Outlanders 34 successors, p.1
Outlanders 34 Successors, page 1
Chapter 1
The scattered tar-paper shacks slumped at the far side of an expanse of mud that had fractured into a million angular plates as it dried. The Andean runoff had passed, and summer's heat had driven the Rio Maranon from its banks like a defeated army. Thatch roofs seemed bowed beneath the weight of the midday equatorial sun. Around the clearing the forest rose like green cliffs.
The smell was like a blow to the face.
"Is this the bloody place?" MacLean demanded as the party emerged from the brush across the mudflat, couple of hundred yards away. His coarse straw hair was brushed at a bias across his forehead and clamped in place by a white straw cowboy hat. He wore amber shades and a tan bush jacket. A scoped Savage bolt-action rifle, brushed stainless steel and black synthetic, was slung across his back.
Guinan spoke quietly in Spanish to the guide. Rogelio. The team's sec man, Witcover, thumbed up the front of his boonie hat to scratch where it chafed his forehead. His other hand stayed on the pistol grip of his M-16 A-2 longblaster. which he held pointed in the general direction of the silent huts. He wore an olive drab T-shirt and camou pants over big boots, as if dressed for a role. He had the size and muscles to carry it off.
"He says it is. Guinan had a nasal voice. She was a wiry woman in her early forties, wearing an electric-green ball cap with a dark green bill over long auburn hair wound into a braid that hung between her shoulder blades. She wore a loose white blouse printed in red-and-blue flowers tucked into khaki cargo shorts and low-topped hiking shoes. A 9 mm Beretta pistol rode in a flapped holster at her hip.
Like MacLean, the little team's leader, she had been born and raised on Earth's Moon.
Senor Rogelio watched with sad apprehension in his dark brown eyes. The whites of his eyes were stained like the teeth of a longtime smoker, and his teeth, such as he had, were stained even darker. His muslin shorts and blouse, stained a uniform dingy brown by jungle slop and sweat, were so baggy his thin red-brown limbs and neck seemed to have been added as afterthoughts. His face was as narrow as a blade. A luxury of black mustache dominated his face the way a pristine satin sofa would have dominated one of the one-room shacks. His general air was that of one who expected little and that not good, and was seldom disappointed.
Except there was a little edge to him, to the way he shifted weight from foot to foot, the way his gaze kept skipping from the brush to the long slow brown slog of river to their left to the abandoned-seeming collection of huts. As if his normal dire expectations had started to be considerably and regularly exceeded.
"Well?" MacLean demanded. "Why are we standing here improving our suntans? Let's get this fool's errand over and done with so we can jump back to Cerberus where it's cool and the humidity isn't at physically impossible levels."
"Come now, Algernon." Guinan said. "We're high up here. The humidity is scarcely daunting."
Witcover scowled. "We should be a little cautious:. He had a mustache of his own, dark brown and substantially less imposing than Rogelio's. It was the only thing about him that was less imposing than the local.
"You're afraid?" MacLean sneered. "I thought you Magistrates were fearless."
“Former Magistrate," Witcover corrected evenly. He had come up as a junior Mag about the time the unrest started, a couple of years before. The only way to leave the Magistrate Division, in the normal course of events, was feet first. So it was certain that a termination warrant had been issued on Witcover. Not that he didn't have lots of company these days on the death list. He had been hiding out in the Shens serving as sec man to one of the small-time chieftains who had begun to spring up in the Outlands in the wake of the civil war among the barons. Then Cerberus redoubt caught wind of him and its agents invited him to join them in resisting the tyranny of the barons and their black-clad myrmidons; the Mags.
“Cautious," he explained. "That way you're not so likely to find yourself with dirt hitting you in the eyes, you know?"
Witcover looked a typical coldheart, albeit better fed than most. But he didn't lack perception. He had encountered a few fellow fugitive Mags even before being brought to Cerberus where Kane and Grant, the most famous renegade Magistrates of all time, made their lair. He noticed that those who tried to run the standard Mag game of busting any head that didn't bow quick enough to your passing by and kicking in every door that didn't open fast enough at your approach—without your body being encased in hard-contact armor and without being backed by phalanxes of fellow Mags—wound up reaching ambient temperature in record time.
