Outlanders 32 Evil Abyss, page 15
Kane narrowed his eyes at the peculiar choice of phrase but before he could demand clarification, Chou continued, "You are very lucky that I encountered you. The forest isn't kind to strangers."
"I kind of got that impression when I came across your son," Kane retorted darkly.
Chou Chan's grin vanished and he said nothing more for the next few minutes. The road doglegged to parallel the muddy bank of the Siemrap River. Brown water swirled and foamed around the buttressing roots of colossal trees that rose from the shallows like pillars, "Am I to understand this trading post of yours is on the river?" Kane asked.
Chou Chan nodded. "That makes it easier to reach for villagers who live downriver."
A sudden thrashing in the undergrowth ahead of them brought the little man to a halt. He gestured for Kane to do the same. After a few seconds of tense, alert listening, he whispered, "There is a dragon stalking us."
"How can you be sure?" Kane wanted to know in the same low voice, pitched low to disguise the tremor of fear in it.
The little man's splayed nostrils dilated. "I smell it."
Kane took a tentative sniff of the air and detected the faint, musky reek of reptiles. "I think you're right," he murmured. "Let's find a place to—"
The rest of his words were drowned out by a snapping and rending of bushes and saplings. Palm fronds and leaves scattered in an explosion as the scaled monstrosity came blundering onto the road, its long rail lashing, whipping up loose twigs. With lumbering steps of its four squat Legs, the giant lizard crept forward to block their path.
Kane realized the dragon was smaller than the one he had killed earlier, but not by much. Its whitish belly nearly dragged on the ground, but the height of its head was almost the same as Chou Chan's.
Tamping down the panic that threatened to consume him, Kane unleathered his Sin Eater and raised the Copperhead. Chou Chan took several unsteady steps backward. Faintly, he said, ''We can try to run, but I am not very fast."
Kane carefully stepped around him, putting his body between the little man's and that of the giant monitor lizard "I don't feel much like running," he side mouthed. "Feel free to go if you want."
The little man cast Kane a frightened look, then turned on his heel and began sprinting. As Kane hoped, the dragon lunged straight for the bent little man, its jaws gaping open and revealing needle-pointed fangs and a huge split tongue lolling in its mouth.
Kane fired both the Sin Eater and Copperhead simultaneously, the double reports sounding like a crazed jackhammer beneath the closed canopy of the rain forest. The 9 mm rounds spat by the Sin Eater pounded into dragon's barrel-shaped body, stitching the scales with a series of lithe blood-rimmed holes.
The 4.85 mm bullets fired by the Copperhead ripped gouges through the creature's slab-muscled neck, tracking up to punch through the side of its skull. Emitting a hissing screech, it turned to snap at the wounds, as if it were being stung by insects.
The giant lizard went into thrashing convulsions, writhing and thrashing through underbrush, crashing headlong into a tree trunk, making great gurgling cries. Kane watched as its huge body spasmed wildly, its claws tearing up great clots of earth and its whiplashing tail shredding the undergrowth.
The monster reptile flipped and flopped and struggled crazily, as if its brain refused to admit that its body was dying. Rolling over and over, it crushed a bed of ferns, then fell into the river with a great splash. The heavy flailing tail sent sheets of water cascading over the bank.
The dragon's violent death throes slowly ceased, although its tail continued to twitch with postmortem spasms. Crimson-tinged ripples spread out from its body. Chou Chan gingerly returned to stand beside Kane. In a whispering voice made husky by awe, he said, "You have powerful weapons, outlander. You would be wise to conceal them if you travel to Angkor Thom. To be caught with such weapons by the Cobra Guard would mean certain death."
Kane gazed down at him and said coldly but with a great deal of meaning, "I wouldn't die alone."
The little was nodded in comprehension. "You needn't fear that I will betray you to them. I would not betray an enemy to those pigs, much less a man who just saved my life."
"Good," Kane said sarcastically. "Somebody else who claims they owe me big."
Chou Chan squinted up at him puzzled. "I do not understand."
