Outlanders 28 mad gods w.., p.27
Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath, page 27
The oxygen in the pit wasn't sufficient to maintain the fire for very long, but before it was extinguished, his cape was little more than a scorched rag. His gauntlet, the deadly Silver Hand of Nuadhu, spit little sparks. Its artfully crafted silver segments were blackened, half-slagged scrap metal. The lens on the palm looked like a cheap bauble made of glass.
Struggling to his feet, Kane saw that the wave of force had extended outward from the platform and flattened all the people on the ledge. Raschid and Shayd stirred feebly. The transadapts lay sprawled and unmoving. Without the hard suits, they had taken the full brunt of the feedback pulse.
A strange dark halo shimmered from the crystal cluster, expanding like a wave sweeping outward. Kane felt the throb of it within his skull.
Lakesh, sounding half-strangled, gasped, "We must get out of here—the vibrations of the resonator are building to critical mass."
Temples feeling as if they were caught in a vise, Kane began a shambling sprint across the walkway, muttering, "I figured it was something like that."
He glanced back once. From the facets of the cluster, great whorls of color spiraled out, growing in size and brilliance like immense flame flowers blossoming into life. He saw Brigid running after him
Lakesh stepped onto the walkway, intending to follow Brigid, but a steel-hewed arm encircled his neck from behind and jerked him off his feet.
Maccan sent Lakesh reeling almost to the very edge of the platform, but Grant snatched him by the wrist and hauled him back.
Without a word, Grant closed in on the crimson-eyed Maccan. He threw the first punch, but Maccan brushed it aside with a forearm and sidestepped, avoiding another blow. Grant moved in quickly and pounded two solid punches to the man's midsection. He took them without even so much as a grunt of pain. With his right arm, Maccan aimed another blow at his face. He managed to catch Grant's right wrist and bore down, grinding flesh and tendon against bone, trying to force him to his knees.
Teeth clenched, Grant resisted. He wasn't a small man by any standards, but in Maccan's grip he felt like a child. The Danaan grinned, showing his teeth, eyes blazing like two coals dug out of the hearth of hell.
Grant locked his gaze on Maccan's face and refused to bend. In his mind and heart, it wasn't a struggle between man and man, but between ancient ways and new, between the concepts of master and slave. Anger washed over him like a tide as an image of Domi, barely able to move or to talk, filled his mind.
Unexpectedly, Grant bent at the knees, as if being forced down, then he lunged forward, passing under Maccan's arm on his right side, turning and dragging his arm backward, forcing it in a direction neither human nor Danaan arms were designed to bend.
He twisted it up into a hammerlock and seized a handful of Maccan's long hair with his left hand. He slammed him face-first against the dais, cranked his captured elbow skyward, levering it up until he heard a mushy crack. Maccan screamed a very ungodlike scream of utter agony and sagged to his knees, the side of his face pressing against the conduit. There was a sizzle as of meat on a hot griddle, and he screamed again, throwing himself away from it. His pale face bore a red streak of seared, blistered flesh.
He tried hooking Grant's leg with his own, but Grant simply dropped on top of him, his fist striking him on the point of the chin and bouncing his head against one of the interlacing loops of the Celtic knot design.
His face a half mask of blood and burned flesh, Maccan was somehow able to reach up with his left hand to catch Grant's down-plunging fist. It didn't stop Grant's right fist, which came down like a rock on the side of Maccan's head.
Maccan's head rolled to the side and he didn't move, his grip loosening and falling away from Grant's fist. Panting, Grant crouched atop him, as if suspecting a trick, hand raised to strike him again. But Maccan didn't stir and Grant slowly pulled himself erect, swayed for a second, then staggered out onto the walkway. Lakesh came after him
"Are you all right, friend Grant?" asked Lakesh anxiously.
Grant opened his mouth to reply, then felt a shattering blow between his shoulder blades that turned the pit into a spinning carousel of light and darkness, pin-wheeling crazily away. He heard Lakesh cry out in alarm and anger. He let himself fall, catching himself on his hands and knees, trying to drag air into his laboring lungs.
Lakesh wheeled to confront Maccan and saw the ugly welts of burns on his face and the way his right arm hung dead and useless at his side. But Maccan smiled in savage satisfaction as he pulled back his leg to kick Grant again, to kick him off the platform.
