“Perhaps it’d be best to send one of your shadowbolts their way,” said Kane. “Scare them silly.”
Rith snapped her fingers and exclaimed, “If we can make them think we’re djinni, that ought to put the fear into them.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Arik, smiling for the first time since they had spotted the army the previous night.
Kane gazed out at the many dead Arabs lying beyond the walls, and then turned and looked at the bodies within the fort and then at the gate and said, “Why was the gateway open when we rode in.”
“Your meaning . . . ?” asked Ky.
“I mean they’re in perfectly good working order,” said Kane. “Shouldn’t they be broken down or some such?”
“Probably treachery from within,” said Rith. “Or then again, perhaps some Mahdists slipped over the walls and opened them.”
“Hmh,” said Kane.
“What I want to know,” said Rith, “is why is the Union Jack still flying. I would think they would haul it down.”
“They’re probably saving that for their general to do,” said Arik, his sight now on the approaching army.
Trendel looked at the arc of Mahdists arrayed west of the fort. He said a word and then another and watched and seemed to listen. After a moment he said, “The kneeling one with the red sash about his waist, Arik, he’s the new leader.”
“You know this how?” asked Kane.
“I’m a seer. I listened to their whispers.”
“My, what long ears you have, grandmother,” said Ky, grinning, then she laughed when Trendel replied, “The better to hear you with, my dear.”
Arik took aim and fired, and the man in the red sash fell over backwards and did not move again.
Another hail of gunfire erupted from the Mahdists, but no damage was done except to the wood of the wall.
Trendel listened and laughed, then said, “They’re arguing over who will lead them next.”
“How many?” asked Arik.
“Just two.” He pointed them out to Arik, and two shots later, the remainder of the Mahdists ran in panic to the opposite side of a distant dune.
Arik took cartridges from his saddlebag and reloaded his Winchester.
Yet the army came onward as the sun crept downward toward the western horizon.
A camel rider galloped swiftly from the far dune and toward the approaching multitude. He reached the tall stele along the hard-packed ridge at the same time the army did.
Trendel, now at the south wall, said, “He is calling out for someone named Akhanon.”
Yet keeping an eye on the western dune where the vanguard had fled, the others moved to the southern wall to join the seer.
The army halted, and after long moments the ranks parted like a wave, as a soldier led a black camel forward. On its back was a small, silken tentlike structure, as if it were protecting a beautiful queen from the eyes of infidels, or concealing someone of great power who did not wish to be seen.
And a wide lane opened as Mahdists drew aside as if in great fear, most dismounting, some salaaming, others falling to their knees, and yet others bolting away.
The man who had called for Akhanon leapt from his camel and fell to his knees and laid his brow to the sand.
The soldier leading the camel stopped before the groveling man.
The man crept forward on hands and knees, and spoke without lifting his head.
“He’s telling whoever is on that camel that there is a sorcerer or a witch within these walls,” said Trendel. He listened a bit longer, and then said, “I don’t like the measure of that.”
“What do you mean?” asked Arik.
“I mean, if a snake could talk, that’s what it would sound like.”
“The one on the camel?”
“Yes. And I don’t think it’s the Mahdi, for his speech is archaic, old, and the— Uh-oh. Get ready. He says he would see this for himself, and is ordering a charge.”
“The whole army?” asked Kane, alarmed.
Trendel shook his head. “No. Instead what we’d consider a small company, perhaps sixty men in all.”
Arik glanced at the lowering sun, now nearly touching the horizon. Long shadows streamed across the desert from the dunes, and the interior of stockade had fallen into darkness as well, the mutilated Brits and slain Arabs lying in the dimness below. “Ky, Rith, stand ready. We’ll give old snake-voice what he wants. Perhaps it’ll scare him off long enough for night to fall. Kane, Trendel, make every shot count. And Trendel, if you can identify any leaders, let me know.”
A number of men rode out to the fore of the Mahdists.
