Outlanders 24 equinox ze.., p.11
Outlanders 24 Equinox Zero, page 11
Temporarily blinded by blood and flying brain matter, the bowman held his arrow, nocked but unloosed. Zakat went low, dropping the pistol and drawing a knife from his belt. He took the shock of hitting the man with his shield. The bowman dropped to the deck, and as the man's head snapped backward from the impact, Zakat slashed his throat with the knife. Scarlet rivered down the front of the tunic as he clutched at his neck.
Elbowing him aside, Sif screamed hoarsely and chopped off the man's head, the ax blade burying itself deeply into the deck planks. Her eyes were wild and glassy. As she struggled to wrench it loose, Zakat took advantage of the opportunity to strike her across the face. He had learned there was no other way to get her attention, to check her battle madness.
He pointed out the survivors of the junk's crew, how they had taken refuge on the quarterdeck. There were only a handful of them, less than a half dozen, but they were still armed with the longbows and equally long arrows, not to mention a few swords.
Thulian warriors, under locked shields, stormed the quarterdeck, but they were driven back by a shower of arrows. Three of them hobbled out of the fray, tugging at the shafts protruding from various parts of their bodies.
Zakat saw a brass, tripod-mounted telescope bolted to the quarterdeck. A man stood beside it, waving his arms in a strange, rhythmic manner He held a pair of long-handled, flat, paddle-like fans in his hands. Zakat only glimpsed the complex symbols inscribed on their surfaces, but he knew the sailor was using them to signal to an observer.
Zakat whispered to Sif, then Zakat bellowed an order to the Thulians They roared and made another concerted charge, milling below the quarterdeck with their shields raised. A salvo of arrows struck them with a series of semi-musical gongs. Then Sif bounded forward, brandishing her unsheathed broadsword. Gracefully she leaped atop the massed shields and ran along them as if she were crossing a stream by jumping from rock to rock.
Shouting in fear and anger, the sailors met her as she alighted on the elevated deck housing. Feinting with the sword, Sif sent the sailor to her left stumbling to the side. Sif spun instead, facing a man with a heavy sledge lifted over his head, holding the long wooden shaft in both hands. Teeth bared in a fierce grimace, the sailor brought the hammer down.
Sif shifted position, a grim smile on her face, and the Thulians below her bellowed approval. Fighting was the one true art they knew, and by the skilful way she whipped her sword forward, Sif proved she was a master.
Already committed to the move, dragged by the weight of the heavy hammer, the sailor cried out in panic as he saw Sif step lithely out of the way, then swing her sword.
The blade bit into the man's midsection with a sound like a melon splitting. His intestines spilled out, flopping in all directions. Sif wheeled again, slashing backhanded with the sword. The keen edge sliced through the neck of a second man, popping the head free of its shoulders. Before she could move again, another sailor was on her. He swung a sword as hard as he could at her head.
Sif lifted her bloody sword, meeting the other blade edge-on. Steel rang against steel, and sparks jumped from the impact point. She moved again, instantly on the attack, her thrust with the sword was quick and sure, burying the point deep in the man's chest.
Incredibly the sailor managed to grab the sword blade impaling him in one hand, then pulled himself closer. The scream that issued from his throat was thin and piping, and his lips were flecked with blood. He raised his sword in one hand.
Sif lifted her foot and kicked the man contemptuously in the stomach, removing his last dying threat, as well as freeing her sword. Only two defenders remained on the quarterdeck. The man with the signal fans dropped them to the deck. Completely blank of expression, he moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with his comrade. They dropped to their knees.
Coldly smiling down at them, Sif cocked back her sword arm as if she intended to decapitate them both with a single scything swing. Before she moved, the two men produced small knives from their tunics and stabbed themselves, almost in unison, in the lower abdomen. As they bent forward in the direction of the pain, they jerked up on the handles of the knives. Blood and viscera spewed from the incisions as they toppled forward onto their faces.