Not having any time to think, Lakesh roared in fury and bounded forward, cannonading his entire weight into Maccan's body. The man stumbled and staggered. For a frantic instant, he tottered on the rim of the platform, clawing with his good hand for a grip to prevent his fall.
An image of Domi with the Silver Hand of Nuadhu pressed against her forehead flickered through Lakesh's mind, and he kicked the man with all his strength. Maccan screamed and toppled over the side. For what seemed like an eternity Lakesh could hear his shrieks as he plunged down and down. Then it ended abruptly.
Breathing hard, blinking cold sweat from his eyes, Lakesh turned toward Grant and helped the man to his feet. "I ask you again, friend Grant...are you all right?"
"That depends," Grant retorted, teeth set on a groan of pain. "Where's Maccan?"
"Right about now, coming to rest in his own Tir Na Nog, I hope."
A grating, crunching rumble swallowed up the incessant keening hum in their helmets. Both men glanced up as a pouring of powder sifted down from above. Without another word, they began to run across the walkway to the ledge. Kane and Brigid were engaged in a struggle to get past Raschid, Shayd and the transadapts.
The transadapts, hemorrhaging from their ears and nostrils, were in poor shape to put up much resistance. Brigid's right leg whipped up in a swift, spinning crescent kick. The side of her boot knocked one of the gnomes into two of his companions, piling the three of them up in the corridor.
Raschid raised himself to his knees and even through the visor of his helmet, Kane saw that his eyes were glassy. He swung his Uzi around, but Kane kicked him square in the chest, knocking him backward, his subgun falling from his hands.
Kane reached for it, but felt his right leg being pulled out from under him. He went down on top of Shayd. He slapped her Gyrojet rocket pistol aside and lunged again for the fallen Uzi, even as Raschid scrabbled on the floor for it. He kicked free of Shayd and wrestled with Raschid, rolling over into the corridor, slamming into a support column
At the same time, a dazed Shayd struggled to her feet and bent to retrieve her rocket pistol. Brigid brought her heavy-treaded boot sole down on the woman's wrist. She put all of her weight onto her heel, and Shayd screamed a curse. Her fingers opened around the butt of the tiny pistol, and with her other foot, Brigid kicked it over the side of the ledge.
Shayd lunged upward, catching Brigid at the knees and muscling her over onto her back. The two women rolled into the corridor where Kane and Raschid fought for possession of the Uzi. They collided with the men and the subgun fell from Raschid's hands.
Kane grabbed for the machine pistol, missed and tried again. He secured his hold just as David rose up, hooks held over his head. He was wild-eyed, his ratty hair hanging in his eyes. Shrieking in mad rage, he swung the hooks from shoulder level straight at Kane's faceplate.
Having no choice, Kane lined up the Uzi muzzle automatically and fired a dozen rounds. The stream of 9 nun bullets caught the transadapt in the center of his stomach and rapidly tracked upward, punching him backward, then splitting his head open.
Grant and Lakesh pounded into the corridor just as David's body settled to the floor, both of them wild- eyed. "You fools!" Lakesh bleated. "This place is shaking itself apart! We've got to find a way out of here!"
Kane wasn't sure if Lakesh included him and Brigid in his "fools" remark, but Raschid stopped struggling long enough for him to break free of the man and to climb to his feet. He looked into the pit and saw the hanging crystal cluster surrounded by a bubble of quivering ripples through which coruscating particles of brilliance shot. Rolling multicolored clouds overlapped, engulfing it and the platform.
Shayd staggered to her feet, releasing Brigid. "Where is Maccan?" she demanded, panic thick in her voice.
"Never mind him," Grant snapped. "We've got to—"
Shayd bulled between the two men, shoving them aside. "Maccan!"
Raschid followed her out onto the walkway, reaching for her.
As both people reached the halfway point, a torrent of stone blocks cascaded down from above with a thunderous roar. Great slabs of rock fell and crashed. The four people wheeled and raced down the corridor, the floor quaking beneath their feet. Fragments of rock pattered down all around them. The walls showed cracks, and rocks and mortar, shaken loose from the ancient walls overhead, sifted down. The pyramid heaved and shuddered around them. 'Where are we going?" panted Brigid. "To the train?"
