Death Sentences (30 page)

At that moment-sweat was flowing from every pore in his body. (I will not read it ever again) He made a vow to himself. (Not ever!)

When he went back to his bedroom, he put away the book with its yellow jacket in a drawer of his desk. He even locked it.

(Throw it away! Burn it!)

One part of him was issuing such commands.

But another part of him (But it's for work. It's important for you as a policeman responsible for regulating hallucinatory words.) was desperately making excuses.

He was so torn between the two impulses that he could not even close his eyes to sleep.

It was still dark out.

It was only two hours until the alarm clock would go off, but it felt like ten years.

He worried that if he let his mind slip even for an instant his spirit might drift away.

Bathed in a cold sweat, he shivered incessantly.

"Something wrong?" His wife mumbled sleepily from alongside him.

"No, it's nothing. Just a chill."

"Catching a cold?"

With these words, his wife fell asleep again.

"Mr. Sakamoto."

Kuroda's voice sounded close, right in his ear.

"What's the matter? You don't look so good."

He must have been zoning out.

"Um ..." The words caught in his throat. He forced them out. "Coming down with a cold or something. I'm not feeling so good."

Voice barely above a mumble, he looked around.

"Where's the rest of it? There's got to be more than just a tape."

"Yes, sir, right away. Right to it-"

"Great. But dress her properly first. You're way out of line, you know ..."

"Yes, sir, I'm really sorry about that."

Sakamoto left the room.

Kuroda was a classic case of delinquent-turned-cop.

The spells were spreading like wildfire.

And there was an increase in the number of cops like Kuroda, cops with flexible morals who took pleasure in degraded acts.

Shouldn't there be a lot more complaints about the situation?

Clucking his tongue again, Sakamoto started down the stairs.

It looked like the girl's parents were also users. But their symptoms were not so apparent, and they were kicking up a fuss.

In any event, there would be a thorough search of the house.

They couldn't let a single page, no, not even a single word, escape them.

At that very moment, mid-thought-

A shock coursed through him. His thoughts veered away on their own.

Nearly plummeting headlong down the stairs, Sakamoto struggled to keep his footing.

"Sir, are you okay?"

An officer had seen him from the bottom of the stairs and reached out to stop his fall.

"No ... just a bit dizzy ... started coming down with a cold yesterday."

Sakamoto repeated the same excuses.

"You're just worn-out, chief. Just head home and leave this here to us, okay?"

The officer looked quite concerned. But you never knew what they were really thinking. Who knew what they'd do with Sakamoto off the scene?

Still Sakamoto nodded in agreement.

"I'll do that. I'm not feeling good. Might even see the doctor. Take care of things."

On that note, he headed out.

Neighborhood housewives were loitering outside in the street. No doubt they knew the police were there.

As he came out, they all looked the other way.

Even though the general public had been kept in the dark, the term cord police was already widespread and meant no good. They were as feared and despised as the special-force police in the prewar era.

He quickened his pace to reach the main street.

Just as earlier that morning, his entire body was drenched with sweat.

He wondered if he would make it.

It wasn't so unpleasant. On the contrary. He was struggling to repress the feeling of euphoria bubbling up within him. It was rather like trying to withhold an orgasm.

He hailed a cab. He gave his home address.

He arrived home within twenty minutes.

His wife greeted him with a look of surprise.

"You caught a cold after all, didn't you?"

She had him take cold medicine despite his protests. She sent him to bed.

Sakamoto slid under the covers.

After a while his wife went out on errands.

Sakamoto was shaking. His entire body was trembling like a leaf.

He sneaked out of bed. He unlocked the desk drawer.

The yellow cover appeared. He had confiscated a bunch of stuff from Miura Sachiko, one of the cases he had disposed of. And he had ended up slipping just this one copy into his pocket.

He slipped back into bed. And with trembling hands, he opened the pages.

"The Gold of Time ..."

He spoke the title aloud as he began reading. And then he continued.

"The shade of the shadow of light ... the depth of the depths of light ... at the equinox of light ... around behind the light."

He was suddenly thrown aloft.

Or, rather, to be exact, his consciousness was sucked out by some powerful force.

It was being carried off, just like that.

Soon darkness enveloped him. The darkness was spinning, turning round and round. Everything was turning around.

Countless threads of light appeared amid the darkness.

Scorching heat and intense cold ruled the darkness. It entered his comprehension as a concept.

The spinning became faster still.

Something was approaching from in front. It was a red circle. A circle ... no, it wasn't that. It was a sphere!

A giant whirling sphere was approaching at an incredible speed.

The darkness faded, and then the threads of light. Before he realized it, the sphere had completely filled his conceptual field of vision.

(I'm falling!)

For some reason he felt he was. In the instant that he felt it, he understood that it wasn't the sphere that was spinning around, it was his consciousness.