"I cannot believe it," MacLean said, hunching his shoulders as if he wanted to stamp an athletic-shoe-clad foot for emphasis but didn't quite dare. "A world of chillers and blasters to choose from and we get saddled with a coward."
"Don't be a twit, MacLean," Guinan responded. "He's got a point. Something out of true is going on down here, or we wouldn't be here in the first place. And our poor local guide is frightened out of his wits." “That's a short journey." MacLean said. "He's such a rabbit he's liable to bolt if he sees his own shadow sneaking up on him. And if this human thumb has a point, its on top of his fucking head. Bloody hell."
Witcover knew the female biologist wasn't defending him. She was just arguing with MacLean to piss him off. She was a hardly less conceited snot than the team leader, who was an astrophysicist of all things. All the Moon-base émigrés acted as if mere ground-pounding Earthmen were born to fetch and carry for them. That the ground crawlers had given them refuge after they were driven from Manitius Base on the Moon didn't seem to register with many of them, at least to the extent of registering gratitude.
Witcover didn't mind. Any shit they gave him, they dished out with a spoon, whereas any Mag senior to you, even if by minutes, used a fusion-powered bulldozer.
"What we can expect to learn from a lot of superstitious devolved savages is entirely beyond me," MacLean added.
"Dr. Lakesh thinks there's something here." Guinan said
MacLean grunted. The only terrestrial the Manitius émigrés generally respected was Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh. Cerberus redoubt's director. He was a certifiably brilliant scientist from way back in predark days, a freezie, and as high-handed as the worst of the Manitius bunch. His word trumped all of MacLean's misgivings unless the displaced whitecoat cared to try his hand at shifting for himself on the mother planet—something none of the oh-so-superior refugees seemed inclined to do.
"Well, what do you suggest then. Mr. Witcover?"
"Mebbe try to circle this mud flat and get closer. Stay in the bush instead of just strolling across the open."
"And have every twig jab us with thorns and every branch tip another loathsome bug down our collars? I think not."
"It's the Maranon Valley, MacLean." Guinan said. "It's a major feeder of the Amazon. There are bugs everywhere. As you call them."
"Then let me go scope it out," Witcover said stolidly. "Not on yours, old chap. Will you make up your bloody mind? First you've got the wind up, next you want to go gallivanting off and leave us to our own devices. Which is it to be?"
"Please, senores," Rogelio pleaded. After the lone English word he continued in quiet but impassioned Spanish.
"What's the dammed coward on about now?" MacLean demanded.
"He doesn't want us to argue too loudly," Guinan said. "He fears the demons who took the ville." MacLean snorted. "Enough of this bullshit. Come on. Move! Witcover, you can lead the way. The rest of us will follow."
He grabbed Rogelio by an arm like a maroon stick and yanked him in front of himself. "And you, my friend, will walk close behind Witcover. Capisce? Or whatever the fuck it is you say."
Rogelio took off his battered hat, ran his hand nervously through his brush of dense black hair, placed the hat and crossed himself. He spoke briefly and without animation to Guinan, and then set off after Witcover, if without eagerness, then without reluctance, either. "He says he has entrusted himself to the Virgin," Guinan supplied as she and the expedition head set off in the wake of the other two. "He advises us to do likewise. He says we're going to die soon." She spoke with a sort of gloomy satisfaction.
"Moody bullshit," MacLean said. "You can't take that seriously. It's barking made"
Guinan shrugged. "We're down here for a reason.” "A wild-goose chase, more likely than otherwise." Although it had rained savagely from the time they set out from their camp near the village, the sky was clear, with white clouds shining like hope itself piling up into the blue. The sun stung bare skin.
“Bloody madness not to bring the boat here straightaway." MacLean complained. "rather than nose in and stumble half a klick upriver through the bloody bush." "We need to show a little caution." Guinan said in her dry and slightly nasal voice. “Senor Rogelio says the demons have been advancing steadily through the forest until they overtook his sister's village as he slept in a hut on the outskirts.”
