by Mark Ellis
They were barely a score of yards past the Vulcan-Phalanx housing when Kane, glancing upward again, saw the chopper break off its circling and come plunging down toward them.
Yelling a warning, he skipped into a fissure in the canyon wall. He raised his Sin Eater and let loose with a 3-round burst, but not before the gunner loosed a missile. It struck very close to him. The explosion filled the canyon with rolling, thunderous echoes. A sheet of flame erupted, and shrapnel and rock fragments clattered against his arms and legs, rebounding from the armour.
Peering through the thick smoke, Kane couldn’t see the others. Turning his head, he watched the Deathbird climb skyward, trying to keep to the centre of the canyon to avoid the irregularities in the walls. A notion occurred to him, and he immediately acted on it, not giving himself the chance to think it through.
Before the breeze had cleared the smoke, Kane scrambled out of the fissure and lay down on the ground, very close to the smouldering crater. He carefully arranged his limbs, lying as he had seen corpses lie, arms and legs bent unnaturally and stiffly, head slightly to one side.
So far, it appeared as if the gunner was primarily targeting him, which made sense for a couple of reasons. First, Pollard hated him. Second, he seemed to be the only member of the party who was armed. Finally, his black armour made him stand out, not only among his comrades but against the buff-coloured surroundings.
As he lay there on his right side, he heard feet pounding on the ground, and Grant kneeled over him, grabbing at his shoulders. His face glistened with sweat.
“Kane—”
“Just get away from me,” he hissed. “Pretend I’m dead, then work your way toward the ruins. Act upset.”
Grant’s face twisted in annoyance, but his tone was relieved. “If I really found you dead, I’d skip my way toward the ruins.”
Then he was up and gone, running back the way he had come. The wind thinned the veil of smoke, and Kane watched the Deathbird hover a hundred or so feet overhead, just above the uppermost canyon ramparts. It dropped slowly, below the rim, swinging out carefully. Pollard was very cautious, not just because he was checking out Kane’s demise, but because of the unpredictable geothermals present in the canyon.
The chopper continued to descend. He imagined Pollard gazing down at his motionless body with the hope that he’d made the kill but knowing he had to make sure before he continued the pursuit. Slowly the Deathbird moved forward, at an altitude of thirty feet, airspeed at bare minimum.
Kane waited, made himself hold off, even after every cell in his body demanded action. Then he gathered himself, coiling his body like a spring. With all the speed his years of training and honed reflexes had given him, he sprang into a squat, then to a crouch. The Sin Eater roared with a prolonged burst.
Pollard reacted almost instantaneously, pulling back on the yoke for a fast, frantic ascent, but Plexiglass pieces of the cockpit canopy flew away in flinders. As the chopper gained altitude, it revolved, turning the port away from the bullets. Kane kept on blasting, and flame flared from the tail boom as a bullet smashed an exhaust cowl away.
The overstressed engine whined, missed and cut out altogether. The Deathbird’s sudden rise halted, as though it had bumped into a transparent roof over the canyon. Listing from side to side, it sank from view behind the ramparts. Kane waited for the sound of the crash.
When, after a few seconds, it still hadn’t come, he bit back a curse, turned and ran up the canyon to rejoin his companions. They didn’t have much farther to go, but they still had a lot to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
KANE AND GRANT led the two women on a circuitous route through the Cliff Palace ruins. Brigid kept slowing to examine the shapes of the doorways, the layouts of the kivas.
“Starborn, that’s what the Anasazi tribe who built this place called themselves,” she remarked, apropos of nothing. “They disappeared without a trace nearly a thousand years ago.”
Partly because of the stabbing pain in his leg, partly because he was exhausted and stressed out, Grant whirled on her, raging, “This isn’t a field trip! Pollard and his gunman could be right behind us!”
“So what?” she demanded. “Don’t we outnumber them?”
“We don’t outgun them! They’ve got Sin Eaters and Copperheads, both with full loads. Compared to that firepower, we’ve got shit!”