Sif stared at them in dumbfounded silence, her face registering angry confusion as if she couldn't quite understand how her victims had put themselves out of the reach of her blade by the simple dint of suicide. Zakat had heard of seppuku, of course, even if Sif and the Thulians had not. Any doubts he might have had about the nationalities of the junk's crew dissolved. They were Japanese without a doubt.
With a snarl of frustrated fury, Sif lifted her sword high and slashed downward in two strokes. The men's heads rolled across the, quarterdeck like awkward balls and fell from the edge, banging on the shields of the Thulians. As if the postmortem beheadings were a signal, the mailed warriors laughed uproariously. They kicked the heads around for a few moments, as if they were playing a game of soccer.
Then they shook their notched and dripping swords skyward, blood trickling down their arms as they stood above the mangled corpses of the junk's crew. A bestial howling arose from their lips, the cry of a rabid wolf pack baying its victory over the bodies of the prey. They bellowed "Too-lay! Too-lay!"
Zakat removed his stifling helmet and wiped at the sweat pebbling his face. He waited until the warriors had no breath left to shout the name of their homeland and their religion and snapped orders to search the hold.
He removed his helmet and scaled the ladder to the quarterdeck and patted Sif’s shoulder. "Well done, my queen."
She looked nothing like royalty unless she was ruler of a slaughterhouse. Her face, arms and heaving bosom were splashed with blood, the ends of her long blond hair dabbed in crimson. She looked at him with a dazed, almost beatific expression, then grabbed him around the waist, kissing him violently. The film of Bragi's blood on her mouth salted her lips.
Zakat carefully disengaged, not wanting to offend her for fear of his life, but also knowing the Valkyrie expected a fuck dessert after a blood feast.
"Later," he said to her quietly, using a low yet vibrant and persuasive tone of voice. Khlysty training revolved around a form of psionics, of imposing the force of one will upon another.
Sif blinked, smiled and whispered huskily, "Later, my warlord."
She turned and marched off the quarterdeck, to join the search for loot. Zakat picked up one of the signal paddles, noting how the symbol inscribed on it was utterly unfamiliar, like a sunburst containing three geometric shapes. Although he had no way of knowing what it meant, he did know that the marking was called an ideograph, and as such would mean something to somebody. He wondered who that somebody might be.
On impulse, he shaded his eyes and scanned the distant island, at least a quarter of a mile away. He could barely make out a rocky sweep of beach and the outlines of a small, single-masted boat anchored there. He stiffened when he caught sight of movement shifting in the undergrowth.
Zakat went to the telescope and, bending, aligned it with the island, squinting into the eyepiece. A group of people was emerging from the perimeter of a jungle and walking down to the shoreline.
He saw several Japanese men wearing lacquered, laminated armor and flaring helmets that gave them a sinister, dangerous appearance. At their sides hung broad, curved swords in wooden scabbards.
A woman stood among them, dressed in a billowy kimono-like garment. Her face was of a startling Oriental beauty, but her dark eyes glinted with anger. A man dressed much like the sailors aboard the junk appeared to be speaking to her urgently, gesturing frantically toward the sea.
Zakat nudged the telescope up a fraction. Towering a full head over the other people was a mustached black man. He held his left arm immobile in a sling. There was something in the set of his grim features that touched a distant chord of recognition in the files of Zakat's memory.
Before he could pull out the file and examine it more closely, the man raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and appeared to gaze directly at him. It took Zakat a moment to identify the bulky shape strapped to the man's forearm as a holster. Then, in a rush, he recalled where and when he had last seen such an item in tandem with the black man; and whom he had been with.
A thrill of elation surged through Grigori Zakat, so powerful and exhilarating he felt his knees grow momentarily weak. He stood up from the telescope to allow Grant a clear and unobstructed view of him. After a few seconds, he bent back down over the telescope, peering through the eyepiece.
To his disappointment, Grant's expression remained neutral. But he watched as he lowered the binoculars and he saw his lips stir. He knew without knowing how he knew that Grant muttered, "Zakat."
