Outlanders 14 hell risin.., p.9
Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 9
He wasn't sure what that meant, but he knew he always felt comfortable with Brigid Baptiste on a spiritual level, despite their many quarrels.
Kane found the thought of losing his anam-chara too horrifying to contemplate, not just because of the vacuum she would leave in the Cerberus personnel, but because of the void her absence would leave in his soul. The memory of the kiss he'd given her when they'd taken the jump back in time to the eve of the nukecaust drifted across his mind. It was no surprise that he should remember the kiss, but the intensity of emotion associated with it shook him.
He also recalled with startling clarity what Sister Fand of the third parallel casement had whispered to him about Brigid Baptiste: "The lady is your saving grace. Trust the bond that belongs between you. The gift of the anam-chara is strong. She protects you from damnation—she is your credential."
Although most, if not all, of the details of his visits to the three parallel planes of reality were now misty fragments, he remembered those words as if they'd been imprinted in his mind.
Kane shook his head furiously to drive out the recollections of the past so he could focus on the present. He had seen Brigid injured before, he argued with himself. She had always recovered, sometimes so quickly it seemed almost miraculous.
Panting, he loped along the corridor, lungs laboring, wincing at the pain of a stitch lancing up and down his side. His pounding footfalls sounded like a primitive funeral dirge beaten out on a drum. He tripped over Skorzeny's discarded control box and stumbled for nearly a score of feet before managing to regain his balance.
By the time Kane reached the open door that led to the pit, he was sweating profusely despite the cool air. He constantly had to blink the stinging salt from his eyes. Skidding to a clumsy halt, he went through the door, down the narrow corridor and into the cube- shaped chamber. It reeked of cordite, and was so drenched in blood and stinking body wastes, it looked and smelled like an abattoir. His stomach lurched in a jolt of nausea.
Kane skirted the maimed corpses of Cotta and Jacko
as he crossed the pit. He found the survival kit on the far side, surrounded by a pool of Cotta's blood. His dismembered arm lay nearby, like the limb of a doll torn off and tossed away by a petulant child.
Cotta himself lay on his back, bled almost white, his sightless, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling. His face was contorted in a rictus that looked more like astonishment than pain. Kane tried but failed to suppress a shudder. Bending over him, with thumb and forefinger he gently closed his eyes.
"This was no way to die," he said hoarsely. "I'm sorry."
"Sahh-ree."
The grumbling, gasping voice raised Kane's nape hairs and caused him to whip his head around so fast his neck tendons twinged. To his amazement, he saw Jacko stirring fitfully on the floor, hands clenching and unclenching.
"Sahh-ree... ah'm sahh-ree..."
Kane gaped at him incredulously, refusing to believe that any creature, no matter how big and powerful, could have survived his multitude of wounds long enough to mock him.
In a sudden fury, he glanced around, found Cotta's VP-70 and picked it up. He marched over to the fallen giant. Jacko appeared to be floating in a lake of liquid vermilion. Kane aimed the pistol at the little electrode on the monster's forehead.
Bitterly, he growled, "Monkey-man see, monkey- man do. Monkey-man fucking well dies."
As his index finger constricted on the trigger, Jacko coughed up blood and words. "Sah-ree. Couldn't he'p mysel'. Din't mean—din't want to hurt."
Kane's finger froze. Jacko's pronunciation was slurred due to the structure of his mouth, but he understood what he said nevertheless. The hairy giant's eyes peered up from his massive brow bones. In their dark depths swirled the light of intelligence, far more human than bestial.
"Free now," Jacko grunted softly. "Free."
His body quivered and became rigid. Kane sidestepped away, cold sickness leapfrogging in his belly as he realized the man-ape wasn't a mindless animal, but a sentient being. He had seen a number of abhorrent genetic hellspawn over the past year, from the hybrids in Dulce to the Martian transadapts, but unlike them, Jacko was far more victim than mutant.
Tucking the VP-70 into a pocket, he retrieved his Sin Eater in its ruined holster and left the pit. As soon as he was out in the passageway, he started running again.
Reeling and light-headed, he didn't slow his pace until he came in sight of Grant, still applying steady pressure to Brigid's head.
"The bleeding has tapered off some," Grant said, taking the medical case from him, "but there's no sign of her coming around yet."
Wheezing, Kane bent over, hands on his knees, watching as Grant unlatched the lid and opened the kit. Methodically, he began removing items from it— a vial of sulfa, antiseptic, coagulant powder, pressure bandages, a roll of gauze and a small hypodermic of stimulant. Kane didn't offer any suggestions on procedure since Grant was as proficient in field medicine as he was.
After his lungs stopped aching, Kane went in search of materials to make a stretcher. In a small storage room adjacent to the generator area, he found squares of canvas, lengths of rope, leather straps and lumber, no doubt used to shore up the walls and ceiling of the passageway.
Working with a feverish haste, he constructed a makeshift stretcher out of a pair of long boards, holding them together by knotted turnings of the rope. By the time he dragged everything back to Grant, Brigid's head was bandaged like a mummy's and her face cleaned of some of the blood, but by no means most of it.