Brigid glowered at him, but she didn’t pause to examine anything more.
They reached the bottom of the palace itself, and Kane nimbly scaled the stone niches, waited for the others to climb up through the embrasure, then moved to the stairwell cut into the cliffside. The interior was very dark, and Grant put on his treated glasses, pulling his flashlight from a pocket, as well. Kane’s image-enhancer sensor lit his way adequately, if not satisfactorily.
The metal door hung open, and he pushed through it into the tunnel. The neon light strips stretching along the ceiling were dark. As he had only two nights before, Kane stalked along the tunnel. He went just a few feet before he stopped, listening and sniffing. He heard something but didn’t smell anything. By all rights, he shouldn’t have heard anything and should have smelled something very unpleasant. The tunnel should have been redolent with the stench of decomposing bodies. As a general rule, Magistrates didn’t clean up after themselves, so somebody must have removed the bodies.
The sound he heard was very faint and innocuous, like papers ruffling. Turning, he used hand signals to inform the others to hang back. Kane walked down the tunnel on the balls of his feet. When the passageway opened onto the scaffold assembly, he dropped flat and belly-crawled forward. The bruises made by Salvo’s bullets twinged. His elbows and knees made near inaudible scrapes against the wood.
He peered down into the square room below. At first the light-intensifying polymer of his visor showed him nothing but bullet-riddled equipment and boxes. The corpses of Reeth and his crew, including his Squidoo strong-arm, were nowhere in view. Then a figure shifted in the shadows, at the extreme limit of his helmet’s image enhancer.
The figure was slight of build and very slim. Above the narrow shoulders rose a smooth, domed cranium, jet black and bald. The skull tapered down to a sharp chin, so the impression of the head was of an inverted teardrop.
The eyes were protuberant, completely round like an insect’s, and between the large eyes pair of insect-like antennae spread outward in a V. Kane caught his breath as the figure moved closer, deeper into the range of his enhancer. He got a better look at it.
After the first striking impression, Kane realized that the figure was wearing a black skullcap. Attached to it were night-vision goggles, a slightly modified version of the Mag-issue glasses. The antennae were a pair of infrared projectors.
Still, there was something about the figure’s movements, something a bit too mannered, too sharp, too graceful. It wore a tight bodysuit that looked as though it was made of dull grey foil. Because he saw no secondary feminine characteristics, he assumed the figure was male, although it could as easily have no particular sex at all. A plastic tube-shaped holster was strapped to his right thigh.
Kane watched the man examine sheaves of paper resting in an open crate, and then drop them with a gesture that almost seemed like disgust. The pale hands were long, slender, with very delicate fingers.
He realized the figure’s danceresque movements and general body shape were somewhat familiar. A chill went through him. They reminded him of Baron Cobalt’s. For an instant, he wondered insanely if the man below was indeed the baron, but he dismissed the notion immediately. The baron was slightly taller, a bit shorter in the leg.
A scutter and scuffle of fast-moving feet echoed up from the tunnel. When the man heard it, he gave a great leap back, his huge, goggled eyes staring upward. Then he whirled and darted toward the dark doorway with an astonishing fleetness of foot.
Kane swore, swinging his body o
ver the edge of the scaffold, hanging on to the planks and pipes. Grant, Domi and Brigid rushed up. Breathlessly Grant said, “Pollard’s on his way up.”
“Follow me.” Kane dropped down from the makeshift platform into the room. He stumbled when he landed, but he recovered his footing quickly and sprinted for the doorway on the far side of the room. Behind him, he heard his companions thumping down the staircase made of two-by-fours. Then Domi’s voice rose in a short, shrill cry.
Kane heeled to a halt, turning to see her careen down the steps. Because of the wavering light of Grant’s flashlight, the girl had made a misstep. Kane ran toward her, but before he reached her, she levered herself into a sitting position, probing at her rib cage.
Brigid stooped over her. “She’s all right,” she said tightly. “May’ve ruptured some intercostal cartilage.”
