Shadow Box, page 15
Edwards shook his head. “My orders are to keep you two safe, Bryant, and this isn’t my idea of safe.”
Clem looked up at Edwards and Mariah as he tightened the climber’s harness around his waist. “If our parents had played it safe, we’d never have been born.” He smiled. “Come on, let’s see what’s down there.”
As Edwards stood there, feeding the climbing line slowly through his hands while Clem disappeared from view, Mariah considered what a strange contradiction Clem Bryant was. He was always urbane, never took offense, and he demonstrated a passing knowledge in every field. And yet, out here in the field, the man showed no fear and was certainly not the bookworm-cum-chef she had expected.
FOLLOWING DOMI’S DIRECTIONS, two of Decard’s Incarnate warriors shared a solar-powered chariot to pick up its missing twin. All Domi had needed to do was point in its general direction—the landscape was so bleak that it would be easy to spot the discarded buggy even from a distance, a little square blot on the sand.
The Incarnate driving the chariot wore a stylized cat mask over his features, while his companion was the bug-faced man who had suffered a bloody nose in Rosalia’s lightning-fast attack. The bug-masked man, whose name was Amun, had volunteered for the assignment, determined to regain some honor after his disastrous earlier performance.
They bumped over the dunes until Farouk, in the cat mask, pulled the two-wheeled vehicle to a stop a few feet from the unit that Smarts and Rosalia had abandoned. Farouk pointed to the discarded vehicle, and Amun stepped from the back plate and strolled across the sand to it. As he did so, he heard a strange humming in the air, like a million insect wings, and he looked up instinctively, the metallic blue paint on his bug mask catching the sun.
“Do you hear something?” Amun asked, turning to his colleague. “A whirring, buzzing sound?”
Farouk nodded. “I hear it.”
The noise was faint, but it grew perceptibly louder as they listened. Farouk pointed with his staff toward the west, and Amun peered in the same direction. Out there, close to the horizon, a cloud of billowing sand was being tossed into the air. The plume of sand caught on the breeze, dragging like a mist toward the north.
As the two Incarnates watched, the cloud grew larger, the noise louder, and suddenly they saw figures in the cloud. A dozen vehicles raced across the dunes, motorbikes and quad bikes, with a bulky Sandcat bringing up the rear, their wheels churning the fine sand up in a frenzy. The Incarnates knew then what the humming noise was: twin-stroke engines.
“They’re heading this way,” Amun declared, “coming straight for us.”
“Friends of the man Smarts?” Farouk suggested. “Reinforcements, come to collect their brother?”
Amun was already standing on the back plate of the abandoned chariot, running through the prep sequence and firing its engine. The chariot’s wheels spun uselessly in the sand for a few seconds, then suddenly found a grip and the vehicle lurched forward. “Back to the others,” he instructed his partner. “Quickly!”
With the approaching horde bearing down on them, the two Incarnates powered their chariots across the sand at maximum speed.
CLEM BRYANT CAREFULLY lowered himself through the crack in the mountain, swinging freely for a moment until the toes of his booted feet knocked against the rock face ahead of him. He let go of the climbing cable and stretched out one arm until he could feel the cold surface of the rock there. Gradually, swaying a little uneasily, Clem dropped into the hole.
“Everything okay, Clem?” Edwards’s voice echoed from above.
Clem looked up, discerning the ex-Mag’s head silhouetted against the bright sky. “Fine so far,” he called back. “Just like diving,” he added to himself.
As he lowered himself farther, Clem felt the sudden absence of the rock face against his toes, and he peered down into the darkness. Unable to make out anything in the shadowy depths below, Clem reached for the flashlight he had attached to his belt, shifting its beam as he did an ungainly pirouette at the end of the climbing cable. The bright xenon beam showed the rock face clearly, and he aimed it below him, past where his feet swung.
Edwards’s voice came again from above. “You need more rope, Clem? You’re not moving.”
