Shadow Box, page 9
“The quake struck a fault line that ran through Arizona and across into California, culminating somewhere out in the Pacific,” Bry told his chief. “Mariah says it topped seven on the Richter scale, and estimates it went far beyond that before it had played out.”
Lakesh spoke after a moment, still looking pensively at the map. “So, Kane is definitely within the little pocket that it disturbed,” he said.
“He is,” Bry confirmed, “but there’s no reason to assume there will be another quake anytime soon.”
Lakesh turned to his copper-haired assistant, indulging him with a friendly smile. “Of course there’s not, Donald,” he said. “It was merely an observation.”
Bry moved back to his terminal and set about tracking ahead of Kane’s team in the direction of the deep footprints that the man had described in his communiqué. As the satellite traced slowly along the area, Bry turned back to Lakesh, who was still studying the Mercator map, his thoughts his own.
“If I may be so bold,” Bry proposed, “when you make what you call ‘a mere observation,’ it usually means you have something in mind.”
Lakesh turned to Bry, an enigmatic smile playing across his lips. “In my long years I have noticed one thing above all else,” he explained. “Coincidence is a very tricky thing.”
Bry nodded knowingly before returning to the task of scanning the live satellite feed.
DECARD’S INCARNATES, the Cerberus warriors and their prisoners waited in the lee of the outcropping as the blazing sun dawdled high overhead. Señor Smarts sat beside Rosalia, his jacket hanging from a jagged part of the rock face, while she fanned at her face with long, languid strokes of one of the silks that had made up the veils of her costume. The wispy costume itself was now stained from her dunking in the sea and muddied by the kicked-up sand of their passage, but it still clung to her curvaceous body enticingly. To fan herself, she had pulled away a strip that wrapped across her belly, leaving her midriff exposed.
While things were quiet, Kane took the opportunity to speak with Brigid and the rest of his allies.
“I’ll be honest,” Brigid explained, “and say I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The Roamers, like the girl, appeared to have just burned up from within, as though struck by a massive surge of energy.”
Grant nodded thoughtfully, looking from Brigid to Keb, the Incarnate medic. “Could it be some kind of spontaneous combustion?” he proposed.
Keb and Brigid shook their heads doubtfully. “This has the nature of a disease,” Keb explained, “or an infection of some sort. But, like your companion, it is something the likes of which I have never witnessed before.”
“A fever,” Kane said darkly, “that burns people from the inside. Is such a thing even possible?”
Brigid smiled tightly. “The human body is capable of a great many things,” she stated. “Just because we haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
“How about calling in DeFore?” Domi proposed. “Lakesh might even want to take a look.”
“We have no idea how this thing started,” Kane said, “nor where. For now, let’s keep the number of personnel who come into contact with it to a minimum.”
Domi’s lips pulled back in a feral smile. “You’re just scared of what I’d do if Lakesh got hurt,” she said, staring at Kane with her fierce scarlet eyes.
“Maybe a little,” Kane conceded amiably.
“Off the top of my head,” Brigid said, addressing everyone in the group, “I’d go so far as to say that this is something not seen in medical dictionaries. Which means it’s something new and we cannot discount the possibility that it has been intentionally unleashed.”
One of the Incarnates scoffed as he heard her words. “You recall the details of every disease? Such a feat is beyond credibility.”
Brigid’s emerald eyes held the man’s gaze in silence for a few seconds before she spoke. “I remember a lot,” she told him, “and seeing these symptoms didn’t trigger any kind of recall.”
Decard shot the Incarnate a warning look, urging the man to back down.
WHILE THE OTHERS were immersed in their discussion, Smarts reached into his pocket and withdrew the pocket chron, flipping open its ornate brass cover. The clock face had cleared now, the condensation—evidence of its dunking in the tsunami—all gone. His dark eyes flicked up to assess his captors before he clicked the watch’s winder once, holding it in for the count of three. The compass and range finder took effect, and the hands on the dial spun as they gave a reading. Smarts smiled. Flipping the cover back in place, he turned to Rosalia as she rested against the cool, shady rock, waving her silk at her face to create a breeze.
“We are just nine miles from camp,” Smarts told her under his breath.
Rosalia’s eyes flashed to him and a broad smile crossed her features. “That close?” she wondered. “Which direction?”
Smarts leaned back, yawning and stretching his arms above his head. Rosalia watched carefully as his right arm pointed to the west. “There are markers as one gets closer,” he told her. “Things that would be missed by others.”
She nodded once, solidly, sweeping the silk back and forth again to fan her face. The time was drawing near.
AS THE CERBERUS field team waited in the shade of the vast rocks, swigging water and taking salt supplements, Bry’s voice came over their Commtacts.
“Satellite surveillance isn’t showing much,” he admitted. “I’ve tracked along the basic direction you’re heading in, northwest, but there’s not much going on. Looks like a small settlement about five miles ahead of you, just a handful of shacks, could be temporary.”
“Any people?” Kane asked over his Commtact.
