Death Cry, page 20
“Yeah,” she told him. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
Grant unleashed another burst of rapid-fire from the Copperhead, forcing the approaching group to back away, before he closed the hatch and quickly ran through the pre-flight sequence. “Seem like a friendly bunch,” he muttered as he pulled at the throttle and the Manta lifted into the air.
“Bastards wanted to eat me alive,” Domi spit, watching the town of Poti disappear below them.
“Yeah,” Grant said, “you’ve got to learn to choose your friends better.”
THE STRIKE TEAM STEPPED OUT of the Dreaming and found itself in a forest in the mountains, the cool, fresh air whistling through the trees. Its members spread out, weapons at the ready, checking their surroundings warily.
Neverwalk stayed close to Good Father as he leaned against his walking stick and kept to the shadows. Cloud Singer and Rabbit in the Moon rushed ahead to check that the area was secure.
Ahead of them, Neverwalk could see a clearing and a single-story building, just a box really, built of concrete with slit windows all around. Over the far side of the building were more trees, and just before them was a wide, sleek metallic object finished in a glistening bronze that glowed like fire in the rays of the early-morning sun. Neverwalk recognized it from the Vela-class satellite feed as one of the vehicles that the Cerberus people had traveled there in. But hadn’t they used two of the graceful aircraft to get there?
“Good Father,” Neverwalk said, keeping his voice to a whisper, “look. One of their vehicles is missing.”
Good Father looked to where Neverwalk was pointing, nodding when he noticed the lone metal-shelled craft sitting there.
“What does it mean?” Neverwalk whispered urgently.
Good Father held a finger to his lips, shushing the boy.
Rabbit in the Moon dashed back to the others, his compound bow in one hand. “The area is clear,” he assured them. “No one is around.”
Bad Father stroked his beard thoughtfully as he looked around the clearing at the overgrown road. “They spoke of a burrow,” he said slowly. “Beneath our feet.”
As the strike force made its way toward the clearing, Cloud Singer cried out from the end of the blacktop opposite the low concrete building. The road was shaped like a hangman’s noose there, a little circle for turning large vehicles, and an old, rusty truck was parked at a lurch, its wheels rotted through. “Here!” Cloud Singer shouted, pointing to a patch of weed-covered ground at her feet.
The team jogged across to look, and Cloud Singer gestured to a wide, circular grille of rusty bars, partly obscured by the undergrowth. On one side of the circle there was a space where a large hole had been cut and a thin cord snaked from the hole, snaking into the grass until it attached to a climber’s piton that had been driven into the ground.
“They came this way,” Rock Streaming decided. “Do we follow?”
Good Father unhooked the bull roarer from his belt and looked to Bad Father and Rabbit in the Moon. “We’ll get there through the Dreaming,” he stated, and the two navigators agreed with nods.
The five of them gathered around Good Father, forming a rough circle as the bull roarer gathered speed above his head. After a tingling of the implants at the base of their necks, they all emerged in Realworld.
In this instance, Realworld was a close-walled tunnel, almost entirely dark apart from a light source shining from a rectangular opening at the far end. As one, the strike team called on the electrochemical polymer lenses that appeared over their eyes on nictitating membranes, and suddenly the corridor was revealed to them clearly, as though well lit.
“Silent now,” Bad Father hissed as the bull roarer stopped spinning. “We’re in the lap of the enemy.”
Neverwalk swallowed, and it felt hard and jagged in his throat. He watched as Cloud Singer and Rock Streaming moved ahead, warily checking the open doors to the left and right of them.
KANE HAD FOUND A LOCKER in the far end of the bunk room and was running the beam of his microlight over the contents: books and magazines, personal letters stuffed in old envelopes. Suddenly he cocked his head, thinking that he had heard something.
Kane stepped away from the locker and made his way back to the open doorway of the room, covering the beam of the microlight with his hand. He waited by the door, listening.