Clem nodded to himself, taking a slow, calming breath before he continued into the darkened area below. “Ready when you are,” he called back to Edwards. From the beam of the flashlight, Clem could see that the crevice opened wider. As he lowered farther, he found himself dropping into a circular area. “A room,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping over the cavern. “It’s an honest-to-goodness room.”
Excited now, Bryant lowered himself until his boots met with the rock floor. As he found his feet, Clem called up to Edwards, ordering him to let down more rope so that there was sufficient slack for him to operate.
“You found something, Clem?” Edwards called back.
Clem cupped his hand to his mouth and responded, “I’m not sure.” His voice reverberated off the rock walls of the little, hidden room.
Edwards dropped another ten feet of rope, giving him plenty of slack, and Clem walked around, peering at things in the beam of the flashlight. It was a defined room, circular in construction with benches carved from rock lining the walls. There was a pit in the center, likely used for a fire, and a low wall beside it separated the pit from what appeared to be a ventilation shaft. Clem wandered over, holding his hand by the opening to confirm that a current of air was flowing from it.
“How delightful,” he said aloud, marveling at the little room beneath the mountain.
The circular nature of the room suggested that this was artificial, probably man-made. The floor was a flattened expanse of the rock that made up the mountain, and the ceiling formed a simple dome overhead, with struts interrupting the side benches at regular intervals, presumably to ensure that the domed roof didn’t collapse on its inhabitants. A few rocks littered the floor where the crack in the mountain had opened, but it was otherwise free from debris.
As Clem paced around the outside wall of the circular room, he noticed a low doorway cut into the rock. He stepped toward it and was abruptly halted by the rope attached to his waist. Clem looked longingly at the doorway for a moment, intrigued by what was on the other side, then he glanced down at the harness that attached him to the surface.
“Oh, well,” he decided, “in for a penny and all that.” Smiling, Clem reached for the buckles of his harness and detached it. Once he was free, he stepped briskly through the doorway and into the next room.
BACK ON THE SURFACE, Edwards was on his knees, calling to Clem down the dark rent in the ground. He received no answer and, after the third attempt, he gave up, exasperated.
Mariah turned to Edwards, concern marring her features. “What’s he doing down there?” she asked. “He’s been gone too long.”
Edwards shook his head slowly. “I shouldn’t have let him go down there,” he decided. “Not alone.” With that, he unclipped the catch on the paddle holster at his right hip and pulled out the Colt Government Model .45 he habitually wore there. With the swiftness of long-practiced routine, Edwards checked the chambers of the pistol were full before replacing it in his holster. Then he stepped over to his backpack and swiftly attached his own climbing rig around his waist and across his shoulders.
“You going to be okay, Mariah?” he asked.
She nodded, mouth closed tightly.
“There’s no one about for miles,” Edwards assured her. “Nearest mat-trans is downslope, the one we came here by. No one’s going to sneak up on you without you seeing them coming.”
She nodded again.
Edwards stood at the edge of the crevice and raised his voice once more. “Clem? I’m coming down to join you.”
A few seconds passed, and Edwards and Mariah tensely listened as the ex-Mag’s voice echoed from the walls. Then Clem’s voice came back, tinged with excitement.
“Bring Mariah,” he said. “She’ll want to see this.”
FOUR MINUTES LATER, Edwards and Mariah joined Clem in the second chamber. Like the first, this one was a simple circular room carved out of the solid rock of the mountain. The walls were lined with shelves, and each shelf held a tiny fetish, a little humanoid form no more than six inches in height. Each fetish appeared different, and the overriding feeling at looking at them was one of revulsion—every single one was an ugly caricature of a person or animal or hybrid of both.
The center of the room contained a dip, like a wide basin carved into the floor, almost eight feet across. The basin contained a cloudy liquid to a depth of roughly ankle height.
“I see you’ve found some dollies to play with,” Edwards said, admiring the numerous fetishes that lined the walls.
Clem shot him a look, but the man was too busy chuckling at his own joke as he examined one of the little figurines.
“Do you have any idea where they came from?” Mariah asked Clem. “What any of this stuff is for?”
