Читать книгу Cradle Of Destiny - James Axler - Страница 10

With Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta broken up, Kane pulled in the remaining third of Domi’s team, Sela Sinclair, to join him on an emergency jump to Thunder Isle. Right now, in the mat-trans chamber, Donald Bry and Daryl Morganstern were busy trying to override the lockout placed by the Millennial Consortium hijackers at the Operation Chronos facility. Kane didn’t doubt Sinclair’s ability. The woman had fought for Cerberus redoubt for a year, proving herself as brave and skillful a warrior as any he had met. Sinclair had been born in a different time, an air force security officer whose training had been geared toward protecting United States military bases from terrorism. She was a freezie, a cryogenically preserved relic from centuries in the past, and upon awakening, she had sided with Kane, Brigid and Grant in battling another temporally displaced set of opponents.

Kane was in his shadow suit, the high-tech polymers conforming to his lean, wolflike musculature like a second skin, except this skin would protect him from hard vacuum decompression and intense heat or cold, though it could not redistribute kinetic shock from small-arms fire. Due to its high-tech composition, the shadow suit did protect its wearer from hard impacts such as falls and even punches from foes of great size and strength.

Kane preferred the shadow suit over his old Magistrate armor. It provided him better mobility and superior comfort. It also hid easily under other clothing, being low profile and formfitting. He didn’t mind being able to ignore the biting, frostbite-inducing chill of arctic winds or the blazing, mercilessly hot suns of deserts in nothing more than the shadow suit and its hood. Other features, such as camouflage and protection from radiation, were simply icing on the cake.

Sinclair wore another shadow suit, identical to Kane’s, but her forearm was not adorned with the Magistrates’ weapon and badge of office, the folding Sin Eater machine pistol. Rather, Sinclair had her Beretta M-9 pistol hanging on a pistol belt, along with a collapsible combat baton, a fighting knife and various bits of security kit that gave her a continuity of force from mild restraint to lethal response that compensated for the relative lack of size compared to big, muscular men like Kane, Grant or Edwards. There was no doubt, thanks to the curve-hugging properties of the shadow suit, that Sinclair was athletic and strong, but without the feral ferocity of someone like Domi, she had to supplement her strength and skill with an assortment of equipment that would give her an edge against the rare opponent whose greater might was matched with fighting ability.

Kane, after years of adventuring with some of the most dynamic women on the planet, had no doubt that a woman with training and experience could handle herself quite well in almost as many situations as he could. But he also appreciated Sinclair knowing her limitations and adapting strategy and preparations for them. Kane himself knew that he was not the strongest or the most skilled warrior on the planet, nor was he the smartest. That was one of his strengths.

Grant had relayed some wisdom from the Tigers of Heaven from a swordsman named Musashi, one of the most celebrated samurai warriors in the history of Japan. Musashi had said that “to know one’s limitations is to be limitless.” Kane had innately understood that, and it was what had carried him and his allies to victory over gods, armies of cultists and other threats to humanity’s tenuous existence in the dangerous world that existed in this postapocalyptic time. That bit of philosophy passed on from a swordsman hundreds of years ago was simply a confirmation for what Kane didn’t have the words. Right now, however, he was more interested in the limitations of technology.

Because the mat-trans unit on Thunder Isle was part of the Totality Concept, a Continuity of Government program in the event of an apocalyptic event, it would have been easy to pop into the Operation Chronos facility if it weren’t for the fact that the mat-trans was on total lockdown because of the millennialist’s attack. Kane had suggested using the interphaser, a unit that acted in concert with natural vortices of magnetic energy.

The Thunder Isle facility was constructed around such an intersection of magnetic force lines, often called Ley Lines by western alchemists or Dragon Roads by Asian geomancers. The interphaser would drop them somewhere in the control room. While the sudden appearance of Kane and Sinclair would give them some advantage, there was no way to know if they would emerge in a murderous crossfire.

“You will end up in their mat-trans, which could easily be put under guard. You’d be gunned down—” Lakesh said.

A glare from Kane cut him off.