No one had any breath to answer. Everyone was too occupied with trying to maintain his or her balance and footing on the convulsing floor. Blocks of stone dropped like bombs from the ceiling.
They reached the end of the corridor and the lift car. Brigid batted the lever to the up position and fell back against the wall of the elevator, gasping for oxygen. The car rose rapidly to the level above. When Kane glimpsed the scattering of boxes and crates, he slapped the lever to the midposition, locking the lift in place.
"What the hell?" Grant boomed.
"Those air skids, the sleds," Kane said breathlessly. "We can use them to get out of here...we'll never make it to the train-before this place buries us alive!"
No one argued with him They dashed out of the lift and into the warehouse area. The far wall was covered by a massive steel shutter, and Kane's eyes frantically searched for a way to open it. Brigid pointed to an elaborate chain-and-pulley contraption.
Grant bounded to it, giving the device a swift visual examination, and yanked at the handle protruding from its base. With a clanking crash and a shower of rust, the steel panel dropped open, revealing a black, star-speckled sky.
"This was one short-ass day," Kane commented. "Seemed long enough to me," Grant countered. "How do you get these things to work?" Lakesh asked in angry, frightened frustration.
Grant, Kane and Brigid turned to see him on his hands and knees inside an air sled. "I don't have the slightest idea," Kane replied, inspecting another craft.
A huge stone cube tumbled down from overhead, driving up jets of dust. Brigid declared tensely, "We'd better get ideas and fast!"
Kane found controls on the underside of 'he sled's forepart. They were very simple, consisting of a pair of knobs and a gearshift-like control stick. He kneeled in front of the controls, twisting the knobs experimentally. The sled suddenly rushed up from the floor with tremendous acceleration, flinging him backward and entirely out of the craft.
He hit the floor with an impact that momentarily stunned him, but he glimpsed the sled smashing headlong into the wall above the open portal. The nose flattened and bent back on itself. It dropped atop a stack of boxes and toppled them.
"Shit," Grant hissed softly in disgust, hauling Kane to his feet none too gently.
"At least we know how to make them go," Kane said, voice tight with the effort to keep from groaning "Let's try 'em again."
The four people climbed into individual air sleds, inserting their knees into special hollowed-out sockets. Flexible metal straps passed around their legs and secured them in position.
Lakesh murmured, "The motive power appears to be an electromagnetic field that alters graviton levels—"
"The knobs control your speed and altitude," broke in Kane impatiently. "You use the stick to steer and for attitude."
A bucketful of rock particles sifted down, rattling against Grant's helmet. "Let's get the hell out of here!" he bellowed.
The air sleds rose from the floor and shot toward the opening in the wall as if they had been launched from catapults. Inestimable tons of thundering stone collapsed behind them and they barely kept a few yards ahead of it.
The craft flew up and out into cold Martian air, not more than twenty feet above the desert. They felt a series of consecutive hammering blasts thundering from behind them. Kane goosed the sled to its highest speed and twisted around to take a look. He saw black cracks a hundred feet across zigzagging through the pitted face of the pyramid. It seemed to implode, crashing inward, block after block collapsing and then scattering in exploding fragments. The walls folded in on themselves, cascading in a contained avalanche.
The four of them followed the trail made by the monorail for the Cydonia Compound, reducing their speed only a trifle. When the domes of the colony came into view, Kane felt it was safe enough to land and look behind them at the pyramid.
Veiled by swirling clouds of dust, the ancient monument of the Tuatha de Danaan settled to the Martian desert like a massive grave marker. A pillar of whirling dust and grit rose toward the sky. They followed its ascent with their eyes.
Phobos was cold and hostile in the infinite darkness of the Martian night, regarding them with indifference. The Milky Way was a silver ribbon of frosty brilliance across the black sky. No one spoke for a long time, then finally Brigid broke the silence. "It was all over for Maccan long, long ago. I can't help but wish this had turned out differently."
Grant grunted. "We fought for every inch of ground we've gained to free ourselves from baronial slavery. If it had ended any differently with Maccan, our fight wouldn't have meant anything."
"How can we judge Maccan by our standards?" Brigid asked.
"Easy," Kane said flatly. "He lies there covered by the same dirt that's at our feet."
Lakesh looked up toward Phobos and murmured, "Shadows in the eyes of the gods, indeed."
James Axler, Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath
