Shadow Box, page 13
Where the Incarnate’s eyes had been a dark chocolate brown before, now they were a light tan. Their color was fading away.
Chapter 10
Damp with sweat, the wispy silk of her dancing costume clung to Rosalia’s toned body as she ran across the desert. Her shapely tanned legs stretched out, eating into the distance with seeming effortlessness. Her right arm pumped back and forth, the hand held rigid, cutting the air like a blade, while her left hand clung to the handle of the little metallic carrying case of the interphaser unit. Her breathing came regularly, deep breaths drawn in by her nostrils, held in her lungs, released in a steady stream between her parted lips. Despite the hot afternoon sun, the sweat sheen glistening on her body, Rosalia showed no signs of tiring.
Her dark eyes were fixed ahead, looking for the signs that Señor Smarts had promised she would recognize. She had never been to this dugout before, at least not on foot, and she was certain that it would be easy to miss. Tom Carnack’s gang knew the value of keeping things hidden from prying eyes, even out here in the middle of nowhere. When you were a trader, it didn’t pay to advertise where you stored your goods.
As her long legs continued to kick forward, racing for the western horizon, she spotted the stump of a dead tree off to her right, barely poking from the ground. She angled her run toward it, slowing as she approached.
Rosalia put down the interphaser and stood there a moment, looking at the little stump. It rose just three inches above the sand, the bulk of the tree snapped off and long since removed. The brown bark had been blackened by smoke where someone had burned the tree’s remains, and Rosalia knelt a moment, scrutinizing the burn marks carefully.
There, to one side, carved into the blackened stump so that it showed as a pale yellow streak, was a symbol. A circle, irregular in its hasty carving, with parallel lines scored across it at an angle. Carnack’s symbol.
Rosalia glanced back to where she had come from, up at the sun shifting a little lower in the sky as the afternoon progressed. Then she looked back at the tiny carving and judged what direction it pointed. All she needed to do was head in the same direction as the carving indicated, a straight line all the way to the horizon until she found the hideout. But if she misjudged, deviated even a little from that route, she ran the risk of passing the base, never finding the hidden entrance.
Scanning the landscape to the west, where the carving indicated, Rosalia saw a low outcropping forming a muddy brown lump against the blue sky. She shielded her eyes from the sun, narrowing them to get a better look. Up there, circling overhead, she saw a family of buzzards, looking for scraps. That would be it, then—Carnack’s base.
Picking up the carrying case by its handle once more, Rosalia resumed her jog toward the rocky outcropping. With no markers around, it was hard to guess how far away the rocks were, but she estimated it was perhaps a mile—five or six minutes, maybe.
GRANT URGED the solar-powered chariot to even greater speeds as the wind whipped into his face. “She can’t have got much farther,” he told himself as his vehicle roared over another dune, throwing up a cloud of dusty sand in its wake.
The chariot landed on the other side of the dune, the hard impact jarring through Grant’s body, making his teeth clack together. As he landed, Grant spotted the tiny figure in the distance, just a speck amid the dirty yellow sands. He turned the chariot toward the dark speck, smiling as the dot became recognizable as a human form, the thin lines of the legs and arms protruding from the torso.
“Now I’ve got you.” Grant grinned as he gunned the chariot’s engine.
As Grant got closer, he confirmed that the figure was Rosalia. He saw then that she was holding a square case that glinted in the sun—the interphaser. Raising his head, Grant stared ahead, trying to discern where she was running to. There was nothing there, just a little outcropping, perhaps two stories high, and stretching maybe thirty feet along the sand. Hardly a great hiding place—at best the dancer might have hoped to use it for shade until the sun went down and she could travel more comfortably.
Of course, she had the interphaser, but Grant reassured himself that she couldn’t have figured out the operating protocols involved from just a single observation of the unit in use. Smarts, he accepted, might just be wily enough to get the unit working by a process of trial and error, but he couldn’t imagine Rosalia getting it operational by anything other than luck. Not that luck hadn’t already played its part in her survival and escape to now, he reminded himself.