Clem shook his head. “Not really,” he admitted. “There’s a drainage system running beneath the paddling pool.” He pointed at the cloudy liquid and Mariah leaned closer, trying to see through the gunk.
“What is this?” Mariah asked, indicating the liquid. “Stagnant water?”
Clem sniffed. “Doesn’t smell like it to me. It smells like the sea, don’t you think?”
Mariah nodded. “Now that you mention it…” she agreed.
Clem gestured around at the shelves that ran the length of the circular room. “These look like artifacts of a primitive culture,” he postulated, “familiar and yet I can’t place them.”
Mariah looked at the little figurines for a moment, her brows furrowed in thought. “I’ve seen them before, back when I was here skiing. There was a museum in Phoenix, I don’t recall its name. They had a display, just like this, and I remember my friend Sally calling them Barbie-steins. Like Frankenstein Barbies,” she added after a moment.
“I followed.” Clem nodded, indulging the geologist.
Mariah stood there, her tongue flicking as she tried to form the word she hadn’t thought of in over two hundred years. “Kachina!” she said at last. “They were called kachinas. Kachina dolls. Cripes, the things you remember.” She laughed.
“Kachina dolls,” Clem repeated thoughtfully, rolling the word around his mouth. “Do you recall anything else?”
Mariah pushed a hand through her hair as she considered the question. “They had to do with the local religion. Tribal stuff, I don’t really remember, Clem. I spent a lot of that holiday wondering if some guy in my group was ever going to notice me. Girl stuff, you know?”
Edwards picked up two of the little figurines and shoved them together into one of the deep hip pockets of his combat pants, clipping the fastening over it to make sure they remained secure. “Let’s get out of here, people,” he instructed. “Won’t do to wake the dead.”
Clem held up a hand to halt the man. “Look at this place, Edwards,” he said. “This place was built, carved out of the solid rock of a mountain. Just imagine how much effort that would take, how much energy and organization.”
Edwards shrugged. “They tell me that the ancients built pyramids that aligned with the stars, ‘impossible’ stone circles and other crap I’ve got zero interest in. I’m past being all amazed that they did it with a primitive pulley system and six thousand indentured slaves. Go tell it to someone who cares.”
Clem smiled at the man’s bluster. “A primitive pulley and six thousand slaves would do it, but where would they put the rocks they carved away, Mr. Edwards?”
Edwards gestured to the first room with his thumb. “Let’s get topside,” he instructed. “Time to clear out and go home. Anything else needs to be done here, someone can come back.”
Clem took another look around the room before they left, then reached for the water bottle that he had attached to his climbing rig. “One moment,” he told Edwards, who looked irritated as he waited in the doorway.
Unscrewing the cap of the bottle, Clem walked past him and tossed the contents into a corner of the circular room with the rock benches. Then he returned into the second chamber and knelt at the pool of liquid in its center, swishing a little of the contents into his emptied bottle. He held the bottle up to the flashlight, examining the cloudy contents. The bottle was about one-third full.
“There we are,” Clem said, smiling. “A little something for the folks back home.”
“That’s great,” Edwards growled. “Now let’s get moving, huh? We’ve got a twenty-minute trek back to the mat-trans, and I’ve worked up an appetite with all this climbing.”
Clem turned to Mariah as they followed Edwards back into the main room, where the climbing ropes dangled. “Even critical scientific exploration has to stop for lunch, it seems,” he whispered.
She glared at him, then started to laugh.
Soon, the three of them were making their way back to the surface, ready to return to the Cerberus installation.
Chapter 12
Grant stepped out from the recess in the rock wall, retracting his Sin Eater into its hidden wrist holster and holding his now empty hands high above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he instructed, raising his voice to be heard above the footsteps of the approaching brigands.
Three armed men had reached his hiding place, and another half dozen hurried up the sand-dappled slope.
“Who are you?” the lead man demanded, shoving the long barrel of a Colt Anaconda pistol toward Grant’s face.
