chamber itself, where a specific destination could be selected by inputting destination coordinates.
Most recently the unit had dispatched a field team to meet with an arms supply ring that was threatening to destabilize the already volatile area of the western United States.
There was something about the mat-trans, however, that served to unsettle Domi right now. She padded toward it on her bare feet, sniffing at the air as she felt that eerie wrongness wash over her. The mat-trans tampered with quantum energy, but it also involved standard mechanical processes, including the automated air-filtration system that functioned when the unit was in use, clearing the gases that were expelled during teleportation.
As Domi brushed past him, a Cerberus operative called Farrell peered up from his post. Farrell had a shaved head, a thin, goatee-style beard and a gold hoop earring in one earlobe, and he had been poring over a printout. “Domi?” Farrell asked, peering over the papers. “Everything okay?”
“Who’s coming through the mat-trans?” Domi asked, addressing Farrell without looking at him.
“No one,” Farrell assured her. Then, as if in afterthought, he checked the monitor before him, confirming his statement. “No one.”
Domi’s eyes remained fixed on the chamber. “Wait,” she said in a low voice.
“Domi,” Farrell began, “there’s nothing coming. The unit’s powered d—”
He stopped, the words drying in his mouth as he heard the familiar hissing and whirring that accompanied the activation of the mat-trans chamber.
“Incoming!” Farrell shouted, glancing across the operations center for the security detail that waited close to the room’s main door. “The mat-trans is live.”
From his post at the back of the ops room, Mohandas Lakesh Singh rose to his feet. The founder and director of the Cerberus operation, Lakesh had been a part of the original team of scientists who had operated here in the twentieth century, when it was a military research facility dedicated to matter-transfer research. Visibly in his fifties, Lakesh was of medium height with dusky skin and clear blue eyes that were the product, as was his longevity, of organ replacement. Lakesh had sleek black hair with just a trace of white at the temples and sides, slicked back from his forehead, and an aquiline nose over a small, refined mouth. In his time as Cerberus director, Lakesh had seen many strange things, so it took more than an alert regarding the mat-trans to shock him.
“Mr. Farrell, status report,” Lakesh demanded as Edwards and Sinclair came charging along the double aisles of computer terminals, their weapons drawn. “I heard no request from Kane’s team. Why did you activate the mat-trans?”
“I didn’t activate it,” Farrell confirmed. “It just...activated.”
“Troubling,” Lakesh murmured.
Edwards, a former Magistrate, was a muscular man with a bullet-bitten ear and hair cropped so close to his skull that he appeared almost bald. Sela Sinclair was a slender, dark-skinned woman with a fierce expression and short black hair in ringlets. Both Sinclair and Edwards had served with Cerberus for a long time, and they well understood the mat-trans procedures. The incongruous figure of Domi stood before them in a semicrouch, her nose twitching as the chamber powered up. Behind this group, the remainder of the Cerberus staff watched from their designated positions behind their terminals, with several of them standing up to better see what was occurring.
And then the mat-trans chamber seemed almost to shake. Lightning streaked through the air within the hexagonal chamber, joining the ceiling and floor tiles in bent lines of dazzling whiteness as something solid was dragged from the quantum ether to materialize within. The whole operations room suffered a dramatic temperature drop at that instant, as if struck by an icy blast of air. Hidden motors hummed and chuntered as the chamber powered down again, the familiar whine of whirring fans drumming from their hidden alcoves.
Still in her semicrouch, Domi stretched forward, peering into the chamber as the mists cleared, feeling the coldness like a weight on the atmosphere. As the fog parted, Domi and the others saw a figure standing within. No, it wasn’t standing—it was moving, propelled toward the door.
Unconsciously, everyone in the operations room reared back as the thing in the chamber slammed into the locked door, making not the slightest sound through the barrier of the armaglass.
“Open it,” Domi instructed, not looking away.
When Farrell questioned the order, Lakesh consented with a single nod of his head. “It’s the only way we’re going to find out what’s come through,” he reasoned. As he spoke, he reached for a small rebreather that was located in one of his desk drawers, and he watched as other personnel in the room did the same. From its operating specs, the mat-trans chamber should not open until the filtration system had cleared any toxins from the air, a fail-safe to prevent the units from accidentally carrying a biological weapon to the heart of the military redoubts where they were located.
At the control desk, Farrell ran his eyes over the system’s stats, confirming that the air within had been cleansed. “Opening now,” he advised. “We are live in five...in four...in three...”
Impatiently Domi leaned a little closer, watching the dark figure within the mat-trans chamber, still obscured by the transport mists.
“Domi,” Lakesh reminded her. “Be careful.” The two of them were romantically involved, but Lakesh knew better than to try to persuade Domi to back off when there was danger near; she was too brave and too much of a free spirit for that.
A highly skilled hand-to-hand combatant, Domi pulled her knife from its ankle sheath as she stepped closer to the door of the chamber. The seal hissed, venting air as Farrell tapped the fail-safe code into the control terminal. Then the door opened.
The first thing that hit Domi was the smell of rotting meat that poured from the mat-trans chamber like a storm front. The stench made Domi gag, and before she could do anything else, the lone figure emerged from within, shuffling forward in a stumbling, staggering abruptness of limbs. She was tall, female, five foot ten and wearing a sheer body stocking of inky black. Her dark hair had fallen over her face. Beneath the body stocking, her frame was so slender it left every muscle on display. There was not so much as an ounce of fat on the whole of the woman’s figure, and the shining body stocking only accentuated that fact.
The woman took four staggering steps, her movements angular like a stop-motion animation in a film, her long limbs jutting and awkward. Her face was still hidden by her drooping hair, and Domi saw now that her hair was black and wet, matching the body stocking exactly. Her arms poked out behind her, elbows bent, wrists turned backward, gloved fingers taut. And then, before Domi could say a word, the woman fell at her feet, sagging to the floor amid a forming pool of oil.
Domi stepped closer as the woman slumped to the floor, two guns trained on her by the Cerberus security staff. The woman’s hair was in disarray over her face and Domi saw more clearly that it was streaked with black gunk, the same oily stuff that seemed to sheath her body. It was not clothing, Domi recognized now. Rather it was a tarlike substance, thick and viscous, covering the woman’s body entirely and creating a second skin that blocked every pore.
Domi leaned down to address the woman, but before she spoke, the dark-sheathed woman started to shudder violently. Her body trembled as black gunk poured from it, oozing across the floor like an oil slick on water. Domi skittered backward, careful to not let any of the gunk touch her bare feet. Then the woman lifted her head, revealing for the first time that her face, too, was covered in the dark sludge. It shone beneath the fluorescents, obscuring the woman’s features, turning her eyes into smooth bulges like eggs, covering her open mouth with a taut skin like the top of a drum.
Domi watched with a growing sense of unease as the woman opened her constrained mouth wider and began to scream. It sounded strained and penetrating, like a distant seagull’s caw. The awful scream seemed to reverberate through Domi’s bones, punching through to her core.
“Who is she?” Edwards asked as the mysterious woman shook more violently still.
But before anyone could answer—if, indeed, they had an answer—the woman’s scream turned into a wet gurgle, that sounded as though she was being drowned in a basin of water. Then—quite impossibly—the dark sheathed woman’s body lost its solidity and she deteriorated into a spreading pool of blackness in a matter of moments, merging with the gloop that had been pouring from her body in its shadowy waterfall.
As one, the Cerberus personnel in the room held their collective breath, all eyes fixed on the mat-trans chamber door and the dark stain where the woman had collapsed.