Outlanders 28 mad gods w.., p.8
Outlanders 28 Mad God's Wrath, page 8
The chopper's nose pitched down at a sharp angle as the horizontal stabilizers were locked out. The Deathbird plummeted toward the trawler.
Grant kicked himself away from the skid, launching himself into empty air. The blue surface of the Cific sped up toward him He didn't have the time to slip into a vertical position, and so enter the water in a dive, so he curled himself into a tight ball.
The water smashed at him, the brine stung his cut lip like liquid hellfire, but he fought to stay beneath the surface. He opened his eyes and looked up, seeing the outline of the fishing trawler only a few yards away. Within a second a hell-hued blossom of fire flared as the Deathbird crashed into the ship's deck. Tongues of flame lapped out and leaped in all directions. Pieces of ship and chopper splashed all around him The vanes snapped from the shaft and pinwheeled away.
The remaining missiles in the pods detonated upon impact. A few of the rockets went screaming away on crazed, corkscrewing trajectories. They splashed down harmlessly in the open ocean or exploded against the hulks of vessels.
When the noisiest and most pyrotechnic aspects of the Deathbird's crash tapered away, Grant slowly rose to the surface and surveyed his surroundings. The burning, ebony hulk of the gunship lay canted at a grotesque angle on the trawler's deck. Its stub wings had been blow off by the missile detonations, and with the rotor blades missing and the tail assembly bent almost double, the chopper's fuselage looked like a giant, maimed grasshopper. Scarlet sheets of flame jumped high all around the derelicts, and a pall of smoke blurred the wrecks.
Treading water, Grant activated his Commtact but received no signal. At the top of his lungs he shouted, "Kane! Brigid!"
After a moment his ears caught a faint reply, but because of the crackle of flames he wasn't sure who had responded. He swam slowly in the direction he thought the voice had come from and yelled again, "Brigid! Kane!"
"Here!" Kane's voice sounded hoarse and breathless, as if he had just been exerting himself. "Over here!"
Breast-stroking around a clot of jetsam, Grant saw Kane and Brigid Baptiste hanging on to a long timber. She was retching, dry-heaving. Her eyes were closed, her mouth sagging open. Her shoulders shuddered, but she didn't seem to be aware of much of anything.
"I saw her go down," Kane said grimly. "I think an explosion dazed her, but I got to her in time. She probably swallowed only a gallon of the Cific."
Brigid gasped and vomited a cupful of water. She struggled to take a deep breath and opened her eyes. She stared around unfocusedly with reddened, glassy eyes and managed to husk out a question. "Status?"
Kane smiled crookedly. "We're safe for the moment. Grant clipped the Bird's wings."
Brigid shifted her clouded green gaze toward Grant. "I had to jettison your Sin Eater," she said, her voice a trifle stronger and less strangulated. "Sorry."
Grant tried to shrug but it wasn't easy while treading water. "Plenty more of them back in Cerberus."
A dozen Sin Eaters and their forearm holsters were in storage in the Cerberus redoubt. Grant and Kane had appropriated the spares a year or so before from a squad of hard-contact Mags dispatched from Cobaltville.
The squad's mission had been to investigate Redoubt Bravo to ascertain if it was inhabited. The Magistrates had been stopped and soundly defeated by Sky Dog's band of Amerindians in the flatlands bordering the foothills. Grant and Kane, instrumental in the victory, had they managed to keep their involvement concealed from the invading Mags.
The survivors of the engagement had been disarmed and allowed to go on their way, believing the Indians alone were responsible for their humiliation. Kane and Grant had taken their discarded Sin Eaters since they were murderous weapons and almost impossible for a novice to manage. Mag Division recruits were never allowed live ammunition until a tedious, six-month-long training period had been successfully completed.
Unaccustomed to blasters of any sort, Grant and Kane had feared the Indian warriors would wreak fatal havoc by experimenting with them and so had appropriated them, adding them to the Cerberus arsenal.