Grant looked past the pistol at the man who held it. He wore a dirty red bandanna across his forehead, dusty, unwashed clothes with a belt of bullets around his waist. The other men and women who had chased up here upon Benqhil’s whistled command were dressed in similarly grimy, sweat-stained clothing.
“Speak,” the bandanna-wearing man urged, shoving with the pistol until it was just a few inches from Grant’s forehead.
“I’m an old acquaintance of Tom Carnack’s,” Grant explained, watching the man’s eyes for the telltale flinch of recognition at the name. “That name mean something to you, or do I gotta point him out?”
Still holding the pistol at Grant’s head, the bandanna-wearing man glanced across the cavern and called for Carnack. “Tom? Got someone here claims to be a friend of yours.”
From the corner of his eye, Grant saw Carnack’s head look up, then the sharp-featured young man started making his way across the floor of the cavern toward the slope. The brigands who had rushed up the slope made way deferentially for Carnack and Rosalia, who strode beside him.
“Mr. Grant,” Carnack said as he looked the Cerberus warrior up and down. “Didn’t expect to see you again. How you been? My man here treating you all right?”
In a flash of movement, Grant’s right hand slashed across and down, grabbing the bandanna-wearing man’s pistol by the barrel, plucking it from his hand. Before the astonished brigand could react, Grant drove his knee into the man’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. As the brigand staggered backward and fell to the ground at Carnack’s feet, Grant raised one corner of his mouth in a smile.
“Not so bad, Tom,” he said, “but a little light on the hospitality.” Grant flipped the Anaconda in his hand and offered the weapon, butt first, to Carnack.
Carnack smiled as he took it, his teeth gleaming from the lights beneath. “You keep that up, and someone’s liable to put a bullet in your head,” he said ominously.
“Well,” Grant said, shrugging, “that’s a pretty big risk anyway, far as I can see.”
Carnack stood there for a moment, studying the pistol in his hands as his men waited, their own guns aimed at the interloper. Then, almost casually, he raised the gun and sighted down its length, pointing it at Grant’s head. “So,” he said, smiling amiably, “I can’t think of any reason to let you live.”
Grant nodded in agreement. “I can appreciate that,” he replied. “For one thing I know where your hidden base is now. I’ll be honest and say, if our positions were swapped, I’d sure as hell shoot you.”
Carnack cocked the hammer on the .44 and offered Grant a look that oozed sincerity. “Well, it’s nice that we could agree on something in the end,” he stated. “I wouldn’t say it was nice knowing you, Grant, but at least it didn’t last long, eh?”
Standing with his hands raised again, Grant lowered them just a little, one finger extended as though to make one more point. “I don’t see Señor Smarts here,” Grant said. “He get lost?”
“I’ve got men on it,” Carnack responded coolly. “Sent them the very second Rosie here came back to the fold.”
Grant nodded. “Yeah. See, I knew you were clever. I’ll just bet that, given a few weeks, maybe a month or two, you’ll have that interphaser up and running, too.”
Carnack’s smile turned to a sneer as the realization dawned on him. “You know how to work it, don’t you?”
Grant nodded. “But you’ll figure it out,” he said. “Maybe even before my team use the reverse function to, you know, pop up here out of nowhere.”
“You’re joshing,” Carnack blustered, but he was clearly worried at the prospect.
“You’ll be fine,” Grant assured him. “Just switch it off until you’re ready to use it. Blocks anything coming in or out.” He raised his arms high once more, watching as Carnack considered his options. “You do know how to switch it off, don’t you?” Grant prodded.
With a curse under his breath, Tom Carnack lowered the pistol and carefully replaced the hammer. Then he looked Grant in the eyes, a snarl across his lips. “You’re going to show us how to use this interphaser thing, Grant, and maybe I’m going to let you live. But you try anything—anything at all—and there’s thirty men here armed for bear who’ll make sure you walk on stumps for the rest of your very short life. Get me?”
Grant nodded, slowly lowering his hands. “Not really into the stumps-for-legs look,” he uttered.