He had heard something, just for a second, a kind of moaning. A ghost maybe? Crap, this place is giving me the heebie-jeebies, he told himself as he drew his hand away from the front of the microlight.
Then he heard something else, a light scampering, so quiet it was almost not there at all. That wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him; his point-man sense was damn sure of that even if his conscious, rational mind was trying to deny it.
Kane doused the beam and placed his dark glasses with the electrochemical polymer lenses back over his eyes, granting himself artificial night vision in the dark complex. Silently he paced toward the door, his feet kissing the tiled floor.
Once he reached the doorway he pushed his back against the wall and listened for sounds in the corridor beyond.
He had heard the footsteps of at least two people, quietly moving along the corridor. Warily Kane leaned forward and popped his head around the door frame for a fraction of a second, peeking down the length of the corridor with the polymer lenses over his eyes, creating light where there was darkness.
His head whipped back behind the doorjamb, eyes closed as he assessed what he had seen. There was a group at the far end of the narrow corridor. Kane couldn’t say how many, but not more than ten, maybe as few as three.
Crouching, he leaned against the door, his wrist tendons flinching as he slapped the Sin Eater into the palm of his hand. Then he popped his head out once more, looking up the corridor and assessing the situation. Five—no, six people. One of them was a woman, leading the others, a stick or pole in her hand. Next to her was a man, a long coat similar to Grant’s billowing behind him, some kind of bent blade in his hand.
Kane ducked back again, looking around for another exit that he knew wasn’t there, just an instinctive reaction to being trapped as the strangers approached.
The weight of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand was just another part of Kane’s body, not even a consideration in his mind. But he looked at it then and he thought of Brigid Baptiste, three doors away from him and lost in meditation.
Diplomacy, Kane reminded himself, stepping into the corridor and preparing to introduce himself. He flicked on the microlight beam and waved it along the corridor, hoping he hadn’t blinded anyone. “Um…hello?” he called.
Before Kane realized what was happening, an arrow whizzed through the air and clapped against the flashlight, knocking it from his hand and killing the beam. A second shaft whistled toward him, and he dodged his head back as it slapped into the wall behind him.
“Looks like negotiations are over,” Kane muttered as he raised the Sin Eater.
Chapter 19
Brigid Baptiste turned to Dr. Djugashvili as they rushed down the pure white corridor toward the main room of the astral complex.
“We must launch the Death Cry,” he told her, gritting his teeth as he limped along at her side.
“The soldiers will never let us do such a thing, Doctor,” Yuri called from behind them. The lab assistant had slung one of the rifles over his shoulder by its strap and he hefted the other in his hands, poised to shoot anyone who followed them.
“We’ll have to convince them,” Brigid said, shoving the Tokarev into her hip holster, where it seemed to overlay then replace the ghostly image of the TP-9. “Yuri, hand me a rifle.”
Yuri passed the one that he held across to her, then shirked the other from his shoulder and rested it in his hands while she covered their advance.
“We don’t have much time,” Djugashvili said, his voice strained.
“Why not?” Brigid demanded. “What’s going to happen?”
“I won’t be here to help you for very long,” he told her.
“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing at him before turning her attention back to the corridor ahead of them. Djugashvili seemed to be disintegrating. Flecks of his face were blowing away, rising into the air like the embers of a wood fire before disappearing into nothingness. A mist of washed-out black billowed from his head where his hair had once been, and his limbs seemed to smolder, billowing like smoke as he swung them to march onward.
“I don’t understand. What’s happening to you?” Brigid asked.
“Do you remember what I told you about Laynia Krylova?” Djugashvili prompted.
“You told me she was shot, that she became a mist, a fog before your eyes,” Brigid replied, feeling her stomach tighten in horror. “You’re not…You can’t be…”
Djugashvili nodded wearily. “General Serge shot me in the chest,” he told her, pulling his bloody hand away from the wound that sat just to the left of his breastbone. Brigid saw the hole in his chest, the charcoal burn on his shirt where the bullet had driven through the material into his body. “I think perhaps he has clipped my heart.” There were tears running down Djugashvili’s face now as he explained what had happened.