Holding her wrist, timing her pulse by his wrist chron, Grant announced, "The stimulant has regulated her heart rate. Respiration is improving. I think I've gotten her stabilized for the moment. This is the best time to get her out of here."
Kane spread out the canvas over the stretcher and, taking Brigid by the ankles, he and Grant carefully lifted her onto it. They wrapped her up in the canvas, swathing her in its folds like a cocoon. Kane secured her to the boards by the leather straps. Gripping the ends of the boards, the two men picked her up and carried her into the passageway.
"Once we navigate our way out of here," Grant said, grunting, "our real problem is going to be getting her topside."
Kane nodded toward the leather straps cinched tight around Brigid. "We can make a sling out of those and the tarp and lift her out."
"That won't be as easy as you make it sound," said Grant skeptically.
"Hell," snapped Kane, "what is?"
They shuffled sideways down the corridor, straining under the weight, the exertion exacerbating the pain of their injuries. Both men knew there wasn't a way up to the higher level through the door that led to the pit, so they moved on past it. They didn't go far before they saw the old-fashioned caged-in elevator. Neither of them repressed sighs and exclamations of relief as they squeezed into it.
Grant pulled the lever projecting from the wall, and with creaks and clanks, the elevator ascended. It brought them to a little anteroom just outside the office suite. It was on the opposite side from where they had entered and was concealed from view by partitions covered with framed photographs of the Berlin skyline.
Laying Brigid on a desk, they adjusted what was left of their protective clothing, snugging their mittens, lowering their goggles and drawing close their hoods. They made sure Brigid was completely covered by the canvas. Kane steadfastly refused to look at her face, a shocking pale beneath its layer of drying blood. Grant checked her pulse one more time and found it satisfactory.
The two men lifted her up and carried her out through the office and to the entrance foyer. As they passed under the Nazi banner, Kane wrestled with the mad urge to shoot holes in it. But his Sin Eater was probably damaged, and Cotta's VP-70 was zippered in a pocket. Besides, his hands were full and it seemed a fairly futile gesture at this point.
The temperature at the bottom of the crevasse seemed to have dropped and the cold struck at them like bludgeons of ice. It felt shockingly cold after the relative warmth of the installation.
Teeth chattering, Grant eyed the rungs of the ladder doubtfully. "Who goes first?"
Looping the slack of the rope and passing it under and over Brigid's canvas-shrouded body, Kane said curtly. "You're the strongest, so you'll have to do the hauling. I'll push and keep her steady."
Grant's dark eyes clouded with worry. "Once we get up there, we'll have to move bastard fast. She could contract hypothermia in minutes. All of us could."
wasn't intending to sightsee." Kane threaded the ropes through the straps around Brigid's shoulders, knotting them expertly. He tugged them experimentally, then entwined two lengths of rope together and tossed it to Grant. "Let's get it done."
The men lifted the board-bound woman upright. Her head lolled loosely as Kane raised the fur-lined hood of her thermal suit and snugged it tight around her face by its drawstrings.
Rope in one hand, Grant scaled the ladder to the top rung. Kneeling at the opening, he began hauling Brigid up, hand over hand. Kane stabilized her ascent, preventing her from bumping against the icy wall or revolving at the end of the rope. It was strenuous, muscle-pulling work. Kane followed Brigid rung by rung. Twice he nearly lost his grip on the frost-rimed rungs.
Finally, after what seemed like a chain of interlocking eternities, all three of them reached the surface. Kane and Grant shivered violently as a gust of subzero wind buffeted them. Their footprints leading from the hutch were almost obliterated by the drifting snow, but they moved in that direction, each man dragging the stretcher-bound Brigid by strands of rope.
Within a minute, the wind moaning over the ice field turned into a shrieking wail that seemed to fill the entire world, tearing at Grant and Kane with a clawing fury. They were blinded by a white, stinging ice curtain. Breathing in the gale was difficult as snowflakes and ice particles seared the moist, soft tissues of their mouths and sinus passages. The wind cut through the rents in Kane's thermal suit like razor-edged blades.
The two men put their heads down and trudged forward, dragging Brigid behind them as if they were dogs hauling a sled. She lay only a few feet behind them; but she was almost invisible in the shifting veils of wind-whipped white.
Their faces, hands and legs grew numb, and ears and teeth ached fiercely. Blind, freezing and aching, they fought their way onward, tiny splinters of ice scouring the exposed portions of their faces like hundreds of insect stings.
Although they could no longer see their tracks, both men possessed an ingrained sense of direction, partially due to their Magistrate training but primarily derived from instinct. Neither Kane nor Grant feared becoming lost so much as succumbing to the soul-killing cold, falling and freezing solid within minutes.
Breasting the wind, Kane shambled and shuffled until he struck something hard and unyielding. He stumbled and nearly fell. Pawing at the frost on the lens of his goggles, he was just able to make out, through a part in the whirling streamers of snow, a dark mass.
