Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  Chapter 8

  The blind soldier’s words buzzed around Kane’s thoughts as he and Grant led the way toward the mine, creeping down the only ladder that emerged on the lip of the shaft, moving swiftly, hand over hand. Kane had come up with the plan hurriedly and on the fly—standard operating procedure for Cerberus field missions, it seemed. As the most combat savvy, he and Grant would clear the path of any resistance—not that there would necessarily be any; it was just better in Kane’s opinion to expect the worst than to be caught with your pants down. Kane’s opinion of people in general was low, since he had seen too much both as a Magistrate and as a freedom fighter.

  They reached the first level swiftly. The level was made of planks lined up beside one another like floorboards—a scaffold structure held them roughly horizontal, actually at a twelve-degree slope heading down toward the mine. There was no one on this level, and a dozen strides took Kane and Grant to the next ladder, running down the sheer surface of bored rock.

  Kane led the way once more, hurrying down the ladder to the level below, those eerie words of the soldier still playing on his mind.

  I can see. I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation. That’s what the soldier had told Kane when he cornered him.

  Kane reached the next level, another strip of planks running at a rough horizontal. This level supported one of the two basic structures that were presumably used for shelter. Kane waited at the final step of the ladder, ducking his head down and peering at the boxy structure that dominated this level. It was fifteen feet in length with an open, glassless window at the near end. Within, Kane could see someone’s head and shoulders, the rest of the person was hidden beneath the sill of the frame. As he watched, the figure in the construct drank from a leather flask.

  Suddenly the structure’s door swung open, and two more figures came walking out of it while the figure in the window kept drinking. These two were both men, solidly built with pistols tucked through the belts holding up their pants, loose cotton shirts in a kind of grimy off-white. There was something else, too—both men had scarves over their faces, covering their eyes but leaving their mouths and noses visible.

  I see the face of god before everything, Kane thought, recalling the haunting words of the soldier.

  Kane waited until the two scarfed figures were completely outside and had closed the door. Then, stepping down from the ladder, Kane raised his blaster casually in his hands, enough that the two men could see what it was, and hissed for their attention.

  “Hands in the air,” he told them. “I’m not here to hurt you if I can help it.”

  The two men halted, turning to face Kane. He could not see their eyes, which were entirely hidden behind cloth, but he figured they were looking at him in some arcane way he did not understand.

  “Who are you?” the one on the left asked, the words automatically translated by Kane’s subdermal Commtact.

  “What do you want?” asked the other, again translated in real time.

  Neither of them had raised their hands, as Kane had requested, but nor were they making any obvious move to reach for their weapons or raise an alert of some kind.

  “Hands up, where I can see them,” Kane urged, gesturing with the Sin Eater’s barrel. “What’s going on here? What are you mining?” He repeated the words via the Commtact’s translation, waited as it translated the men’s response.

  “Heaven’s Light,” the man to the left stated.

  Frustration swept over Kane, wondering whether the translation circuit in his Commtact had gone buggy. “You’re mining light...from Heaven?” Kane asked, once again trusting the Commtact’s translator circuitry.

  Both men nodded. “Yes, Heaven’s Light.”

  “Down there,” the man on the right clarified, pointing at the mine.

  O-kay, so this just got a whole lot weirder, Kane thought. Now he was talking to two strangers wearing blindfolds who assured him that they were mining Heaven’s Light. Not exactly just another day at the office!

  Kane engaged his Commtact, automatically patching through to Grant—even though the man was just a flight above him. “You hear this?” he asked. “They say they’re mining Heaven’s Light. Mean anything to you?”

  “Could be a nickname for a drug of some kind,” Grant proposed, “though not one I’ve heard before.”

  “Me, either,” Kane agreed.

  The two blindfolded men were still—well—watching him was the only description Kane could come up with, their hidden eyes seemed to be locked on him beneath the covering of their headwear. To them he must look as if he was talking to himself, that was, of course, assuming that they could see.

  After a moment’s consideration, Kane gestured to the man on the right, the one closest to the edge of the walkway. “Lift up the blindfold,” he ordered. “I want to see what you’re hiding under there.”

  Both men just stood stock-still, waiting as if they had not heard Kane’s demand.

  Kane raised his Sin Eater so that it was in clear view of both men, pointing it at the forehead of the man on the left. “Lift up the blindfold or your pal here gets a 9 mm guest in his skull.”

  Slowly, the man on the right began to raise his hands, reaching for the bottom edge of the blindfold he wore.

  “No sudden movements,” Kane advised, translating again through the Commtact.

  At that moment, Grant dropped down from the lower rungs of the ladder, hands raised and his own pistol tucked away in its hidden wrist sheath. “Better drop it, Kane,” he said reluctantly.

  Grant was followed down the ladder by a man in his thirties, wearing dirt-smeared fatigues and holding a Vektor SP nine-round pistol in his right hand. Like the men that Kane was facing, he had a scarf pulled low to cover his eyes.

  Kane did not turn around, he only asked Grant a question: “This for real?”

  “Yeah,” Grant said. “Lower your blaster, this ain’t the right time for heroes.”