In that case-

What was the world of darkness through which he had passed? The threads of light-and this enormous, red sphere-

Before he knew it, the surface of the sphere was before his eyes.

It's Earth-! Red Earth was there before him. And it was spinning.

And there was-

He was pulled into it. And then it stopped.

(What place is this!?)

This body, of which he was conscious, was moving independently of his intentions.

"Move out!"

He heard the voice. It took some time before he realized that it was coming from him-it was issuing from the mouth of this body that he now felt as his own.

His body started walking.

He looked at his hands. They were rough hairy hands. The hands gripped a long pole of a sort that he had never seen before. It looked like a weapon.

Ahead flames were whirling out of something that looked like a house. It was a house ... probably a house.

Corpses lay scattered across the reddish earth like so many rags.

(This place-where is it!?)

It wasn't him. That much was clear to him. This body was not his body.

And the place and the time-neither was his.

This very world was not at all like the one he knew, Japan of the late twentieth century.

His face turned skyward.

The sky bore a tint of pale pink. And there was not a cloud in it. Directly overhead the sun was shining. But-it was so small. Compared to the sun he knew, it looked so very small.

Astonishment ripped through his mind.

Ripped open, his mind gushed thoughts that touched other consciousnesses. And then they overlapped and merged. It all came to him in that instant.

This was neither his place nor his time. Nor was this body his.

It was 2131-he could read the year from the minds that had merged.

He had been flown away. Or, rather, he had been sucked up.

And he had been sucked into an unfamiliar body belonging to an unfamiliar world in this unfamiliar time.

Anything else was unthinkable. Or maybe the notion was simply easy to believe.

This man-the name of the man marching across this desolate red earth with Sakamoto housed within him was Schmitt, Carl Schmitt.

5

"Move out!"

He gave the order to move and advanced two, three steps.

At that moment-he felt something.

He turned quickly, finger on the trigger of his assault weapon. He swung the muzzle left and right, seeking his prey.

It must have been his imagination after all.

Not even so much as a shadow was moving.

Nothing but corpses as far as the eye could see.

Housing complexes in the residential area were ablaze with fire. It was only a matter of time before they burned to the ground. It didn't seem possible that there would be anyone left alive.

Nonetheless, something was amiss.

He could definitely feel something. And very close to him-

With the sleeve of his combat suit, Schmitt wiped away the fine Martian dust that had accumulated on his goggles.

He no longer felt the presence. Yet he couldn't shake the unpleasant feeling that something was watching him.

It wasn't possible.

Schmitt inspected the entire perimeter once more, looking down the muzzle, and then advanced.

The hell on earth right before him seemed unreal.

Everything around him suddenly went silent.

Tat tat tat .... Tat tat tat ...

The popping of assault weapons sounded far off as in a dream.

Then it stopped.

This operation was quickly coming to an end. The Golgi settlement had been eradicated.

Schmitt's squad alone had killed some three hundred people.

It had been an easy mission.

With such defenseless targets, it was easy to shoot them down and advance; the only obstacle was a sense of conscience. With Schmitt's troop, that hadn't been an issue.

The soldiers operated as one on the battlefield. They turned into a single weapon for military deployment. That's how they were trained.

Even upon slaughtering hundreds and burning down entire settlements, their faces remained cool, impassive.

This squad had eight soldiers. Usually they combined with a second squad to form a sixteen-man attack force, but their partner squad hadn't joined them today. There had been too many rookies in their number.

The eight under Schmitt's command were seasoned in combat.

Which is to say, they were all men without any other career options open to them.

The job attracted anyone who wanted to make a clean break with his past.

And they were no longer required to think for themselves. They went wherever commanded. They embarked on missions as ordered. That was the beauty of it. It wasn't a bad bargain at all.

In particular, for a man who had witnessed his beloved wife trampled to death in the midst of a riot less than five meters away, there was no better place to find some peace of mind than the barracks of one of the military units of the Martian Guard.

Mars was also a good option for the various nations of Earth that needed to deal with the global population explosion, the depletion of resources, and economic collapse, affording a New World for the destitute and rejected.

Even before the overnight transformation of the planet through terraforming had been put into orbit, massive fleets of refugees from every nation had already built settlements across the surface of Mars, gaining a foothold on the planet through anticipated but nonetheless massive sacrifices, and finally establishing a planetary federation, and now one century later-

A population of nearly eighty million thronged the planet, comprising both recent immigrants as well as the descendents of the first generation of settlers.

Riots and insurrections continued to break out on an almost daily basis in every location. That was why Schmitt's line of business never suffered from a lack of clientele.

The Martian Guard was a corporate enterprise. It was all about profit. And so they involved themselves in all manner of situations.

The military complement of the Martian Guard comprised a total of about twelve hundred soldiers, three thousand armored vehicles, and two hundred warplanes.