In short, all she could do now was run. And there was nowhere to hide; Grant knew it and she had to, as well.
SHE RAN, and the only sound in her ears was the rhythm of her body, the beating of her heart, the pulse throbbing below her ears. But as she neared the rocks, Rosalia heard another sound, a sound that didn’t belong, an intrusion on her body’s rhythm, and she glanced over her shoulder, quickening her pace automatically.
There, racing across the dry dirt, a plume of sand tossed up in his wake, was the dark-skinned Magistrate aboard one of the little electric chariots. He was a huge figure, standing erect over the low-set console of the twin-wheeled buggy.
The trace of a smile crossed Rosalia’s lips for a moment, bunching the pleats of skin at the corners of her eyes. She spun back, standing still for several seconds as she let Grant get just a little bit closer. “Too late now, Magistrate man,” she whispered. Then she blew Grant a kiss before turning once more.
A second later, she trotted into the shade of the outcropping and was lost to the solid black shadow that it cast.
Grant urged the chariot onward, all the more determined not to lose his quarry now that she was so close.
BACK AT THE settlement, Kane lifted his hand from the shrieking Incarnate’s head and stepped slowly away from him. The wounded Incarnate continued to toss and turn, his head weaving backward and forward as though taking punches, his body writhing on the ground, tossing the fine grains of sand up into the air.
Kane turned to Decard, his face stern and impenetrable. “Well?”
Decard looked from Kane to his writhing guardsman and back, fear lining his youthful features. “What is it? What’s going on?”
Kane glanced to Brigid and Keb before he uttered the word on his mind. “Virus,” he stated.
“No, Kane,” Brigid said thoughtfully. “No virus I know talks back. He called you an…ape-thing?”
“Yeah,” Kane muttered as if to himself. “Sounds like the kind of bull Enlil and his cohorts spout.”
“The Annunaki?” Brigid confirmed, and Kane nodded. “This doesn’t look—” She stopped herself as she noticed the irritation on Kane’s face.
“Nothing those lizards do ever looks like what we expect,” he reminded her with irritation. “Nothing they do conforms to what we think they’ll do. Every time we think we’ve beaten them down it turns out they’ve got another trick just waiting to be played.”
Keb looked to Brigid for reassurance before he spoke. “Kane,” the medic gently urged, “for those of us who came in late, perhaps…?”
Kane gestured to Keb’s fallen colleague as the man bucked and writhed as though possessed. “I think this is an Annunaki virus that—” he hesitated, trying to find the right word “—overwhelms people’s minds.”
“A mind virus?” Decard asked. “Could such a thing exist? Keb? Brigid?”
“Hypothetically.” Brigid nodded. “But how would such a thing be spread?”
“That creature touched him,” Kane reminded them.
Brigid shook her head. “It touched you, too, Kane.”
Kane disagreed. “No, it didn’t,” he told her. “I was damn close, but we never touched. You made sure of that, Baptiste. And thank you,” he added after a moment.
Keb looked at his shrieking colleague. “With just the one host, and everyone who contacts it dying in a matter of hours, this would be a very slow way to intentionally spread a disease,” he observed. “If it is intentional.”
“He’s right,” Brigid agreed. “I touched the girl in the tent before she died. Nothing’s happened to me.”
“What about an incubation period?” Decard suggested. “Maybe, Brigid…” He stopped, clearly uncomfortable with speaking his thoughts aloud. “Maybe you’re a carrier now?”
Brigid pointed to the suffering Incarnate who had worn the crocodile mask. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s affected your man here immediately, and the evidence we’ve seen is that that’s true for everyone else who’s come into contact with it. If I had it, you’d all know by now.”
“You could be immune,” Kane suggested, no cheer in his voice. “Back in Cobaltville, there was a program of immunization against a number of diseases. Since Baron Cobalt turned out to be an Annunaki in sleeper form, isn’t it possible he’d have immunized his loyal subjects with whatever they needed to survive this virus?”