  Kane lowered his hand, then dropped the Sin Eater so that it fell to the sloping surface at his feet. Before him, the man had got no further in raising his blindfold, and he pulled it back in place as soon as Kane had dropped his weapon.

  “What’s going on?” Kane asked, turning his head slowly to glance over his shoulder. He saw Grant standing three steps behind him, a dour expression on his face. As he caught Grant’s eye, the bigger man winked at him, his mouth twitching with a hint of a smile. It meant he had a plan.

  * * *

  TWO MEN HAD sneaked up incompetently on Brigid and Mariah as they had waited at the top of the trash heap. Brigid, alerted by their voices, had spotted them as they emerged from behind a clump of piled rocks across to the right of where Kane and Grant had disappeared. They must have been stationed on this pile of discarded rocks, set to patrol it in a basic concentric sweep pattern. Counterclockwise, what used to be called widdershins.

  They had been discussing different approaches to goat rearing, of all things, when one of them spotted the Cerberus women and ordered his colleague to hush. Brigid stood out, of course, her long train of vibrant red hair catching in the wind atop the pile of sandy rock.

  Brigid leaned across to Mariah, who was a few paces away trying to follow where the crack in the earth led next, and whispered, “Mariah, we’re about to have company. Just play along and don’t do anything stupid.”

  Mariah’s eyes widened at the instruction. “As if I ever do anything...stupid or otherwise,” she muttered with an irritated shake of her head. She had a point, Brigid realized; Mariah was a geologist, not a field agent—quick-thinking and fighting for her life was all a little new to her. She was more used to dealing with rock formations that had taken millions of years to settle into their current patterns.

  Brigid pushed the interphaser back in
to her backpack, masking the movement from view with her body, clipping the protective case closed. It wasn’t as though the unit was working, and she doubted that these locals would have the engineering know-how to get it operative again, but it didn’t pay to advertise the tech. She listened as the footsteps came closer on shifting rocks.

  “You, woman,” said a male voice behind her, speaking French with a rough accent, “hands up in the air.”

  French? Now then, wasn’t that interesting? She had expected the man to be speaking Libyan but it seemed he had come from farther afield.

  Without turning, Brigid raised her hands. “May I help you?” she asked in fluent French. Brigid did not need the Commtact to translate for her; she was fluent in more than a few languages and, thanks to her amazing eidetic memory, could manage in many more.

  As she spoke, Brigid heard the other man call to Mariah, heard the crunch of boots on gravel as he reached for her. Mariah yelped, stifling a scream.

  “What are you doing here?” the man who had approached Brigid demanded.

  Brigid slowly turned her head until she could see her questioner. He was a man in his thirties, dark skinned, and the stubble on his jowls masked a hint of a double chin. His shirt was a sweat-stained white with an open neck, and he had a yellow kerchief wrapped around his neck. He wore cotton pants and heavy boots that laced halfway up his calves. Most oddly, he had a thin ribbon of red material tied around his head which covered his eyes. A swift glance to his partner confirmed Brigid’s suspicion that the other man also had something covering his eyes, his blindfold thicker and colored a brilliant white, wide as a winter scarf. Both men held South African–made Vektor SP pistols in their hands, their dull black finish gave them the appearance of being cloaked in thick shadows despite the brilliant sunlight.

  “Well?” the man approaching Brigid pressed.

  “Afternoon stroll,” Brigid replied. “Such a nice day out here, isn’t it?”

  The muzzle of the man’s gun flicked to indicate the holstered TP-9 semi that Brigid had retrieved from Mariah and now wore at her hip. “You always stroll armed?”

  “Hey, who doesn’t?” Brigid teased. “You can never be too sure who or what you’re going to run into, right? Present company excepted, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” the man drawled in French. “You will remove the gun—fingertips only, you understand?”

  Brigid nodded, reaching slowly for her weapon. She didn’t intend to upset this jerk, nor did she plan to get shot—in fact, what she hoped would happen was that this sentry crew would escort her and Mariah into the heart of the operation here and unintentionally reveal just what the heck was going on.

  * * *

  AS KANE STOOD there on the scaffold, Brigid’s voice came from above them, regretful. “They snuck up on us,” she explained, her slender form appearing on the ladder as she made her way down at the end of a gun barrel. Her pistol had been removed from its hip holster, though she still had her backpack in place—presumably with the interphaser still inside. Mariah followed her, looking pale with fear.

  A few seconds later the two women had joined Grant and Kane on the flat level of the scaffold, accompanied by two more soldier types holding pistols and wearing makeshift blindfolds. Brigid was a capable fighter, Kane knew—in fact she was far more than that simple description implied. Had these people gotten the drop on her because of Falk, or was there something more to this than he realized?

  One of the two men that Kane had ambushed dropped to his knees and recovered Kane’s blaster, shoving it in his waistband, while the other unholstered his own Vektor pistol and held it on Kane. “Follow me,” the man said.

  Kane inclined his head. “Lead on.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE TAKEN down to the lower level of the mine, where the scaffolding ran out and they instead found themselves walking down a slope that spiraled all the way around the outside edge of the mine shaft itself. This close, Kane could see something metallic waiting in the darkness, more scaffolding but this time with a kind of pulley system across its surface. It was an elevator of some sort, Kane guessed, and even as they dropped into the shadows he saw the elevator car trundling up on its wire, halting below them at its highest point before a cage door was pulled back and its passengers disgorged.

