Shadow Box, page 21
Chapter 15
The familiar armaglass walls of the Cerberus mat-trans chamber appeared before Kane’s eyes and, for a moment, he could see the silhouettes of figures moving about beyond, within the confines of the control room. He looked around as he recovered from the jump. Beside him, Domi was slumped against the armaglass wall.
Grant was in a ready crouch, his Sin Eater poised, but he looked unsteady, swaying a little where he was poised. Brigid Baptiste was beside the interphaser, the little pyramid having traveled through the quantum slipway with them.
And then, still running, the creature, its mouth open in an appalling shriek, rushed out of nonspace into the reality of the room, literally forming before Kane’s bewildered eyes. He tried to raise his own pistol and to shout a warning to Grant, but his arm felt heavy and his voice wouldn’t come. As the creature continued its charge, Kane felt himself toppling forward, that feeling of tripping in a dream, when you shock yourself awake.
But he didn’t awaken. Indeed, Kane fell to the tiled floor of the room in an inglorious heap, his fist still tightly clutching the pistol, but his finger never receiving the impulse to twitch against the trigger.
The others were falling around him, sinking to their knees, toppling over; even the hideous creature that had come through with them seemed to lose its momentum, its legs crossing beneath it, tripping over itself. There was something in the air, Kane realized, as his thoughts slowed to a crawl.
THE PUNGENT SCENT of burning chemicals came to Rosalia as she struggled to escape the heavy, dreamless sleep. She was lying on the hard ground, sharp rocks pressing against her.
Immediately alert, she pushed herself up from the ground, struggling to free her leg where a heavy weight rested over it. She looked down at her leg and saw Wils, one of the gang members, lying there, mouth and eyes wide open, blood streaking across his face. Dead, she realized.
Ahead of her she could see the flames, tinted blue and green with the chemicals that burned within them, where the laboratory was being reduced to ash. Thick, dark smoke poured from the lab area, funneling up into the air, and already the highest of the stalactites were lost to the black fug.
All around, men were howling, screaming, nonsensical words emanating from their throats. Others were dead, lying in their own blood. Looking across the cavern, Rosalia spotted two brigands making their way into the exit tunnel, holding kerchiefs over their mouths and nostrils so as not to breathe in the awful fumes of the burning laboratory.
She struggled up, wary of further attacks. Something had happened, but she hadn’t seen what. The monster was gone; that was for certain. She paced through the moaning bodies, considering the true value of helping any of these people. There wasn’t time—the smoke from the lab was polluting the air in the cavern, and soon no one would be able to breathe in here.
She stopped for a moment close to the lab and peered across at it as the thick, black smoke rushed upward from its center. The interphaser was gone but there, on one of the work surfaces, she could make out one of Carnack’s precious flasks, the gunmetal tubes that contained the genetic material he had had his men working on night and day. She leaned over, weaving her hands between the chartreuse-tinted flames, struggling to grasp it. She pulled her hand back in a sudden jerk as a flame licked at her arm. It was no use—the flask was too far away, impossible to reach.
Time to go, she realized, running toward the tunnel. Above all else, Rosalia would always be a survivor.
“KANE,” THE VOICE URGED beside his ear. “Come on, Kane, I know you’re awake. Quit pretending.”
His eyes flickered open and, for a moment, he was dazzled by the bright lights of the Cerberus medical bay. He turned his head, feeling sore and drained and empty inside, and saw Reba DeFore standing over him, her blond hair tied back in an elaborate braid over her shoulder, her stocky body sheathed in a white jumpsuit.
“Reba,” he muttered, feeling the word scratch against his throat. “What happened?”
“You took a lung full of anaesthetic gas. Domi instructed us to fill the mat-trans chamber with it before you made your jump, ‘enough to knock out an angry elephant,’ were apparently her exact words.”
“No, I said ‘a horny elephant,’” Domi corrected from the next bed over to where Kane lay. She looked awake, fresh-faced and full of life, despite the trauma that they had suffered on returning to the Cerberus installation.