"I didn't expect you to," Kane replied "But I do expect you to stop calling me 'outlander.' It has unpleasant associations for me. My name is Kane."
Chou Chan repeated the name several times until he had mastered its pronunciation. "Very well...Kane." "Yes," Kane drawled sardonically "Very well. Is there any other carnivorous wildlife I should know about before we go on",
Chou Chan's brow furrowed as he pondered the question. “Tigers."
"Tigers?" Kane echoed uneasily. "Big ones?" Chou Chan nodded. "Oh, yes. Very big tigers indeed. With very big appetites. So we should hurry before one of them smells the dragon's blood and comes to feast...and decides we might make a good dessert."
Kane only swiftly ejected the empty clip from the Copperhead and toggled a new one home. "Giant lizards, tigers and warlords" he murmured. "Oh, my."
Chapter 15
Brigid Baptiste had been taken prisoner too often over the past couple of years to delude herself into thinking that by lodging complaints with her captors she would receive better treatment As it was, she had been dealt with much more humanely by the self proclaimed Magickers than by most of her prior abductors.
With her back pressed against a damp stone wall, her wrists and ankles were bound to pitons driven deep into the floor and wall. Multiple strands of leather thongs were drawn through eyebolts in all three pitons and expertly twisted and knotted around her extremities. Several yards across the dark gallery, a small fire burned in a bowl-shaped brazier, sending sooty smoke curling up to vanish in the dense gloom. Seated around the fire were three lean men wearing hooded, cassock-like robes and sandals. Despite their Asian features, they reminded her of pix she had seen of Franciscan monks, but after three days in their company, she knew they weren't holy men. The surreptitious glances they flicked up and down her figure, as tightly encased as it was in the black shadow suit, were anything but pious. All were bald, with heads so closely shaved no stubble was evident on their scalps. Their skin was a pale saffron hue, their eyes dark and for the most part their faces were expressionless. The men all appeared to be identical at first, but after a couple of days Brigid discerned differences among them, primarily due to their ages. Each bore upon his brow a symbol worked in metallic ink, that of a spiral surrounding a starburst. The spirals were of all the same cobalt blue, but the starbursts varied as to hue—red, yellow and white.
The Magickers acted as her warders, but she learned almost nothing of them except they employed the honorific "Brother" when they addressed one another in the Khmer dialect.
Despite her eidetic memory, Brigid retained very few solid recollections of how she came to be in their custody. All she could call forth in her mind were dazed and chaotic visions—the staccato hammering of autofire, voices shouting words in a strange tongue, fleeting glimpses of rushing figures, Nora Pennick's loud scream of horror, then a fragmented image of Brewster Philboyd falling down, blood streaming over his face. A blow on the back of her head detonated a bomb of stars within her skull. She vaguely remembered a sensation of falling, but not of landing. She plunged into a sunless gulf of unconsciousness.
When Brigid awoke, she found herself securely bound, her thought processes moving like half-frozen mud, her stomach jumping with nausea. Her head ached with a blinding pain. Not long ago, a blunt trauma to her skull had put her in a coma for several days and severely affected her short-term memory. Since then, she had harbored a fear of suffering a similar injury that would result in permanent mental impairment.
The dull realization that she was physically sound finally occurred to her. She accepted the miracle grimly because she had no idea of where she was being kept prisoner or even why.
At first Brigid could make out very little of her surroundings. All was gloomy and dim, with little more than monstrously elongated shadows shifting over roughly hewed rock walls. She heard only whispering echoes of a sibilant language. She smelled mildew and stagnant water. After a little while, objects, sounds and actions assumed proper proportions to reality. She made out hooded figures moving to and fro within a stone gallery, firelight glistening from damp, mossy walls. The language the figures spoke was Khmer, a sample of which she had briefly listened to in Cerberus before embarking on the inter-phase transit. She assumed she was within a temple, perhaps one similar to that she, Nora and Philboyd had phased into. Brigid had no difficulty recalling the few minutes preceding the attack and her abduction. Followed by Nora and Philboyd, she had carried the interphaser into the Cerberus mat-trans unit. The shape of the interphaser resembled a very squat, broad-based pyramid made of smooth, gleaming alloy. Only one foot in overall height, its width did not exceed ten inches. From the base protruded a small power unit and a keypad. Philboyd had commented again, in his wry way, how closely the pyramidion reminded him of incense burners that could be purchased in ''head shops" during the 1960s and '70s. Inasmuch as he had helped construct the latest version of the device, Brigid didn't take his slightly dismissive comments seriously.