  “Quite a tidy operation you have going here,” Kane said, not bothering to translate it for his captors.

  “You be quiet,” the man in front of him advised in French, waving his pistol in a threatening manner.

  “So, how do you guys see?” Kane asked, ignoring the instruction.

  “You have many questions, foreign dog,” the man said.

  Kane eyed the elevator, saying nothing. Its cage was made from metal piping, with three horizontal bars running approximately at waist height—enough, presumably, to stop anyone from falling out so long as they didn’t do anything silly.

  The group followed the path down to the elevator, passing another group of men whose fatigues were covered in dirt. Miners, Kane guessed, looking at the smears on their clothes and faces.

  Once they were at the elevator, the guard in the front stepped aside and gestured for Kane to go into the elevator cage.

  Kane held his hands out, fingers open. “You sure?”

  When the man said nothing, he stepped inside and was followed by Grant, Brigid, Mariah and two of the guards. Four against two—good odds, Kane calculated. Okay, so the guards were armed and Mariah could not be relied upon in a fight, but he and Grant were trained as Magistrates and Brigid was wicked in close-combat situations. They could take these mooks if they needed to, just so long as Kane could figure out what the plan was and who had come up with it.

  A moment later, the cage door was drawn shut and the car started to descend. Kane watched their captors warily, sizing them up as the elevator car lurched on its cables.

  A few moments later they were lost in complete blackness.

  Chapter 9

  It looked like something Nikola Tesla might have dreamed up centuries ago.

  At the base of the elevator shaft was a carved-out cavern, vast and full of dancing twinkles of light. There were people working down here, Kane saw, men in dirty overalls and flowing robes, almost all of them wearing blindfolds, though a few had opted for glasses whose lenses were completely black.

  The descent into the mine shaft had taken ninety seconds. During that time, Kane had eyed the two guards, his muscles tensed and ready. With measured subtlety, he had looked to his companions for any hint of what they wanted to do, first Grant, whom he knew could be relied upon to follow his lead, and then Brigid. She had met his gaze with her own and, very markedly, looked to her left and mouthed the word no. Her eyes had barely shown in the darkness of the shaft, but Kane had seen the signal, knew he was to do nothing, that she had a plan. That was something they had between them, a kind of catch-all signal for situations like this one. He figured that maybe Brigid had meant to get herself caught, or if she hadn’t, then she had at least settled on a way to play her capture to their advantage. They were, after all, in the shaft, which was where they wanted to be.

  “Out,” one of his captors said. The metal of the blaster in his hand just barely caught a flicker of light because there was no light down here, no artificial light anyway. The people here were working in darkness, where the glint of the things they mined was enough to find their way.

  “Where are you taking us?” Brigid asked in French. She spoke a lot of languages fluently, one side effect of her eidetic memory.

  “Keep moving,” the guard said as they filed out of the elevator cage. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  That’s not very reassuring, Brigid thought, judging by the sneering tone of the man’s voice. She wondered if she had done the right thing, surrendering so easily to these local thugs.

  Once down i
n the mine, the Cerberus crew were guided toward a side shaft, past towering hunks of whirring machinery. Constructed from scaffold and tubing, the machinery had a skeletal appearance, as if its shell had been removed to reveal its insides.

  “What are they mining here?” Mariah asked.

  “Diamonds, looks like,” Kane replied, as one of their guards instructed them to remain silent.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mariah said, ignoring the guard’s instruction, though she knew enough French to understand it. “There aren’t any diamonds in Libya.”

  “None?” Kane queried, turning to face her, brow furrowed.

  The guard beside him jabbed Kane in the ribs with the nose of his pistol, sending a sharp stab of pain through his side. “Eyes forward, no chitchat,” the guard growled at him in heavily accented French.

  Kane saw Mariah shake her head in a definite no.

  No diamonds in Libya according to our resident geologist, Kane thought, and yet here we are in the center of a huge diamond mine. Something’s not right.

  Kane and his companions had traveled far and wide, even beyond the reaches of the globe itself; they had seen a lot of strange and near-inexplicable things. But there were some fundamentals that you simply could not change, Kane knew, and creating diamond mines out of thin air was one of them. Unless maybe this was an effect of the fallout from the nukecaust—Mariah was a freezie, she had spent two hundred years in cryogenic stasis before being rewoken on the Manitius Moon Base. Could be that her knowledge of the area’s geological resources was out-of-date, maybe. But then, Kane didn’t hold a lot of hope in that theory—Mariah may be old-school but she wasn’t dense. And whatever else he knew about diamonds, he was pretty darn sure they didn’t just materialize in new locations without warning.

  The group was ushered down a side passage that had been carved directly from the rock. Tools and machinery had been left to the side of the broad passageway, whose walls and roof were roughly circular. Sparkling facets glinted here and there in those walls, like stars in the night sky. A bright light emanated from the far end of the cavern, catching the flecks of brilliance in swirling patterns.