“How can this be?” Brigid asked, her mind demanding reasonable answers, rejecting the evidence before her. “How can guns work here? How can they even exist here?”
“Laynia,” Djugashvili explained as he limped forward, “was quite brilliant. She deduced a way to bring solid items here—our files, the materials we would need to work on the Death Cry itself. Quite, quite brilliant.”
“And so she brought the guns?” Brigid asked.
“Soldiers do not travel without guns, Miss Baptiste,” he told her sadly. “It was a prerequisite of the project, before we could even begin working in this astral factory.”
“But what happens to your consciousness?” Brigid asked. “When you die, I mean.”
Dr. Djugashvili smiled at her then, a kindly, forgiving look. “That is a question that has taxed minds far superior to mine or yours, I suspect.”
Brigid realized that, up until now, albeit subconsciously, she had been treating this like a dream. An incredibly vivid, detailed and downright painful dream, but a dream just the same. Something that she could wake up from. Seeing the doctor breaking apart as they spoke made her acknowledge there was something fundamentally wrong with her assumption, that if she was killed there perhaps she wouldn’t simply wake up to try all over again like some character in a video game.
The three of them had reached the end of the corridor, and Brigid peeked out at the colossal weapon that dominated the vast white-walled room. She counted nine soldiers there, including Krementsov, who had subjected her to that sadistic beating in the interrogation room. There were a dozen white-coated laboratory assistants going about their business at the hull or shell of the huge weapon itself.
Brigid turned back to the others and told them what she had seen. “How does the weapon work, Doctor?” she asked him. “Is there a control panel? Do we launch it or do we get inside it, like a vehicle?”
“We need to be inside the Death Cry to move it to the corporeal world. Once there, we can unleash its scream at a single designated target,” Djugashvili told her solemnly as Brigid watched more parts of his face and hands flaking away, revealing nothing beneath but some substance that looked like dust or sand.
“Scream,” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. “What the hell does this thing do?”
“It obliterates life,” Djugashvili told her, “with surgical precision.”
FACE HIDDEN IN THE pilot’s helmet, Grant suddenly shook his head and muttered, “Oh, no, no, no.”
“What?” Domi asked, sitting behind him in the cockpit of the Manta. “What is it?” They were swooping through a range of mountains now, beautiful, pristine territory that reminded Domi of the wilds around the Cerberus redoubt where she would often go hunting.
“I just did a scan of the underground bunker, Project Chernobog,” Grant explained. “Shows eight bodies beneath the surface. Warm bodies. Living folks.”
Domi counted off on her fingers: “Kane, Brigid, plus six mean Russians who just thawed out?”
“Dunno who they are, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say they are trouble with a capital T and probably a capital R, too,” Grant rumbled as he aimed the Manta down toward a clearing in the trees.
Below, Domi could see a small track of road and, snuggled between the trees at its edge, another Manta aircraft—Kane’s.
“I explained that someone has systematically blocked and altered the feed data that Cerberus has received on this operation,” Domi said, referring to the conversation they had had on the brief flight over as she brought Grant up to speed. “These people could have been waiting right outside, unseen by the satellite, just out of sight, waiting for you to leave before they made their move.”
“Exactly,” Grant growled, “a whole pot roast of trouble.” He brought down the Manta, bumping it on the ground and unlatching the cockpit seals as he tossed his flight helmet to one side. “Keep your eyes open, Domi—we’re going in.”
KANE POPPED INTO THE corridor and reeled off a few shots from the Sin Eater, deliberately aiming over the heads of the newcomers. So far as he could see, they didn’t even flinch, which told him a couple of things. These people were fantastically aware of their surroundings, and they were exceptionally disciplined warriors, despite appearances to the contrary.