“Get her up,” Kane snapped, spinning around and running again. As soon as he entered the corridor, turning right at the T, he caught the whiff of death. The wooden door to the holding cell was ajar, and as he drew up to it he glanced in. All the bodies of the Dregs were riddled with circular punctures, obviously the result of automatic fire. Though flies had not gotten to them yet, putrefaction was well under way. He shoved the door shut, still in motion. He didn’t waste time trying to reason out why these bodies had been left but the others removed.
From the end of the corridor, he heard a sound, like the distant howling of a gale-force wind, overlaid with the faintest of mechanical hums. He caught a flash of silvery light and he increased his pace.
The portal chamber door was sealed, but when he laid his left hand on the keypad, a tingling discharge of static electricity rushed through him, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. He heard his hair bristling against the lining of his helmet.
He tapped the three buttons he remembered seeing Reeth input. The door panel opened. The hollow chamber was empty except for the vaguest curling wisp of white mist. The metal disks on the floor shimmered faintly, a shimmer that faded away even as he looked at it.
He was still looking at it when the others caught up to him. He didn’t have to say anything. Brigid made a wordless utterance of surprise and wonder, then grabbed the flashlight from Grant and played the beam over the exterior and the interior.
“Why’d you take off like that?” Grant demanded.
“Someone was in here.”
“Who?”
“Maybe more like a what. He was wearing a night-vision headset and going through Reeth’s hard-copy records. I chased him into here.”
Grant looked around suspiciously. “Where is he, then?”
Kane gestured to the chamber. “He ran in there, transported himself somewhere else.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“This thing was winding down when I got here,” Kane declared. “Where else could he have gone?”
Brigid studied the keypad affixed to the transparisteel beside the door. “This is pretty much like the schematic I saw. I think we can activate it.”
“There’s no power in here,” said Grant. “Salvo shot up the generator.”
“It has an independent power source, a mini-fusion generator below it.”
“We get in it, and it takes us away?” Domi asked sceptically.
“No!” Grant’s tone was harsh. “We’re not getting in that thing. We don’t know for sure what it is.”
Down the corridor, stealthy footfalls echoed.
“Pollard and his gunner,” murmured Kane, and edged past Brigid into the passageway. He took position at the T junction. He waited as the steps got louder.
Then Pollard called out. “You’re trapped, all of you. It’s time to die, and it’s time for you to accept the inevitable. You’ve got no food, no water. You’ll perish anyway, but it’ll be a long and lingering and painful passing. I promise to make it quick. The choice is yours.”
“Have we tired you out?” Kane called. “We haven’t accepted anything as inevitable except your next fuck-up.”
Pollard’s reply was the characteristic dut-dut-dut of a Copperhead slamming rounds down the corridor. Kane pulled back as a storm of slugs chiselled chips out of the angle of the junction.
He returned the fire with the Sin Eater, ricochets screeching and striking sparks from the metal girders and stonework. Grant shouldered up beside him, and for a long minute they exchanged fire with the two Mags at the end of the passageway.
“I don’t care for our options,” Grant said tightly. “They’re better armed and have more ammo, and more Mags are probably on their way.”
“Unless you want to accept the inevitable, then you better re-evaluate your fear of the portal.”
“I’m not afraid of it!” replied Grant vehemently. Then he shrugged and added, “I just don’t like the whole idea.”
The firing tapered off to a sporadic crackle. Kane signalled for Grant to stay while he returned to the teletransducer unit. Brigid shone the flashlight on the keypad, and her fingers hovered tentatively over the buttons.
She said, “According to what I read, a fallback program can be accessed by this button.” She pointed to a square key at the bottom of the pad. It glowed with two letters “LP.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Last Phase. If pressed within five minutes of a successful jump, it’ll reactivate the portal and transport us to the last reception point.”
Kane replied uneasily, “I don’t know that’s such a good strategy. We might end up in the baron’s harem or something.”
Brigid nodded distractedly. “Five minutes have passed anyway. I’ll punch in the codes as I remember them. There were three in New Mexico alone.”