Right now, Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man for running the functions of the Cerberus redoubt, was working code and math together with Clem Bryant and Daryl Morganstern. Bryant wasn’t a computer expert or a mathematician like Bry or Morganstern, but he had rapidly become one of the premier scientific problem solvers. His field of expertise had been oceanography, something that was not immediately necessary in the struggle against the Annunaki and other forces threatening the freedom of humanity. He’d originally become the chef for the redoubt, but his ability to think outside of the box had granted Lakesh and the others the spark to reach conclusions.

The three men were an odd amalgamation, from the slender, rust-haired Bry to squat, pudgy-faced Morganstern to tall, goateed Bryant.

Kane looked to Sinclair. “We could just take a Manta…”

“No good,” Bry said. “Grant’s already in motion, from what I heard over his Commtact.”

“Lakesh, we don’t have time to dick around,” Kane said. “Just jump us in. No one has a gun that can punch through the armaglass chamber doors.”

Sinclair managed a smile. “I do have something that could help us with that.”

With that announcement, she drew a flashlight from her well-stocked utility belt.

“Flashlight,” Kane noted.

“I’d show you what it does, but it’d take you a few seconds to get over the strobe setting,” Sinclair answered.

“What kind of candlepower does it put out?” Kane asked.

“Ten thousand,” Sinclair said. “It’ll still be sharp enough to leave a millennialist seeing spots for about fifteen seconds.”

“That should buy us enough time to get out into the open,” Kane returned. “Lakesh?”

The chief scientist of Cerberus frowned, but his decision process was quickened simply because of the swiftness of Kane’s decision. The former Magistrate was a man of action, but also one with an uncanny danger sense that had kept him alive in conflicts against menaces powerful enough to erase the solar system. “Bry, can we send them?”

Bry nodded and he and Morganstern exited the mat-trans unit. Kane and Sinclair entered the armaglass chamber with swiftness and purpose.

Kane wasn’t going to let Grant, his partner and best friend in the world, disappear into history without a fight.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA STALKED through the entrance into a well-lit corridor. The millennialists were too savvy to allow stretches of shadows to obscure the approach of enemies. It didn’t matter, since the hallway was empty of sentries, which made this approach all the more suspicious. For a brief instant, Grant wished Kane, with his uncanny point man’s sense, was by his side instead of the beautiful samurai Shizuka. She was highly skilled, but Grant had yet to encounter another with Kane’s instincts and reflexes.

The former Magistrate pushed the thought from his mind. Instead of occupying his thoughts with what could have been, he needed to concentrate on the here and now. His eyes and ears couldn’t pick up on minuscule details with the same razor-sharp precision that Kane could, but he hadn’t survived years as a Mag without relying on his own well-honed awareness. That’s when he saw the smears of mud tracking along the otherwise mirror-polished floors.

Grant slowed and Shizuka, shadowing close to him, did likewise, her attention falling to the mess on the tiles. Neither of them spoke, but they both realized that something else was waiting down the hall, out of sight. The smell of the mud was the same primal stench of jungle that they had passed through. The Tigers of Heaven had done their best to clear the road between the beach and the installation of the dangerous feral predators trawled from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, then utilized speakers producing uncomfortable infrasonic pulses to keep them away.

The speakers had made manning Thunder Isle much safer, but nothing was perfect, necessitating sidearms and a contingent of sentries on the island at all times, just in case a predator’s taste for human flesh was stronger than the discomfort that pumped through his eardrums every time he neared their world.

Those speakers, unfortunately, had a limited range. Behind the walls of the facility, anything carted past them would be unhindered, save by locked bulkhead doors, just like the one that sat at the end of this corridor. As Grant and Shizuka kept to the cover of a wall outcropping, minimizing their exposure to security cameras, they realized that something else could have been curled up in nooks down the way.

“Judging by the size of the mud smears, trailing off into man-size footprints, we’re looking at deinonychus,” Shizuka said.

Grant, who had grown familiar with the time-displaced dragons of Thunder Isle, nodded in agreement. “More than one, too. And check it out, feathers. Definitely those little ‘terrible claws.’”