Kane ducked back into the bunk room as another arrow whizzed through the air in his direction, its point missing his retreating shoulder by just six inches. He stood with his back to the wall, his breathing steady, the Sin Eater held high, ready for the next attack.
“If you people weren’t sure,” Kane called out, turning his head to the open doorway, “those were meant as warning shots. Now, I’m certain that if we all talk about this we can figure on some kind of agreement to our mutual benefit. What say you?”
The complex went silent and Kane could detect no movement from the hallway beyond. Then a deep, rumbling male voice called out from the far end of the corridor. “You are to hand over the weapon, the Death Cry, to us. That’s the beginning and the end of the negotiation.”
Well, that certainly makes things clear, Kane thought as he listened for signs of movement beyond the open door. “I’m going to have to say negative to that request,” Kane shouted, his back still pressed to the wall, “on account of my not actually having the Death Cry.”
“One of your people has it, Cerberus man,” the rumbling voice called back down the corridor. “You will place your gun on the floor now and you will provide us with access to the Death Cry immediately.”
Kane was startled by the brashness of his unseen opponent. Whoever they were, they knew that Kane’s crew were representatives of Cerberus and, furthermore, that the Death Cry had already been accessed by one of them—Baptiste. The speaker had a definite accent, kind of nasal, but he hadn’t sounded Russian. Not American, either.
As Kane pondered his next move he heard Grant’s voice coming through in fits and starts over the Commtact. “…you reading me, buddy? I’m with Domi…”
“Repeat,” Kane subvocalized after a moment. “Didn’t receive your full transmission, Grant. Please repeat.”
HAVING RAPPELLED DOWN the climbing cord, Grant stood in the sludge and muck of the ventilation shaft, waiting for Domi.
“…peat,” Kane’s voice said over the Commtact. “…ceive…full transmission, Grant. Please repeat.”
“I said me and Domi are coming down the shaft now,” Grant said over his Commtact. “We’ll be with you in under a minute. You copy?”
“Copy that,” Kane responded. “I’ve got some company dow—”
“Yeah,” Grant replied. “We know.”
At his side, Domi let go of the cord and splashed down into the mud before freeing her Detonics Combat Master from its holster. “You ready to do this?”
Copperhead subgun held two-handed, Grant gave her a look. “They might be friendly,” he reminded her.
“Law of averages on that one?” she asked in a piqued tone.
“Yeah,” Grant agreed, “but let’s try not to get kill crazy unless and until, okay?”
“Hell, Grant, you take the fun out of everything,” Domi cussed as she sprinted beside him toward the far end of the sludge-smeared shaft.
“FOR YOUR ATTENTION, Dr. Singh,” Donald Bry said as he stood beside Lakesh’s chair in the center of the Cerberus operations room and handed him a paper report of roughly two dozen pages.
Lakesh flicked through it for a few moments. “Summarize it for me, Donald.”
“We’ve managed to break the coding on the hack, and control of the satellite feed is now back in-house,” Bry explained, pointing to an unmanned screen that showed a live feed of a clutch of islands in the Pacific. “Skylar’s just retooling the feeds from the transponders now, bypassing the errant code that had masked them. We’ve cracked it, Doctor,” Bry added triumphantly.
“Good work,” Lakesh said, offering Bry a faintly self-conscious thumbs-up. “Can you call up a live image from the Caucasus Mountains? I want to check on our field team right away.”
“The satellite’s repositioning as we speak, sir,” Bry assured him. “Is there anything else?”
“Communications security?” Lakesh asked. “And where did this hack originate, do we know?”
“We think it’s Australia, but we haven’t been able to triangulate it as yet,” Bry explained. “As for communications security, my team is still working on that. Hope to have a solution in three to four hours.” With that, Donald Bry strode over to the unmanned communications desk and resumed his regular position behind the monitor.
“Donald?” Lakesh asked as he placed the unread report on his desk for later examination. “Once the field team is back safely, I want you to get a good eight hours’ sleep before I see you back in that seat again.”