"I know, I know," the leader said sullenly. "He was awakened by screaming. Clawed black forms attacked him and he barely escaped with his life. Fantastic yarn." "He still has half-healed scratches on his face, MacLean," Guinan said. "Unless you think they're psychosomatic."
"That kind of story isn't too uncommon down here on Earth," Witcover called softly over his shoulder. "Now, both of you pipe down."
"I will not!" MacLean shouted the last word in petulant defiance. "I will not pipe down!"
Trudging stolidly behind Witcover, Rogelio cringed at MacLean's outburst.
"Asshole," Guinan said.
N o one in Cerberus redoubt, buried beneath a mountain peak high in the Bitterroot Range, had any clear idea what was going on down here, just below the eastern foothills of the Andes. The redoubt's satellite coverage showed a zone of distinct change in the flora. Its thermal signature and even its color to the naked eye had changed, as distinctly as if it were a giant pool of spilled paint: a rudely circular splotch of country that had been various shades of verdancy and brown was now almost uniform bluish green, of a shade that matched no other area of the planet's surface visible from the still functioning or recently repaired satellites under Cerberus's command. Moreover, it had appeared suddenly, between one overhead pass and another two days later. Worst of all, it was expanding at a pace of several miles a day.
"Still no sign of life," Witcover called over his shoulder as they drew closer to the first of the shacks. "Well, splendid," MacLean said. "Then you've got nothing to be afraid of:'
Guinan had stopped and stood frowning. "There in something peculiar about the vegetation here." "What? It's all bloody green."
"But it's the wrong green. McLean. It's a shade of blue-green I haven't seen before except in Lakesh's photos from space. Like that creeper there." She pointed with a slim hand at a vine running up the bole of one of the nearer trees like a line of blue-green flame. "So maybe there's something to find here after all," MacLean said. Witcover had stopped a few paces short of the nearest hut. The ancient advertising logos on its soda-can walls had faded to hieroglyphics. "But I want to find somebody to talk to us who didn't run away." Rogelio, who cowered behind Witcover, began to shake and babble even before Guinan translated. "He says he can't." she told MacLean. "He says they're all dead"
"How would he know?" The astrophysicist put lists on his hips and smirked. "If he's as accurate as he is brave, the bloody ville must be teeming with informants. In fact I'm going to put an end to this malingering right now!”
He strode to the frightened local and grabbed him by the back of the neck hole of his collarless smock. He frog-marched the frightened man to the hootch.
Its floor was elevated on pilings several feet above the dried mud flat, as a hedge against the river's unpredictable moods. A set of rough plank steps led to the entrance, which was covered by top-to-bottom strings of plastic beads sun-faded to murky purple. Rogelio refused to climb them.
Showing a strength that belied his skinny arms the astrophysicist propelled Rogelio up and into the darkness with a slithering rattle of ancient beads. The villager's knees thumped noisily on the floorboards. For a moment there was rustling as he tried to pick himself off the floor. Then silence.
Half-outraged or at least acting that way, Guinan had marched up almost to MacLean’s back. Witcover held out a big hairy sunburned arm to stop her. She seemed to accept his intervention gratefully.
From inside came a dry whisper of sounds, as of leaves blown across woven-reed mounting. But somehow sharp.
Then the screaming started.
Chapter 2
"Target acquired."
Oblivious to a light drizzle falling from clouds almost low enough for him to touch, an anchorite sat cross-legged on a gray granite ledge above a nearly sheer drop to the surf churning green on the rocky shore to which the Cific had advanced after Soviet earth- shaker devices set off monster quakes during the big nuke two centuries before.
Glowing pale green in the dubious light, the telescopic sight's crosshairs centered on the meditator's head. The pale face was almost obscured by a cloud of wind-wilded black hair and gray-streaked beard. Despite the chill the man wore only a pair of black pants, possibly sweats or pajama bottoms.