“Come on,” Carnack urged, leading the way back down the slope and into the main area of the cavern.
Clem looked up at Edwards and Mariah as he tightened the climber’s harness around his waist. “If our parents had played it safe, we’d never have been born.” He smiled. “Come on, let’s see what’s down there.”
As Edwards stood there, feeding the climbing line slowly through his hands while Clem disappeared from view, Mariah considered what a strange contradiction Clem Bryant was. He was always urbane, never took offense, and he demonstrated a passing knowledge in every field. And yet, out here in the field, the man showed no fear and was certainly not the bookworm-cum-chef she had expected.
FOLLOWING DOMI’S DIRECTIONS, two of Decard’s Incarnate warriors shared a solar-powered chariot to pick up its missing twin. All Domi had needed to do was point in its general direction—the landscape was so bleak that it would be easy to spot the discarded buggy even from a distance, a little square blot on the sand.
The Incarnate driving the chariot wore a stylized cat mask over his features, while his companion was the bug-faced man who had suffered a bloody nose in Rosalia’s lightning-fast attack. The bug-masked man, whose name was Amun, had volunteered for the assignment, determined to regain some honor after his disastrous earlier performance.
They bumped over the dunes until Farouk, in the cat mask, pulled the two-wheeled vehicle to a stop a few feet from the unit that Smarts and Rosalia had abandoned. Farouk pointed to the discarded vehicle, and Amun stepped from the back plate and strolled across the sand to it. As he did so, he heard a strange humming in the air, like a million insect wings, and he looked up instinctively, the metallic blue paint on his bug mask catching the sun.
“Do you hear something?” Amun asked, turning to his colleague. “A whirring, buzzing sound?”
Farouk nodded. “I hear it.”
The noise was faint, but it grew perceptibly louder as they listened. Farouk pointed with his staff toward the west, and Amun peered in the same direction. Out there, close to the horizon, a cloud of billowing sand was being tossed into the air. The plume of sand caught on the breeze, dragging like a mist toward the north.
As the two Incarnates watched, the cloud grew larger, the noise louder, and suddenly they saw figures in the cloud. A dozen vehicles raced across the dunes, motorbikes and quad bikes, with a bulky Sandcat bringing up the rear, their wheels churning the fine sand up in a frenzy. The Incarnates knew then what the humming noise was: twin-stroke engines.
“They’re heading this way,” Amun declared, “coming straight for us.”
“Friends of the man Smarts?” Farouk suggested. “Reinforcements, come to collect their brother?”
Amun was already standing on the back plate of the abandoned chariot, running through the prep sequence and firing its engine. The chariot’s wheels spun uselessly in the sand for a few seconds, then suddenly found a grip and the vehicle lurched forward. “Back to the others,” he instructed his partner. “Quickly!”
With the approaching horde bearing down on them, the two Incarnates powered their chariots across the sand at maximum speed.
CLEM BRYANT CAREFULLY lowered himself through the crack in the mountain, swinging freely for a moment until the toes of his booted feet knocked against the rock face ahead of him. He let go of the climbing cable and stretched out one arm until he could feel the cold surface of the rock there. Gradually, swaying a little uneasily, Clem dropped into the hole.
“Everything okay, Clem?” Edwards’s voice echoed from above.
Clem looked up, discerning the ex-Mag’s head silhouetted against the bright sky. “Fine so far,” he called back. “Just like diving,” he added to himself.
As he lowered himself farther, Clem felt the sudden absence of the rock face against his toes, and he peered down into the darkness. Unable to make out anything in the shadowy depths below, Clem reached for the flashlight he had attached to his belt, shifting its beam as he did an ungainly pirouette at the end of the climbing cable. The bright xenon beam showed the rock face clearly, and he aimed it below him, past where his feet swung.
Edwards’s voice came again from above. “You need more rope, Clem? You’re not moving.”
Clem nodded to himself, taking a slow, calming breath before he continued into the darkened area below. “Ready when you are,” he called back to Edwards. From the beam of the flashlight, Clem could see that the crevice opened wider. As he lowered farther, he found himself dropping into a circular area. “A room,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping over the cavern. “It’s an honest-to-goodness room.”