Kane became aware then of other people in the room, two more beds where Grant’s and Baptiste’s familiar forms lay.
Something about Baptiste…
The thought wouldn’t hold; Kane lost it almost before he had time to even acknowledge it.
“Whoa,” Grant muttered, sitting up on the bed he had been laid out on. “I can’t remember shit and my head is pounding.”
Standing in the center of the room, DeFore addressed them all in her clear voice. “You all imbibed quite a heavy dose of anaesthetic gas,” she explained, “so you may feel some aftereffects for a while—wooziness, nausea, a general inability to concentrate.”
“I feel hungry,” Domi piped up, and Kane and Grant agreed.
“The effects will wear off in a few hours,” DeFore continued. “If you need anything at all, I’ll be right here.”
They thanked her as she scribbled something in her patient notes.
“Canteen,” Grant said, pointing to the door. “Who’s with me?”
Domi nodded eagerly, but Kane looked across to the bed beside Grant’s and realized then that Brigid hadn’t said anything. The redheaded woman just lay there, her eyes closed, a blissful smile on her lips.
“Is she okay?” Kane asked, turning to DeFore. “She’s not waking up.”
“You all took different doses and you all have different constitutions,” the redoubt medic reassured him. “Domi was awake for five minutes before you joined us.”
“Yeah.” Domi chuckled. “I’ve been sitting here the whole time watching you drool, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Nice,” Grant agreed with a smile.
DeFore addressed Kane as she checked the monitoring link to Brigid’s vital signs. “She’s fine,” she said, “just needs to sleep it off a little longer. I’ll let you know if there’s any change.”
Kane ran a hand through his dark hair. “Thanks, Reba. I’ll pop back later.”
Kane joined Grant and Domi as they made their way to the canteen, leaving Brigid Baptiste under DeFore’s watchful eye.
AFTER KANE and his field team had been pulled out of the mat-trans area, Lakesh oversaw the removal of the monster that they had brought with them. The adjacent operations room had been evacuated of all but the most necessary personnel, and those who remained wore hazmat suits and gas mask rebreathers. As one team continued to douse the area with anaesthetic gas from huge hoses, the remainder carefully wrapped the creature in tarpaulin, heeding Domi’s instructions that no one touch it. The whole operation, with the smoking lances of anaesthetic gas and the wide-brimmed masks of the hazmat suits, reminded Lakesh of old-fashioned beekeepers with their smoke guns, suited up and collecting honey from the hive. But this wasn’t a bee—more like a hornet caught in a jar. A very, very angry hornet.
Once the sleeping creature had been wrapped up, its limp body was rolled onto a wheeled flatbed that was normally used to move crates around in the storage area of the redoubt. Under Donald Bry’s instruction, a path was cleared of all personnel and the flatbed carrying the monstrous body was slowly wheeled out of the control room. The masked men with the anaesthetic hoses kept pace, as they proceeded down the wide main corridor that was carved directly into the rock of the mountain.
Wearing his gas mask, Lakesh hung back, watching warily, wishing he knew what it was that they were handling. Decard’s reports had not boded well, and he feared that the monster might reawaken at any moment. If he understood correctly, its very touch burned into an individual, mind and body, eating the victim up from within. Lakesh shivered at the thought, crossing his arms over his chest.
As soon as he had received Domi’s instructions, he had planned the next stage. If anaesthetic gas might be used to hold the creature, then a continuous supply piped into a room could be used to quell it until they could find a more permanent way to deal with it. Reports from the field team had been sketchy, but as he understood it, the creature was apparently impervious to bullets and other attacks. Something immensely powerful was driving it, an internal engine that stopped at nothing to reach its goal. The real question, then, was just what that goal was.
Creature and flatbed were loaded onto an elevator and a small squad squeezed inside, anaesthetic lances piping more mist into the air. The doors closed and Lakesh stood in the corridor with Donald Bry, watching the indicator lights of the elevator as it dropped to a lower level. The team down there already had clear instructions of what to do, and they were all prepared with their own lances of smoky, anaesthetic gas.