Lips moving as she extracted the numbers from her memory, she tapped in a sequence of keys. A glass fronted liquid-crystal display at the top of the pad flashed the word “Inactive.”
She made a sound of dismay. “I was afraid of that. If the receiving units aren’t powered up, we can’t achieve a destination lock. Or maybe there is a security lockout to prevent what we’re attempting—unauthorized teletransportation—and if that’s the case, none of us are going anywhere.”
“Try another code.”
She did, and again “Inactive” glowed on the display. The process was too stressful for Kane to simply stand and watch and he sensed he wasn’t helping by anxiously hovering over her. He left her and rejoined Grant at the junction.
There came another flurry of cracks from the Copperheads. The bullets hammered ineffectually against the walls. Grant fired a single shot, and then a triburst, but Pollard and his gunner were safely out of range in the adjacent room.
“What’s going on back there?” Grant whispered.
“She’s working on it.”
Kane went to one knee, bracing the Sin Eater on his left forearm. He took careful aim. He waited until he saw the snout of a Copperhead ease into the passageway and he pressed the trigger once.
His blaster roared, and a spark flew from the barrel of the Copperhead. He heard a sharp clang, followed by a cry of pain and astonishment. The Copperhead, torn from Pollard’s grasp, clattered end over end across the stone floor.
“You son of a bitch!” Pollard yelled, his voice thick with hatred, wild with fury. “You’re dead, Kane! Dead!”
“Now we’re not quite as outgunned,” Kane murmured, straightening up.
Pollard cursed in a frenzy, and they heard his companion’s murmured rejoinders for him to calm down. Kane chuckled, but Grant didn’t find it very funny.
“That did it,” he said dolefully. “You pissed him off so bad, they’ll make a suicide charge. Since you’re the only one in armour, you might last thirty seconds longer than the rest of us.”
Brigid called out, “Hey! I’ve got something!”
They left the junction and went to the unit. The first thing Kane saw was the
light from the readout display flashing Active. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not. “Where is it?”
“A place coded as Stronghold Bravo, somewhere in Montana. It was the fourth one listed in the records, and the fourth one I tried. We’ve got a transit line now.”
Grant, Kane and Domi eyed the transparisteel chamber hesitantly. Now that the possibility of matter transmission was no longer an abstract concept, Kane found his enthusiasm ebbing. He covered his uncertainty by consulting his wrist chron.
“Well?” asked Brigid impatiently.
“How does this work exactly?” Grant asked.
“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “I don’t know if it works at all. According to the Cerberus Codex, the principle is based on hyperdimensional physics, phasing transport subjects from the relativistic here, through a quantum path, to arrive at a relativistic there.”
“That’s not what I meant,” replied Grant gruffly.
“Oh. Well, when you shut the door, the jump mechanism is automatically triggered, and —pfft— you’re on your way. To someplace.”
Domi fingered her ribs. “Will it hurt?”
“The Codex indicated there were occasional side effects, referred to as ‘phase sickness.’ Nothing too unpleasant.”
“Assuming we get in there,” Kane said, “what’s to keep Pollard from just opening the door and blasting us while we’re penned up?”
Brigid rapped the keypad with a crooked finger. “Simple. Before we shut the door, I’ll enter a security lock code, 108J. They can’t get in until after we’ve transported unless they know the unlocking code.”
Grant shifted his weight from foot to foot. “But can we get out?”
“Yes, we can get out,” snapped Brigid in exasperation. “You wanted me to find an active-destination unit. I did. Now, are we going to stand around and discuss it some more or are we going to get phasing?”
Kane opened his mouth to voice an objection to her tone, and then shut it again as swift, rattling roars came from the passageway. The sudden crash of noise was stunning. Bullets howled down the corridor, and fragments of splintered rock whined into the junction. Ricochets twanged like plucked guitar strings. Sparks blazed from the metal girders. Behind it all was the steady hammering of three blasters on full-auto. Howling like blood-mad berserkers, Pollard and his gunner charged down the corridor, weapons blazing.