“Grant tells me you ran into an old friend out in Saskatchewan,” Lakesh began after welcoming Kane and Brigid. They had been gone for four days.
Kane nodded gravely. “Ullikummis. Not quite back, but his devotees are trying real hard to hasten the second coming.”
“Wrong savior,” Brigid corrected him. “They were using the old stone seeds,” she elaborated, “that budded from his body, charging them with human blood.”
“Sacrifices?” Lakesh asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Brigid said. “At least, none so far. The blood of pilgrims gave the thing life, but it seemed mindless—like it didn’t have any purpose. It just stumbled around draining blood from anyone who stepped into its grasp.”
“And we blew it up before it could get very far with that,” Kane added.
Lakesh nodded solemnly. “A worrying development, dear friends,” he said.
“Were any of you hurt?” DeFore asked as the room went silent.
“I took a few knocks,” Kane admitted, “and Brigid took a few, too—”
“When you knocked me to the floor,” Brigid pointed out.
“—but we’re all good, I think,” Kane finished.
DeFore proposed checking them over anyway and, using a portable medical kit, accessed their transponders for a full rundown on their current health. The shadow suit had protected Kane from most of the knocks he had taken at the hands of the deluded pilgrims, and other than a bruised arm, Brigid had got off scot-free.
While DeFore was sterilizing the few scrapes and grazes Kane had taken during the frenetic conflict, the group discussed their mission in detail. As they reached the wrap-up, Brigid recalled one thing that had stood out as possibly important.
“A few people have mentioned something about a storm out to the west over the past few days,” she said. “Sounded vicious, like it’s taken some lives.” She shrugged.
Donald Bry brought up a map on the projector screen that dominated the wall behind the stage. Using the old designations, west of Saskatchewan was Alberta or British Columbia. “This is pretty much no-man’s-land now,” Bry stated as he indicated those areas.
“Well out of reach of the baronies,” Kane pointed out as he eyed the map.
Lakesh looked at Kane querulously. “Something on your mind, Kane?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Kane said. “People were speaking about this storm like it was a big deal. A big deal well away from the baronies, where there wouldn’t likely be much in the way of organized help.”
Lakesh took a slow breath as he looked at the map. “We could send out a rescue party, see if anyone needed our assistance,” he said.
“Helping people is what we do,” Grant reminded everyone. “Can’t always be fighting crazy aliens and nutty priests.”
“It’s a lot of territory,” Bry argued. “Do you have any idea whereabouts this storm hit?”
Brigid’s red-gold locks cascaded about her face as she shook her head. “We had more important concerns at the time.”
“Would a satellite scan find evidence?” Kane suggested.
“It may,” Lakesh confirmed. “It really depends on how much damage the storm created and whether there was any notable habitation there to begin with. If it’s trashed, unpopulated territory we’d be hard-pushed to confirm it from the air.”
Kane fixed Lakesh with his no-nonsense stare. “Look,” he said.
Lakesh nodded once, accepting Kane’s challenge. He had organized Cerberus to help people, and while a storm was not the kind of threat he had had in mind, helping those in danger or trouble was the operation’s remit. They would use the satellites to scan the area to the west of the sacred temple of the stone god, and maybe—just maybe—find a place where help was needed.
Designated Task #016: Sleep
Sleep has been prescribed for all citizens at an optimum 6.2 hours a day. Sleep occurs when a citizen is not on shift, and this may be in the day or night. After 6.2 hours an alarm alerts the citizen to wake, after which their routine begins again.
I note that the sleep patterns of my immediate neighbors in this residential block are different to my own, accounting for their own shifts at their designated tasks.
My bed is soft and uncomfortable, the padding inadequate and the base structure of the sofa which it converts from pushing against my body as I toss and turn. I have no one to report this to.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
“Storm,” Brewster Philboyd announced emotionlessly.
“Storm,” Lakesh agreed.
The two of them were sitting in office chairs in the Cerberus operations room. The room was a vast space with high ceilings and pleasing indirect lighting. Two aisles of computer terminals faced a giant screen on which material could be flagged. A giant Mercator map dominated one wall, showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The map was peppered with glowing locator dots, which were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. The indicated routes were not flight paths, however, but rather they showed the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network. Developed for the US military, the majority of the units were located within North America, but a few outposts could be seen farther afield.
A separate chamber was located in one corner of the room, far from the entry doors. This chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color. Within was contained the Cerberus installation’s mat-trans unit, along with a small anteroom which could be sealed off if necessary.
Right now the mat-trans chamber was empty but the main ops room was buzzing with activity.
“Big one, too,” Philboyd said as he enhanced the satellite image on his screen, giving a wider view of the storm over British Columbia. Philboyd was a tall, lanky man who seemed somehow hunched over whenever he sat in the standard office furniture of the ops room. His blond hair was swept back and slightly receding while the skin on his cheeks showed evidence of acne scarring from his youth. Philboyd wore round spectacles with dark frames and was a physicist of some good standing. Like many of the personnel who populated the Cerberus redoubt, Philboyd was a transplant from the twentieth century, part of a research project that had been located on the Manitius Moon Base. After the nukecaust had struck, the moon base had gone into lockdown, plunging its staff into cryogenic deep freeze and retaining that expertise for another generation. It had taken a Cerberus exploration party to discover and relocate them to the redoubt.
Lakesh looked at the monitor screen where the satellite feed was playing out. It showed a desolate area of the territory that had once been Canada, around the point where Alberta met British Columbia. The area was white with fallen snow, a few clumps of trees visible as dark shadows on the ground. There was no sign of human habitation; any roads or tracks cutting through the land had been painted white with snow. In the midst of this desolate wasteland was a whirling blur of cloud, feeding the land with ice crystals. It was a small, isolated shower but it still covered several miles. “I didn’t expect the storm to still be raging,” Lakesh muttered, shaking his head.
“No housing nearby,” Philboyd observed, twiddling the image control dial to pull out farther from the storm. “Closest settlement