Outlanders 28 mad gods w.., p.24
Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath, page 24
David dropped into a groveling posture, his hooks clicking on the stone floor.
Maccan smiled genially at the three people. "Forgive him. He hates humans very much in general, and you three in particular."
Kane smiled condescendingly. "He just likes to threaten and scream and switch loyalties. It's who he is."
Maccan nodded. "I understand. I hope you understand why your own threats will never come to fruition."
Grant shrugged. "Your fused-out gnomes don't worry us as much as you think they should. We've had a lot more experience kicking their asses than you have ordering them around."
Maccan made a tsk sound of sympathy. "You are brave—all of you are brave, but like most humans, your courage derives from rash stupidity?'
"That might be so," Brigid said casually. "But we know what you're hoping to accomplish with the interphaser working in conjunction with the infrasound transmitter here in the pyramid."
"What I am hoping is of no importance to you, Brigid. You and your friends are so very close to death that I can only presume you are seeking to distract me by acting as if my intentions are childishly transparent. Please do not bore me further with such a display. All of you, Kane in particular, know I have some small degree of psychic ability."
Brigid recollected that Maccan had denied being a telepath, although he conceded a large number of the Tuatha de Danaan were adept in the art of mind manipulation. He claimed the human mind was very easy to trick, to feed illusions of invisibility and shape-shifting, abilities that folklore attributed to the Danaan. However, Maccan possessed the ability to interact with brain-wave patterns, to sense emotional states, intercepting intent, to receive flashes of insight.
"So what?" Kane demanded derisively. "There are plenty of psi-muties on Earth who could run rings around you—telepathically speaking. So you don't impress us by boasting about it."
Kane spoke the truth as he understood it. Mutants with obvious physical characteristics were dying out, partly due to the long campaigns of genocide waged by the baronies, but primarily because most of the human muties had reached evolutionary dead ends generations before.
The general supposition had always been that the muties, human and animal alike, were the unforeseen by-products of radiation and other mutagenics. Lakesh had indicated otherwise, claiming if radiation and/or chemicals were the sole cause, then logic dictated all human mutants would be similar, nor would the non- adaptive traits have lasted beyond a single generation. Genetic codes scrambled at random couldn't account for the many different monstrosities and deformities among men, women and animals.
According to Lakesh, most of the hordes of muties that once roamed the Outlands were the result of pantropic sciences, the deliberate practice of genetic engineering to create life forms able to survive and thrive in the post-nukecaust environment. However, one breed of human mutant that had increased geometrically since skydark was the so-called psi-mutie---people born with augmented extrasensory and precognitive mind powers. As Lakesh had said, these abilities weren't restricted to muties, since a few norms possessed them, as well, but generally speaking, non-mutated humans with advanced psionic powers were in the minority.
Maccan sighed as if Kane's comment vexed him. "Kane, I owe you a bloodletting, but I am not a vengeful man by nature. Nor do I easily forgive. You humiliated me and imprisoned me, and for that you must be duly punished."
Kane rolled his eyes in weary exasperation. "Oh, please. Do you have any idea how many assholes with attitudes have uttered that very same lousy cliché—"
Maccan's eyes flamed up as if the fires of hell erupted from the sockets. They instantly filled Kane's field of vision, overwhelming all of his perceptions. The shock was so unexpected, so terrible, he nearly collapsed. Time, space, the universe darkened and tilted.
His surroundings shattered into a kaleidoscope of flying fragments. He drifted among them and the sudden terror of it dragged a scream up his throat. He clamped his jaws shut on it. Quite suddenly he was in the pyramid again, standing in front of Maccan, surrounded by transadapts.
Kane's heart drummed in his chest and his head ached and his body was filmed with cold sweat. The psychic assault wasn't a fraction of the intensity of the one Maccan had inflicted upon him on the Moon, but he wasn't inclined to make a comparative analysis at the moment. He smiled contemptuously.
"Is that the best you can do?" he asked, trying to minimize the faint tremor in his voice.
Maccan's face lost its facade of gentle good humor. "By no means, Kane. Hasn't it occurred to you that I may choose to punish you by inflicting great pain, a maddening eternal agony on these two friends of yours?"
Kane swallowed hard, realizing anew that Maccan was no ordinary adversary. He briefly relived the terror he had felt of the man during their struggle in the lunar catacombs. He had always secretly feared he would one day cross swords with his superior, and during that fight his fear had seemed to come to life and take physical form.
He knew the statistics for survival in his chosen profession were discouragingly low, but so far he had beaten the odds. He couldn't deny he and his friends seemed to lead exceptionally charmed lives, but he knew his own personal string of good fortune couldn't last forever. He had made too many powerful enemies, brought too much hell in his wake.
Hearing the rapid respiration of Brigid behind him, Kane knew the same uncertainty about Maccan gripped her and probably Grant, as well. But he allowed none of his doubt to show on his face or to be heard in his voice as he said, "Point taken."
He retracted the Sin Eater into its holster and began to unstrap it from around his forearm.