Under heavy sedation, the monster was wheeled into a midsized storage room where its limbs were chained. Six portable air recyclers had been brought to the room, and they had been converted to feed anaesthetic gas from large, free-standing cylinders. “I just hope it’s enough,” Lakesh said as he and Donald Bry came down the stairs to observe the final part of the pivotal operation.
Still slumbering, the black-skinned creature was left alone in the emptied storage room, feeds of anaesthetic pumping through the air in vaporous clouds, sequenced so that at least four units would be pumping at any one time. The door was locked, leaving only a small window of glass within the door itself through which to observe the behemoth. Lakesh had considered using a windowed observation room, but the glass would always pose a weak point, no matter how strong it was, compared to the solid concrete walls of the storage room.
As the door was secured, Lakesh and the others breathed a long sigh of relief inside their gas masks. The portable hoses were switched off, and the extractor fans for the corridor were engaged so that the guards wouldn’t need to remain masked the whole time.
“What happens next?” Bry asked, his voice muffled through the mask.
“Perhaps Kane or Brigid will enlighten us,” Lakesh suggested, “once they wake up.”
“Let’s hope that they wake up before it does,” Bry said with deep concern.
IN THE MEDICAL BAY, Reba DeFore watched the indicators as they reported Brigid Baptiste’s condition. Heart rate and breathing seemed normal, and nothing was untoward in her blood pressure level. Brain-wave activity seemed a little more rapid than normal, but that was only to be expected, DeFore considered. Brigid was an honest-to-goodness brainiac with a high IQ and an astonishing faculty for mental recall—her hallucinatory nightmares would surely be something to behold.
Chapter 16
Kane returned to find Reba DeFore sitting at her desk, working at a series of charts beneath her desk lamp.
“Any word on Baptiste?” he asked, leaning against the door frame and instinctively keeping his voice to a low whisper.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Kane,” DeFore assured him. “She was hit with a strong dose of that knockout gas, but she’ll sleep it off. Her breathing’s normal. No use hurrying her.”
Kane gritted his teeth, biting back his concern. “You mind if I wait?” he asked.
The blond-haired physician gestured toward one of the chairs in her immaculate office. “Be my guest,” she encouraged. “You can tell me all about what happened out in California.”
Pulling a chair across from the corner of the room, Kane sat and began to relate events to the medic while they waited for Brigid to awaken.
BRIGID WOKE SLOWLY and with great effort, as though clawing her way from a pool of quicksand. Her head felt muzzy, and her senses came back to her very slowly, one by one, as though being overwhelmed with heady incense.
Her eyes opened and she tried to focus on the expanse of white before her. With an effort of will, she brought the white into sharp focus, dappled white squares a few feet before her. Tiles, she remembered. Ceiling tiles. It was strange, as if she had forgotten what ceiling tiles were for just a moment.
She blinked, holding her eyes scrunched closed for a slow count to five as she held a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes again and looked around her. She was lying on something horizontal and cushioned—a bed. Her head turned to her right and she saw a transparent cylinder there, the tiny bubbles clinging to its side. Liquid, water—in a glass.
And past that, the off-white walls, a tower of black blocks on a pedestal in one corner. Crash cart.
She knew where she was then. The Cerberus medical bay, lying in bed. Alone in the recovery room.
The room was silent, but, just barely she could hear the low murmur of voices coming from nearby.
Slowly, warily, Brigid raised herself until she was sitting on the bed. She wiggled her toes, feeling the sensation slowly return, the little tiny fireworks of pins and needles as they came back to life.
With one hand resting on the bed beneath her, Brigid pulled herself around until her feet swung over the edge. Her long hair flopped over her face, tickling at her nose, as she tried to steady herself, feeling like a passenger aboard a ship in a storm, her insides roiling. She sat there for a moment, head bowed, red-gold hair over her eyes like a curtain, taking in deep breaths. Something had really affected her there, making her head feel so clouded, but it was going now, dissipating.
