Dark Goddess, page 17
“A blending of scientific disciplines,” Ishkur answered autocratically. “You would not understand them.”
“Nanotechnology is probably the basis,” Brigid remarked.
When none of the overlords responded, Kane figured Brigid’s casual assessment was the correct one. In many ways, the Tuatha de Danaan had been technologically superior to the Annunaki.
A thousand years after the Flood, the Tuatha de Danaan arrived on Earth. Humanoid but not human, they were an aristocratic race of scientists, poets and warriors and they made fertile, isolated Ireland their home.
They had met the representatives of the Annunaki during their explorations and struck a pact with them to watch over humanity until the Niburuans returned.
The Danaan took the tribes living in Ireland under their protection and taught them many secrets of art, architecture and mathematics. The essence of Danaan science stemmed from music—the controlled manipulation of sound waves—and this became recorded in legend as the “music of the spheres.”
“I’m guessing that the chalice introduces repair nanomachines into the body,” Brigid went on, “not too different from the so-called hydra rings we came across a while back. A stasis field—again similar to tech we’ve encountered before—stabilizes her metabolism while the repairs are being conducted.”
Smiling, Kane glanced over at Brigid, then around the antiseptically simple room. Rhea had led them to it through a honeycomb of corridors and chambers. Everywhere there was an ominous sense of intense, hurried activity. They glimpsed people in bodysuits at work in laboratories, bent over mysterious machines. Nephilim with the ASP emitters and Arabs with subguns marched everywhere “You seem to be pushing to meet a timetable,” Kane said to Lilitu.
She nodded. “We are ready for the final phase.”
“Phase of what?” Brigid asked.
A gravelly voice boomed from behind them. “For you to complete your part of our transaction.”
Overlord Marduk strode into the chamber, the glow from the chalice pit casting highlights on his armor. Grant raised his gaze from Shizuka and although his face was expressionless, both Kane and Brigid realized he was struggling to tamp down the mad urge to leap at Marduk’s throat.
“If not for you,” Grant intoned, “we wouldn’t be transacting anything.”
“Of course,” Marduk retorted indifferently. “However, I would much prefer to transact the final piece of business we have between us…. with yours and Kane’s traitorous hearts within my hands.”
To illustrate his point, he extended both fists, working the fingers and knuckles as if he were crushing eggshells.
Kane favored Marduk with a smile of feigned innocence. “There are two kinds of traitors. The first kind lies to and betrays people who trusted him. The second kind of traitor is someone who betrays his own instincts, who violates what his heart and reason tells him is the truth.”
He paused meaningfully and his innocent smile twisted into one of contempt. “As Baron Cobalt you were the first kind and tried to make me and my friends the second. You didn’t succeed then, and you won’t succeed now.”
Marduk glowered at him. “Kane, you are alive only because we have a use for you. I have not forgotten the way you insulted and abused me all those years ago. There will be a suitable punishment—I can promise you that.”
Kane sighed as if bored. “Yeah, yeah. Sing a new song, will you?”
He turned toward Lilitu. “Is there anything to drink in this joint?”
Lilitu jerked her head toward Rhea. “If you would be so kind as to fetch refreshments for our guests?”
Rhea hesitated, seeming to be on the verge of arguing, and then she strode swiftly across the medical facility.
“We should not have to remind you that if you do not go to Agartha and return with Ninlil, Shizuka will not be released from our custody,” Utu said.
Grant said flatly, “No, I don’t need to be reminded. But I’m not going anywhere without her.”
Ishkur opened his mouth to voice an objection, but Grant raised his voice. “You can kill me, but I’m not leaving Shizuka. It’s not debatable.”
Lilitu shrugged. “That is fine with me. Two hostages are always better than one. Kane, Brigid Baptiste and a couple of my own handpicked operatives will undertake the mission. You are more than welcome to remain here, Grant.”
Kane and Brigid stared incredulously, first at Grant then at Lilitu. Marduk chuckled, making a sound like iron filings being shaken in a tin can. “Oh, this gets better and better.”