“Some movement,” Bry told him, “but nothing struck me as out of the ordinary. No fires or signs of destruction. Just a normal little settlement, five small buildings, people eking out a living. Looks like a horse in a corral there, too.”
“Anything farther?” Kane asked.
“I’m panning ahead now, continuing northwest, but it’s hard to tell,” Bry explained. “I can’t see the prints from this distance, just can’t get that kind of level of detail into the image. Far as I can see, I’m looking at sand on sand, so if your bogey has changed course, then I’ve lost him.”
“Pull back,” Grant chipped in. “See if anything else is out of the ordinary. Something as big and heavy as this shouldn’t be that hard to miss.”
“I could lose it in a shadow, or it could be undercover,” Bry said, “but I’ll try my best.”
“Thanks, Donald,” Kane said before he broke the connection.
Then he addressed everyone in the group, aware that Decard and the Incarnates hadn’t been privy to both sides of the discussion with Cerberus. “Our surveillance tells us there’s a settlement about five miles up ahead. No signs of trouble, but it’s right in the path of our mysterious quarry. I think it’s worth checking out.”
Decard nodded. “We’re farther out than my men usually come,” he explained, “so any settlements out this way will be as new to us as they are to you.”
“Then let’s all keep our eyes open and watch one another’s backs,” Kane instructed.
Decard looked across at the ragtag pair of street thieves as they waited patiently in the shade of the rocks. “What about your two friends?” he asked Kane. “I predict they’ll start flagging if we’re going as far as this settlement.”
“We’ll keep moving forward for now,” Kane announced, “and they’ll have to keep up.”
“Why don’t you just force them to give you the information?” Decard wondered.
“If we put too much pressure on them, they’ll only give us a false lead and rabbit as soon as they see an opportunity,” Kane told everyone.
Domi’s hand stroked the hilt of the large knife she had strapped against her calf. “I could cut the information out of them,” she told Kane. “Bet the man would start speaking pretty soon once he started bleeding his own blood.”
“No.” Kane shook his head. “You have to understand these people. They lie and swindle for a living. No amount of pressure will change that in them—it’s instinctive. But if they realize they’re not going anywhere until they give us what they want—and they maybe see an opportunity to get something out of it in the process—they’ll cave. Just give it time.”
“That’s showing a lot of patience,” Domi said dismissively.
“And a lot of faith in your skills of second-guessing people,” Decard added.
“Well,” Kane replied, looking at Domi, “if it comes to it, we’ll use your way.”
MARIAH FALK SAT at the computer in the Cerberus redoubt, puzzling over the figures that were displayed before her. A very experienced geologist, Falk was a slender woman in her midforties with short brown hair streaked with gray. Though not especially attractive, she had an ingratiating smile that always put others at their ease. She sat at her desk, idly chewing at her pen as she tried to map out the readings.
She was looking at a variety of data regarding the earthquake from two days before. Earthquakes, in fact, a half dozen in quick succession had rippled across the tectonic plates to the west of the old United States. The Cerberus operation was geared up for study in a number of fields, but acquiring accurate readings for an unexpected phenomenon like this was difficult.
Mariah leaned forward in her seat, pulling a printout from the stack that sat in her In tray and noting the peaks that the crazy logarithmic wave had hit when the quake rocked the California coast. Her fingers played across her keyboard for a moment, and she brought up a relief map of the western side of the continent of North America. If her data was correct, this quake had reached over four hundred miles from the effects that had been felt by Kane and his teammates on the California coast. She fed the data into the computer simulation program and watched as concentric circles grew from a point about one hundred miles north of Phoenix, Arizona.
She tapped at the keys for a few moments, switching the epicenter farther to the north and incorporating the limited data that she had amassed. Then she sat back and watched as the quake pattern was mapped.
“Monstrous,” she muttered when the program had finished mapping the quakes’ effects.
She was still sitting there, staring in astonishment at the computer screen, when Clem Bryant strode up to her desk carrying a tray with several covered dishes.
Mariah gasped with surprise when Bryant’s shadow crossed over her computer screen. “Clem, I didn’t hear you,” she began.
“Quite all right,” Clem said in his genial manner. He was a quiet man in his late thirties, with dark hair swept back from a high forehead, a neatly trimmed goatee and intelligent blue eyes. Bryant was an expert in oceanography and had been part of the scientific brain trust that had been placed in suspended animation shortly before the nukecaust. However, upon his awakening at the Manitius Moon Base, Bryant had found little application for his chosen discipline, and had instead begun devoting a large amount of his time to working in Cerberus redoubt’s canteen. Much to everyone’s surprise—not the least his own—Bryant had turned out to be a natural chef, and he had thrown himself into this new discipline with gusto. He took great pride in his culinary creations, adding a personal touch despite being called upon to feed more than sixty personnel per meal most days.
Mariah cleared a space at her desk and Bryant set the tray down. “Thank you,” she told him. “I had planned to come up to the canteen…”
“An army marches on its stomach,” Clem reminded her as he gazed at the map on Mariah’s terminal. “Plotting your empire?” he asked in his friendly way.