Carefully, Brigid stretched her right foot down until it touched the cold tiles of the flooring. She felt the cold seep into her, feeling the goose bumps rising up her ankle, along her leg. Grunting with the effort of pulling her other leg from the bed, Brigid forced herself to stand, swaying a little as she stood in place, arms outstretched for balance, to protect her should she fall.
She looked around once more, gazing at the long, white oblong before her. Bed. The square block beside it. Cabinet. The tower of shiny black things. Crash cart.
This was weird, she realized. As if her memory was slowed down. No, not her memory. It was something more fundamental than that, something more akin to understanding.
Seeing the glass of water atop the cabinet once more, Brigid reached forward and picked it up with a shaking hand, bringing it to her lips. Slowly, she sipped at the water, feeling its coolness wash into her mouth, trickle down her throat.
Suddenly, the glass slipped from her hand, falling to the tiled floor where it shattered into a puddle of water and glass shards.
“Baptiste?” a man’s voice called from the next room.
She felt him enter the room, pushing through the door behind her, his steps light despite his large and imposing presence.
“Baptiste? Are you okay?” the man was saying.
Brigid turned to face him, saw the large figure there, another behind him, this one with long blond fur atop its head, weaved into tresses, a female. Apes.
No, not apes. People. She knew they were people. She knew who they were. But for a moment, the names wouldn’t come.
The male was stepping forward, his hands grasping her by the shoulders, pulling her toward him, into him, holding her steady.
“Careful now,” the male was saying. “Careful. Broken glass and bare feet—not a good mix.”
Her lethelogica passed in a flash, and, like a spiritual revelation, she remembered who he was. “Kane,” she mumbled as the tall man guided her away from the puddle on the floor, holding her tightly in his arms.
“Yeah,” he replied soothingly. “It’s okay now, Baptiste. You’re okay.”
“My head feels all messed up.”
The female with the ash-blond tresses—Reba, Brigid remembered suddenly, like a light being switched on in her head—spoke quietly as she bent to clear away the shattered glass. “You took a big dose of tranquilizer gas,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for almost four hours.”
Brigid looked at the physician as she wrapped the glass carefully in a paper hand towel she had pulled from a dispenser on the wall. “Thank you, Reba,” she said, barely any sound to her voice.
Kane helped Brigid from the recovery room, letting her rest her weight against him as they slowly exited into the little office where DeFore had been working at her charts. He sat her down in one of the empty chairs that ran along the side wall and crouched before her, his blue-gray eyes looking into hers.
“Are you okay, Baptiste?” he asked.
Brigid began to nod, then stopped as she felt the heaviness still in her head, that awful, roiling feeling once more. “I think so,” she told him, her voice pathetic, little more than a whisper. “Feel kind of…hungover.”
“Well, it was a heck of a party,” Kane assured her. “Got a bit rowdy there at the end.”
Brigid smiled, knowing that Kane was making fun of her, just a little. “Tell me all about it,” she said, reaching forward and placing a hand on his face for reassurance, feeling the warmth of his cheek.
Moving backward, Kane reached for the wheeled chair at DeFore’s desk, sat and began to relate the events of the last hour or so that they had spent in California. Brigid’s recollections were faint, but gradually, with Kane’s help, she started to piece it all together.
DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, Grant stood outside the storage room that had been converted into a prison cell for the captured monster, looking at its imposing form through the three-inch square of reinforced glass in the door. The hulking creature was slumped across the floor, its chest moving slowly, rising and falling as it breathed in the anaesthetic mist that clouded the room. Wisps of green smoke from the creature’s strange eyes mixed with the white of the anaesthetic, even though its eyes were now closed as if in slumber.
As he stood there, watching through the little window, Grant heard the footsteps on the concrete floor of someone approaching down the long corridor. He looked up and saw Domi walking toward him, a tight smile on her face. She had changed her clothes since they had got back to the redoubt, and now wore an abbreviated vest top in wine-red over her tiny, pert breasts, with a pair of cut-off denim shorts, leaving her bone white legs and feet bare.