Excited now, Bryant lowered himself until his boots met with the rock floor. As he found his feet, Clem called up to Edwards, ordering him to let down more rope so that there was sufficient slack for him to operate.
“You found something, Clem?” Edwards called back.
Clem cupped his hand to his mouth and responded, “I’m not sure.” His voice reverberated off the rock walls of the little, hidden room.
Edwards dropped another ten feet of rope, giving him plenty of slack, and Clem walked around, peering at things in the beam of the flashlight. It was a defined room, circular in construction with benches carved from rock lining the walls. There was a pit in the center, likely used for a fire, and a low wall beside it separated the pit from what appeared to be a ventilation shaft. Clem wandered over, holding his hand by the opening to confirm that a current of air was flowing from it.
“How delightful,” he said aloud, marveling at the little room beneath the mountain.
The circular nature of the room suggested that this was artificial, probably man-made. The floor was a flattened expanse of the rock that made up the mountain, and the ceiling formed a simple dome overhead, with struts interrupting the side benches at regular intervals, presumably to ensure that the domed roof didn’t collapse on its inhabitants. A few rocks littered the floor where the crack in the mountain had opened, but it was otherwise free from debris.
As Clem paced around the outside wall of the circular room, he noticed a low doorway cut into the rock. He stepped toward it and was abruptly halted by the rope attached to his waist. Clem looked longingly at the doorway for a moment, intrigued by what was on the other side, then he glanced down at the harness that attached him to the surface.
“Oh, well,” he decided, “in for a penny and all that.” Smiling, Clem reached for the buckles of his harness and detached it. Once he was free, he stepped briskly through the doorway and into the next room.
BACK ON THE SURFACE, Edwards was on his knees, calling to Clem down the dark rent in the ground. He received no answer and, after the third attempt, he gave up, exasperated.
Mariah turned to Edwards, concern marring her features. “What’s he doing down there?” she asked. “He’s been gone too long.”
Edwards shook his head slowly. “I shouldn’t have let him go down there,” he decided. “Not alone.” With that, he unclipped the catch on the paddle holster at his right hip and pulled out the Colt Government Model .45 he habitually wore there. With the swiftness of long-practiced routine, Edwards checked the chambers of the pistol were full before replacing it in his holster. Then he stepped over to his backpack and swiftly attached his own climbing rig around his waist and across his shoulders.
“You going to be okay, Mariah?” he asked.
She nodded, mouth closed tightly.
“There’s no one about for miles,” Edwards assured her. “Nearest mat-trans is downslope, the one we came here by. No one’s going to sneak up on you without you seeing them coming.”
She nodded again.
Edwards stood at the edge of the crevice and raised his voice once more. “Clem? I’m coming down to join you.”
A few seconds passed, and Edwards and Mariah tensely listened as the ex-Mag’s voice echoed from the walls. Then Clem’s voice came back, tinged with excitement.
“Bring Mariah,” he said. “She’ll want to see this.”
FOUR MINUTES LATER, Edwards and Mariah joined Clem in the second chamber. Like the first, this one was a simple circular room carved out of the solid rock of the mountain. The walls were lined with shelves, and each shelf held a tiny fetish, a little humanoid form no more than six inches in height. Each fetish appeared different, and the overriding feeling at looking at them was one of revulsion—every single one was an ugly caricature of a person or animal or hybrid of both.
The center of the room contained a dip, like a wide basin carved into the floor, almost eight feet across. The basin contained a cloudy liquid to a depth of roughly ankle height.
“I see you’ve found some dollies to play with,” Edwards said, admiring the numerous fetishes that lined the walls.
Clem shot him a look, but the man was too busy chuckling at his own joke as he examined one of the little figurines.
“Do you have any idea where they came from?” Mariah asked Clem. “What any of this stuff is for?”