Zakat stood again and grinned broadly, hands on his hips, his head cocked at a defiant, challenging angle. The spiritual debt was now in the process of being paid.
Chapter 10
Mohandas Lakesh Singh seemed to black out and come to again repeatedly, swimming in and out of consciousness. In one of the brief moments of lucid wakefulness, he sensed he was lying on the floor of his quarters, grinding the side of his face into the carpet as he writhed in pain.
He felt deep, boring pains in his chest, in his legs, and a fire burning behind his eyes. With a certain amount of clinical detachment, he understood the curious fact that it was the waves of pain that made him lose consciousness. Even more intense pain had roused him again. Then, his skill at analysis left him, usurped by agony again.
Lakesh heard a faint voice floating over his head, calling his name, echoing as if speaking down a well. He was fairly certain he was being summoned over the intercom, but he couldn't gather enough strength or resolve to answer. Everything was overwhelmed by agony, even the shocking realization that his body experienced the worst pain in areas where it had undergone surgeries in the distant past—his legs, where the knee joints had been replaced with polyethylene, his chest, where he had undergone a lung and heart transplant, and his head, where his glaucoma-afflicted brown eyes were switched out for bright new blue ones.
As it was, his heart thudded slowly, lurching in his chest. Breathing took such a deliberate, conscious effort that he didn't bother with it for what seemed like a long time. Lakesh laboriously reviewed the past few minutes of his life, trying to isolate the incident that had slammed him to the floor in blinding pain. All he could remember was sitting on the edge of his bed, zipping up his bodysuit and then standing. He presumed the onslaught of pain had been so sudden and overwhelming he had no recollection of falling.
Finally, by degrees the flaring fireballs of agony igniting in his body began to ebb. His mind slowly started working again. Sucking in a noisy rattling gasp, Lakesh clawed himself forward by the strength of his fingers. His head pounded, as if sharp hammers were beating on the inside of his skull, chipping away at the bone.
He fought, wrestled and cursed his way to all fours, then to his knees. The furniture of his quarters tilted and spun all around him. He forced himself to shamble erect, face glistening with sweat. His hands shook violently in a tremor. He stumbled and reeled and fell half on top of a built-in bureau, leaning his entire weight against it.
Lakesh gazed into the small mirror hanging above it, examining his reflection by the dim light. For more than fifty years, since his resurrection from cryo sleep, he had always experienced a moment of disoriented shock when he saw a wizened, cadaverous face gazing back at him For the first three years after his awakening, he was always discomfited by the sight of blue eyes staring out at him from his own face.
The year before the nukecaust he had been diagnosed with incipient glaucoma, and although the advance of the disease had been halted during his century and a half in cryostasis, it had returned with a double vengeance upon his revival. The eye transplant was only the first of many reconstructive surgeries he underwent, first in the Anthill, then in the Dulce installation. None of the reconstructive surgeries or physiological enhancements had been performed out of Samaritan impulses. His life and health had been prolonged so he could serve the Program of Unification and the baronies.
After his brown eyes were replaced with blue ones, his leaky old heart exchanged for a sound one and his lungs changed out, arthritic knee joints had been removed and traded with polyethylene ones. By the time all the surgeries were complete, the mental image he'd carried of his physical appearance no longer coincided with the reality. From a robust, youthful-looking man, he had become a liver-spotted scarecrow. His glossy, jet-black hair became a thin gray patina of ash that barely covered his head. The prolonged stasis process had killed the follicles of his facial hair, and he could never regrow the mustache he had once taken so much pride in.
His once clear, olive complexion had become leathery, criss-crossed with a network of deep seams and creases that bespoke the anguish of keeping two centuries' worth of secrets. For a long time, Lakesh could take consolation only in the fact that though he looked very old indeed, he was far older than he looked.
But now he looked far, far younger than his chronological age. Still he felt a shock when he looked into the mirror, but it was different, stemming as it did from fear. At the temples of his thick, jet-black hair, he saw more and more gray threads, but his olive complexion was still unlined, holding few creases from either age or stress, although he certainly had a stockpile of both.
The vision in his blue eyes was still sharp. He glanced down at the pair of eyeglasses resting on top of the bureau. They were ugly, dark-rimmed things with thick lenses and a hearing aid attached to the right earpiece. For over a decade he had worn them, knowing he resembled a myopic zombie or Jerry Lewis's portrayal of the nutty professor.
For the past six months, they hadn't been necessary, and he realized the prospect that they might be again shook him far more profoundly than he expected. Although he didn't see any signs of accelerated aging, he assumed the sleet storm of agony he had just experienced was an omen of far worse things to come.
Inhaling a deep breath, wincing at the ache in his lungs, Lakesh inspected his reflection with a more objective eye. His restored youth—or more accurately, his restored early middle age—was the only beneficial result of his encounter with Sam, the self- proclaimed imperator of the baronies.
He still remembered with vivid clarity how Sam, who resembled a ten-year-old boy, had accomplished the miracle by the simple laying on of hands.
Lakesh knew the process was far more complex than that, but he could engage only in fairly futile speculation of how it had been accomplished. He would never forget how Sam laid his little hand against his midriff and how a tingling warmth seemed to seep from it. The warmth swiftly became searing heat, like liquid fire, rippling through his veins and arteries. His heartbeat picked up in tempo, seeming to spread the heat through the rest of his body, a pulsing web of energy suffusing every separate cell and organ.
He was aflame with a searing pain, the same kind of agony a person felt when circulation was suddenly restored to a numb limb. His entire metabolism seemed to awaken to furious life from a long slumber, as if it had been jump-started by a powerful battery.
He still remembered with awe that after the sensation of heat faded, he realized two things more or less simultaneously; he wasn't wearing his glasses but he could see his hand perfectly. And by that perfect vision, he saw the flesh of his hand was smooth, the prominent veins having sunk back into firm flesh. The liver spots faded away even as he watched.
Later Sam claimed he had increased Lakesh's production of two antioxidant enzymes, catalase and superoxide dismutase, and boosted up his alkyglycerol level to the point where the aging process was for all intents and purposes reversed. For the first few weeks
following Sam's treatment, his hair continued to darken and more and more of his wrinkles disappeared. But then the entire process reached a certain point and came to halt. Lakesh estimated he had returned to a physical state approximating his midforties.
Lakesh assumed Sam possessed the ability to transfer his biological energy to other organic matter, which in turn stimulated the entire human cellular structure. Beyond that, he could only guess.
Regardless of how Sam had done it, Lakesh knew his youth and vitality was not bestowed without a price. At this juncture he didn't know what he would eventually have to pay out. The fact his hair showed streaks of gray after such a short time indicated he either needed regular treatments or the process had a definite time limit.
He recalled the words of the extremely skeptical DeFore: "If aging is controlled by a kind of biological alarm clock, a sort of genetic switching system and the hands of yours were turned back, it stands to reason they'll start moving in the normal fashion again."
She went on to say, "Just as different kinds of clocks and watches are designed to run for different lengths of time after being wound, so different kinds of bodies are genetically designed to run for different periods. The mainspring of your body's clock could break at any time or it could go haywire. You could age ten years in ten seconds."
Comparing his body to a clock with a malfunctioning mainspring did nothing to ease Lakesh's fears. He started to push himself up, then winced as pain crawled across his chest. Slowly he unzipped the front of his bodysuit. Outlined in blue and red against the deep olive tone of his skin, a spider web pattern of broken blood vessels and ruptured capillaries extended from his left pectoral across his chest. They radiated outward from the surgical scars of his heart and lung transplants. Even as he looked at them, the livid network seemed to pulse and expand.
As fingers of dread knotted in the pit of his stomach, Lakesh bent and undid the Velcro tabs on the bodysuit's left boot sock. Leaning against the bureau, he tugged up the leg, over his knee. He set his teeth on a groan of incredulous horror when he saw the same kind of blue-and-red pattern spreading across the skin, just under the kneecap. He didn't bother checking on his right leg.
