Outlanders 28 mad gods w.., p.1
Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath, page 1
Prologue
A silence as deep and still as the white pumice deserts of the Moon's Mare Imbrium draped the tomb of Maccan. When Eduardo Vega caught that singularly sepulchral concept slinking through his consciousness, he tried to stomp on it and crush it out. The big, vault- walled room was not a tomb, he told himself fiercely, only a storage chamber. The star shine flowing down from a round skylight in the high, arched roof proved that without a doubt, even though it glinted dully on two objects resembling high-tech Egyptian sarcophagi.
The filtered illumination struck highlights on the stacked metal crates and the hand tools scattered atop the long trestle tables. Most of the crates were stenciled with the legend NASA and a few others read DEVIL/Manitius Base. Pieces of machinery lay scattered on the floor. Various areas around the warehouse were piled with debris, separated by their materials for future recycling.
The walls, ceiling and floor of the storage chamber formed one continuous surface to make a huge, hollow ellipse that measured out to a hundred feet in diameter. When in it, Eduardo always felt as if he were trapped within the center of an impossibly gargantuan ball.
From the curving walls of the chamber jutted platforms connected by a series of cage-enclosed lifts and crossed girders. Tall, Y-shaped induction pylons sprouted from the floor, but their ceramic surfaces were blackened with soot. Between two of the pylons stood a pair of oblong pedestals, nearly seven feet long. Four small pyramids crafted from pale golden alloy were placed at equidistant points around them. Resting on pedestals were smooth, crystalline ovoids made of translucent materials, both of which canted at forty-five-degree angles.
Climbing off the stool on which he had half dozed for the better part of an hour, Eduardo wiped his eyes with the heel of his left hand. From his right wrist a radiophone dangled by a leather strap. He squinted up at the skylight. Space looked unchanging. The deep, jet-black emptiness, alleviated only by the bright, tiny pinpoints of stars, was the canopy of eternity overhanging the Manitius Moon base. He snorted at his own poetic turn of thought.
The radiophone suddenly crashed with a blend of static and an angry male voice. "Eduardo! Goddamn you! Eddie!"
Eduardo winced at Morisette's tone as he thumbed the transmit key. "I'm here, Gabe. What's the problem?"
"You're ten minutes overdue for your check-in! If I come down there and find you asleep again—" "You'll what?" Eduardo broke in harshly. "Court-martial me? No, wait, you can't do that, 'cause I'm a civilian, just like you are. Exile me to Earth? Oh, that would be a fucking shame, wouldn't it? I couldn't pull guard duty in these lovely surroundings anymore. Oh, boo-hoo, that would just shatter me!"
The comm accurately transmitted Morisette's deep sigh. "You drew the short straw this week, Eddie."
"Don't remind me." Eduardo tried to smooth some of the sharper edges of anger from his voice. "I don't see any point in posting guards here. That elf-eared son of a bitch isn't going anywhere."
In a tone of aggrieved patience, Morisette retorted, "You know damn well we're not worried about him going anywhere...but keeping somebody else from coming along to fetch him, to wake him up, is the mission statement."
Eduardo snorted in derision at Morisette's use of military jargon. "Oh, please. Saladin is dead. If Mac has any followers left, they're out scrounging in the Wild Lands. They wouldn't come back here."
"That's why we post guards, dumbass. To make sure they won't come back. I'm tired of arguing with you. Just be a little more on the ball when the next check-in time comes around."
Morisette signed off with an autocratic click. For a moment Eduardo wrestled with the urge to reestablish radio contact just so he could tell the man to kiss his ass, both in Spanish and French.
The urge passed and Eduardo began to make a circuit of the room, trying to work a kink out of his back in the process. As he passed one of the stasis canisters, he caught his reflection in the rounded crystalline cover. He glimpsed a middle-aged man slightly below medium height, wearing a dark brown coverall. His complexion was of a similar hue and his long black hair framed a deeply scarred face.
