Sorrow Space by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page B

cut down to a fraction of its former size, and left the survivors living in a virtual hellscape. Seeing the building blocks laid out, seeing it all start again like this, did not sit well with him. He wanted to get out of there, ponder his next move, bring in Cerberus and shut this operation down, root and branch. How the hell did this kid come out of Magistrate incarceration to end up like this?
    “There’s just one problem, Kane,” Pellerito said as the Cerberus team gathered themselves up. “You’ve seen the operation now—and perhaps my people weren’t clear to your people about this—but we can’t let you leave.”
    Kane turned back to face Pellerito, and as he did so he heard the distinctive click of safety catches being switched on the sec men’s weapons.
    “We need money,” Pellerito said, “not friends. You’ve come too far to back out now.”
    * * *
    C ERBERUS MEDIC R EBA D E F ORE had never wanted to play coroner, and she had done too much of that over the past six months. Now she knelt before the inky stain pooled across the operations room floor outside Cerberus’s mat-trans chamber—the one that had been a woman—with a portable lab beside her.
    DeFore was a stocky woman with long, ash-blond hair that she had tied behind her in an elaborate French braid. Besides the standard-issue white jumpsuit, DeFore wore a pair of thin rubber gloves with which she could sift through the oily detritus without contaminating it.
    The area of the inky stain had been cordoned off using a couple of well-placed chairs, allowing Reba to work undisturbed as standard procedures continued all around her in the operations center. The black liquid had spread to a rough circle pattern that ran about nine feet in diameter, and it glistened under the fluorescent lights of the room, an oily rainbow shimmering across its surface as DeFore collected her samples.
    The circle still had four struts poking from it, a vestigial hint of how the limbs had been spread when the mysterious woman had dropped to the floor here. The farthest edges of the stain were dry now, and the remainder was evaporating as DeFore worked, scraping the coal-black residue from the floor. The dark material had a powdery quality, clotting from the liquid into tiny islands of solid matter that adopted an almost crystalline appearance, like flecks of onyx littering the floor. She leaned closer, running the metal tip of her scraper across the lumps, pulling a few more away to analyze under the microscope.
    As DeFore continued to work, running a battery of tests on the samples, Lakesh strode across the room to join her, standing on the far side of the carefully placed chairs that formed the barricade around the stain. “Have you found anything, Reba?” he inquired gently.
    The Cerberus medic looked up from her work, a serious expression on her striking features. “It’s genetic matter,” she summarized, “which appears to be going through the standard stages of decomposition far faster than one would expect. I wish I’d been here when the—woman, you said?—when she came through the mat-trans.”
    Lakesh stroked his chin pensively. “You said the material was experiencing decomposition at a faster rate than normal.”
    “‘Normal’ is too specific a term,” DeFore corrected, “but certainly, the body has deteriorated far faster than a human should in this environment. Normally, the human body passes through five stages of decomposition once it has died.
    “In stage one, once the blood stops pumping the flesh will take on a bluish hue and rigor mortis will set in, stiffening the tissues and making it difficult to move the limbs.
    “That is followed by the bloat stage, where anaerobic metabolism begins to break down the body, resulting in the accumulation and dispersal of gases.
    “Stage three is active decay, which involves the purging of decomposition fluids. This is typically the period of greatest mass loss, when what had been a corpse moves