Shadow box, p.7
Shadow Box, page 7
“None of your nose,” Domi said, flashing him her feral smile.
Leaving Grant with the prisoners, Domi made her way to a small, tan-colored rucksack to the side of the tent and rummaged through its contents. A moment later she returned with a Sin Eater handgun in a black leather holster. “Thought you might need this,” she told Grant. “Brought one for Kane, too.”
Grant shrugged out of the right sleeve of his coat and clipped the wrist holster to his right forearm. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and the weapon with which Grant and Kane felt most comfortable. Less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, the automatic handblaster folded in on itself to be stored in the bulky holster just above the wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, snapping the pistol automatically into the user’s hand.
The trigger of the Sin Eater had no guard; the necessity for any kind of safety features had never been foreseen when the weapon had been assigned to the infallible Magistrates. While both Grant and Kane were schooled in numerous forms of unarmed and armed combat, the Sin Eater was an old friend, a natural weight that their movements accommodated, like wearing a wristwatch.
Smarts watched with amusement as Grant finished clipping the Sin Eater in place. “I said you were Magistrates, did I not, señor?”
Grant looked at him, no hint of amusement or pity in his features. “Why don’t you help yourselves out here and give us the information we want about the hybrid DNA. You can see that you’re nothing more than deadweight to us right now. You give us the info and we’ll let you walk out of here, no questions asked.”
Smarts nodded slowly, considering the offer. “I would need to discuss this with my colleague, you understand?” he said, indicating Rosalia.
“Discuss away,” Grant said, ejecting and returning the Sin Eater to its holster in the Magistrate’s standard test routine.
“In private, if you would be so kind.” Smarts grinned.
Grant flicked the Sin Eater into his hand again and gestured to the open doorway of the tent covering. “Let’s go outside,” he said.
Smarts and Rosalia led the way into the cool night air, with Grant and Domi following. They made their way past the guards and walked for a half minute until Grant instructed the group to stop. He indicated vaguely in the direction ahead, where a few dried-up bushes dotted the sand. “Take ten paces off in that direction,” Grant said, “and have your discussion. I’ll be right here.”
“Me, too,” Domi added, producing a Detonics .45 pistol with a chrome finish from the rear of her waistband.
“As you wish, Señor Grant.” Smarts bowed subtly to Grant before walking with Rosalia toward the dried-up brush.
The pair of brigands walked a dozen paces before stopping, trying to create as much distance from their captors without stoking their ire.
“We need to get out of here, Axel,” Rosalia whispered, keeping her voice low and her eyes on Grant and Domi.
“Not yet,” Smarts told her, his own eyes also fixed on their guardians. “You saw that device they used, the portable mat-trans unit.”
“Of course.” Rosalia nodded.
“Such a device would be of inestimable value to our people,” Smarts told her.
“It would doubtless sell for a pretty penny.” Rosalia smiled. “A very pretty, shiny penny indeed.”
“Forget your magpie instincts,” Smarts chastised her, subtly repositioning himself so that she masked his body from their captors’ watching eyes. “With that unit we could go anywhere, take anything. We could be the new masters of the world.”
Rosalia laughed. “You’re a fool,” she said. “You overestimate its value to Tom.”
“A gateway to anywhere on the planet, arriving and departing without warning or preamble,” Smarts rationalized as he pulled a pocket chron on a thin metal chain from his pants pocket. “I think not. You saw the case in which the woman put it. She has it with her. We must steal that case before we depart. Can you do this, Sweet Rose?”
Rosalia pondered this for a moment, thinking about the small size and apparent light weight of the device. “That won’t be a problem,” she assured her colleague, “if the right opportunity presents itself.”
“They are busy worrying about the sick woman with no sight,” Smarts said in a rush. “We’re no longer their primary concern. They’ll let their guard down soon enough, I am sure of it.” The plastic face of the pocket chron had misted up where water had been caught inside it during the tidal wave in Hope. The front was still blurred, and Smarts tapped it lightly with the tip of his manicured nail.