The scars had been inflicted well over a year ago by a carnobot under the control of Megaera, but she was thoroughly dead, killed—according to Brewster Philboyd—by Maccan himself. He could only hope the mechanoid that had permanently disfigured him was equally inactive, as well.
He glanced over at the second cryostasis canister and repressed a shiver. If the storage room could be called a tomb, then that particular stasis unit was a coffin or a sarcophagus. But neither the hollow chamber nor the canister was exactly what Eduardo found himself mentally identifying them as.
The big room was little more than a warehouse, holding the odds and ends left over from the construction of the Moon base two centuries earlier. The colony wasn't much to see, but it represented twenty- some years of tremendous labor, conducted largely in secret between the 1970s and the late 1990s. Most of the base had been hollowed out of the rock of the regolith, the inner wall of the Manitius Crater. A network of conduits and ventilation shafts supplied air to most of the colony, and machines called grav-stators transmitted Earth-normal gravity fields.
Out on the flat plateau on the floor of the crater, a sprawling solar power station had been built. This was an arrangement of metal frames holding reflective semiconductor chips that stored and converted solar energy to electricity. Much of the solar power was directed toward the big hydroponic gardens enclosed within the main part of the base. The individual sections were roofed with domes of transparent plastic. Plants of all kinds grew in beds of fertilized soil. For many years the vegetable gardens had served as the source of most of the food for the colony.
Eduardo swallowed a sigh, thinking back to the long months he had lived on the lunar colony before entering cryostasis to relieve some of the strain on the base's limited resources. After the nukecaust of 2001 forever separated three hundred and thirty human beings from the world of their birth, they'd had no choice but to make the colony self-sustaining. At first the base personnel fabricated everything they needed—or they'd tried to do so. Fortunately, even before the nukecaust, rich veins of gold, copper and iron ore had been discovered and mined in areas outside the Manitius Crater. Then other items had been found and the reasons to continue with the manufacturing process had become less immediate.
Thinking about those other items caused the flesh between Eduardo's shoulder blades to prickle. At the faint scuff of a footfall, he whirled, every nerve end tingling. Someone was walking down the narrow passageway just outside the open hatch.
Swiftly he returned to his stool, reaching for the pulse-plasma emitter leaning against the bulkhead. The weapon, known colloquially as a quartz cremator, looked like the skeleton of a rifle made of polished glass overlaid with ceramic. The sectionalized barrel terminated in a long cylinder made of a crystalline substance. He cradled it in his arms as the footsteps, interspersed with the clink of metal, grew louder. Despite realizing that whoever strode down the corridor wasn't making any effort to be stealthy, a sense of imminent peril crept over Eduardo.
He rested his fingers on the firing plate just as a figure appeared in the hatchway. He heard a startled intake of breath. "For God's sake, Eddie—"
George Neukirk gaped at the quartz cremator with wide, alarmed eyes. Eduardo gusted out a profanity- seasoned sigh and lowered the weapon. "For God's sake yourself, George. What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were down in Cerberus."
Neukirk nodded and stepped farther into the room, his eyes darting nervously from Eduardo to the pulse- plasma emitter. He was a short, chunky man with seamed, weather-beaten features and a white crew cut. He wore a gray, zippered coverall cinched at the waist by a wide leather tool belt. Wrenches and various sizes of screwdrivers dangled from it.
"I'm up here servicing a replacement TAV," he replied in his gravelly voice. "One of the two Mantas flown to Cerberus was shot down over India a couple of weeks ago, remember?"
Eduardo nodded. "Right. Grant was the pilot."
Neukirk shrugged. "Just figured I'd stop by and say hello before I gated back. Thought you might want some company."
"Thanks," replied Eduardo sardonically. "But I've got company." He turned, gesturing to the cryo canister. "Mac's a great conversationalist."
Neukirk's chuckle sounded forced. "He did have the gift of gab."
Eduardo walked toward the unit. "Beats me why Kane doesn't just drag this thing out to the surface and open it up. Mac wanted to die anyhow."
