James Axler – Parallax Red Parallax Red

Kane smiled thinly. “I seem to recall you saying much the same thing on occasion.”

Brigid waved aside his comment. “I was referring to your Magistrate’s persona. I can see beneath it.”

“And what’s there, Baptiste?”

Very quietly she answered, “A lonely and frightened man who is doing a job that needs doing. That doesn’t make you fused out, Kane. It makes you human. I saw no reason to mention that DeFore diagnosed you as human.”

Kane swallowed the hot lump swelling in his throat, felt his heart thud within his chest. He averted his face from the intense pressure of her emerald eyes, knowing they peeled away the carapace to see the pain beneath. He felt the familiar, longing ache and tried to bottle it. Brigid sighed and stepped around him toward the doors.

He turned toward her. “Baptiste?” His low-pitched voice was barely above a whisper.

She paused. “Yes?”

“You were wrong about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“About you having no hold over me.”

Brigid said nothing, but inclined her head in a short nod before pushing open the doors.

Chapter 7

Like most of the territory surrounding the ^ille that took his name, Baron Sharpe had been dead for a long time, but spiritually really dead only for the past eight years.

One day he had succumbed to an infection, some airborne filth that had wafted up from either the Pits or floated in from the rad-rich Outlands. Baron Sharpe coughed up blood-tinted phlegm for two days before falling into a coma. Members of his personal staff had whisked him, via mat-trans gateway, to the bioengi-neering facility in Dulce, New Mexico. There, geneticists who were intimately familiar with all the limitations of the hybrid immune systems, worked on him for a week.

At the end of those seven days, Baron Sharpe opened his big blue eyes and sat up. They told him he was cured, that his metabolism had been adjusted, his tainted blood replaced and detoxified, his damaged organs replaced. They told him he was cured, but the baron knew better. He was dead, regardless of the fact that he walked, talked, ate and breathed.

At first his condition disturbed him since no one else seemed to notice it. After a few months, he grew accustomed to being dead and found it oddly liberating, even exhilarating. Very infrequently, the notion that he might not be dead but simply deluded intruded on

Baron Sharpe’s peace of mind. He was unique among the members of the baronial hierarchy, of the hybrid oligarchy, and therefore he had responsibilities to the Directorate that he couldn’t shirk, alive or dead, deluded or sane.

Unlike Barons Ragnar, Cobalt, Palladium and all the others who were polyglot mixtures of human and Ar-chon DNA, Sharpe was a direct descendant of the first baron who had claimed the environs in and around Washington Hole as his sovereign territory.

Of course, that baron’s genes had been mixed, matched and spliced with Archon material, but nevertheless, there was no question of his illustrious human antecedent, four generations removed. He’d seen old pix of his great-grandfather, and the resemblance was certainly striking.

He had inherited the same close-cropped blond hair, broad shoulders and chilling milky blue eyes the color of mountain melt water. What he didn’t have was the man’s six-foot height and one hundred percent human physiology.

Unlike his ancestor, his blue eyes were very large, shadowed by sweeping supra-orbital ridges, and his hair possessed a feathery, duck-down texture. His cranium was very high and smooth, the ears small and set very low on the head. He also had inherited a few of his namesake’s eccentricities, though he knew some few referred to them as insanities.

One of his eccentricities was a fondness for picking through predark articles of clothing stored in the archives of the Historical Division and wearing whatever struck his whim at the moment. Depending on his fancy, Baron Sharpe would outfit himself in white tie and tails, complete with a silk top hat and silver-knobbed walking stick. On another day, it might be a backless evening gown of gold lame, with a teased-out bouffant wig as a shock-value fashion statement It didn’t matter much if the clothing was on the verge of falling apart with age. He was dead, and entitled to indulge his impulses.