Kane glanced into the sky, at the smoke staining the limitless canopy of azure. It seemed strange that it was barely midmorning after all that had happened since daybreak. "Speaking of home, why don't we start back? We've got a jump on the day at least."
"You feel strong enough to get back to dry land?" Grant asked Brigid.
She smiled wanly. "I've had about all I can stand of water sports for the day."
Brigid clung to the timber while Grant and Kane pushed it ahead of them, propelling it with their kicking legs, maneuvering through the graveyard of ships.
When the shoreline became visible, Kane groused, "This mission was a complete waste of time. Instead of adding to our store of ordnance, we lost some."
"Yeah," Grant agreed gloomily. "But we cost Baron Snakefish some, too...in materiel and manpower."
Brigid coughed, cleared her throat and declared, "I don't think we or the baron lost as much as Breeze Castigleone. We ought to take a little consolation in that."
Kane turned his head and spit out a jet of seawater. His tongue felt like a strip of cured leather, the soft tissues of his throat were as abraded as if he had been gargling with sand, and his eyes stung. He knew if they couldn't find a source of fresh water to bathe in, they would be scratching at their salt-caked bodies all the way back to Montana.
"Oh, I do take it like that," he replied with icy sarcasm. "This is how I look when I'm consoled."
Grant glanced at him and grunted. "You look like shit."
"Now you're getting it," Kane said.
Brigid sighed and rolled her eyes skyward. "There are a lot worse things we could be doing, you know."
"Yeah," Kane retorted. "But they'll have to wait until I change into some dry underwear."
Chapter 7
By the time Domi trotted up the crumbling blacktop, the sun had begun to set. Long shadows lanced from the peak of the mountain towering high above her. The blazing glory of fusing sunset colors filled the sky. They should have been a beautiful sight, but the girl scarcely noticed them. Instead she glanced worriedly at the chron strapped to her wrist and quickened her pace. The full knapsack hanging from her belt bumped against her left hip. The Detonics Combat Master .45 filled a holster on her right hip, but her step was swift and sure.
Born a half-feral child of the Outland, Domi had never fallen into the habit of paying much attention to the passage of time. Her attitude toward it was simple and pragmatic. When the sky was light, it was time to wake and hunt. When it grew dark, she slept. But as dusk began to collect around the plateau, she was thinking of activities other than sleep. At such a high altitude, despite the spring growth far below in the flatlands, the frosty night winds were not kind to creatures of warm blood.
A chill breeze suddenly gusted down from the peaks and Domi shivered. She wasn't dressed for low temperatures—khaki shorts, a white tank top and nothing else. She almost never wore shoes since her feet were thickly callused on the soles. An albino, Domi was barely five feet tall and weighed every ounce of a hundred pounds. Her unruly bone-white hair was cropped close to her head, and her bright red eyes, shining like polished rubies on either side of her thin- bridged nose, lent her a ghostly aspect.
Despite the scars marring the pearly perfection of her white skin, particularly the one shaped like a starburst on her right shoulder, Domi was maverick beautiful. Her body was a liquid, symmetrical flow of curving lines, with small, pert breasts rising to sharp nipples and a flat, hard-muscled stomach extending down to the flared shape of her hips.
The old blacktop she walked was steep and treacherous. It stretched up from the foothills and plunged deeply through the Bitterroot Range before turning into a twisting, rugged hellway. It skirted dizzying abysses on one side and slid along foreboding, overhanging crags on the other. On her left, beyond the tree line, rocky ramparts plunged straight down to a tributary of the Clark Fork River nearly a thousand feet below.
The few people who lived in the region held the Bitterroot Mountain range, colloquially known as the Darks, in superstitious regard. Due to their mysteriously shadowed forests and deep, dangerous ravines, a sinister body of myths had grown up around the range. Enduring folklore about evil spirits lurking in the mountain passes to devour body and soul kept the curious and greedy from exploring too far.