“Looks about like fifty to me,” said Kane, levering a round into his Winchester.
In the center, a man wearing a red sash raised his rifle and shouted a command, and in that same moment, Arik shot him dead.
But the company charged, yelling, “Akhanon! Akhanon!”
“That’s odd,” said Trendel. “They should be calling out Mahdi! and Allah Akhbar!”
“Why do you think that’s so?” asked Arik.
“Though they carry the flag of the Mahdi, I think they are not Mahdists. But why? I haven’t the foggiest.”
Arik turned to Ky and said, “When they get within your range, give them a blast of black. Rith, hold off till they are inside, say, twenty, thirty yards, then dismount them all.”
On charged the company, and Arik slew two of the riders that had a significant lead over the others.
And then, a shadowbolt sprang from the hand of Ky and streaked out to blast into the center of the charge, slaying three riders outright.
Yet the onrush continued, and Ky loosed another black bolt, and slew two more.
Rith then screamed, and some camels veered away in spite of their masters, while others bucked and threw riders to the ground and fled. Trendel and Kane began firing at the men afoot. Arik calmly shot one after another of the Mahdists, pausing only to reload.
Rith then sang another note, and Arabs clutched at their ears.
And Ky threw another shadowbolt, and the men fled in terror.
Fifty had charged; twenty-nine lay dead; twenty-one made it back to the ranks.
After a moment, the soldier leading the black camel moved to the shadow of the obelisk. The camel knelt, and a dark-robed figure dismounted from the silken enclosure on its back.
Trendel spoke a word, and stared. “Lincoln’s ghost! The ring! The ring on his finger! It’s a scarab-inscribed sapphire.”
“You can see a ring on his finger?” asked Kane.
“My dream! I remember my dream! All of it!”
“What dream?” asked Arik.
“I remember dreaming that this-this, this Akhanon crawled out of a sarcophagus in a secret chamber in the Library of Forbidden Knowledge. He drank a potion and then emerged from the ruins and went down to the Nile and called a reed boat to him.”
“The reed boat Lyssa saw on the bank where the army was encamped?” asked Ky.
“Yes, that one. And he floated down the river to the encampment, and with but a word he slew the general in command and took the army for himself. No wonder they didn’t cry out Allah Akhbar, this Akhanon has nothing to do with modern-day Egypt. He’s from— My god, the curse on the lintel stone: he’s after us and the things we took from the ruins.”
The dark-robed being stood in the shadow of the stele, and he put one hand against it and raised the other to the sky.
“He’s chanting something,” said Trendel. “I think he’s drawing power from the obelisk, and he’s calling upon someone named Serqet.”
“Serqet?” asked Rith. “Isn’t she the goddess of . . . of . . . rats, I can’t remember.”
Arik took long aim at the distant figure and fired.
Akhanon staggered but did not fall, and he continued to chant.
“I don’t think you can kill him that way,” said Ky.
Arik fired till his rifle was empty, each round striking the being in black, each round staggering him, but none
doing apparent harm.
“Uh-oh,” said Kane. “What’s that?”
A darkness came creeping over the desert sand.
Trendel turned his seer’s sight upon it. “Oh, hell.”
“What?” asked Ky. “What is it?”
“Asps, cobras, scorpions, velvet ants, blister beetles, and, out beyond them, hornets swarming in the air.”
“And they’re all coming to kill us,” said Kane.
46
Five Months Before the Hearing
(Coburn Facility)
Down in the second sub-basement, Al Hawkins shut off the klaxon, and he looked at the doomsday clock on this level: 3:58:42 . . . 3:58:41 . . . 3:58:40 . . .
Kat Lawrence keyed her comband. “Toni, what in blazes is going on up there?”
“Kat,” relied Toni, “you should know.”
Kat frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Aren’t Mark’s crew of powertechs down there with you?”
“What crew?”
“Mark brought in a crew from Universal Power—some bloke named James Packwood in charge.”