Striving for a logical, reasonable tone, Brigid said, “Grant, you know if you stay here, you’ll be playing right into the overlords’ hands and forcing our own.”
“I don’t care,” he replied, his voice so thick with anger it was an animal’s guttural growl. “Shizuka is in there because of me. It’s my fault. I’m not going to leave her alone with these bastards. Don’t waste your time or your breath trying to argue me out of it.”
“On the other hand,” Kane ventured, “if we just flat-out refuse to go at all—”
“Then all of us are dead,” Grant broke in. “It’s a rotten choice and I’m sorry you have to make it. But I’ve already made mine.”
In a calmer tone, he added, “Besides, you’ll think of something. You always do.”
Rhea cleared her throat. When Kane turned toward her, she pressed a large cold goblet into his hands. He inspected the clear liquid suspiciously. “What is it?”
“Taste it and find out,” Lilitu said teasingly.
Lifting the cup to his lips, Kane sipped experimentally. It was water, pure cold water. He took three grateful swallows and handed it over to Brigid. “It’s just water,” he told her.
Brigid sniffed it, then drank deeply and passed it over to Grant, who drained off the rest.
“If all of you have agreed that staying alive is preferable to being dead,” Lilitu said, “you’ll be shown to your guest quarters. You can rest while the final preparations are made.”
“‘Guest quarters,’” Brigid repeated wryly. “That’s a cute euphemism for a cell.”
“Not a cell at all,” Lilitu replied, exchanging knowing smiles with the other overlords. “Not at all.”
Kane’s stomach churned uneasily, but he said nothing, not even when Grant folded his arms over his chest and refused to move from the side of the pit. For a long, stretched-out tick of time, the two men locked eyes.
Then Grant touched his right index finger to his nose and snapped it away in the wry one-percent salute. It was a private gesture he and Kane had developed during their years as hard-contact Magistrates and reserved for high-risk undertakings with small ratios of success. Their half-serious belief was that ninety-nine percent of things that went awry could be predicted and compensated for in advance. But there was always a one-percent margin of error, and playing against that percentage could have lethal consequences.
Kane returned the salute and turned away.
Two Nephilim escorted Kane and Brigid to an elevator that whisked them downward. They were shown to separate rooms at opposite ends of a long corridor. By the time Kane entered the chamber assigned to him, drowsiness washed over him in waves. He sank down on a soft divan covered with silk and brocade. The effort to swallow a yawn made his ears pop, and his eyes began to water.
Kane suddenly realized what was happening and he snarled, forcing himself to his feet, or at least that was what he thought he made his body do. He was only dimly aware of falling backward, deeply asleep before his head hit the cushioned surface of the divan.
A SMOOTH, SOFT WARMTH like silk slid across his chest, caressing his thighs, lightly touching his groin. He struggled up out of the blackness. His head ached abominably but he forced his eyes open.
Kane felt a firm body press against his, all rustling silk, and he smelled the slightly acrid tang of perfume, the scent of a woman. A voice whispered above him, “Is he not beautiful? For an apeling, that is.”
Another feminine voice murmured something indistinct, either a wordless sound of agreement or an endearment. Narrowing his eyes, Kane squinted through the gloom and made out the outline of a woman standing above him. A second woman lay atop him, the gem-hard points of her breasts pressing into his chest. With a distant sense of shock, he realized he was completely naked.
“The beautiful Kane,” came the breathy whisper again, and he recognized her voice as that of Lilitu. It held a hard, cold edge of sarcasm. “He became a legend among your kind, little sister…breeding with a hundred of them, planting his seed in their bellies, all for naught. Perhaps this time will be different.”
Kane knew what she referred to and his skin prickled with both dread and the memories of humiliation when he had been sentenced by Baron Cobalt to what amounted to stud service.
Although Kane was biologically superior, he knew the main reason he had been chosen to impregnate the female hybrids was simply due to the fact male hybrids were incapable of engaging in conventional acts of procreation, at least physically. Their organs of reproduction were so underdeveloped as to be vestigial.
The familiar odor of the aphrodisiac gel tickled his nostrils, and he felt a surge of nausea. Kane struggled on the divan, but his arms were pulled above his head, and he could only dimly feel his hands at the end of them. When he tried to move them, he realized he was chained to a post at the head of the divan, his ankles cuffed, legs spread apart. Soft flesh moved in a steady rhythm against him.
Kane’s thought processes flowed sluggishly, like half-frozen mud. By degrees, he realized Rhea lay atop him, nuzzling his ear and face with her lips. Lilitu stood at the bedside, draped in a filmy silk gown.
“You drugged me,” he said hoarsely.
“Yes,” Lilitu said. “I apologize for the headache, but it will soon pass.”
“Why?”
Suddenly he felt his testicles being cupped, his scrotum tickled by Lilitu’s long nails. “You will make love to Rhea.”
“Not a chance.”
Lilitu chuckled patronizingly. “It’s not like you have a choice. You’re already aroused. You’ve been exposed to the same kind of aphrodisiac that was used on you in Area 51. Can’t you feel it?”
Kane felt the heat spreading over his groin, but his mind was detached from his body. Lilitu leaned over him, her molten eyes mocking him, amused.
Rhea kissed his lips and then whispered in his ear, “This is not my doing.
“I don’t care,” he growled, fighting the artificial excitation of the gel.
Rhea sat up, straddling his pelvis. By the dim artificial light, he saw her slim, pale body with its wispy suggestion of silk threads between the juncture of her thighs. Her breasts were small, but very well formed with a great deal of point.
Kane’s respiration deepened, his pulse quickening, his blood beginning to burn with a flame that first warmed, then threatened to scorch his nervous system and consume his reason. He knew from bitter experience fighting the effects of the aphrodisiac was futile. In the past, the best he’d ever been able to achieve was a temporary balance between a horrified realization that his body’s reactions were out of his conscious control and primordial lust. Always lust won out over horror.
“Do it, little sister,” Lilitu urged, breathing rapidly, her eyes narrowed with frustrated passion. “Do it!”
Rhea suddenly climbed off Kane and stood naked beside the divan, staring at Lilitu defiantly. She hugged herself. “No. I will not debase myself for your entertainment.”
Lilitu’s thin lips worked, as if she intended to spit at Rhea, then she slapped her, the impact of flesh against flesh sounding as loud as a gunshot.
“You half-breed fool!” she spat. “You cannot even manage one arrogant apeling! How can you manage an empire?”
Her words awoke sudden suspicion in Kane’s mind, even in its clouded state. Metal jingled and Lilitu brandished a small ring of keys to the locks that chained him to the bed. She tossed the ring contemptuously onto his bare stomach. “Free him, then,” she said contemptuously. “Then report back to me. You and Ibrahim leave at dawn.”
With a rustle of silk, Lilitu whirled and stalked out of the room. Rhea picked up the keys and opened the lock that held Kane’s hands to the post at the head of the bed.
He sat up, snatching the keyring from her fingers and unlocked the shackles around his ankles.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, her big eyes haunted. “I had no choice.”
“I hear that a lot from you,” he growled, standing up naked in the dark room. He was covered with sweat. “What about Brigid and Grant?”
Rhea averted her gaze from his erection. “Your friends are fine. Sleeping.”
He looked around for his clothes and found his backpack. “What the hell was all this about?”
“Lilitu hates you and she hates me.” Rhea shook her head helplessly. “She wanted to rape us…by proxy. But I diluted the aphrodisiac.”
Kane shuddered. “I understand why she hates me. I can’t figure out what she has against you.”
Rhea sighed. “I think I’m a reminder of what she once was.”
“Then why doesn’t she just kill you?” Kane asked bluntly.
“I don’t know.” The hybrid woman spoke in such a resigned way, Kane instantly suspected that she did know. Rather than press her further, he asked, “What did she mean about you and Ibrahim leaving at dawn?”
Rhea lifted her bare shoulders in a shrug. “We’re going with you to Agartha, to make certain you do as you’re told.”
“Let me guess,” Kane shot back, opening his pack. “You have no choice.”