Brigid held her hands open in despair. “Anything’s possible, Kane,” she acknowledged, “but we left Cobaltville years ago. Why is this virus—if it is a virus—only showing up now? What held it back? Who’s unleashed it and why?”
“By mistake maybe?” Decard postulated.
“Could be just to thin the herd in the Outlands, outside of ville walls,” Kane proposed. “The Annunaki are very into culling the herd, selective evolution or whatever you want to call it.”
Brigid looked at the Incarnate as he writhed in the sand, his eyes now wide open and disturbingly colorless. He had stopped shrieking, but continued to mumble and mutter from deep in his throat, as though clearing phlegm.
“I don’t see it,” Brigid decided. “There are too many variables for it to ring true,” she told Kane. “We’re looking too deeply for an answer to something that’s likely much more simple.”
Slowly Kane nodded, accepting her point.
“The monster’s the key, then,” Keb said as the group stood, considering its next move.
The four of them stood there, watching in helpless silence as the wounded Incarnate who had worn the crocodile’s face pounded at the ground, occasionally screaming at the top of his lungs before reverting to the mumbled patter of nonsense that they had seen in the other altered people.
Finally, Kane turned away and activated the Commtact hidden beneath his skin. “Kane to Cerberus. You there?”
A moment later, Brewster Philboyd’s voice came over the Commtact receiver. “Yes, Kane.”
“We’ve got us a creature of unknown origin,” Kane explained, “approximately eight feet tall, jet-black skin, appears to be disintegrating with movement—”
As Kane spoke, Lakesh interrupted: “Kane, Lakesh here. Please describe again.”
Kane gave a full description of the creature that they had faced less than an hour earlier. He concluded, with a request. “We think that this creature is the host for the virus or infection that Decard originally reported. Trouble is, we lost it after the battle—the thing retreated underground. Now, this creature moves like lightning, and it’s a burrower, so it won’t be easy for us to track from the ground. I’m wondering if we can employ the Vela satellite for some surveillance.”
IN THE CONTROL ROOM of the Cerberus redoubt, Lakesh bent over a desk as he considered Kane’s request. He looked across to where Brewster Philboyd sat at the communications relay desk, an unspoken query on his face.
Aged somewhere in his midforties, Philboyd wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks. His pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline, and his lanky six-foot frame seemed hunched as he sat at the computer terminal uplinked to the satellites and communications relay. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. His dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had assisted in refining the operation of the portable interphaser. While he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he addressed a scientific or engineering problem. Just now, the unvoiced problem was whether the Vela-class satellite could track a body underground.
Philboyd nodded after a moment, showing Lakesh a shaky hand that suggested that he would try but could not guarantee results.
“Kane,” Lakesh replied, “we can try that, but no promises. Do you know which direction the creature moved off in?”
“Hard to say,” Kane answered. “Like I said, the thing spun itself a tunnel into the ground, disappeared inside. Maybe south, but I can’t say for sure.”
As the conversation continued, with Brewster Philboyd taking down details and coordinates, Mariah Falk and Clem Bryant entered the operations center, full of enthusiasm. Lakesh held his palm up to them as they approached, warning them to remain silent until the communication with Kane was over. He needed to concentrate on every word.
“One more thing,” Brewster explained as he watched the satellite feed from California. “Grant’s requested some monitoring assistance, too. I can’t be watching two places at once, no matter how close you guys are. I’ll see if anything leaps up from under the surface, but I’ll need to keep with Grant for a while.”
From the communications link, Kane voiced his assent. “Grant’s out on his own,” he said, “so I want you to stick with him, priority one.”
With that, Kane signed off, and the conversation was over. Lakesh motioned Mariah and Clem over.
“Mariah believes that she’s found something,” Clem began as Mariah unfolded her map of Arizona onto Lakesh’s desk.
THE CHARIOT PULLED to a stop beside the rocks, and Grant leaped from it, Sin Eater in hand, using the vehicle for cover as he surveyed the area.
