Sorrow Space by James Axler Page A

doubling, tripling, quadrupling in a stuttering motion as it filtered past their fractured aspects.
    It had taken just a split second to arrive here, to enter the unknown.

Chapter 8
    “You brought us here, Baptiste,” Kane whispered as the shadow thing passed behind the pebblelike armaglass. “Where did you send us?”
    Brigid held her shotgun in a two-handed grip, steadily targeted on the chamber door. Short of breaking through the reinforced armaglass, the door was the only way in and she reasoned that, as such, it was the only entrance an attacker could use. “I programmed the mat-trans for Cerberus,” she assured Kane in a harsh whisper. “I’m sure of it.”
    “Brigid never makes mistakes,” Grant reminded Kane, keeping his own voice low as the shape continued to flutter beyond the ridges of the glass, obscured from view. “You know that.”
    “This ain’t Cerberus,” Kane stated softly. “So something, somewhere, is out of whack.”
    Brigid hissed through her teeth with annoyance. “I’d need to check the equipment to find out, run through the logs here. Which means going—out there.” She indicated the chamber door.
    Warily Kane and his colleagues eyed the dark figured rippling past the armaglass, moving slowly from right to left. They could not hear anything through the soundproof wall of the armaglass; the only noise in the chamber came from the mat-trans unit itself as it ran through its power-down cycle. It didn’t sound like the familiar winding down of a mat-trans; instead it sounded rough, like an old smoker clearing his lungs.
    Hesitantly, Kane moved closer to the door. Grant and Brigid followed, covering Kane and the door as he reached for it.
    “I don’t like this,” Grant hissed.
    Kane turned back to him. “Me, either,” he agreed in a whisper. He watched the shadowy form move outside the chamber, trying to make sense of it from the fractured glimpses the pebbled glass offered.
    There was no way to know what was out there. All they knew for sure was that nothing had responded to their arrival—so far, at least. Which meant, moving fast may just be the only advantage they had. Getting out of there, getting their backs out of this corner with its lone exit—that was the only option open to them.
    Kane held his free hand up, the fingers outstretched. Then he silently counted down from three, closing his hand into a fist that the others could just barely see silhouetted in the faint glow from outside. On zero, Kane reached for the chamber door, tapping the exit code. It opened, not with the usual sigh of compressed air, but with the mournful whine of old metal on runners.
    Even before the door had slid back to its full extent, Kane was moving, hurrying out of the mat-trans chamber, gun raised, his head ducked low to his body. It was cold out here, icy wind howling through the room with such force that it buffeted Kane and his companions. A narrow strip of light poured into the room from the far side, where the exterior wall was entirely missing, leaving the room open to the elements, just a few struts of rubble where the brickwork had once stood. The light was silver and gray, and outside Kane could see it was overcast.
    The room itself was a shambles, like something a bomb had struck, just a few pieces of furniture scattered around, all of it worn and broken. A line of beaten-up locker-style cabinets ran along one wall, and there were holes in the floor where exposed copper piping gleamed. The shadow that Kane and his allies had seen moving across the pebbled glass of the mat-trans chamber was just a sheet, grimy with dirt, streaks of soil and blood marring its already dark surface. The sheet clung to a metal strut, flapping around it in the wind. It dawned on Kane that perhaps it had been cinched there by someone, like the curtained-off area of Pellerito’s factory, better to obscure the fierce outburst of the mat-trans when it functioned. There were other metal posts dotted around