There were other reasons for the sinister body of myths ascribed to the Darks, the least of them legends about ferocious, blood-freezing storms and flesh-eating fogs. Both had their basis in reality, but over the past century they had been blown out of all rational proportion. Neither Domi nor anyone else who lived in Cerberus cared to tear away the veil of frightful fable from the shrouded peaks. All the scare tales were a form of protective coloration that no amount of jack, not even ville scrip, could buy.
Domi stumbled on a loose piece of asphalt and hissed out an obscenity as she stubbed a toe. The road wound and twisted, as if its builders had followed the trail made by a giant broken-backed snake, thrashing and whipping in its death throes. She turned another bend, then topped a rise. The road widened as it entered a broad plateau.
A grim gray peak of granite shouldered the sky on the far side of the plateau. At its base gaped open the vanadium-alloy security door that led into the heart of the Cerberus redoubt.
The mountain peak concealing the Cerberus redoubt was an organized masterpiece of impenetrability and inaccessibility. Two centuries before, trained labor and the most advanced technology available had worked hand in glove to ensure that no one might even suspect it existed. For a handful of years, from the end of one millennium to the beginning of another, it had housed the primary subdivision of the Totality Concept's Overproject Whisper, Project Cerberus. The Totality Concept was the umbrella designation for
American military super-secret researches into many different arcane and eldritch sciences.
The three-level, thirty-acre Cerberus facility had come through the nukecaust more than intact. It, and most of the other Totality Concept-related redoubts, had been built according to specifications for maximum impenetrability, short of a direct hit. With its vanadium radiation shielding still in good condition, and powered by fission nuclear reactors, Cerberus could survive for at least another five hundred years. The multi-ton vanadium security door was already folded aside accordion-fashion as Domi crossed the tarmac. As she approached, Lakesh stepped out of it.
"I was getting a little worried," he said, a lilting East Indian accent underscoring his cultured voice. "You're overdue by about an hour."
Mohandas Lakesh Singh was a well-built man of medium height, with thick, glossy-black hair, an unlined dark olive complexion and a long, aquiline nose. He looked no older than forty-five, despite a few strands of gray streaking through his temples. In reality, he was just a year or so shy of celebrating his two hundred and fiftieth birthday.
As a youthful genius, Lakesh had been drafted into the web of conspiracy the overseers of the Totality Concept had spun during the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. As a physicist and cyberneticist, he worked for Project Cerberus, which dealt with matter transfer.
"I can take care of myself," Domi replied in her piping, childlike voice.
"With Grant, Brigid and Kane away on a mission," Lakesh said, striving for an admonishing tone, "there are very few here who are capable of finding you, if you became lost."
Domi threw him an impish grin. "You could find me easy enough if you had the right kind of motivation."
"And what might that be, young lady?" Lakesh asked with mock severity.
Domi increased her pace and threw herself into his welcoming arms. He kissed her passionately and she reciprocated, her tongue touching his. Reluctantly breaking the embrace, Lakesh asked, "How went the herb hunt?"
Domi unslung the knapsack and patted it. "Not too badly. I found a lot of useful things?'
Lakesh smiled slightly. "I'm not so sure how useful Dr. DeFore will find them."
Domi shrugged as if the matter were of little importance. "It's Quavell's choice."
The sack bulged with roots, plants and herbs Domi had spent most of the day gathering in the woods. Although the infirmary of the redoubt carried a wide assortment of drugs and pharmaceuticals, the outlander girl placed more faith in natural healing agents, particularly when prenatal care was involved.
Quavell's pregnancy had already manifested a few unusual qualities , so Domi figured any and all treatments should be made available to her, not just those approved and dispensed by Reba DeFore. Domi had grown up in a primitive settlement on the banks of the Snake River in Hells Canyon, Idaho. More than once, despite her young age, she had assisted in the birth of children.
"As Quavell's physician," Lakesh said, "Dr. DeFore might feel she should have some input."