Clem shook his head. “Not really,” he admitted. “There’s a drainage system running beneath the paddling pool.” He pointed at the cloudy liquid and Mariah leaned closer, trying to see through the gunk.
“What is this?” Mariah asked, indicating the liquid. “Stagnant water?”
Clem sniffed. “Doesn’t smell like it to me. It smells like the sea, don’t you think?”
Mariah nodded. “Now that you mention it…” she agreed.
Clem gestured around at the shelves that ran the length of the circular room. “These look like artifacts of a primitive culture,” he postulated, “familiar and yet I can’t place them.”
Mariah looked at the little figurines for a moment, her brows furrowed in thought. “I’ve seen them before, back when I was here skiing. There was a museum in Phoenix, I don’t recall its name. They had a display, just like this, and I remember my friend Sally calling them Barbie-steins. Like Frankenstein Barbies,” she added after a moment.
“I followed.” Clem nodded, indulging the geologist.
Mariah stood there, her tongue flicking as she tried to form the word she hadn’t thought of in over two hundred years. “Kachina!” she said at last. “They were called kachinas. Kachina dolls. Cripes, the things you remember.” She laughed.
“Kachina dolls,” Clem repeated thoughtfully, rolling the word around his mouth. “Do you recall anything else?”
Mariah pushed a hand through her hair as she considered the question. “They had to do with the local religion. Tribal stuff, I don’t really remember, Clem. I spent a lot of that holiday wondering if some guy in my group was ever going to notice me. Girl stuff, you know?”
Edwards picked up two of the little figurines and shoved them together into one of the deep hip pockets of his combat pants, clipping the fastening over it to make sure they remained secure. “Let’s get out of here, people,” he instructed. “Won’t do to wake the dead.”
Clem held up a hand to halt the man. “Look at this place, Edwards,” he said. “This place was built, carved out of the solid rock of a mountain. Just imagine how much effort that would take, how much energy and organization.”
Edwards shrugged. “They tell me that the ancients built pyramids that aligned with the stars, ‘impossible’ stone circles and other crap I’ve got zero interest in. I’m past being all amazed that they did it with a primitive pulley system and six thousand indentured slaves. Go tell it to someone who cares.”
Clem smiled at the man’s bluster. “A primitive pulley and six thousand slaves would do it, but where would they put the rocks they carved away, Mr. Edwards?”
Edwards gestured to the first room with his thumb. “Let’s get topside,” he instructed. “Time to clear out and go home. Anything else needs to be done here, someone can come back.”
Clem took another look around the room before they left, then reached for the water bottle that he had attached to his climbing rig. “One moment,” he told Edwards, who looked irritated as he waited in the doorway.
Unscrewing the cap of the bottle, Clem walked past him and tossed the contents into a corner of the circular room with the rock benches. Then he returned into the second chamber and knelt at the pool of liquid in its center, swishing a little of the contents into his emptied bottle. He held the bottle up to the flashlight, examining the cloudy contents. The bottle was about one-third full.
“There we are,” Clem said, smiling. “A little something for the folks back home.”
“That’s great,” Edwards growled. “Now let’s get moving, huh? We’ve got a twenty-minute trek back to the mat-trans, and I’ve worked up an appetite with all this climbing.”
Clem turned to Mariah as they followed Edwards back into the main room, where the climbing ropes dangled. “Even critical scientific exploration has to stop for lunch, it seems,” he whispered.
She glared at him, then started to laugh.
Soon, the three of them were making their way back to the surface, ready to return to the Cerberus installation.
Chapter 12
Grant stepped out from the recess in the rock wall, retracting his Sin Eater into its hidden wrist holster and holding his now empty hands high above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he instructed, raising his voice to be heard above the footsteps of the approaching brigands.
Three armed men had reached his hiding place, and another half dozen hurried up the sand-dappled slope.
“Who are you?” the lead man demanded, shoving the long barrel of a Colt Anaconda pistol toward Grant’s face.