“And in the meantime?” Rosalia asked. “They will keep pestering us for the information about the hidden base.”
“Let them pester,” Smarts told her, checking the chron carefully. Though disguised as an old-fashioned fob watch, the item that Smarts had produced from his pocket wasn’t simply that. It was, in fact, a compass with electronic range finder. Smarts looked at the spinning needle that appeared to be a loose minute hand for a moment, before glancing back at their captors to reassure himself that neither Grant nor Domi was taking any notice; they weren’t. With Rosalia still standing before him, Smarts replaced the compass in his pocket.
“A little sleight of hand, the illusion of progress…they’ll soon get bored and sloppy.”
“The dark-skinned one is like a wall, impenetrable,” Rosalia decided. “But Kane is a soft touch. He lets emotions rule him.”
“I think you like him,” Smarts observed with a smile.
“He has a certain way about him,” Rosalia said, nodding, “but a knife still fits between his ribs.”
Smarts nodded firmly, once, before leading the way back to Grant and Domi.
AS SMARTS AND Rosalia were talking between themselves, Domi turned and nudged Grant. “Do you trust them?” she asked quietly.
“They’re a pair of brigands who deal in stolen genetic material,” Grant answered sarcastically. “What’s not to trust?”
“Touché,” Domi muttered as she watched the pair approach.
THE ELECTRONIC thermometer beeped, and Brigid took it from the woman’s ear and checked its reading before looking up at Kane. “One-ten,” she said solemnly.
Brigid looked at the slick sheen of sweat that covered the pregnant woman’s face and made her clothes dark. The woman crouched there as when they had first seen her, but she no longer hummed and her rocking was slowing, more of an occasional shift of balance now.
“What can we do,” Kane asked, “to cool her down?”
“I don’t think there’s anything,” Brigid replied sadly.
“What about going outside the tent?” Kane suggested. “No cloud cover, and that desert wind—it’s pretty damn chilly out there.”
“No.” Brigid shook her head. “That won’t work. This is something inside her. Something eating away at her.”
“The baby?” Kane asked.
“I don’t think so,” Brigid said thoughtfully.
“Then what about—?” Kane began, but Brigid silenced him with a stern look from her emerald eyes.
“The baby’s dead, Kane,” Brigid told him. “Whatever trauma her body’s going through here, the infant’s going through it ten times worse. Horrible as it is, we have to face facts.”
Kane glanced at Brigid before casting his eyes over the crouching woman again. “We could call in Reba DeFore,” he suggested.
DeFore was the Cerberus healer, tasked to care for every member of the redoubt’s staff. In her time with Cerberus she had dealt capably with hybrid and alien physiognomy, as well as human.
Brigid shook her head. “I suspect there’s nothing Reba could do even if she were here. I’m sorry, Kane.”
Brigid had worked with Kane for a long time. Whether it was simply knowing the man the way she did, or something deeper, she knew that Kane drove himself hardest in the pursuit of saving true innocents like this woman and her unborn child.
“We could still save the baby,” Kane stated.
“No, we can’t,” Brigid said, all emotion drained from her voice.
“We can try. Cut her belly…”
“No, Kane.”
Kane looked at the girl as she shook in place, a shiver running through her fragile body, and his lips parted in a snarl. He turned away then, and Brigid caught and held his gaze with her own. “No,” she told him.
Twenty minutes later the young woman and her unborn child were dead. She had moaned and shook violently for a brief period, less than half a minute in all, and a trickle of blood had oozed momentarily from her left ear, working its way down her cheek, where it mixed with the viscous goo that had once been her eyes as they melted from their sockets.
“Do you think she was in much pain?” Grant asked as Decard’s men placed a sheet over the victim’s body.
Brigid looked at him and smiled sadly. “I don’t think she felt anything,” she answered, addressing everyone in the tent. “I don’t think she even knew who she was in the end.”
The Incarnate who doubled as a field medic caught Kane’s attention and asked if he wanted to examine the body. Beside him, Brigid Baptiste shook her head.
“Just bury her,” Kane said before striding out of the tent.
Fifteen minutes later, once the body had been given a shallow grave and the prisoners placed under armed guard, Grant found Kane standing a little way from the bivouac, gazing off into the heavens. “Clear sky,” he said as he approached his longtime friend and partner.
“It’s the desert.” Kane shrugged. “Clearest skies you ever did see.”
Grant stood with Kane for a while, observing the twinkling stars in companionable silence. Finally he spoke again. “You okay?”
Kane looked at his partner then, and Grant saw that familiar steely gaze. “I’m fine,” he muttered.
“The girl?” Grant probed.
“It’s not the girl,” Kane told him. “At least, it’s not just the girl. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to happen, especially to an unborn child, like that. But it’s not that.”
Grant looked up at the sky again, following Kane’s gaze. “Wasn’t so long ago that we were up there, fighting aliens and causing a ruckus.”
Kane laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “and it’s the ruckus that bothers me. Where are the Annunaki? We’re down here, chasing around after hybrid DNA and the latest strain of fever and we’ve not heard zip from the overlords.”
The Annunaki were an alien race who had evolved through the genetic manipulation of the nine barons who had controlled mainland America in the early years of the twenty-third century. The Annunaki were a bored, alien race who had first appeared on Earth many millennia before. Their saga was literally the stuff of legend—they had subjugated humankind and had been revered as gods by the earliest of humanity’s cultures. But in reality the Annunaki were little more than a technically superior race of bored, cruel monsters who enjoyed playing with the primitive creatures that they found on the Earth.
A division within the ranks of the Annunaki themselves had brought about the near destruction of humankind when the aliens unleashed the catastrophe that the Bible recounted in the tale of the Great Flood. The flood was intended by Enlil, prince of the Annunaki, to wash away the remnants of the primitive playthings that dotted the Earth like a rash. Later Enlil had discovered that tenacious humanity had survived, with a little help from the dissenters within the ranks of the Annunaki themselves, led by his own brother, Enki. Enlil’s purge had been unsuccessful and, amused by the survival of his playthings, Enlil and his fellow Annunaki had devised whole new ways to manipulate their enduring, rebellious toys.
Nobody could really say how long the Annunaki had shaped world events, but it was understood that they had orchestrated the second great cataclysm in the form of the nuclear war that had devastated the planet in January 2001. The nukecaust had culled the human population and allowed for the emergence of the new ruling elite called the barons, whose DNA Tom Carnack’s people claimed to be holding. The baronial elite were merely a chrysalis form for the Annunaki, however, and a download from the organic computer in the starship Tiamat, stationed in orbit around the Earth, had regenerated the godlike Annunaki pantheon from their shells.
The Cerberus warriors had spent much of the past few years battling with Enlil and the other reptilian Annunaki, and every victory was bittersweet. As Kane reasoned, any file download could be opened and accessed again—defeat one Annunaki and another could appear in its place. As such, any lull in the ongoing war felt like nothing more than a temporary reprieve.
“There’s an old saying,” Grant told Kane as they gazed into the heavens, “make hay while the sun shines.”
“I prefer the other one,” Kane told his partner, “about the calm before the storm.” With that, Kane turned and paced back to the camp, with Grant at his side. “Pack your waterproofs, partner,” Kane warned, “we’re in for a shitstorm.”
Chapter 6
“What’s the story with your two friends?” Decard asked Kane as they sat together under the rippling canvas roof of the tent. Besides four Incarnates left standing guard, everyone in the group was asleep, catching a few hours of rest before sunrise.
“They’re a pair of street thieves,” Kane told him in a hushed voice.
Decard smiled. “Seems a bit low rent for you, Kane,” he said. “They must have stolen something real big.”
“Word from the rumor mill has it that they’re holding hybrid DNA out of Beausoleil,” Kane told him, “along with the means to reproduce little barons from it. We leave crap like that unchecked, and suddenly we’ve got a whole new spate of the tyrannical bastards cropping up to push people around like pawns on a chessboard.”