“Why would he be doing—?”
“The heirs want everything shut down. That son of a bitch Mark said he’d give us till Tuesday.”
“Toni, there’s no U.P. techs down here shutting things off. Something else has been done.”
“No techs?”
“Nobody here but us chickens,” said Kat.
“Bloody crap. Well then, see if you guys can find out what’s going on. Me, I’m going to call Mark.”
“Well, if the U.P. guys have shut things down, Toni, we’ve only got about five, six hours of power.”
“What?”
“Four hours of battery backup and maybe, just maybe two hours on the Astro. We forgot that we had burned H2 six months ago, and it has never been replaced. The nearest tanker is on the way, but it started in Denver, and we’ll be kaput before it gets here.”
“Well, then, find out what happened and fix it.”
“Right, chief,” said Kat.
In the control room, Toni turned to Drew Meyer and said, “Kat tells me that the H2 supply will only last for an hour or two. Take Alya, and John and grab some hardhats with lights and go to every floor and shut down everything that isn’t essential, including the emergency lights down there. If the Blackledge guards interfere, evict them.”
“Right,” said Drew. He looked at John Greyson and Alya Ramanni and said, “Let’s go.”
As those three scrambled out of the control room, Toni took up her holocom and flipped it open and said, “Mark Perry’s personal com.”
A moment later, a small image of Mark sprang up from the com display and said, “I’m not available right now, Toni, but you can leave a message.”
“Mark, if you’re there, pick up. This is an emergency, you bloody shit.”
Toni waited a moment and when Mark didn’t answer she snapped the com shut and opened it again. “Melissa French’s personal com.”
An image of Melissa sprang up. “Melissa French, Toni. I’m—”
Melissa’s voice broke in over her standard announcement, but she left the holo image running instead of switching on live cam. “What the hell, Toni, it’s what, two A.M., three?”
“We have an emergency, Mel. Do you have that court order?”
“Tuesday, Toni. Tuesday.”
“Well, I need it now, within the next”—Toni looked at the doomsday clock—“two or three hours at most. That bloody bastard Mark had his men shut off our power. He promised me he’d wait till Tuesday, but—”
“Where are you, Toni?”
“At the facility. We’ve lost power, and if—”
“But you’ve been thrown out.”
“Listen, Mel, that doesn’t matter. The only thing of importance is that if we don’t get our power back, then six, perhaps seven people will die.”
“What do you mean ‘seven people will die’?”
“Just that. The alpha team is back inside VR, and their mentalities have been sucked into Avery. And we think Arthur Coburn is in there, too. We’re running on reserve battery, and the doomsday clock is now reading 3:48:30. And when the reserve dies, they’ll all die with it. We need that court order to get the power back on.”
“I’ll try, Toni, but finding Judge Raines at this hour is iffy at best. You’d better have a backup plan.”
“Right,” said Toni, and she snapped her holocom shut, wondering just what the hell her backup plan would be.
Kat clicked her holocom shut and turned to Al. “Well, I couldn’t get Billy the Bull, but I did get his assistant. They’ll have a crew out here pronto. Now let’s go see what we can discover for ourselves about this power outage.”
They strode to the Astro. “We gonna fire it up?” asked Luiz.
“Not yet,” said Kat. “Carleen, call Doc and have him find an empty H2 tanker. Then send him around to every source in town and load that sucker up—service stations, national guard, even hospitals—and have him bring it out here. Tell him we need whatever he can get in three hours. I know it won’t be much, but by then perhaps Tucson Solar will have us up and running again.”
Al looked at Michael Phelan. “Mikey, head up and shut down everything that’s not essential.”
“You got it, boss.” Mike gave Carleen a quick peck on the cheek, and took off running, clicking on the light of his hardhat as he started up the stairs.
Kat and Al trotted up a set of metal steps and to the outside, and they headed for the substation on the property.
