James Axler - Truth Engine

Ullikummis pulled his hand back, and began to stride away across the space behind her. She waited, bound to the chair, and her heart raced in fear as she heard the creature of living rock pacing across the stone floor, his steps echoing like hammer blows.

As Ullikummis’s mighty footsteps faded into the distance, Brigid took a moment to gather her thoughts. She had a remarkable gift of eidetic recollection, more popularly known as a photographic memory. Brigid was able to remember the smallest details of anything she had witnessed. The last she could recall, she had been with the other members of CAT Alpha—Kane and Grant—as their atoms were digitized and sent across the quantum ether via the mat-trans unit, a teleportation device in use by the Cerberus operation. The three of them had emerged in their home base of the Cerberus redoubt to a scene of carnage. The overhead lighting had been sparking, and the nearest of the computers was shattered, blood smeared across the shards of its monitor screen. There had been shouting, too, and gunfire, and Brigid and her companions had been forced to assess the situation in less than two seconds, realizing their help was needed urgently.

Eight hooded strangers were in the operations room, where the mat-trans unit was located, and they were in the process of destroying the equipment there while Cerberus personnel tried to fend them off. As Brigid scanned the area, Domi’s pure white albino form had dropped from an overhead vent and leaped across the room, bouncing from work surface to work surface like streaking lightning as a stream of bullets—were they bullets?—whipped through the air at her. Beside Brigid, Kane was already drawing his Sin Eater pistol, the 18-inch muzzle of the weapon unfolding in his hand as it was propelled from its hiding place beneath the sleeve of his jacket.

Agile and girlish, Domi blasted a stream of shots from her Detonics Combat Master, firing behind her as she leaped behind one of the computer terminals. In a second, the glass screen of the terminal shattered as one of the enemy’s projectiles struck it, shards bursting across the desk as the circuits fizzled and died.

Grant was still in the doorway to the mat-trans chamber behind Brigid, and she heard him call out one word—“Duck!”—before he began picking off the hooded strangers with rapid blasts from his own Sin Eater weapon, even as Kane hurried to help Domi.

Brigid was in motion then, too, reaching for her own blaster where it jounced against the swell of her hip. She selected her first targets as, bizarrely, a stream of what appeared to be pebbles raced through the air toward her at high speed. As soon as her TP-9 had cleared its holster, Brigid snapped off her first burst of return fire, felling one of the mysterious strangers, who wore a hood to cover his features. The figure went down, tumbling backward as the bullets struck his body.

Brigid was turning, finding her second target even as her semiautomatic shook in her hand with recoil. But as she spun she noticed something unnerving from the corner of her eye: the figure she had just shot was pulling himself up off the ground, pushing the hood from his face. He was still alive….

Back in the cave, Ullikummis’s footsteps grew loud once more, and Brigid focused her thoughts on the present. The looming stone creature came around to stand before her, and he held a rectangular object almost five feet in length. Brigid watched as the stone colossus set it before her, turning it to face her. It was a freestanding, full-length mirror with a swivel mechanism to adjust its tilt.

“Are you able to see?” Ullikummis asked, changing the angle as he spoke.

Brigid peered at her reflection in the mirror, saw the yellow crescent on her cheek despite the gloom. “Yes,” she said.

Nodding sullenly, Ullikummis stood back, and he seemed to wait patiently while Brigid examined her face in the mirror. It wasn’t quite a black eye; the blow had been just a little too low for that. Instead, it had left a nasty bruise, along with some swelling, but there didn’t appear to be a cut or abrasion.

Brigid looked up into the glowing orbs of Ullikummis’s eyes. “Why am I here?” she asked. “And where are we?”

He looked back at her, his face an expressionless mask of rock, like a cliff ruined by erosion. “In time,” he replied, in that terrible voice of grinding stones. And that was all he said.

Brigid watched as Ullikummis walked past her once more, watched his retreat reflected in the mirror. The glowing veins that webbed his body faded as he disappeared into the shadows of the cave behind her, the resounding strikes of his footsteps fading to nothingness.

Brigid watched the reflection of the blackness for a long time.

Kane struggled to order his thoughts as he stood alone in the cold-walled cavern, trying to remember how he had arrived there. It was hard to think straight. His head ached, not with a throbbing but with a tautness that felt like a clenched fist, as if somehow his hair was too tightly woven into his scalp.

His mouth was still horribly dry, and the ex-Magistrate was conscious that he was woefully dehydrated. His stomach hurt, too, hurt with emptiness.

Kane pushed past the pain in his skull, forced himself to examine more closely the space he found himself in. Pacing it out, Kane estimated it to be a rectangular shape of approximately eight feet by six—small but accommodating so long as he lay on the floor the right way. The floor itself was hard, unforgiving rock, but there was an uneven carpet of sand, enough to cushion the contours of his body and so provide a little comfort while he slept.

The sand reminded Kane yet again of the dryness in his mouth, but there was nothing to drink here; it was just a cave, empty but for its lone occupant—himself. Cold, too, since his shadow suit’s regulated environment had somehow failed.

“It’s a prison,” Kane muttered. “I’m in a cell.”

But who had put him here and why? No, those questions weren’t important, not yet. Those were questions that Kane could address when he needed to. Right now, he needed to find the answer to a far more fundamental question—how had they put him here? Because if he could figure that out he might have a chance to escape.

The room was sealed, and more than that, it was solid. The walls reached all the way around with no signs of a break, he discovered as he ran his fingers slowly along them, high and low. But his captors had managed to place him inside, so there must be a way out; there had to be.

Kane peered up then, the thought occurring to him with slow inevitability. An oubliette—that could be it. A dungeon with its access point in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner. He had seen them before and admired the simplicity of the design, imprisoning a man merely by removing the ladder that led to his freedom.

But no. As far as he could see in the gloom of the cavern, there was nothing up there, just more rock running across the ceiling, like clouds on an overcast day. He reached up, found that if he stretched he could just scrape the tips of his fingers against the stone. It seemed solid enough, not a hologram or an optical illusion. Bending his knees, Kane sprang into the air, slapping his palm against the ceiling. It was solid, giving back no echo to suggest any hollowness beyond.

For the moment, at least, he was trapped.

Kane moved to a corner of the room, unzipped his fly and relieved himself, the pressure in his bladder finally insisting upon release. The stench of his own urine came to him, stronger than he expected. After he was done, he covered the puddle of urine with sand like a cat. He wondered if he was being foolish, if this was the only liquid he would get here, and that, no matter how repellent the thought, he would need to salvage it to combat dehydration.