James Axler - Planet Hate

The child walked and Kane remained with him, feeling the weight of his stone cladding, the hideous aches that fought for attention in his muscles. He felt stretched, pulled almost to breaking point, his muscles screaming as if shot through with influenza.

His feet—which is to say, the child’s feet—clomped heavily on the brick floor, stone on stone as he descended the steps. Strange noises flittered to his ears from the foot of the stairs, and Kane marveled as they entered a vast laboratory set in the windowless room there. Clay containers hissed and burbled, naked flames playing on their bottoms and sides. The flames were mostly blue or orange, but Kane noticed that two of them were a fearsome green and a disarming lilac, neither color natural. A plain wooden bench waited in the center of the room, a high side table next to it like a bedside cabinet. A network of glass tubes ran along one wall, multicolored liquids turning to gas or being refined into solid lumps of crystal at various apertures along its glistening, sleek lines. A figure stood there amid the bubbling tubes, his back to the child, his green scaled flesh the color of jade. Kane looked at the figure with fascination—it was an Annunaki, the enemies of mankind. Kane tried to leap, to attack this hated enemy, but he was unable to move, still watching events as though watching a stage play.

Without warning, the scaled figure turned and Kane saw a strange apparatus masked the top half of his lizardlike face. The apparatus was made of circles of glass, lenses on metal arms that could be brought in front of his eyes to magnify his vision, one in front of another. The lens arrangement stood out almost six inches from the Annunaki creature’s face, and some of the metal arms remained in the upright position, the lenses not in use by its wearer. Behind the magnifying lenses, the creature’s eyes were as green as his skin with twin vertical slits down their centers in the bottomless black of the grave. The monster admired the stone child who was Kane for a moment, gazing up and down as though admiring his handiwork.

“You’re looking tall,” the creature with the magnifying lenses stated. Kane got the indefinable impression that this Annunaki saw him not as a living creature but as simply a slab of meat on which to experiment, a chef meeting a farm animal.

After a brief exchange, the child lay on the wooden bench, a slab of meat on the butcher’s block, and Kane seemed to be lying there with him, two as one. Then the Annunaki with the strange eyewear checked at some solution that was bubbling close to Kane’s ears, and he heard the hiss of steam as some superheated liquid expanded and tried to escape its container.

“Calm yourself, child,” the jade-scaled Annunaki instructed, his tone soothing. “I can hear your breathing from all the way over here.”

“I’m sorry, Lord Ningishzidda,” the child said, bringing his breathing down to a more normal level.

Kane waited, helpless as if strapped to the bench where the child remained free. Then the Annunaki, the one that the child had called Lord Ningishzidda, strode over to the bench, wielding a syringe tipped with a vicious-looking needle. Within the syringe, an orange concoction bubbled and steamed like lava, a trail of hot mist whispering at its edges.

“You must keep your eyes open, mighty prince,” Lord Ningishzidda explained. “There is no other way.”

Then the green-scaled Annunaki came at Kane with the syringe, watching with sick delight as he drove its needle deep into Kane’s left eye. It felt like liquid fire being pumped into his eye, burning all sense and reason away. Kane cried out, loosing a scream that seemed to echo beyond the walls of the underground chamber itself, shattering them as he watched. Colors swirled there for a moment.

Around him, the multicolored lotus blossom of the interphaser was fading, lightning strikes firing across its depths like electricity-firing neurons.

Shunted two hundred miles through quantum space by the interphaser, the three companions emerged on a tranquil, grassy plain beneath a cloudless azure sky. Kane staggered forward, clutching a hand to his face where his left eye continued to burn. The eye was watering and he could feel warm tears burning at the dam of his tear duct, swelling as they clamored to burst free. He rubbed at his eye with the ball of his hand, wiping at the tears as he stumbled blindly forward, two steps, three, before tumbling to the ground, the bright green grass rushing up to meet him with its fresh-cut smell so strong that Kane could taste it.

“You okay, man?” Grant’s voice came as if from far away. Beneath that sound, threatening to obscure it, a dog barked repeatedly—Rosalia’s mutt, excited at the instantaneous transition through space-time. And beneath that, distant like a shushing hush in a library, the waves of the sea crashed against some nearby shore.

“Kane?” Grant asked again, reaching for his partner where he lay facedown on the grass.

Kane rolled over at his partner’s gentle shove, and Grant saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. “You okay, buddy?” Grant asked.

Kane’s eyes flickered and he nodded, his head feeling suddenly sore as he moved it. “Jump dream,” he explained.

The human body had not been designed for the instantaneous transportation of the teleport, and one side effect was the so-called jump dream that threatened a user’s sanity. Mostly associated with the mat trans, a man-made teleportation system that the Cerberus team had employed on numerous occasions, jump dreams were accompanied by nausea and a sense of disturbed reality. However, the interphaser units had rarely generated such jump dreams, and Grant was surprised to hear his friend refer to such a thing after so long.

“You need some time?” he asked, concerned.

Kane brushed at his face, swiping at the tears. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.” His face looked red and his left eyelid was puffy, the eye itself bloodshot. “I’ll be fine,” he repeated as Grant looked at him.

Turning then, Kane led the way up a subtle incline that led to a one-story building set amid the quiet grounds. His companions followed, Rosalia’s dog scurrying ahead excitedly to scope out this new place. Off to their left was a simple wooden fence, a long strip of two horizontal boards attached to wide-spaced posts like a farmyard gate. Behind the fence, a sheer drop fell away, ending in the pebble-dappled shore of a tiny beach.

“Looks like a nice spot,” Rosalia observed as she peered over the cliff side. “Quiet.”

“Work on your tan later,” Kane growled as he marched onward. “We have us a meeting to attend.”

He was angry, he knew—not with Rosalia but with himself. Whatever that vision had been, that “jump dream,” as he had called it, it had left some mark inside him, an indelible burning behind his eye. He blinked, forcing back the salty tears that welled there once again at the memory.

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES after dawn in Tibet and the watery yellow-white orb of the sun was just starting to nudge itself over the towering mountains that dominated the landscape. The woman with the fire-red hair pulled her cloak around her as she ascended the rise that led to the cave opening, striding the final few miles of the snow-dusted mountain path, her horse abandoned with exhaustion. It was cold out here in this mountainous range where Tibet bordered China, bitingly so. In fact it was cold enough to freeze the flesh of the woman’s steed almost three hours before. She hadn’t cared—the armor-like properties of her shadow suit kept her warm, regulating her body temperature beneath the scarred black leather of the supple armor she wore like a second skin. The cloak that she wore was made of animal fur, a dead thing cinched around her throat, encasing her with its ghosts. Hung inside the cloak, a bag slapped against her hip, a large leather satchel containing something heavy. It had been better when the satchel had been contained in her horse’s saddlebag where it couldn’t irritate her, but it mattered little.