Outlanders 28 mad gods w.., p.21
Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath, page 21
The oppressive silence made the passageways feel haunted by the ghosts of all the people who had died during the Cydonia struggle.
Brigid, Grant and Kane followed corridors lit by luminous neon bands that ran along the curved ceiling. When they reached an intersection Grant asked, unconsciously lowering his voice, "Where do we go from here?"
Brigid said, "If I recall correctly—"
"And there's no reason why you shouldn't," Kane broke in.
She ignored the interruption, gesturing to their right. "This way leads to the residential habitats."
The three walked for a score of yards in silence. When they reached a wide, outward bulging niche in the tunnel wall, Brigid stopped and touched a button. A shutter slid up, affording them a exterior view of the compound. The midmorning light came through the transparent port, the sun hovering a hands breadth over the rust-red horizon in a salmon-pink sky.
Beyond a fenced-in perimeter spread a seemingly endless desert of orange-red sand. Low ridges rose naked from the desolate landscape and grew into a distant, barren mountain range. Many miles to the west rose a vast bulk of stone, a smoothly contoured formation that resembled a slightly squashed mesa.
Windblown sand had piled high in drifts all around the perimeter of the colony. Windmills, water towers, trenches and solar reflectors were placed in functional patterns. Clusters of domes made of dull metal humped up from the sand like half-buried balls connected by tubes. Each one was connected to the others by tubes composed of the same material. Domes with translucent plastic roofs covered blurry green areas, which they guessed were vegetable gardens.
In the far distance they saw a range of stone shouldering up from rock-strewed and barren ground. Lowering his gaze, Kane saw a small object squatting on the ground between two of the tube-tunnels. Flat-topped and suspended by an assembly of tread-enclosed rollers, it looked vaguely like a toy version of a Sandcat.
The machine rested in exactly the same position as he had last seen it, when Sindri had identified it as the Mars Pathfinder, landed by NASA in the late 1990s. According to him, the mission had been a cover story to help to quell rumors they were deliberately concealing facts from the American citizenry about the discovery of ancient Martian artifacts.
Within the perimeter of the fence, rust-hued sand spread, piling up in dunes at the bases of the domes. A few of the habitats were larger than others, their exteriors faintly etched with window lines. They contained barracks, manufacturing facilities and even nurseries for transadapt children.
A rusty patina of granules covered every surface. At least once every Martian year, hurricane-force winds whipped up vast dust storms all over the surface of the planet. When Mars was closest to the sun, the storms developed in the southern hemisphere and the winds roared across the desert at three hundred miles per hour.
"Place looks about as inviting as the last time we visited," Grant said darkly.
Kane pointed out through the portal. "Those look new. They're not covered by dust, anyway."
Resting on the ground, on the opposite side of the fence, about one hundred yards away, they saw an array of long, open, flat-decked craft with low side- walls. They resembled pix of bobsleds Kane had seen, but were about twice as long.
Brigid squinted toward them. "What are they?"
Grant gave them a brief visual examination and grunted. "Who cares. I'm more interested in where the transadapts might've gotten to."
"On Parallax Red, maybe?" Kane ventured.
"Maybe," Brigid said doubtfully. "But after the damage we caused the last time we were there, I don't think there are enough transadapts to manage major repairs. The station wouldn't have been able to sustain the entire colony."
Kane nodded in reluctant agreement. "They've got to be someplace. Either here or..."
He trailed off and Grant shot him an inquisitive, impatient look. "Here or where? The pyramid?"
"That would be my guess."
The three people began walking again, their feet almost soundless on the rubbery composition of the floor. Grant remarked tersely, "I'm a lot less interested in the whereabouts of the transadapts than Maccan and his crew."
"I have a feeling that if we find the one, we'll find the other," Kane replied offhandedly. Addressing Brigid, he asked, "Have you given any more thought to a connection between the interphaser and the pyramid?"
She hesitated before answering, "I have. But I want to take a look at the structure first and refresh my memory before I put my theory into words and leave myself open to ridicule."
Kane regarded her with a wide-eyed look of hurt innocence. "Now, who would do that, Baptiste?"
"I can't imagine," she retorted sarcastically. "You've always proved yourself so four-square supportive of all my flights of fancy."
"Please," he said stolidly. "My modesty—"
"Doesn't lend itself to close inspection, Kane."
She smiled wryly to let him know she was only joking. When she and Kane were first thrown together, their relationship had been volatile, marked by frequent quarrels, jealousies and resentments. The world in which she came of age was primarily quiet, focused on scholarly pursuits. Kane's world, wherein he'd become accustomed to daily violence, was supported by a belief system that demanded a ruthless single-mindedness to enforce baronial authority.
Both people had their gifts. Most of what was important to people in the twenty-second century came easily to Kane—survival skills, prevailing in the face of adversity and cunning against enemies. But he could also be reckless, high-strung to the point of instability and given to fits of rage.