"There was some discussion along those lines," Neukirk said. "But everybody thinks Mac might be a good source of information...providing he can be controlled?'
Eduardo nodded distractedly, stopping beside the sarcophagus. Beneath the crystal cover, it seemed filled with a cloudy substance like smoke that had been frozen in mid-swirl. He touched the transparent surface, and the vapor within the ovoid immediately cleared.
Within it appeared Maccan, his long fingers curved like talons, the tips flattened against the inside of the lid, his eyes wide and wild but unseeing. His expression was locked in a contortion of fury. All the color seemed to have been leached from his body. His form had the appearance of pale blue ice, not only in color but composition. Even a spattering of blood on the side of his face was black, like splashes of ink. The blood had trickled from a wound Kane had inflicted.
Eduardo could see that Maccan, even lying half prone, was a little over six feet in height, but so exceptionally lean he a
His limbs were encased in a black, skintight covering, and an assortment of brightly colored cloths decorated his almost emaciated frame, giving him a scarecrow-like appearance. A yellow rag around his hips served as either a sash or a belt, and another length of bright green fabric was knotted around his left thigh for no apparent purpose.
Maccan's face was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the smaller V of his pursed lips. His long, narrow nose looked delicate, with tiny nostrils. His eyes were abnormally large and back-slanted, but without the epicanthic folds of the Asian. Because of the polarizing effect of the stasis chamber, Eduardo couldn't tell their color, only that they were dark. His smooth skin was marred by a curve of scar tissue along his right cheek.
The man's unnaturally long fingers bore many sigil and talismanic rings. One was a loop of iron embossed with a cup-and-spiral glyph. Another glittered with a hexagonal red stone. Each ring was fashioned from a different substance—crystal, metal, gems and even what looked like polished, lacquered wood.
A mane of iron-gray hair grew outward from a point on his forehead and swept down from high, flat temples. It was brushed back behind his ears to fall in a loose tumble around his shoulders. Maccan's ears were positioned very low on his jawline, and though they lay close to the sides of his head and weren't large, they tapered to upswept points.
"Sometimes," Neukirk murmured from behind Eduardo, "I wonder if we weren't better off not reestablishing contact with Earth."
Eduardo removed his hand from the humped crystal cover and the smoky vapor within it immediately swirled around the figure of Maccan again, obscuring it from view. The stasis unit was an encapsulated survival system that froze a subject in an impenetrable bubble of space and time, slowing to a stop all metabolic processes. He grasped only a little of the technology involved, but he knew it was of extraterrestrial origin.
Turning to face Neukirk, he asked, "What do you mean?"
Neukirk reached behind him with his right hand. "I mean—" he whipped his hand back around "—knowing about postnuke Earth put all sorts of ideas in my head. Like how to get the hell away from it."
Eduardo's thought processes felt paralyzed, numbed by bewildered shock when he finally realized the rail pistol gripped in Neukirk's hand was trained on him. The pistol held the general configuration of a revolver, but instead of cylinder, a small round ammo drum was fitted into the place where there would normally be a trigger guard. The gun had no trigger, just a curving switch inset into the grip.
The slender barrel stretched to nearly ten inches in length. Made of a lightweight alloy resembling dulled chrome, the rail pistol utilized a system of tiny electromagnets to launch an explosive projectile of tungsten carbine at a fantastically high muzzle velocity. A unit of energy inside the grip propelled the projectile out of the barrel at a speed of nearly 15 miles per second. In a vacuum, the velocity would be closer to 35 miles per second, with absolutely no recoil.
Eduardo was intimately and uncomfortably familiar with the destructive effects of the long-barreled hand weapons. Not too long ago, he'd used one of the rail guns to destroy a marauding carnobot. He inhaled deeply and as he exhaled, he demanded, "What the fuck is this about, George?"
Neukirk gestured with the pistol. "Drop the cremator, Eddie."
Eduardo hesitated for only a second. He dropped his emitter to the deck. Responding to another jerk of the rail pistol's barrel, he stepped away from it. "Why are you doing this?"