"Shall I turn this puke's head to pink mist for him?" asked the man behind the scope. Although the contact patch taped all but invisibly over his Adam's apple would transmit even inaudible sub-vocalizations as distinct speech. He spoke in normal conversational tones. As measured by the sight's laser rangefinder his target sat over eight hundred meters away to the south, a couple hundred meters below a peak neighboring the one where he lay with his black synthetic-stocked long-action Remington 700 sniper's rifle propped on a pair of beanbags he carried with him for that purpose.
"That's a negative, Kong." came the reply from the erstwhile Lieutenant Colonel William "Wild Bill" McCombs, Team Lazarus's leader. "We need to make sure this one's a step-on."
"What's not sure?" the sniper demanded in outrage. 'This rifle's got plenty of legs. And at this range I can put it in his ear hole and not even ruffle all the hairs. Don't forget that shot I made in Mogadishu."
"You never let us forget that shot in the Dish," McCombs said. Attached as sniper to Task Force 160 in Somalia during Operation Gothic Serpent in 1993. Second Lieutenant Raymond Hong had made a head shot from a MH-6B Little Bird "Night Stalker" chopper on a man carrying what an observer using low-light television identified as a possible LAW rocket launcher onto a rooftop at over a mile with a Barrett .50-caliber rifle. 'Too bad it turned out your kill was a Nigerian aid worker with a bedroll."
"I made the shot, Chief," Hong insisted. "I sealed the deal. That's what counts."
Wild Bill McCombs's long jaw set in his long craggy face. He stood on a shelf ten yards above the unquiet Cific with the white surf noise clearly audible above the freshening breeze. His Kevlar Fritz-style helmet rested on a rock nearby. The wind wisped a shock of virtually colorless hair across his forehead. His .223-caliber M-4 carbine was slung muzzle down behind his right shoulder.
"Negative." he said to the distant sniper. "Our target's way too slippery and has way too many places to hide if you don't get the control shot. You got your orders, soldier. Do as you're told."
He was a man who knew how to put menace in his voice. His early career as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Special Forces had been distinguished by his success in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. McCombs had gone on to a long career advising Third World forces on advanced coercive interrogation and counterinsurgency techniques, starting in the late 1980's aiding the Iraqis during their war with Iran and wrapping up as an observer with Russian forces during the tint Chechen war in 1994. From there, after a stint with LAPD's Ramparts division, he had gone on to enjoy success handling special operations for the DEA until recruited for his present duty.
"Yes, sir," the sniper agreed sulkily.
"Asshole." The new voice belonged to steroid-burly black Master Sergeant Jameel Adams, ex-Marine EOD, ex-ATF. He was positioned below the target. He carried an M-16 A-2 with a 40 mm M-203 launcher attached and a vest with multiple pockets full of launch and hand grenades.
McCombs raised an eyebrow. "You remember to squelch that next time, big guy."
The fourth member of Team Lazarus—hired, trained and frozen two centuries ago by billionaire computer mogul Gilgamesh Bates--showed his team leader a grin full of crooked brown teeth. Former Navy SEAL Machinist's Mate Ricardo "Ricky" Ramirez, formerly of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and, like McCombs, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, was a lanky, good-looking kid, except for the teeth. He wore slung horizontal to his waist an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon almost as big around as he was.
"Ready to do some climbing, Three Fingers?" he radioed.
Far below them, Adams raised the eponymous left hand in a truncated but still big fist. "Don't ever call me that, cocksucker.” he said.
Still scowling murderously, he began to climb.
"NICE PLACE you got here, Kane."
"Storm front coming." the shaggy man remarked without looking around. "Heard you coming the last fifteen minutes. Getting sloppy, Grant?"
Despite the body weight mandated by his breadth of chest and shoulders, the tall black man with the outlaw handlebar mustache framing his long powerful jaw was not breathing heavily. He brushed his palms together. His hands and head were the only parts of his body not encased in a formfitting shadow suit.
"Negative." he said. The scowl creasing his ruggedly handsome face was habitual, not a response to circumstances. Mostly. "I know better than to try sneaking up on you. You're still the maximum point man. Don't want my last sight in this life to be your ugly mug put an extra hole in the bridge of my nose."
"What makes you think I'm armed, Grant?" the bearded Man asked as he assessed the ocean and the approaching squall. "I've renounced the world."