Brigid on the other hand, was compulsively tidy and ordered, with a brilliant analytical mind. However her clinical nature, the cool scientific detachment upon which she prided herself, sometimes blocked an understanding of the obvious human factor in any given situation.
Regardless of their contrasting personalities, Kane and Brigid worked very well as a team, playing on each other's strengths rather than contributing to their individual weaknesses. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, the two people managed to forge the chains of partnership, which linked them together through mutual respect and trust.
Only once had the links of that chain been stretched to a breaking point. More than a year before Kane had shot and killed a woman, a distant relative of Brigid's, whom he'd perceived as a threat to her life. It had taken her some time to realize that under the confusing circumstances, Kane had had no choice but to make a snap judgment call. Making split-second, life-and-death decisions was part of his conditioning and training in the Magistrate Division, as deeply ingrained as breathing.
What conflicted her during that time was not the slow process of forgiving him, but coming to terms with what he really was and accepting the reality rather than an illusion. He was a soldier, not an explorer, an academic or an intellectual.
When she'd finally understood that about him, the two had achieved a synthesis of attitudes and styles where they functioned as colleagues and parts of a team, extending to the other professional courtesies and respect.
As they followed a bend in the tube-tunnel, the motion detector on Brigid's wrist suddenly emitted a discordant, warning beep. They came to immediate halts, Sin Eaters snapping up and questing for targets.
Brigid stretched out her left arm and the motion sensor's screen lit up with a wavery green line. She swept the device slowly back and forth. The line slid from one side of the screen to the other, formed a dot and froze in a central position. The dot shifted position and the device emitted a second electronic beep.
"Definitely a moving contact," Brigid breathed. "Coming this way."
They waited in tense postures, fingers lightly touching the trigger studs of their pistols. They heard a steady, shuffling scuff and scuttle as of leather sliding over stone. Then the troll shambled around the bend, his spraddle-legged gait causing him to list slightly from side to side.
He wasn't much more than three and a half feet tall, his heavy jawed face sunk between the broad yoke of his shoulders. His beady, black eyes glittered from the shadows of deep sockets. Coarse, straight black hair fell over his retreating forehead. It bore streaks of gray. He wore a frayed coverall garment of drab olive-green.
Brigid inhaled sharply in astonishment when she recognized him. His round gnome's head was still too large for his pipe-stem neck, and his tiny bare feet were still calloused an inch thick on the soles, with nine long, undercurving toes on each one.
The tenth toe was exceptionally long, nearly the length of the foot itself, projecting out at a forty-five- degree angle near the heel. It looked like a double-jointed thumb, topped by a yellow horny nail, caked with dirt to the cuticle.
But the last time they had seen David, his abnormally long arms hadn't terminated in a pair of steel hooks that curved up from metal cups over the stumps of his wrists.
Chapter 18
If Kane had expected to encounter any of the transadapts, he certainly hadn't anticipated it would be David. The troll's blunt face reflected Kane's own surprise and he recoiled, more from caution than fear of the three humans looming over him. The cold glitter in his black eyes betrayed the real hatred boiling away in the little man.
"Well, well," Kane said with a calm he didn't feel. "Little David, Sindri's chief hench-dwarf and personal chef. I didn't expect to see you alive."
"I bet you didn't," David countered in his high-pitched voice, sibilant with spite. He held up his hooks. "I almost wish you hadn't."
"I don't know what you're complaining about," Grant said, gesturing with his Sin Eater to the little man's feet. "You've got a whole extra set."
David's swart face screwed up as if he intended to spit at Grant, but he contented himself by balancing on one splayed foot and performing a passable imitation of giving Grant the finger with the middle toe of the other one.
Kane repressed a smile, reflecting that the bodies of the transadapts were designed to be superior to that of the normal human physique—at least on Mars. The fact that human beings stood erect against Earth's gravity posed problems that were solved by skeletal and body-mass modifications by Overproject Excalibur's genetic engineers.
They changed the image of humanity to fit the environment of Mars—shrinking its stature, giving it a permanent hunched-over posture, increasing the length of the arms while shortening the legs. They rearranged the foot bones, moving the big toe toward the heel and extending it outward, transforming the digit into a double-jointed opposable thumb.
The legs had been modified to become a second pair of arms to provide extra anchorage in a near- weightless environment. The geneticists enclosed the major organs of the transadapts within their own independent shielding of dense tissue and protected the genitalia within a convenient pouch.
As efficient as the bodies of the transadapts might have been, they were still freaks of nature and couldn't live comfortably on Earth with its increased atmospheric pressure and higher oxygen content. Sindri had lied to them about leading them on an exodus to the planet that had birthed their ancestors.
Dreams of empire consumed Sindri. After living his entire life under the heel of a minority human ruling committee, he was fixated on establishing his own kingdom, regardless of the cost. To that end, he planned a double strike, which would not only unseat the barons on Earth but also literally destroy Mars, his birthplace and the world he despised.
