Kane looked, stiffened, muttered something beneath his breath and strode quickly to the body. She joined him as he turned it onto its back. The red badge affixed to the molded polycarbonate pectoral caught the light.
“A Magistrate,” he said, his voice sounding hollow. “But where’s his head?”
Brigid didn’t try to repress the shudder that shook her frame when she saw the red-rimmed cavity between the corpse’s shoulders. What little flesh was visible had a translucent, rubbery look to it, as of meat boiled far too long.
Mouth filling with sour saliva, she cast her eyes away. They rested on the tarlike lump splattered against the wall. In a dispassionate tone, she declared, “There.”
“There what?” asked Kane, continuing to examine the decapitated body.
“His head. There it is.”
He looked up, stared and recoiled, sensing the unknown and the unnatural and cringing from it. He stood up, glaring from the headless body encased in armor to the black ooze smeared over the wall. Brigid’s mind functioned in a matrix of mounting fear and keen analysis.
“Some force, some kind of weapon, broke down their molecular integrity,” she heard herself saying. “Whatever it was, everything holding their bodies to-,gether became unstable.”
“I never heard of a weapon like that. It can’t exist,” Kane said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it. “What would be its operating principles?”
“Electromagnetic, particle-beam acceleration, who knows? There were a lot of experimental energy-based weapons in development before the nuke.”
Kane’s lips compressed in a straight line of tension. “We may not know what did this to the Mags or what that troll really is, but we know somebody who probably has a pretty good idea. Let’s get his ass up here.”
He activated his helmet’s comm-link. “Lakesh, status report.”
After a moment, Lakesh’s voice filtered into his ear. He sounded distracted. “I’m just about done here. Another minute, and I’ll have the memory pulled and we’ll be on our way to reasoning out this conundrum.”
“Good,” replied Kane. “Add a couple more to the laundry list while you’re at it.”
Lakesh’s response was a laconic “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You will when you see them. Or maybe not. I’m sending Baptiste back down to fetch you. Try to be done by the time she gets there.”
Chapter 10
While waiting for Brigid to return with Lakesh, Kane checked the passageway around the bend. It stretched out for about twenty yards, ending against a massive sec door. The film of dust on the floor showed scrape and scuff marks, as of fast-running feet.
He tried to keep from conjecturing about what had happened in the redoubt, to the Mags or upon the identity of the troll. At the door, he reached for the green control lever, took a deep breath, held it and lifted it to the midpoint position.
The huge portal shuddered, then slowly rose upward, raised by the buried systems of gears and hydraulics. Dropping to one knee, Kane peered out into late-afternoon sunlight, slanting down from a partially overcast sky. He saw outcroppings of dark, flintlike rock sloping downward to a sere and sterile plain. The black bulk of a mountain rose on the near horizon, its summit lost to view amidst a cloud of vapor. A faint, rotten-eggs odor irritated his nostrils. The air tasted foul and acidic, making him want to spit.
The door reached the halfway point, and locking solenoids clicked into place. Kane made a motion-detector sweep and cautiously edged out onto a broad shelf extending from the rock-ribbed recess.
At the lip of the tumble, he stopped, scanning in all directions. He saw only barren flatlands. West and east, the view was identical. Southward, he saw a vague black line, a hint of the vast crater that had replaced Washington nearly two centuries ago.
Looking down at the base of the slope, he stiffened, eyes slitted. A double set of treaded tracks was visible in the dry earth. He followed them with his gaze to a heap of slag, metal that had turned molten, then hardened again. It had no identifiable configurations, but Kane guessed by the tracks the slag had once been a Sandcat. Sooty steel fragments lay scattered around it. A looping, crescent-shaped scorch mark had fused the ground to black glass, and it intersected with the heap of metal.