Neukirk grinned, showing the edges of his teeth. "I'm asserting myself." His voice sounded like two steel plates striking one another edge-on. "I've been one of Maccan's people for months, nearly a year."
Eduardo's lips worked as if he was trying to spit or to scream. Finally he managed to husk out, "Maccan's a maniac, George! He wanted to kill himself and take the whole damn solar system with him!"
Neukirk nodded agreeably. "I'm not saying he's perfect, but since the DEVIL platform imploded, he probably won't be so fixated on suicide."
"You'll give him a hobby?" Eduardo demanded. "Like what, knitting?"
"We already have something ready to occupy his attention."
"'We?" Eduardo echoed incredulously. "You've hooked back up with those idiots who believe he's a god?"
Neukirk shrugged. "He's not a perfect god, I'll admit. But he's about the most reasonable facsimile I'm liable to run into in my lifetime."
Eduardo squeezed his eyes shut, feeling terror knot in the pit of his stomach like lengths of slimy rope. Hoarsely he said, "Mac is just as likely to tear your eyes out as thank you if you revive him. What can you gain from freeing him? He wants followers, not colleagues!'
Neukirk's lips compressed. "There are less worthy pursuits for someone of my intelligence and talent."
Opening his eyes, Eduardo uttered a sneering laugh. "Name two, Georgie."
Neukirk's face twisted into a something ugly. "I've only got time for one. Goodbye, Eddie. "
He squeezed the trigger switch of the rail gun. A pellet no larger than a shirt button sped from the long barrel with a sound like a piece of wet cloth being ripped in two. It punched Eduardo in the chest and exploded at the instant of impact, pulverizing his clavicle and all the bones in his rib cage. The detonation was not necessary, since hydrostatic shock instantly stopped his heart. He careened backward, his feet completely leaving the floor.
Arms and legs flailing, blood foaming from his mouth in a crimson fountain, Eduardo Vega flew nearly half the length of the chamber and almost through the hatch. He struck the deck with a wet slap, his body twisting and writhing, legs kicking feebly.
His legs were still twitching in post mortem spasms when seven people strode into the storage facility, all of them looking around alertly. They wore steel-gray armored EVA suits, known in the old NASA vernacular as "hard" suits. Designed for high-impact resistance and to deflect the penetration of micrometeorites, the extravehicular activity suits were the late-twentieth-century versions of medieval battle armor. However, none of the people who marched into the warehouse—four men and three women—wore the helmets.
They paid no attention to Eduardo's corpse except to shift position to keep from bloodying their boots in the dark, wide pool spreading out around his body.
A woman marched up to Neukirk. "You sure you know how to operate these units, George?" Despite the feminine timbre of the voice, her tone was harsh, both an inquiry and a challenge.
Neukirk turned toward her, forcing a smile to his face. "I'm not like you, Shayd, or the rest of your crew. I was born in a world of technology, so I don't fear it as something arcane I can never master. Besides, keep in mind I was in cryostasis myself for most of my two hundred years on this turd ball.
Shayd stiffened at the patronizing bite in Neukirk's response. Nearly a full head taller than Neukirk, she was a good deal leaner and longer of limb, as well. Her angular, café-au-lait face was set in a grim mask, her long, yellow-streaked hair tied up in a knot atop her head.
Her large pewter-colored eyes regarded him unblinkingly. Faint scars showed on the left side of her face, one of them bisecting her eyebrow.
A ten-inch bowie knife lay in a canvas scabbard across her belly. The square butt of a Gyrojet rocket pistol protruded from the top of a vacuum-formed plastic holster attached to the right thigh of her space suit. The pistol looked like a toy made of stamped tin, but it fired 13 mm rocket rounds. The percussion primers of the projectiles were surrounded by a ring of four canted exhaust ports that propelled the round. The Gyrojet was a weapon perfectly suited for combat on the surface of the Moon, inasmuch as its range and penetration power were far greater than those of a standard firearm in an atmosphere.