“No,” Rhea replied, an edge entering her voice. “And neither do you.”
Kane smiled, but it was without warmth or humor. “That remains to be seen, little sister.”
Chapter 22
A glowing, phosphorescent lotus blossom sprouted from the base of the interphaser. Skeins of blue-white witch fire streaked along the grooves and convolutions carved into the stone slab at their feet. The light pulsed like the lifeblood in a circulatory system. The entire inscribed surface of the geodetic marker was laced with a webwork of dancing light.
The veil of light expanded from the apex of the interphaser, stretching outward in wavering parabola, giving the illusion of a Chinese hand fan spreading wide, with the pyramidion acting as the centerpiece. Then the aurora of the light disappeared into the interphaser, as if it were liquid and had flowed back into it.
It took a few seconds for their eyes to adjust, and for them to regain their balance. Kane tried not to move until the spasm of vertigo faded. When his vision cleared, he saw the grayish sky above him. It was almost dawn. A cold wind blew dust over him and sighed among the columns of the ancient ruins leaning all about.
Ibrahim el-Amid swallowed hard, shifted his feet and said, “This does not look like Tibet. This looks like—”
“Egypt?” Brigid Baptiste inquired casually.
“Yes.” The Arab’s one eye narrowed in sudden alarm. He reached for his subgun.
The stiffened edge of Brigid’s right hand chopped across the side of the man’s throat with a swift, deadly impact. His eye went wide and blank. Ibrahim el-Amid uttered a gurgling noise and toppled sideways, off the stone geodetic marker to the sand heaped at the base of the plinth.
Massaging the side of her hand and wincing, Brigid turned toward the interphaser resting at the center of the carved rock slab. Rhea stepped back from her, her face composed but eyes glinting in sudden fear of the tall, sunset-haired woman.
In a faint voice, full of wonder, she said, “You deceived Lilitu. How?”
“We reset the interphaser coordinates,” Kane said. “For Egypt, not Tibet. There’s no way she could’ve known.”
Kneeling, Brigid touched the interphaser’s inset activation toggles on the miniature keypad. “I’m resetting it again, for Cerberus…just in case we have to phase out of here in a hurry.”
Kane nodded approvingly. “Good.”
Even after all the phase transits he had made, Kane still wasn’t sure how the interphaser did what it did, but the fact it functioned at all never failed to amaze him.
When making transits to and from the Cerberus redoubt, they always used the mat-trans chamber as the origin point because it could be hermetically sealed. The interphaser’s targeting computer had been programmed with the precise coordinates of the mat-trans unit as Destination Zero. A touch of a single key on the interphaser’s control pad would automatically return the device to the jump chamber, but sometimes the phase harmonics needed to be fine-tuned. The adjustments were normally within Brigid’s purview.
Unlike the mat-trans gateway jumps, phasing along a hyperdimensional conduit was more akin to stepping from one room into another—if the rooms were thousands of miles apart.
Kane leaped lightly down from the geodetic marker and checked Ibrahim el-Amid’s pulse. The man’s swarthy face was locked in a contorted rictus of surprise and pain, his head held at an unnaturally stiff angle.
Brigid, packing away the interphaser, asked, “How is he?”
“He appears to have died suddenly.”
Brigid’s motions faltered, but only for a second. Someone who didn’t know her would not have noticed. She stood up, sliding her arms through the straps of the carrying case. She stepped down on the opposite side of where the Arab’s body lay sprawled. Kane took the dead man’s weapons, which consisted of a pair of Copperheads with the extended magazines and two auto-pistols that he identified as Glocks. He guessed they came from the armory at Beausoleil ville.
Rhea jumped down, stumbling slightly in the soft sand. “Isn’t Egypt the kingdom of Enlil?”
“It is,” Brigid said quietly.
“Where are we in Egypt exactly?” Kane asked, handing her a Copperhead.
She frowned, looking at the subgun. “I’ll have to get outside to get a clear sextant reading before I can tell you that.”
She glanced around. “As it is, I’d guess we’re in the central nave of an ancient temple. Looks like it’s been some excavation going on recently.”