The predators that they’d referred to were the height and weight of German shepherds, but were infinitely more dangerous, possessing intelligence and teamwork in addition to flesh-rending killing claws on their hind legs and mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth. The deinonychus were masses of muscle that could sprint at upward of thirty miles per hour, as well. All of that combined into an opponent that was a lightning-quick slashing wind that could bring down elephantine sauropods outweighing an individual raptor tenfold. The Tigers of Heaven had suffered losses because of these cunning, dangerous creatures, and Grant and his other Cerberus companions had nearly succumbed to their threat, as well.

“Damn consortium must have drugged them and brought them here to be guard dogs,” Grant grumbled.

As if on cue, a feather-crowned head poked out, cat-slitted eyes staring manically over a grin full of daggers. Though the deinonychus had existed millions of years before humans had even developed consciousness, there was something primevally terrifying about that wild, unhindered smile that reached down into the mammalian DNA and still resonated in modern humans. This was the cackling wyvern, a fanged cockatrice that was the horror of mankind’s nightmares, the source of myths and horror tales.

Another head, then a third, all looked down the hall, nostrils flaring, heads tilting and twitching inhumanly to locate the source of any sound.

Grant grimaced, realizing that even hushed, his voice carried to the sharp ears of the deadly predators. Shizuka tensed, knowing that they didn’t see all of their dinosaur opponents. A sudden movement would be the trigger to the raptors’ charge. The three hunters, given the height of their heads around the outcroppings they’d nested at, were crouched on haunches of coil-wound muscle that could launch them as swiftly as even Shizuka’s arrows.

One of the raptors padded warily into the open, body and head held low and parallel to the floor tiles. Grant could see the predator’s killing claws, three-inch-long hooks of gleaming black talon, cocked perpendicular to the ground, its other nails providing it traction in the polished corridor. The raptor’s thigh muscles flexed and swelled, the promise of blinding speed stored in the tightly clenched limbs.

Grant sneered. The dinosaurs were simple animals, no matter how dangerous they could be. They were pawns of the millennialists, who simply saw every living thing as their subjects. That these creatures, magnificent examples of an evolutionary line ended sixty-five million years prior, would either kill or die was of no matter to the conspirators. At the same time, Grant was not a man who relished killing animals unnecessarily and hated it even more when those creatures were used as fodder for cowards too lazy to fight their own battles. As much as the initial sight of the deadly predators had awakened instinctual horror in the pit of his stomach, these dinosaurs were not malicious or gleefully violent. The only adversaries whom Grant had ever encountered who had taken joy or pride in their violence were humans. The deinonychus hadn’t made a choice to be here and be killers.

Still, Grant wasn’t going to stay his hand, not with Shizuka’s life at stake. The Tigers of Heaven commander had similar feelings. While one of them could have possibly retreated back out of this corridor, the two of them would not be able to dive through the door without entangling each other. They had to stand and fight, especially since there were citizens of New Edo and Cerberus on the other side of the door the raptors protected.

Grant would make note to provide a little extra pain to the sociopaths who threw away lives like table scraps as he extended his fingers for a countdown. Shizuka nodded, understanding his intent. From the behavior they observed, there was a path that didn’t involve violence and would result in their betrayed presence and injuries inflicted at the talons and fangs of the deinonychus. As Grant’s index finger folded down into his fist, the two warriors stepped into the open swiftly and suddenly, so much so that the lone predator crouched in the center of the hall stepped back, startled into recoil.

Grant’s step was punctuated by the sharp clack of his Sin Eater extending into his hand. The only sound that Shizuka had made was the creak of her bow flexing under the force of her strong arms. Both people were ready to let their weapons speak, and they stood with confidence and strength. Of course, this was surrendering any attempt at stealth on their parts, thanks to the noise the Sin Eater would make.

There was a method of dealing with animals, and predators were not too interested in engaging in combat with prey that could injure them. Successful hunters sought out targets that would provide them minimum risk, or stack the odds in their favor due to surprise and terrain. Here, in an open corridor, with foes who were armed and obviously capable of fighting back, the deinonychus would pause before a foolish head-on rush.

Those yellow-black slitted eyes locked on to Grant, which meant that Shizuka could slip back behind his bulk and head toward the bulkhead access to the outside. If they were to have a chance to advance farther without gunshots warning the millennialists on the other side of their blast shield, Grant and Shizuka would need a path for the deinonychus to run away.