Philboyd understood how the interphaser's pyramidal configuration was neither arbitrary nor aesthetic. The energy generated by the device progressed by four different routes, rejoining in a single point at the apex. The energy output flowed in a helix spiral pattern with opposite but equal frequencies of wavelength and radiation. The intensity on each side of the vortex at any given point triggered the quantum induction shift by vibrational resonance.
Still, Philboyd had expressed doubt many times about the interphaser's ability to function, despite the fact if it had not been for the second version of the device, he would have never been given the opportunity to help in the construction of a third.
A little over three months before, when the Parallax Points program was being decrypted, the Cerberus personnel involved in the process were nonplussed when one set of coordinates led to a location off the planet itself, on the Moon. All of them knew the stories about predark space settlements, even of secret bases on the Moon, one of the largest built in Manitius Crater region. That particular site was chosen because of its proximity to artifacts that some scientists speculated were the shattered remains of an incredibly ancient city, once protected by massive geodesic domes.
A remote probe had been dispatched first and it returned not just with evidence the Manitius Moon colony was still inhabited, but populated by a disaffected group of scientists, marauding packs of carnobots and both a flesh-and-blood devil and a machine known by the acronym of DEVIL.
Brewster Philboyd and Nora Pennick were two of the scientists living there who had agreed to relocate to Earth. Brigid found something very appealing about the lanky, myopic astrophysicist. Whether it was his self-deprecating sense of humor or his intellect, she wasn't sure. He wasn't a man of action, but he wasn't a coward, either. Both of them had faced Enki, the last of the legendary dragon kings, in his lunar citadel. Philboyd's courage, although it had cracked, hadn't completely crumbled, and Brigid had been glad to have a solid bulwark at her side on that terrifying night. The downside of that event was how Philboyd began looking to Brigid as something of an anchor in his new life in Cerberus. He had insisted on accompanying her and Nora on the new interphaser's inaugural transit, and Brigid figured the prospect of losing her due to the malfunction of a machine he had helped to build awakened an almost childlike insecurity within him. Brigid didn't know Nora Pennick particularly well, since she was a quiet young woman with a reserve Brigid attributed to her calm and collected British upbringing. She and another Britisher, Cleve Randolph, had been part of the DEVIL scientific staff on the Moon. Cleve, however, had been killed when he helped Grant at a trans-atmospheric Manta ship.
Unlike some of her colleagues, Nora didn't display a thinly veiled attitude of superiority toward her hosts. Many of the Moon base personnel seemed amused by the Cerberus exiles' ignorance of a number of twentieth-century events and news, but she wasn't one of them, and Brigid readily accepted her offer to accompany her on the test phase.
After a little argument, Brigid agreed that Philboyd could join her and Nora. The mission was not to launch an exploration, but simply intended to test the interphaser's capabilities, to make sure it could correctly process the Parallax Point data. They would make the phase transit, ascertain they had arrived where they were supposed to and then phase back to Cerberus. Brigid anticipated the entire journey would take only a few minutes. However, as a veteran of a number of past missions that went awry, she carried a pack containing MEs, bottled water, first-aid supplies and her TP-9 autopistol. Brigid carried the interphaser into the gateway unit and placed it on the center of the floor. When making phase transits from the redoubt, they always used the mat-trans chamber because it could be hermetically sealed. Philboyd pulled the brown-tinted armaglass door closed on its counterbalanced hinges.
Brigid knelt and touched the interphaser's inset activation toggles on the keyboard. She slid it back into the base as a waxy, glowing funnel of light fanned up from the metal apex of the pyramidion. It looked like a diffused veil of backlit fog, with tiny shimmering stars dancing within it.