That was only one element of Sindri's plan. Even if he and his transadapts migrated to Earth, the males were still sterile, the women barren and utter extinction was less than thirty years away. He realized their only chance for survival was to successfully hybridize their genetic structure with those of native Terrans, so the women at least could reproduce. When Kane, Grant and Brigid had arrived on Parallax Red via the gateway, Sindri saw them as both fonts of information about Earth and the salvation of the transadapts.
Captured and taken to the Cydonia compound, Sindri saw to the removal of sperm from Grant and Kane, and ovum from Brigid. He intended to create recombinant gametes, new combinations of chromosomes, which could be implanted into the females. What he didn't know, nor did Kane at the time, was that like the women transadapts, Brigid was barren due to radiation exposure some months before.
Kane indicated David's pair of hooks with the barrel of his Sin Eater. "Who fixed you up like that?"
David raised his wrists, the light glinting dully from the cups. "Sindri, who else?"
"Right;' he muttered. "Who else."
David had lost his hands when he'd tried to prevent the three of them from gating out of the compound. He'd fired Brigid's appropriated Uzi at them, and Kane had had no choice but to return the fire with a blast of infrasound from an equally appropriated harp weapon. When the rounds in the subgun exploded, so had the transadapt's hands.
"I thought for sure you'd have bled to death," said Kane, trying not to make too obvious a show of staring past David into the passageway beyond him.
Brigid took it upon herself to respond to Kane's remark. "I imagine all the transadapts were bred with the ability to seal off epidermal punctures to protect the internal organs and tissues from the effects of zero pressure."
David ignored her observation. "What are you big 'uns doing back here? Sindri is long, long gone." "We're not looking for Sindri," Grant said. "We know just where the little pissant is. We're looking for a friend."
"A friend?" David's tone was skeptical.
"He was brought here against his will," Brigid put in. "I don't suppose you've seen him, have you?"
David's lips writhed back over his stumpy, discolored teeth in a fair imitation of a mocking smirk. "And if I did, do you think I'd tell you?"
Kane matched his smirk, taking a menacing step toward him. "Not without a little persuasion, which we're highly motivated to do."
David glared up at him with eyes like wet pieces of obsidian. Then, with a burst of scuttling motion, he spun around and vanished down the passageway. Kane gaped in astonishment for a couple of seconds, nonplussed by the troll's speed, even though he had seen demonstrations of it from his kind in the past.
Kane sprinted down the passageway, his helmet bumping with an annoying rhythm against his back. Brigid and Grant ran close behind him Kane saw no sign of David, but he heard the rapid slap-slap of the troll's bare feet on the floor ahead of him.
Once again he was impressed by the speed of the transadapts. Although one of his strides equaled three made by David, the little man still eluded him. He decided when next he caught so much as a glimpse of David's shadow, he would open up with his Sin Eater.
The passageway opened up into an intersection, where the tube-tunnels extended into four directions. As he ran to the hub, he heard Brigid blurt breathlessly, "Be careful! He could be leading us into a—"
Brigid's voice was overwhelmed by the sudden rush of feet and labored breathing, lunging from both sides. Kane caught glimpses of two small figures darting out of the mouths of the shafts.
In his eagerness to strike the first blow, David leaped at Kane with both arms extended. The sharpened points of his hooks could have hamstrung the much larger man, if Kane hadn't pivoted at the waist. He caught David by the left wrist and yanked him forward on his own momentum. He kicked him hard in the rear, sending him sprawling almost under the feet of Grant.
As the troll tried to bound back to his feet, Grant drove the toe of a boot into his face. The sound of teeth splintering under the impact was loud and grisly in the confined space. David fell flat onto his back, uttering a gargling cry, blood spraying from his mouth.
At the same instant another transadapt, this one just as small but with a white-blond mop of shaggy hair, sprang at Kane. He struck savagely at his face with a long-handled instrument that resembled a three-clawed gardening tool. The prongs missed cutting furrows in Kane's eyes by a fractional margin and the down-stroke buried the points in the floor.
As he struggled to wrench it free, Kane brought up his right knee and slammed the little man in the chest, knocking him backward. He staggered into the wall. The way was clear for Kane and Grant to open up with full-auto fire, but the risk of puncturing the tube-tunnel walls was very high. Besides, Kane wanted live sources of information, not dead gnomes.
The blond transadapt made a move to grasp the handle of his weapon and Kane kicked at it. While he was still off balance, he heard Brigid cry out in wordless alarm and he felt steel-muscled arms encircle his knees. He went down heavily, snarling out a profanity.
David released Kane's legs and swung wildly with his hooks at Kane's face, squealing in fury, spitting a mixture of blood and broken teeth. Kane tried to fend the troll off, trying to catch him by the forearms to restrain him The effort reminded him anew of just how deceptively strong the transadapts were.
Brigid kneed David in the kidneys, slamming him over Kane's body and slapping him face-first against a curved tunnel wall. Brigid pinned him there, knee against the small of his back, hands gripping his shoulders.