It helped that the two adventurers could tell the difference between territorial challenge and hunting mode. From what they knew, no raptor would expose itself if there was no net of fellow predators to catch fleeing prey. This was the deinonychus pack standing their ground against a threat, the pack leader taking point and presenting the knowledge that the humans were approaching a very defensive, confused and frightened group.

Grant didn’t flinch, keeping eye contact with the pack leader, but other than showing off his size and weapon, he made no menacing actions toward the raptor. This was a fine line, a balance between a show of strength and passive standing. Too strong, and the deinonychus would take Grant as a threat. Too passive, and the prehistoric killing machine would advance, perhaps even attack.

Grant heard the door behind him—they hadn’t come that far down the corridor—and the smell of the jungle beyond the sonic fence rushed him. The pack leader’s nostrils flared at the familiar scent of home. The predator’s sensitive ears, or rather the feathers around their ear holes that funneled sound akin to mammalian ears, turned to the doorway, and they recoiled momentarily. He spoke in low, calm tones. “Don’t forget…”

“I haven’t. Just locating the speaker,” Shizuka replied just as softly.

Grant didn’t need any verification that his love had disconnected the infrasound generator. The sudden decrease in uncomfortable sonics was flagged by the reaction of the deinonychus pack leader and its kin.

The pack leader’s yellow eyes flicked from Grant to the jungle behind him. The human stepped aside, allowing the confused, uprooted predators a way back to where they were comfortable. Slowly, cautiously, the dinosaurs walked out into the open, the pack leader padding up to Grant. Their eyes were still locked, the raptor’s signal was clear.

To harm my family, you must go through me.

The deinonychus, five of them, zipped past their pack leader, darting through the doorway and beyond, disappearing into the jungle. Once its family was safely away from this place of humans, the leader backed away from Grant, showing its strength while giving itself distance from a potential opponent and the freedom of the forest. Grant hoped that Shizuka hadn’t reset the infrasound projector, but once the lead raptor’s feet felt soil, not tile, it whirled and exploded away into the wilds of Thunder Isle.

Though he had not incurred the wrath of the dinosaur’s claws and fangs, Grant had to lean against the wall. He’d flexed his muscles, making himself appear larger and more menacing. That and the concentration needed to keep the animals at bay had taken its toll. Shizuka appeared in the doorway, closing it behind her before tending to him.

“You all right?” she asked.

Grant nodded, taking a few deep breaths. “Staring down a killer dinosaur is hard damned work.”

Shizuka brushed her hand across his broad chest, sparing a slight, tight-lipped smile. “So taking on some hired guns should be a snap, right?”

Grant chuckled and kissed Shizuka’s forehead, or rather the helmet chevron over her eyes. “Yeah. Can’t go taking a nap now.”

The two warriors headed down the hallway.

BRIGID BAPTISTE WAS impressed with the precision of Edwards’s breaching charge. The reshaped plastic explosives had cut a perfect hole large enough for Brigid, Domi and Maria Falk to slither through. Edwards had no intention of climbing into an ancient underground temple, and a hole large enough to fit his muscular, massive form would risk a weakness in the wall that might cause the improvised entrance to collapse.

Domi took point, putting her head and shoulders through the opening. Though not much sunlight got past even her slender frame, the albino’s ruby-red eyes were attuned to even the deepest of shadows, and could pick up details as necessary. She came out of the hole and reached into a gear bag, pulling a length of rope adorned with knots every two feet.

“Anchor,” she ordered.

Edwards nodded and secured the end of the cord and the grapnel hook to which it was attached in some rocks. When the steel tines of the grapnel were anchored, Edwards gave the hook a tug with all of his strength. If the former Magistrate couldn’t unseat the grapnel, then the combined weight of Falk and Brigid wouldn’t be too much for it.

“Shall we?”

“Maria last. You second,” Domi said to Brigid, slithering through the hole. A slender arm snaked out, snatched up her gear bag and yanked it into the shadows. Brigid waited a moment, wondering what would be the feral girl’s signal to follow her. The hiss of a flare, followed by a reddish glow in the darkened hole was a good preamble.