Up close he saw that the outcropping was formed of two strips of rocks. The right-hand set towered to about two stories while the others, to his left, were a little lower, just over eight feet. The strips of rocks formed a narrow corridor, locked in shadow, its floor carpeted by fine sand. Rosalia had disappeared between the two strips but, even from here, Grant could see that there was hardly anywhere to go. The shady corridor between the rocks ran no more than eighteen feet. At best, she might hope to ambush him if he entered, but she was unarmed, he knew, and Grant was confident he could take her.
Warily, his pistol pointed ahead of him, Grant made his way toward the narrow corridor formed by the rocks.
The outcropping cast shade across the landscape, thick black shadows, and Grant took a few moments as his eyes adjusted from the fierce sunlight. Slowly, the shadows of the corridor took on a familiar greenish hue as his eyes filtered out the sun, and he began to discern the details of the rocky walls. The little corridor was tight, not wide enough to take two men abreast, they would need to walk single file. Its depths seemed so dark after the harsh desert sun, and Grant stood near to the entrance, checking ahead with his gun raised, his eyes flicking left and right, up and down, trying to spy Rosalia.
Slowly, tentatively, Grant took a step forward, edging his back against the higher of the two walls. He couldn’t see Rosalia, couldn’t even sense her presence. He stilled himself, willing his heart to hush as he listened for her breathing.
Carefully, Grant continued down the short passageway between the rocks, his eyes flicking to and fro as he searched for the svelte woman.
By the time he reached the end of the shady passage, Grant wanted to punch something. She wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. She had ducked into this naturally made alleyway between the rocks. He had seen her blow him a kiss and step into the shade and then—nothing.
Grant stepped back into the sunlight and scanned the horizon, looking farther to the west to see if she had continued running while he was carrying out his methodical search. There was no one in sight.
Warily, his senses heightened and alert, he walked around the outside edge of the lower group of rocks, checking to see if Rosalia had doubled back and hidden here while he was searching the shadowy corridor. He paced back to the chariot, which remained where he had left it. There was no sign of her.
Think in three dimensions, Grant, he reminded himself as he reached for the top of the lower group of rocks and pulled himself up by the powerful muscles of his left arm. The surface of the low rocks was sprinkled with sand and spattered with the white residue of bird droppings, but there was no sign of the woman.
Grant took several steps backward until he reached the edge of the outcropping. Then he sheathed the Sin Eater and sprinted across the narrow expanse of rock before leaping into the air and grabbing the edge of the higher group of rocks. He grunted as his chest slapped against the hard rock wall, then clambered up using his hands and whatever toeholds he could find.
Atop the higher outcropping, Grant saw exactly the same thing as he had on the lower group. “A fat lot of nothing,” he muttered, kicking at the flurries of shifting sand that spun about in the breeze. The circling buzzards squawked at his intrusion into their territory as he stood there.
Grant activated his Commtact and called to Brewster Philboyd at Cerberus headquarters. “I think I’ve lost my rabbit,” he explained. “Are you able to give me a fix on her?”
Philboyd’s voice came over the Commtact with crystal clarity. “No can do, Grant. I was watching the whole thing. She went in and you followed, then you came out. Wherever she is, she isn’t running. Is there a cave or caves inside?”
“Not that I saw,” Grant replied, an edge of irritation creeping into his voice.
WHEN DOMI RETURNED to the little desert hamlet, she felt the grim air that had settled over all of the personnel. Señor Smarts had been persuaded at gunpoint to drive one of the chariots back to the settlement, while Domi rode behind him in her own vehicle. They had abandoned the third chariot, trusting that Decard’s men would be able to pick it up once Domi advised them of its location.
Smarts limped from the back of the chariot, gripping his leg wound and gritting his teeth against the pain, while Domi followed, twirling the stolen Incarnate staff in her left hand while she casually held the Detonics Combat Master to the brigand’s back.