FOR A LONG TIME, longer than Lakesh cared to recall, the damp stone walls, the dim light bulb burning overhead and the hard stone bench had been pretty much all of Mars he had been allowed to see. Set in the wall was a massive metal door with huge strap hinges of thick iron and a heavy lock in the center. The door looked as if it hadn't been opened in centuries and perhaps it hadn't until Maccan had pulled it open to admit him into the cell, many hours before.
He didn't resent being confined as long as he knew it was soon to end. After all, he had spent most of his adult life cloistered in installations like the Cerberus redoubt, so he was accustomed to going for days on end without seeing daylight or enjoying so much as a whiff of fresh air. He couldn't help but sourly note the irony that it was only after the Earth had become a nuke-blasted shockscape that he had come to appreciate the small things about it.
Lakesh had been imprisoned before, in the Cobalt- ville cell blocks, where most of his senses had been taken away from him except pain. Salvo, the crazed Magistrate, had been obsessed with forcing him to admit he was a high-ranking member of the Preservationists. Salvo had failed, but only because the Preservationists didn't exist. Many years before, Lakesh had created the Preservationist menace as a straw adversary, an alleged underground resistance movement that was pledged to deliver the hidden history of the world to a humanity in bondage.
Not that there weren't real-life post-skydark precedents for groups like the Preservationists. A century or more before, a loosely knit organization called the Heimdall Foundation had been formed to keep alive the science of astronomy and astrophysics.
And there was Ireland's Priory of Awen, whose origins could be traced back over a thousand years to its reputed founding by Saint Patrick himself. The Priory clergy, many of whom boasted descent from the Tuatha de Danaan, would no doubt be very distressed by Maccan's behavior.
Still and all, neither Maccan nor any of his people had abused Lakesh since their arrival in the Cydonia compound. However, a hook-handed transadapt made it abundantly clear he wouldn't be averse to employing his prosthetics for mutilation. For that matter, he knew Maccan's bodyguards, Raschid and Shayd, would gladly kill him given the slightest provocation to protect the true nature of humanity and its custodians—or masters.
Loathing once more rose up within him. Now he knew the Archons weren't the hidden masters of humanity, but custodians, created by two races who didn't belong on Earth, who hadn't evolved there. The Tuatha de Danaan and the Annunaki, despite all their influences on humankind's development, were from outside, and they feared some aspect of humanity's nature. He still didn't know what. Even after all his years of research and study, his work was pitifully incomplete and inadequate.
All he knew was that the Danaan and the Annunaki had created the so-called Archons to contain and control the masses of humankind. Humans, despite all their failings, had at least learned the concept of acknowledging that others of their kind had the right to freedom. True, they forgot easily and had to be reminded often—sometimes violently—but the history of respect for each other was there. Perhaps it was the sense of freedom, the desire to achieve spiritual liberty, that was so feared.
Lakesh sighed and shifted position on the hard bench. He shivered, despite the environmental suit he had been given by his captors upon their arrival in the Cydonia Compound. The temperature was uncomfortably low in the pyramid, perhaps only a few degrees above freezing. The suit's internal thermostats
Fortunately, Maccan needed his expertise with the interphaser and more than likely his knowledge of hyper-dimensional physics, as well. He couldn't help but wonder why, since he was certain Maccan's race had forgotten more about the subject than humanity was ever likely to learn. Of course, he reminded himself sourly, they had taken great pains to ensure humanity would never learn of the system at all.
It was an axiom of conspiracies that someone or something else always pulled the strings of willing or ignorant puppets. Lakesh had expended many years tracing those filaments back through convoluted and manufactured histories to the puppet masters themselves.
The strings led back to the very dawn of human history. Though Lakesh rarely strayed beyond the borders of science, even theoretical, he had made a study of ancient history, scanning very old texts for clues to Archon involvement in human evolution. He did not have to look very deeply before he realized the so-called alien/UFO phenomenon dated back well before the twentieth century, when it gripped public consciousness. In fact, the historical records of nonhuman influence on Earth ran uninterrupted from the very dawn of humankind to the present day.
Always it was the same; human beings as possessions, with a never-ending conflict bred between them, promoting spiritual decay and perpetuating conditions of unremitting physical hardship. And always, secret societies were created by human pawns to conceal and couldn't keep him warm without the helmet to complete the microenvironment.
Regardless of his physical discomfort, Lakesh still retained the sense of awe that almost suffocated him upon his first sight of the pyramid from the bullet car. Walking through the monument was like entering a long-lost world of the past, a world of the god Lugh, of the goddess Danu, of the Sidhe and the otherworld of Tir Na Nog and all of its fabulous wonders.
He didn't need to be informed the pyramid was honeycombed with rooms and passages. The light and the recycled air indicated a power source either activated or installed by Cydonia Compound colonists was still functional. Lakesh briefly wondered at the sheer number of man-killing hours the colonists had devoted to exploring and even excavating the vast monolith.
Thinking about such things kept his mind from wondering about the possibility of rescue or release and replaying his last sight of Domi. He felt rage rise and then subside in him He was a man of science and couldn't allow raw emotion to sway him now. He sensed with a bowel-tightening prescience that his time in the pyramid was running out.