Domi shrugged again. "Let's find out."
Lakesh followed her into the redoubt, smiling as she kissed the forefinger of her right hand and then planted the finger on the illustration of Cerberus on the wall beneath the door control. Although the official designations of all Totality Concept-related redoubts were based on the phonetic alphabet, almost no one who had ever been stationed in the facility referred to it by its official code name of Bravo. The mixture of civilian scientists and military personnel simply called it Cerberus.
One of the enlisted men with artistic aspirations went so far as to illustrate the door next to the entrance with an image of the three-headed hound that had guarded the gateway to Hades. Rather than attempt even a vaguely realistic representation, he used indelible paints to create a slavering black hell-hound with a trio of snarling heads sprouting out of an exaggeratedly muscled neck.
The neck was bound by a spiked collar, and the three jaws gaped wide open, blood and fire gushing between great fangs. In case anyone didn't grasp the meaning, he emblazoned beneath the image the single word Cerberus, wrought in overdone, ornate Gothic script.
Domi had drifted into the habit of giving the illustration, the totem of the redoubt, little greeting and farewell kisses when she passed by. Lakesh found the ritual silly but endearing.
He had found very little endearing in the past fifty years of his life. After the nukecaust, Lakesh had volunteered to be placed in cryogenic stasis in the Anthill, the largest of the Totality Concept-linked installations. Five decades before, he had been revived and drafted to serve the Program of Unification, the agenda to create the nine barons, the nine god-kings to rule the Earth. It was only after his resurrection that he had realized the horrific magnitude of the plan to conquer humanity.
Lakesh had tried many times since his resurrection to arrest the tide of extinction engulfing the human race. First had been his attempts to manipulate the human genetic samples in storage, preserved in vitro since before the nukecaust to provide the hybridization program with a supply of the best DNA. He had hoped to create an underground resistance movement of superior human beings to oppose the barons and their hidden masters, the Archon Directorate.
A revolutionary force needed a headquarters, and the Cerberus redoubt seemed the most serviceable. When Lakesh had reactivated the installation some thirty years before, the repairs he made had been minor, primarily cosmetic in nature. Over a period of time he had added an elaborate system of heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision vid cameras and motion-trigger alarms to the plateau surrounding it. He had been forced to work in secret and completely alone, so the upgrades had taken several years to complete.
The redoubt contained a frightfully well-equipped armory and two dozen self-contained apartments, a cafeteria, a decontamination center, an infirmary, a swimming pool and even detention cells on the bottom level.
The facility also had a limestone filtration system that continually recycled the complex's water supply. In a cleft on the peak, mostly hidden by the granite walls and camouflage netting, was an array of dish antennae, a transmitting tower and even a slowly revolving radar emitter.
Domi padded barefoot down the main corridor, a twenty-foot-wide passageway made of softly gleaming vanadium alloy and shaped like an arched square. Great curving ribs of metal and massive girders supported the high rock roof.
Lakesh walked beside her, noting the curious looks she received from some of the people they passed, but the glances were essentially respectful and even admiring from the men. Although the redoubt had been constructed to provide a comfortable home for well over a hundred people, it had pretty much been deserted for nearly two centuries.
When Domi, Grant, Kane and Brigid had arrived at the installation two years before, there had been only a dozen permanent residents Like them, all of the personnel were exiles from the villes, but unlike them, the others had been brought here by Lakesh because of their training and abilities. The redoubt had suffered a number of casualties over the past couple of years, and for a long time, the Cerberus personnel were outnumbered by shadowed corridors, empty rooms and sepulchral silences.
Over the past month and a half, the corridors had bustled with life, the empty rooms filled and the silences replaced by conversation and laughter. The immigrants from the Manitius Moon base had been arriving on a fairly regular basis ever since the destination-lock code to the Luna gateway unit had been discovered. Whether the new arrivals intended to remain in the installation or to try to make separate lives for themselves in the Outlands was still an open question.
