James Axler - Janus Trap

“Doctor?” It was a woman’s voice, softly spoken yet urgent. “Doctor, look. I think he’s awake. The Magistrate is awake.”

“In the name of the baron,” said a man’s voice, fearful but with anger bubbling beneath the surface, “where the hell is that anesthesiologist? He shouldn’t be awake for this. Put him out, Elaine.”

Tears swam across his vision, and Grant saw the blur of a woman dressed in white rushing closer to his face, the sound of her heels clattering on the hard tiled floor. She was reaching toward him, her hand a pinkish, blurred rectangle that smelled of antibacterial wash.

Suddenly something hard was pushed against Grant’s face, wrapping itself around his mouth and nose, coiling and shaping itself as though it were alive. And the woman, the nurse, was pushing her hand against his forehead, holding him in place as though he could move.

“Upping feed level to 3.8,” she said.

The sensation of pain in his leg was abating and, for just a second, the thick tears seemed to clear. Grant saw the nurse close to him, leaning over the gurney, her white uniform starched with perfectly creased lines down its edges. The uniform was unflattering, but Grant could see that she was a curvaceous woman, the tunic straining against the swell of her breasts. Above that, russet hair, her head turned away as she spoke to the chief surgeon, counting down in her clear voice, her frank concern clear in her tone.

She turned back then, looking at Grant, her hand still pushing at his forehead to hold him down. His eyes seemed to see only her smile for a moment, white and dazzling beneath the lights, with large, straight teeth; a photogenic smile. The canine teeth at the edges of her burned-umber lips were just visible as she spoke, her tone a soothing purr but the words lost.

Grant’s vision swam and he looked at the nurse’s face, trying to make sense of it. Two dark, watery eyes looking back at him, set deep in her face. Her beautiful, flawless teeth showing in her sweeping jaw, following the curvature of the long muzzle that poked toward him, the pink-and-black nose twitching slightly amid the rusty brown fur.

Grant realized then that the nurse was some kind of animal, a dog. A German shepherd or maybe a timber wolf.

And as he looked up, gazed across the room, the surgeons and the other nurses and personnel in the room all appeared the same. Dogs. He was being operated on by dogs.

BRIGID BAPTISTE’S EYES opened and she looked at the computer screen before her through the small, square-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. The glasses were a symbol of office, marking her as a Cobaltville archivist, but were also a medical necessity. Years of computer work had left her slightly shortsighted. Her eyelids felt heavy, and the information on the glowing screen seemed unfamiliar. Her vivid emerald eyes scanned the glowing screen for a few seconds—it showed an archival report on an island in the Pacific that had been used for bomb testing back in the 1900s.

Strange, she thought, glancing surreptitiously around her, seeing the familiar forms of her colleagues as they worked at their own terminals, running through and amending the documents from the old days, the days before skydark. Everything seemed normal, and yet there was something that Brigid felt in the back of her mind, and the feeling had begun when she looked at the document on her screen.

I blinked, she thought, going through her preceding actions, and when I looked at the screen again it was like seeing it for the first time.

Perhaps there was something in the document? Perhaps she had seen something, or noticed something, or perhaps something had changed even as she was looking at it, almost subliminal and yet different.

“Refresh,” Brigid ordered into her mike pickup. A wipe panned down her terminal screen at the instruction, refreshing the information as though she was loading the file from scratch.

Nothing. No differences. Brigid’s eidetic memory would alert her instantly if something had changed.

“Go back,” she instructed into the pickup.

The screen blinked and refreshed as it went back to the previous document, exactly the same as the item that she had been looking at.

“Go back,” she said again, her voice soft, eyes flicking around the room for a moment to check that she wasn’t drawing any attention.

Before her, the screen blinked and refreshed once more, taking her back to a previous document. It appeared to be a schematic of an underground military facility—a redoubt—and Brigid’s brain automatically decoded the cryptic coordinates as she read them from the top right corner of her screen. The Tennessee River Valley, she realized, close to the barony of Beausoleil.

She had seen this before, she told herself, reassured. She had to have looked at the Pacific island stuff and just not taken it in. Mind wandering or maybe just tired. Yes, Brigid realized even as the word came to mind. Tired—that was it.

She sat there for a moment, looking at the schematic on the screen. “Revert,” she instructed, and the computer returned to her most recent file, the military report on the Pacific bomb tests. She looked at the report for a moment and a smile crossed her lips. There was a satellite picture of the island under discussion, and from this angle it looked sort of like an animal. Four legs, a body, a head with open mouth. No, not a head. Two heads. She giggled as she thought of the words “two heads are better than one.”

Must be tired, she realized. I’m seeing things. She removed her spectacles and glanced around the library room, but no one seemed to have noticed her giggle. Her section leader was across the far side of the room, leaning over Meredith Burrt’s desk, running through a file with the short, blond-haired woman.

Placing her glasses on the desk before her, Brigid raised her hand and waited for the section leader to come over and relieve her of her post. She needed to rest; maybe she was even coming down with something. She couldn’t recall the last time that she had felt so tired.

KANE OPENED the door to his apartment. It was unlocked, a carryover from the Program of Unification, when the Council of Front Royal had decreed that privacy bred conspiracy and, hence, deviant thinking.

He pushed his way into his compact two-room apartment, taking in its familiar walls and familiar smells. The whole place seemed faceless, with barely any sign of individuality or anything that could really be considered decoration. A single shelf against one wall of the main room included three books, one of them his precious, hidebound copy of The Law. Like all Mags, Kane could access all rules, amendments and subsections of the Cobaltville penal code merely by engaging the computer system, but there was something reassuring about having a genuine physical copy of the codes to refer to in his quiet moments. Three tall windows shed light onto the shelf and the wall to which it was attached, and Kane glanced through the panes for a moment, taking in the familiar lights glittering on the Administrative Monolith, which loomed over the ville.

Exhausted, he slumped down on the sagging cushions of his old couch, pondering what to eat. It was strange, he thought, to feel so tired after waking from a dream.

Trent, a sallow-faced Cerberus tech with tired eyes and a messy mop of dark hair, checked the diagnostics as the mat-trans unit powered up. They were expecting Kane, Brigid and Grant to emerge momentarily, but the redoubt had received unexpected guests in the past.

Lakesh leaned over Brewster Philboyd’s desk as the tall man went back to monitoring communications frequencies for the various Cerberus field teams. “I feel increasingly uncomfortable with this part of the operation,” the elderly scientist admitted. “One never quite knows what may jump through the gateway.”