Dragon City
Page 27
“There’s no ‘right’ way to destroy rocks,” Mariah explained to all assembled. She could feel that twinge in her leg where she had taken a bullet a few months back, scratched at it absently as she muddled over their dilemma. “I mean, you can smash them, pulverize them, break them up in numerous ways—you don’t need my geology degree to tell you that.”
“And obviously we can’t use that kind of force inside a human skull,” DeFore said. “We’re stymied.”
Lakesh steepled his fingers in thought. “No, we’re not. We need to consider noninvasive surgical techniques,” he said.
“Such as?”
Lakesh considered for a moment. “I recall reading something about focused ultrasound being used to destroy tumors. That was a long time ago, however, and the details escape me.”
DeFore nodded. “We’ll look into it, Lakesh,” she said, and Dr. Kazuko confirmed he would see what equipment they had access to.
As Mariah began speaking enthusiastically about the use of seismic waves in undersea rock study, Lakesh took his cue to leave them to it. A good leader knows when to trust his troops, he reminded himself.
Outside the room, Lakesh allowed himself a little self-satisfied smile, pleased that the Cerberus operation was slowly getting back on its feet. Ullikummis had struck them such a blow that it had seemed, for a while, that they might never recover. If they could crack this secreted stone virus that had attacked Edwards, Kane and several others, there might just be a chance of regathering his full complement of personnel and overturning the living nightmare that they found themselves in.
As he made his way down the wood-walled corridor and into the temporary ops room, Lakesh could hear Brewster Philboyd and Donald Bry talking in excited voices. When he stepped through the doorway, Lakesh saw the two men huddled over the computer terminal that displayed the satellite feed.
“We’re on it now,” Bry said, speaking into his microphone.
“What has happened?” Lakesh asked as he hurried across the room.
Bry looked up as Philboyd busily tapped out an urgent sequence into the computer, altering the sharpness of the satellite image on his screen.
“It’s Kane,” Bry explained.
“Put him on speaker,” Lakesh instructed, and Bry padded across to his own terminal and flipped a switch. A moment later the hiss of dead air crackled from the speakers.
“Kane?” Lakesh began, speaking into a portable microphone. “This is Lakesh. Donald is just bringing me up to speed now.”
“Just tell me when you can see it,” Kane replied, his voice reverberating through the computer’s speakers.
Lakesh tilted his head quizzically, looking at Donald Bry for explanation.
“He’s with Balam,” Bry explained, shaking the dangling copper curls of his unruly fringe out of his eyes. “They think they’ve located it.”
The image on the computer terminal whirled and blurred as Brewster Philboyd tweaked the view, and for a moment all they could see was the featureless blue of the ocean’s surface. Lakesh looked at the coordinates that were shown in a pane to the bottom left of the screen, wondering where they were.
“Atlantic Ocean,” Bry said, as if reading his mentor’s mind. “A few miles out from the New England shore.”
As Lakesh watched, something came into focus at the edge of the screen, and Philboyd recentered his feed to get a better view of it. There was an island there, formed of slate-gray stone, its jutting spikes like some kind of nightmarish fortress. Narrow channels ran through the island, and Lakesh had no doubt that they would be almost impossible to navigate by boat.
“What is it?” Lakesh breathed, the words barely audible. “What have they found?”
Before Bry could reply, Kane’s voice boomed over the Commtact link again.
“Do you see it?” Kane asked.
“Yes, but what is it?” Lakesh responded.
“Ullikummis’s home,” Kane said.
The words hit Lakesh like a physical blow, and he stared at the satellite feed for a long moment, wondering why the picture feed seemed suddenly so ominous. Slowly, his hand trembling, Lakesh pressed the tiny microphone closer to his mouth and spoke into it, his voice cracking before he finally got the words out:
“Are you there now?”
He waited for Kane to reply.
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459227675
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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