He had bumped into one of the two rock outcroppings that bracketed the Quonset hut. Had he been only a couple of feet to the right, he would have bypassed it without knowing it was there. Grant continued trudging onward, unaware of Kane's collision.
"Here!" he shouted, but his voice was swallowed by the roar of the wind. Kane reached out, and after a few groping swipes, grabbed Grant by the shoulder, pulling him to a halt.
By feel, the two men edged around the rock until they found the front of the little structure and finally the door. Already a snowdrift was heaped halfway to the top.
Fumbling with the latch, Kane tried to open it, but for a heart-stopping, despairing half second, it appeared to be frozen shut. Fueled by fear and anger, he hurled his whole weight against it and it swung open, breaking loose the ice that had formed on the hinges and jamb.
They dragged Brigid's stretcher inside. It took Grant two attempts to push the door shut against the battering ram of the wind. When it was closed, he leaned against it, breath rasping in and out, pluming- before his face. His lungs sounded like a pair of ruptured fireplace bellows. Pulling down his hood, he fingered the ice clinging to his mustache.
Breathing just as heavily and painfully, Kane knelt to inspect Brigid, pulling away the folds of canvas from her face. She was still unconscious, although the blood that had seeped through the bandage was frozen as hard as a sheathing of metal. Neither man could do anything other than pant for a minute, their eyes dulled by a marrow-deep fatigue.
"What do you know?" croaked Grant at length. "We made it."
Kane didn't bother with a response. He stumbled to his feet and started dragging Brigid across the floor toward the mat-trans unit. Pushing himself away from the door, Grant swayed on rubbery legs. "Don't you want to take her off that thing before we make the jump?"
Kane shook his head. "Once we're back, we can carry her straight to the dispensary without waiting for a gurney."
Grant shuffled toward him. "If the transponder signal is getting through, DeFore will already be waiting."
Everyone in the Cerberus redoubt had been injected with a subcutaneous transponder that transmitted not just their general locations but heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the biolink transponder was a non- harmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual's glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis. The signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, one of the two satellites to which the installation was uplinked.
"With the weather conditions, we can't be sure they're receiving the signal," replied Kane. "Only a couple of weeks ago, the entire system was down, remember?"
Grant took a length of rope. "I'm glad one of us is thinking ahead."
"If one of us had thought ahead, we wouldn't even be in this goddamn place." Kane half snarled the words.
Grant didn't take offense. He knew the anger wasn't truly directed at him.
They maneuvered Brigid into the jump chamber and laid her on the floor. Grant closed the heavy armaglass door, and it locked with a click and a hiss. Immediately, the hexagonal disks in the floor and ceiling exuded a glow, and a low, almost subsonic hum began, quickly rising in pitch to a whine. The noise changed, sounding like the distant howling of a cyclone.
The glow brightened. A mist formed below the ceiling disks and rose from the floor. Tiny crackling static discharges flared in the vapor. The insubstantial tendrils thickened to a fog, curling around to engulf them.
Someone who had never traveled the hyper-dimensional pathways opened by the mat-trans units might wonder if the fog really existed or if it was an illusion, a figment of the imagination produced by a mind already in the process of being deconstructed and digitized. Kane knew it wasn't an illusion, but it wasn't really mist, either; it was plasma bleed-off, wave forms that only resembled vapor.
Regardless of what it really was, Kane felt grateful for the fog as it billowed over Brigid, obscuring her bloody, bandaged face.
Kane closed his eyes.
Chapter 10
Ka'in opened his eyes—and swayed in the saddle, grabbing the pommel and nearly dropping Gae Bolg, his war spear, in the process. Dibhirceach snorted, scolding him in equine to keep alert.
The morning sky was starkly blue. On either side of horse and man, tall stones inscribed with Ogham runes marked the boundaries of the counties traversed by the Boyne road. It was little more than a dirt track, winding down and around leading to the council hall near the banks of the river.
Ka'in peered through the road's border of copper beeches and heard a dim uproar of voices and laughter from beyond. He saw the great hall that would play host to the chieftains of all the clans this summer day. He glimpsed them milling about, their moods unusually festive for such a grim council.
He straightened in the high-canted saddle and glanced down at himself, feeling a faint shock of disorientation but not knowing why.
From hip to throat, supple molded leather encased him. The overlapping scales of polished steel on the breastplate caught the sun, sparkling and glinting. A crimson cloak fastened to his shoulders with golden torques given to him by King Conor flowed out behind him. In his right hand, he gripped the long, slender shaft of his war spear. From a leather scabbard at his hip swung a broadsword, the hilt and pommel worked in gold and precious stones.
The stallion beneath him uttered a challenging snort, turning his head to look at him. Then he broke wind explosively. Distractedly, Ka'in muttered, "Mind your manners, Dibhirceach. We're not particularly welcome down there as it is."
The name was taken from the Gaelic tongue and meant "vigilant." At the sound of his name, the stallion pricked his ears and nickered, pawing at the ground impatiently. The horse stood eighteen hands tall or more, very broad through the chest and hindquarters. Long muscles roped his long-legged frame, giving light to the truth that he was bred for war and battle, able to carry his master without fear.