Despite his easy manner and his diverse fields of expertise, Clem Bryant was very much a scientist at heart. In his quieter moments, he could be found hovering around the empty corners of the large canteen or the redoubt archives working at a logic problem that he had found in an old book or newspaper, a mathematical question, a chess puzzle or a crossword of the devious, cryptic variety popular in Great Britain before the end of civilization early in the twenty-first century. In short, Clem Bryant was an obsessive thinker, and his insights had served the Cerberus personnel well over the past few months.
Mariah pointed at the screen with her pen as Bryant pulled over a spare chair to sit beside her. “If my estimates are correct,” she explained, “this quake was at least an eight on the Richter scale.”
“That certainly sounds like a lot of quake,” Clem agreed jovially.
“It’s almost unheard-of. Eight was the level recorded for the infamous San Francisco quake of 1906,” Mariah told him.
Clem nodded. “Quite the cocktail hour.” He chuckled. “Shaken, not stirred.”
“Factor in estimated levels on the Mercalli scale,” Mariah said, but Clem held up a hand to stop her. “The Mercalli scale registers the intensity of earthquake phenomenon,” Mariah explained. “It’s subjective, based on observable levels, but with six or seven quakes one after the other like this, we can safely assume it’s pretty high.”
“Assume away.” Clem smiled.
Mariah had lifted the lid from the bowl that Clem had brought, and the rich smell of vegetable soup filled the office. Mariah took a taste, blowing on her spoon to cool it, then looked at Clem with appreciation. “This is great,” she told him.
“That’s very kind of you to say.” Clem nodded. “But what about this whole Mercalli-scale business?”
“If we could locate the epicenter of the first quake,” Mariah said, “we would find some very definite evidence of a whole change in the lay of the land. This is the sort of tremor that levels buildings and moves mountains, Clem.”
“And where is the epicenter?” he asked her, thoughtfully running finger and thumb over his dark goatee.
“Here,” Mariah pointed out, “Humphreys Peak, Arizona.”
Bryant’s blue eyes looked at the map thoughtfully. “Meaning?” he asked her.
“I don’t know yet,” she said, sighing, “but I can’t help worrying about what comes out of the woodwork when mountains get shaken so dramatically.”
Clem nodded in wary agreement. The Cerberus personnel had been involved in more than one situation where a military or otherworldly base was located in a mountain hideaway. Indeed, the Cerberus redoubt itself was one such facility, and myths had sprung up around the immediate area that surrounded it.
“Perhaps you might show this evidence to Lakesh,” Clem suggested, “and impress upon him the importance of sending a field team to investigate. Just as a precaution, you understand?”
“Mmm,” Mariah began through a mouthful of soup, “I think that would be…”
“Prudent,” Clem finished for her as she swallowed.
Chapter 8
Using the solar-powered chariots, the Cerberus warriors and Decard’s men made good time, reaching the settlement inside of forty minutes despite the rough terrain. The settlement was made up of five shacks, along with a deep well at the side of which was a bucket on a rope-and-pulley system. The roughly constructed buildings had been painted white to reflect the heat of the desert sun, though their sides had been discolored by the grains of sand that the winds had thrown against them over time.
As the chariots approached the settlement, Kane indicated to Decard that they stop here, waiting a little way out. Once the electric chariots had pulled to a halt, Kane hopped from the back of the one he was riding and jogged over to Decard. “I think we should go in on foot,” he explained.
“Any special reason?” the younger man asked, though he clearly trusted Kane’s judgment.
“I’m seeing five dwellings but no people,” Kane said, looking at the desert hamlet. “Might want to take that as a bad sign.”
Decard nodded. “Fair point,” he said. “How do you want to approach this, then?”
“Me and Grant will go in,” Kane decided. “We’re both wearing armor. Think you can spare a couple of your men to cover our backs?”
“I’ll go myself if you want,” Decard told him in a tone of utter seriousness.
“You stay here,” Kane said. “If there’s any trouble, I’d just as soon have a trained Mag leading my backup.”
“As you wish,” Decard said amiably before walking across to address the group.
A few moments later, Kane, Grant and two of the fiercely masked Incarnates walked the last 150 yards to the settlement. As they got closer they heard a bleating, and Grant pointed out two goats tethered beside one of the buildings, sheltering in its shadow from the bright sunlight. Kane scanned the horizon, watching the buildings for movements. A corral at the far side of the hamlet held a single, tired horse, chestnut-brown with sweat foaming on its flanks.
The Sin Eater pistol was already in Kane’s hand, held pointing straight down in a safety position, as he stepped between the closest two buildings. “Anyone home?” he called.
Having discarded his heavy coat, the shadow suit molded to Grant’s muscular body as he walked carefully ahead of Kane, eyes alert, his own Sin Eater in hand. Following the two ex-Mags, the Incarnates took up wary positions, their silver, stafflike weapons held ready.
Giving a signal to Grant, Kane took a step toward the nearest building and rapped his fist against the door before stepping to one side, out of the potential line of fire.
For a moment, all was silent. Then, as they listened, a noise came from inside—a voice.