“Tucson Solar did a fine job of repair,” said Al, puffing a bit as they approached the high chain-link fence, pointing out the new transformers, replaced some six months ago.
They looked at the gauges, and then Al opened a utility locker and flipped a switch. Battery-driven instruments sprang to life. After a moment, Al said, “All this is okay. There just isn’t any juice coming in.”
“What the hell have Packard and his men done?” asked Kat.
“They’ve shut something off on the outside,” said Al.
“Then where is the nearest distribution station?”
Al frowned in concentration, then said, “About three miles from here as the crow flies, but ten miles by road.”
“Does this facility have its own separate feed from the substation.”
“Ah, I see where you’re going with this. Yeah, we have our own feed.”
“Then likely that’s where Packard and his crew did the deed.”
As they went about shutting down unnecessary equipment and lights that were driven off the backup system, Drew Meyer ran a calculation in his head. And when he and John and Alya met up with Michael Phelan on the second floor, Drew said, “I think we can stretch out the H2 supply to last awhile longer.”
“How?” asked Michael.
“The Astro right now is set to drive the building and recharge the batteries, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if I have this figured correctly, if we rewire the Astro to only drive the rechargers for the emergency backup system, then we’ll not be carrying the building load.”
“What load would that be?” asked Alya. “I mean, isn’t most of that already shut off?”
“The majority of the lights are, but there are things such as the refrigerators in the kitchen that will kick on, air conditioning, air duct fans, and the like. Too many control panels for us to find them all in time. So, by eliminating those, we’ll stretch the H2 supply longer.”
“I see,” said Alya.
Drew turned to Michael and said, “I would suggest that you let the backup system run for, oh, say, two hours, then fire up the Astro, and, even though we let the system keep running, the Astro should be able to recharge the batteries in”—Drew paused, then said—“about ninety minutes. Then you shut down the Astro.”
Michael said, “So, we run on batteries for two hours, and then kick on the Astro, and ninety minutes later, even though
Avery keeps running on backup, everything will be charged full, and then we shut off the Astro and let the backup system carry on for another two hours.” Michael smiled and said, “Doc, you’re a genius.”
Drew looked at him and said, “Mikey, it’s a trivial equation.” Then Drew added, “By running the Astro only to the chargers, it’ll let us run on minimum without turning the whole facility back on. We’ll operate on the backup system only.”
“I’ll see if we can do that, Doc. —Oh, and one of the things that occurred to me, is that if you guys up in the control room shut off all but the critical consoles, especially the main holo, that’ll save a lot of power, and maybe we can stretch things out even more.”
“But-but if we do that we won’t be able to see what’s going on,” objected Greyson.
“Never fear,” said Alya, “Vishnu will watch over them.”
47
Egypt
(Tomb Raiders)
The dark mass of lethal serpents and deadly arachnids and venomous insects flowed swiftly across the sand and toward the fort, and Rith gritted, “Now I remember: Serqet is the Egyptian goddess of snakes and scorpions and poisonous things.”
“Good grief,” said Kane, “the ground is covered with them. Where in Hades did they all come from?”
“Too many for our rifles to be effective,” said Arik.
“Too many for my shadowbolts,” said Ky.
“Too many for me to heal everyone,” said Kane.
“Sound won’t deter them,” said Rith.
“And I can’t kill the bastard that’s set them on us,” said Arik, glancing at Akhanon.
“But I can,” said Ky.
And as red and black cobras and horned and sand vipers slithered in through gaps in the palisades, and as scorpions and spiders, centipedes, fire ants, velvet ants, and blister beetles scuttled up the wooden walls, and as wasps sped through the air toward them, Ky drew her black sword from the scabbard on her back and, before anyone could stop her, she stepped into a shadow and vanished.
Moments later, just as the wasps descended upon the fort, Ky emerged in the obelisk’s shadow and swung her blade two-handed and took off Akhanon’s head. Then she vanished again. . . .
Shadowprey: A Black Foxes Adventure Page 22