Grant looked past the pistol at the man who held it. He wore a dirty red bandanna across his forehead, dusty, unwashed clothes with a belt of bullets around his waist. The other men and women who had chased up here upon Benqhil’s whistled command were dressed in similarly grimy, sweat-stained clothing.
“Speak,” the bandanna-wearing man urged, shoving with the pistol until it was just a few inches from Grant’s forehead.
“I’m an old acquaintance of Tom Carnack’s,” Grant explained, watching the man’s eyes for the telltale flinch of recognition at the name. “That name mean something to you, or do I gotta point him out?”
Still holding the pistol at Grant’s head, the bandanna-wearing man glanced across the cavern and called for Carnack. “Tom? Got someone here claims to be a friend of yours.”
From the corner of his eye, Grant saw Carnack’s head look up, then the sharp-featured young man started making his way across the floor of the cavern toward the slope. The brigands who had rushed up the slope made way deferentially for Carnack and Rosalia, who strode beside him.
“Mr. Grant,” Carnack said as he looked the Cerberus warrior up and down. “Didn’t expect to see you again. How you been? My man here treating you all right?”
In a flash of movement, Grant’s right hand slashed across and down, grabbing the bandanna-wearing man’s pistol by the barrel, plucking it from his hand. Before the astonished brigand could react, Grant drove his knee into the man’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. As the brigand staggered backward and fell to the ground at Carnack’s feet, Grant raised one corner of his mouth in a smile.
“Not so bad, Tom,” he said, “but a little light on the hospitality.” Grant flipped the Anaconda in his hand and offered the weapon, butt first, to Carnack.
Carnack smiled as he took it, his teeth gleaming from the lights beneath. “You keep that up, and someone’s liable to put a bullet in your head,” he said ominously.
“Well,” Grant said, shrugging, “that’s a pretty big risk anyway, far as I can see.”
Carnack stood there for a moment, studying the pistol in his hands as his men waited, their own guns aimed at the interloper. Then, almost casually, he raised the gun and sighted down its length, pointing it at Grant’s head. “So,” he said, smiling amiably, “I can’t think of any reason to let you live.”
Grant nodded in agreement. “I can appreciate that,” he replied. “For one thing I know where your hidden base is now. I’ll be honest and say, if our positions were swapped, I’d sure as hell shoot you.”
Carnack cocked the hammer on the .44 and offered Grant a look that oozed sincerity. “Well, it’s nice that we could agree on something in the end,” he stated. “I wouldn’t say it was nice knowing you, Grant, but at least it didn’t last long, eh?”
Standing with his hands raised again, Grant lowered them just a little, one finger extended as though to make one more point. “I don’t see Señor Smarts here,” Grant said. “He get lost?”
“I’ve got men on it,” Carnack responded coolly. “Sent them the very second Rosie here came back to the fold.”
Grant nodded. “Yeah. See, I knew you were clever. I’ll just bet that, given a few weeks, maybe a month or two, you’ll have that interphaser up and running, too.”
Carnack’s smile turned to a sneer as the realization dawned on him. “You know how to work it, don’t you?”
Grant nodded. “But you’ll figure it out,” he said. “Maybe even before my team use the reverse function to, you know, pop up here out of nowhere.”
“You’re joshing,” Carnack blustered, but he was clearly worried at the prospect.
“You’ll be fine,” Grant assured him. “Just switch it off until you’re ready to use it. Blocks anything coming in or out.” He raised his arms high once more, watching as Carnack considered his options. “You do know how to switch it off, don’t you?” Grant prodded.
With a curse under his breath, Tom Carnack lowered the pistol and carefully replaced the hammer. Then he looked Grant in the eyes, a snarl across his lips. “You’re going to show us how to use this interphaser thing, Grant, and maybe I’m going to let you live. But you try anything—anything at all—and there’s thirty men here armed for bear who’ll make sure you walk on stumps for the rest of your very short life. Get me?”
Grant nodded, slowly lowering his hands. “Not really into the stumps-for-legs look,” he uttered.
“Come on,” Carnack urged, leading the way back down the slope and into the main area of the cavern.