Philboyd and Nora stared at the display in wonder. The light expanded into a gushing borealis several feet wide, spreading out within the chamber. A thready pulse of vibration tickled their skin, and shadows crawled over the armaglass walls, moving in fitful jerks and leaps. A faint hint of a breeze brushed their faces and ruffled their hair.
The veil of light produced from the apex of the pyramidion extended up and outward in wavering arc, giving the illusion of a Chinese hand fan opening up, with the interphaser acting as the handle. Both Nora and Philboyd had been briefed on the phenomenon but they didn't move—until Brigid stepped toward the pyramid, strolled through the fan of light and vanished.
Unlike a mat-trans gateway jump, phasing along a hyper-dimensional conduit was more akin to stepping from one room into another—if the rooms were thousands of miles apart. The phase jumper experienced a giddy second of acceleration, a half second of whirling vertigo as if burled a vast distance at a blinding speed, then a strange cushioning sensation as if he or she had jumped into a wall of compressed air.
Upon arriving at the destination point, the period of disorientation was short, despite the fact that Philboyd stumbled and nearly fell. The lanky astrophysicist looked around dazedly, but he recovered quickly. The three people from Cerberus stood within an enclosure of green-black walls, two of them crumbling due to the pressure exerted by enormous tree roots. They waited until the field effect generated by the interphaser collapsed before they cautiously moved out of the building, in order to take a sextant reading and ascertain they were where the Parallax Points coordinates indicated they would be.
Brigid estimated that was at least three days ago— three days of no word regarding the fates of Nora Pennick and Brewster Philboyd, no word of why she was being held prisoner or of what had happened to the interphaser and certainly no word of a rescue mounted by Kane or anyone else from Cerberus. The Commtact was still secured to her mastoid bone, hidden by the fall of her hair. She couldn't be certain that it hadn't been damaged and even now Kane was somewhere in Cambodia, trying to had her on it. But then again, she couldn't be certain Kane, Grant and Domi weren't still engaged in the op to Minnesota.
Regardless, she felt that Kane was already somewhere nearby even though she had no way of knowing if her feeling stemmed from wishful thinking or a far deeper response. The head ruled the body, cerebration came before emotions, but Brigid always shied away from examining the bond between her and Kane. Logically, there was no explanation. They were bound by spiritual chains, linked to each other and the same destiny.
Resolutely, she pushed the conjectures away. What mattered most now was surviving until Kane and most Likely Grant arrived. She knew they would, because entertaining any other alternative was intolerable. It wasn't as if Brigid was frightened by the prospect of being held prisoner. Over the past two years, Brigid had come to accept risk as a part of her way of life, taking chances so that others might find the ground beneath their fee a little more secure. She didn't consider her attitude idealism but simple pragmatism. If she had learned anything from her association with Kane, Grant and Domi, it was to regard death as a part of the challenge of existence, a fact that every man and woman had to face eventually.
She would accept it without humiliating herself if it came as a result of her efforts to remove the yokes of the baronies from the collective necks of humanity. She never spoke of it, certainly not to the cynical Kane, but she had privately vowed to make the future a better, cleaner place than either the past or the present. Dourly, she reflected it was probably a good thing she had never mentioned her goals to Kane since he would have no doubt asked how she intended to achieve them by being captured and held in a stinking cell.
If nothing else, the so-called Magickers had not offered to harm her in any way although they were not the most attentive of warders or hosts. The food they supplied at irregular intervals was of poor quality, usually consisting of a fish stew mixed with a handful of unbleached rice and tasteless root vegetables. The water had a foul taste and she drank sparingly of it, fearful of contracting dysentery. Several times she heard strange trumpeting calls outside the walls of her prison, the noise reminding her of a combination of bugle and roar. Although she couldn't be sure, she guessed elephants were the source of the sound. After she felt confident enough with the dialect, she asked what happened to the emergency ration kit she had carried. She received only a head shake. When she inquired about her pistol, she received no reaction whatsoever, which made her suspect the TR-9 was in the possession of the robed men.