“Come on,” Domi called.

Brigid slipped through the hole, holding on to the rope. The drop to the ground was only twenty-five feet, but it was certainly nothing that she’d have wanted to attempt in the dark. Chunks of broken stone on the floor provided an uneven surface to simply hop on to, promising a broken ankle if she’d made the attempt. The knotted rope also provided an easy, low-profile ladder with which they could leave the temple. Thanks to Falk’s ground sonar, the hole itself was braced by sufficient struts to be fairly stable, if too small for Edwards to want to go through.

Even if he wasn’t wary of crawling into a claustrophobic space, Brigid, Domi and Edwards all agreed that someone standing guard at their entrance would be vital. There was no telling who was here on the Euphrates. The explorers had arrived in via parallax point, so knowledge of local bandits, pirates or tyrants was slim. If it weren’t for a heretofore unknown threat from the time of the Annunakis’ rule, and now new hints of another monstrosity from past millennia, Brigid wouldn’t have come here, making a wild stab for historical data that could be an edge in their next conflict with the Annunaki overlords.

Blindsided by Marduk’s horde alongside New Olympus, then the blade of Ullikummis and later Ullikummis himself, Brigid was getting tired of being caught behind the curve.

The vaulted underground chamber was large enough to be an aircraft hangar. Knowing the ships of the Annunaki, Brigid wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that this been a parking garage for ancient astronauts. She didn’t see any form of doors through which skimmers could flit in and out, but she wasn’t able to perceive the wall opposite the one they’d entered through, thanks to the gloomy shadows and the interruption of support studs. She remembered Falk’s original measurements as the geologist finally made her way down the rope.

Two football fields in area.

“Anything, Domi?” Brigid asked.

“Stale air,” she answered. “Scurrying vermin. Not much.”

Outside of Kane, Domi had some of the sharpest senses of any human that Brigid had ever known. Part of it was due to the sensitivity inherent in an albino’s eyes, the rest coming from growing up in the wilderness. Though her skin was alabaster in color, and her closely shorn hair was the hue of aged bone, the feral woman was hardly the fragile creature that albinos of previous centuries had been. She was strong and tough, having survived trauma that would have killed a less resilient human.

Brigid couldn’t have asked for a better companion to slink through the darkness of a temple that might also be an Annunaki tomb. She glanced over to Falk, who checked the Glock in her belt holster. Brigid saw a mirror of herself in the older woman, a scientist who was willing to journey into the unknown but who hadn’t been tested or tried in conflict. There was a difference between the two scientists, though. Falk was beginning her adventuring in her later years, while Brigid was still young and fit. The former archivist was also tall and heavy enough to make her gender less important should she ever get into conflict with a man. Falk was more petite, larger than Domi was but with none of the animalistic fury and wilderness instincts of the albino warrior.

The Glock was the simplest and easiest firearm to operate in the Cerberus armory, so Falk wouldn’t be completely inept if it came to gunplay. Without spending time on learning the operation of the mechanism, Falk and the other Manitius Base scientists could be grilled on marksmanship. The archivist knew the scores from their training, and Falk was above the median in skill, able to tear the heart out of a paper target. Still, Brigid knew that she’d have to watch out for the geologist, because a printed silhouette was very different from a menacing opponent.

Domi had stopped, looking at the other part of Grant’s trench coat. It hung like a flag, and from this side, there was no doubt that it had been crafted for a giant of a man. Below the empty coat was a pile of rodent-chewed bones. Brigid swallowed hard, but the feral girl knelt and picked up one of the bones.

“Too big,” she announced.

“How do you know?” Brigid asked.

Domi stood up the bone she was examining. It was a femur that was nearly as long as Domi’s entire leg. “Grant’s tall, but his thigh don’t reach to my waist. Someone else was wearing his coat.”

Brigid looked at the sunken, buckled ceiling, wondering how the skeleton had gotten nearly through the roof of the temple. She could only hope that it was a victorious situation for Grant.

She didn’t want to think of how someone else had gained possession of her friend’s coat.