“Have you seen this genetic material?” Decard asked thoughtfully.
“It’s all just rumor,” Kane admitted, “but their leader spun a pretty good yarn.”
“These people always talk big,” Decard pointed out, “trying to jack up the price for something that turns out to be a whole load of nothing.”
“Throw enough bait and you get your fish, right?” Kane agreed. “Still, Lakesh didn’t want it going unchecked.”
“Which one’s the leader?” Decard asked.
“We lost him,” Kane explained. “Got caught up in an earthquake out on the coast. Guy called Tom Carnack—escaped during the confusion.”
“Yeah,” Decard affirmed, “we felt it in Aten, too.”
“Baptiste figures it shook the whole fault line,” Kane elaborated. “Spoke to Cerberus yesterday. Mariah thinks it went as far as Arizona.”
Decard raised his eyebrows. “That’s one monster quake,” he muttered in astonishment.
Kane shrugged. “It’s not unknown around here.”
Decard glanced across at the sleeping prisoners where they lay, their hands cuffed, in the middle of the bivouac. “So what about these two?” he asked. “You have something in mind?”
“Just got caught up in the moment,” Kane admitted. “Priorities went haywire during the earthquake. Seemed the prudent thing to do was bring them with us and interrogate them when we get back to Cerberus. Otherwise we’d have likely lost the trading gang for good.”
“They dangerous?” Decard asked.
“Don’t know about the guy,” Kane admitted. “Doesn’t seem much of a fighter, but he thinks quick. Had me and Grant pegged for Mags as soon as he saw us. The chica’s a different story. Seems pretty enough till you put a knife in her hand. Cut you as soon as look at you.”
“Just knives?” Decard queried.
“Knives, swords.” Kane reeled off the list in a bored tone. “I figure she knows her way around anything with a sharp edge. Haven’t seen her use a gun, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she can hit a target at fifty paces.”
“You always did keep exciting company, Kane.” Decard smiled.
Kane nodded. “Keep an eye on them and tell your men to do the same. If we’re not careful, they’ll turn into trouble.”
“We’re in the middle of the desert,” Decard reminded him. “Where are they going to go?”
“They’re survivors, Decard,” Kane advised him. “Maybe you’ve been living in Aten too long to remember what that’s like.”
Chastised, Decard nodded slowly once more. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”
WITH THE ARRIVAL of dawn came two more Incarnates, riding one of the strange, motorized chariot-like vehicles that Aten produced for its people. Dressed as the other men, in white kilts and gold neck braces, these two wore the carved masks of a hawk and ibis. They had been scouting the area while the rest of the group rested, and now they returned to bring their morning report to Decard.
“We have found the rest of the Roamers,” Ibis said after removing his mask to reveal a hard-looking face with a haughty, imperious aspect to his lantern jaw and a nasty scar just above his left eye.
Bleary eyed, Decard yawned behind his hand as he listened, and Brigid and Kane came to join the discussion after a moment.
“There, off to the east,” Ibis continued. “There is evidence of a campfire, and their wags remain intact. We followed the tracks, and found all five of them about a mile farther on from their fire. They were lying in the sand, and there were signs of a scuffle—sand had been kicked up.”
“Any clue what did this?” Kane asked.
Ibis looked at him fiercely until Decard signaled that he could speak freely to the man. “There are more tracks out there, something big,” he explained.
“Any idea what?” Kane probed. “A Sandcat maybe?”
“They were scuffed but they looked like footprints,” the man reported, “a little haphazard. We followed them for a while but nothing came of it.”
“What, you quit or you lost them?” Kane asked.
“We made a strategic decision,” Ibis told him, looking at Decard for confirmation and support, “that the distance was becoming too far from Aten to pose a threat.”
“Which is to say,” Kane summarized, irritation in his tone, “that you thought you were wasting your time.”