Metal clanked loudly on the other side of the door, startling him so much he bit back a startled, profane cry. Lakesh quickly stood, resisting the impulse to back into a corner. He watched as the door swung slowly inward on squeaking hinges. Three black shadows glided in, and Lakesh felt his nape hairs prickle in an instant of superstitious dread. Then one of them spoke.
"Thought we'd drop by for a cup of that green Bengali tea you like so much," Kane said.
"Fresh out," Lakesh retorted, deadpan.
Chapter 21
The shadow suits lent Kane, Brigid and Grant a sinister aspect, but the garments had become important items in their ordnance and arsenal over the past few months. Ever since they'd absconded with the suits from Redoubt Yankee on Thunder Isle, the suits had proved their worth and their superiority to the poly- carbonate Magistrate armor, if for nothing else than their internal subsystems. Manufactured with a technique known in predark days as electrospin lacing, the electrically charged polymer particles formed a dense web of formfitting fibers. Composed of a compilated weave of spider silk, Monocrys and Spectra fabrics, the garments were essentially a single crystal metallic microfiber with a very dense molecular structure. The outer Monocrys sheathing turned opaque when exposed to radiation, and the Kevlar and Spectra layers provided protection against blunt trauma. The spider silk allowed flexibility, but it traded protection from firearms for freedom of movement.
The inner layer was lined by carbon nanotubes only a nanometer wide, rolled-up sheets of graphite with a tensile strength greater than steel. The suits were almost impossible to tear, but a high enough caliber bullet could penetrate them and, unlike the Mag exoskeletons, wouldn't redistribute the kinetic shock. Still, the material was dense and elastic enough to deflect knives and arrows.
"Surely you three didn't arrive in those clothes,"
Lakesh said.
Kane hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the doorway, where the woman named Shayd lurked. "We took them off so they could be searched."
"And to keep you from getting ideas about trying to escape," Shayd snapped. "You'd die in minutes."
"How long do we have to stay in here?" Brigid asked.
Shayd's lips twisted in a smirk. "Until one of us tells you to come out." -
She didn't pull the door closed, but stood just outside in the corridor, hand resting on the butt of her Gyrojet pistol.
"When did you return from California?" Lakesh asked.
"Yesterday evening," Brigid replied. "So you've been here for about thirty hours, give or take a few minutes?'
Lakesh nodded. "And what was the resolution of the mission there?"
"Unsatisfactory," answered Brigid bluntly, and she proceeded to provide him with a brief overview.
Making no comment, Lakesh's only response was to tug absently at his nose. "You don't seem very happy to see us," Kane commented, eyeing him darkly.
"In truth, I don't know how I feel," Lakesh replied frankly. "I had hoped to complete whatever task Mac can set for me, then be returned to Cerberus. But it's apparent now he's been waiting for your arrival before proceeding." Seeing the alarm spreading across Lakesh's face, Brigid said hastily, "Reba says she'll make a full recovery. She took a jolt of infrasound."
"Proceeding with what?" Grant inquired. The expression of alarm on Lakesh's face changed to one of simmering anger. "I was there—I saw it. Maccan used the Silver Hand of Nuadhu on her. Poor child. As if she hasn't been through enough in her young life."
Lakesh shrugged. "I confess I'm not quite sure, but I think it may have something to do with aligning the energy helixes of the interphaser and the pyramid's transmitter." "So you made the Nuadhu connection, too?" Kane asked, wanting to steer the conversation away from Domi's suffering, particularly with Grant in the same
Kane nodded as if everything now ad made perfect sense. "I see. And Baptiste here thought he was fooling around with a silly theory about mirror matter."
Lakesh's eyebrows rose toward his hairline, and the glance he threw toward Brigid was full of surprise and admiration. "Dearest Brigid, that's exactly what I think!" A toothy grin split his face. "You've made up my mind. I am very glad you're here." "It was a fairly obvious one to make?' Lakesh stated. "Certainly with what we've learned about the Danaan's science of sonic manipulation. Evidently, Maccan's gauntlet emits a tightly focused infrasound envelope, but like the wands in use by the hybrids, it can't propagate destructive waves over an extended distance."
Grant glowered at him "Don't get all giddy on us. We're unarmed and outnumbered and at the mercy of a mad god." "Oh really?" Kane challenged. "The op center looked as if it had been used for artillery practice."
Lakesh regarded him reprovingly. "A mad god? I seriously contest any assertion of Maccan's divinity, sane or otherwise." "Yes," Lakesh snapped impatiently. "That's because most of the damage was caused by conventional firearms:'
Grant's lips moved beneath his mustache in a slight smile. "Domi coined the phrase, not me. She—" "Mebbe so," Grant growled. "But his glove is still damn dangerous. I read up on infrasound weapon experiments after our first exposure to the wands. We were very lucky that when the wands resonated with our body cavities our internal organs didn't turn into jelly. Probably the only reason they didn't was because of our Mag armor. So don't try to tell us Mac- can's glove is primarily for show."
"Domi!" cried Lakesh excitedly, eyes alight. "She's all right? You spoke with her?"
