The baron fetched up in a half-prone posture against the far wall. He continued to voice ghastly laughter through a gurgle of blood gushing from his mouth. “Oh, bay-bee , that hurts !”
The mutie crept over to the baron, picking up the subgun as he did so. In a liquidy burble, Baron Sharpe announced, “I’ll cross back and we’ll play another game, right, Crawler?”
Cradling the baron’s head in one arm, Crawler crooned, to no one in particular, “My vision was a true one^One last prophecy to fulfill.”
Reversing his grip on the blaster, he put the bore under his chin and without even a microsecond of hesitation, pulled the trigger. The bolt of the Copperhead snapped loudly on an empty chamber.
A keening wail worked its way up Crawler’s throat. His finger closed around the trigger twice more, producing nothing but dry clickings. He cast a look Kane’s way, tear-clouded eyes shining with a mixture of guilt and horror. He flung the gun away from him as if it had suddenly scalded him.
“Do you think he knew?” Crawler’s question was a parchment-dry rustle.
Kane lowered his arm. The Sin Eater dangled at the end of it, seeming to weigh half a ton. “You’re the doom-sniffer. Why ask me?”
A great stain of wet crimson spread out over the white front of the baron’s jumpsuit. His chest rose and fell spasmodically. Crawler moaned.
“He’s dying,” Kane said gently. “Leave him. Come with me.”
“To where?”
“Sanctuary.”
Crawler smiled sadly, flicking a strand of fine blond hair away from Baron Sharpe’s forehead. “No, I’ll stay. Just in case he crosses back. I expect he’d want me to.”
Kane stood for only a moment longer, then wheeled around and stalked down the corridor. He took no notice of the twinges of pain in his right knee.
He knew what Crawler’s fate would be once the Mags tired of waiting and decided to investigate the commotion. He refused to look back. The image of a crippled mutie hovering over and giving comfort to a dying hybrid, fatally wounded by a human, was impressed forevermore in his memory.
Human, hybrid and mutie, engaged in a dance of the damned, loathing but relying on one another. He had often wondered where lay the future of the Earth. Kane hoped with every fiber of his heart that the trinity of hatred wasn’t it.
Chapter 12
Lakesh swore. Then, in desperation, he hit a button on the keyboard and rotated the image on the screen, turning it upside down.
“Might as well not have the imaging scanner’s memory,” he said angrily. “For all the bloody use it is.”
“You could reverse the read pattern,” Bry suggested. “It might have a hidden encryption.”
“Like what?” snorted Lakesh. “‘The walrus is Paul’?”
Bry regarded him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
Lakesh didn’t respond, propping his chin on a fist. Bry sensed his bad humor and scooted his chair away. Bry attributed Lakesh’s foul mood to more than trying to make sense of the spidery webwork of intersecting lines and crisscrossed hatch marks glowing on the screen, and he was right.
From Lakesh’s viewpoint, Kane’s actions during and after the confrontation with Baron Sharpe seemed sloppy and dangerously open-ended. Not making certain of the mad baron’s demise was one error, but compounding it by leaving the psi-mutie alive to tell his story had the potential to be the most serious.
Reluctantly he admitted that had he been in Kane’s place, he more than likely would have reacted in a similar fashion. But he was not Kane. One of the rea-sons he had recruited the man was his willingness to take violent action, the ruthless streak that had earned him several Magistrate Division decorations.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a different man would emerge from the black armor after learning what he had about humanity’s secret past. The open question was whether the new Kane could function effectively without incurring lethal consequences for everyone.
He returned his attention to the screen. Dizzying, swirling spirals superimposed themselves over the straight lines. Attempting to isolate the different carrier-wave signatures into separate components was a far more difficult undertaking than he had imagined.
Activated mat-trans units opened a hyperspatial shortcut, avoiding a clash with relativity and causality by moving in a direction at right angles to every possible direction in normal space. Therefore, hyperdi-mensional space was fiendishly complicated in configuration.