Читать книгу Cradle Of Destiny - James Axler - Страница 11

Merkel’s head shot up as two simultaneous events were announced by the consortium mercenaries under his command. One of the mercenaries was not so much a hired gun but a computer technician named Milo Donaldson, the key tapper who was given charge of the mat-trans and the time trawl. He was, to Merkel’s mind, the perfect example of a computer nerd, slender and full of himself because he had abilities that were as vital to the scientists as those of a dozen gunslingers. He got on Merkel’s nerves simply because of his perceived sense of power, which was only as good as his fingertips dancing across a keyboard.

The other was Kovak, who was a former Magistrate like Merkel. However, Kovak was not a war leader like Merkel was. Kovak was just another minion, someone who cleaned up. Merkel would be the one through the door first, while Kovak would hang back, fire a few shots into a twitching corpse and scoop up any dropped magazines. He was simply a cleaner, someone who took care of any messes that Merkel made while he was actively doing.

Not that Merkel himself was in any good mood. Ever since the fall of the baronies, he’d been in business for himself, a walking trigger finger for hire, living hand to mouth in the basest of mercenary lifestyles. He’d long ago sold off any pretense of ethics when he’d learned that he didn’t have a retirement plan. He had felt that his work as a drone under another baron was ignored and degrading. His desire for recognition and glory, despite only excelling at the lowest of achievements, was what finally got him to go from picking up profit in the baronial system to going all out to become his own man.

Of course, that manhood was predicated on being a brute, stripping his office of lawman down to its lowest common denominator. He was a thug, alone in the wilderness. He’d momentarily thought of throwing in his lot with Kane and the people of Cerberus, like a few other Magistrates had done, but Merkel knew he could do better than Kane. Kane had thrown away his life of power and prestige for a half-assed idea of freedom and equality.

Merkel saw a world that he could take on, provided he could scrounge the right people. He’d regarded Donaldson and Kovak as necessary pains, and maybe at some time in the future, he could pick someone better or use them as faceless drones of his own.

Merkel knew that if he told the right lies, he could get his followers. He knew that the consortium had lied about Kane, but most of the soldiers hired by them didn’t care, or had their own vendettas, just like Merkel did.

Men like Allen, another Magistrate who’d been through the same disillusionment. Allen had served under the barons’ whims. He’d upheld baronial law, and when the barons said to kill without mercy, Allen had no compunction about putting a bullet into the head of every single person he was told to. It was his job; it was his life. When the barons abandoned the Magistrates, there were all manner of options that the lawmen could have gone with. They could have gone to Cerberus or continued their career of upholding law and protecting the citizens of the few bastions of civilization in postapocalyptic America, but Allen and Merkel knew that they could do so much better.

The two former law keepers knew better. Serving the unwashed masses without profit didn’t fit their mercenary feelings. The Magistrates had been raised in law, but as Kane and Grant had proved, such rearing was not infallible. Dozens had strayed from the course. Merkel and Allen figured they could convert their strength and training into sustenance of a life they preferred, one where they were in control, and to hell with anyone else’s concepts of what mattered and what was important. Having that power was everything to Merkel, so anything that got in his way was more than an annoyance: it was a declaration of war.

Kovak and Donaldson were simply the messengers of bad news, but Merkel was willing to shoot them.

“Sir! Movement in corridor Alpha!” Kovak announced. “The dinosaurs are leaving.”

“We’ve got an incoming matter transmission,” Donaldson said.

“Shut the door! Lock down the chamber!” Merkel shouted, responding immediately. “Allen! Don’t let the hostages be recovered alive!”

“You’ve got it,” Allen said. “If those Goody Two-shoes bastards want to save something, they’ll be returning corpses to be buried.”

Merkel sneered. “If we can’t have Thunder Isle, they’ll have a tomb. No one takes what I own,” Merkel growled. “Not without great price. Not even Kane and Grant, damn their very existence!”

AS SHE MATERIALIZED the mat-trans chamber, Sela Sinclair felt as if her stomach was a few hundred feet behind her, in the void they’d just crossed. Bry and Morganstern had cracked the lockout codes put in by the millennialist raiders, but since it was a standard jump, there was residual jump sickness. It was nothing that she hadn’t hardened herself against, but it was still disorienting. Her knees went rubbery for a moment, but Sinclair was a strong woman. She hadn’t fought her way into the traditionally male-dominated world of the United States Air Force without having guts.

“Sinclair,” Kane called out, getting her thoughts refocused.

As if it were a code word, a post-hypnotic suggestion trigger, Sinclair reached down to her security torch and swept it out of its spot on her utility belt. Kane saw consortium mercenaries rush down the corridor to hem them in, Calico machine guns held in firing position for the moment that the chamber door hissed aside.

Sinclair focused the lens of her flashlight on the hallway, then thumbed the panic button on the side. Kane ducked his face behind his shoulder, and the normally nonreflective shadowsuit was painted with a brilliant blue-white glow.

The trio of consortium gunmen in the hall let out grunts of pain as their eyeballs were seared by the brilliant burst of light pulsing from the torch. Sinclair had been on the other end of the lens, so she knew that the only thing residing in their optic nerves was an orange halo around a void of nothingness. The effect would last for as long as ten seconds, an eternity when it came to close-quarters combat, but they wouldn’t feel long-term effects, depending on how mercifully Kane and Sinclair treated them.

She turned off the light and was hot on Kane’s heels as the two Cerberus warriors charged the gun-wielding blinded men. The former Magistrate skipped the first of the millennialists, leaving him for Sinclair to deal with as he fell upon the two at the rear. It wasn’t a case of macho posturing on Kane’s part; it was simply the fact that he had the arm reach to engage the gunmen quickly, simultaneously if he moved correctly.

Sinclair drew her collapsible ASP baton, snapping it open with a flick of the wrist. The harsh snap of the telescoping steel tubing caused her target to “look” in the direction of the sound, despite the fact that all he could see was an all-consuming fireball. She whipped the tip of the baton around like a scythe, lashing it across the millennialist’s knees. The sudden impact knocked his feet from beneath him, and Sinclair pivoted the top section up and chopped it hard on his neck, just over his jugular.

That particular shot was a stunner. The blood vessel transmitted hydrostatic force back into his brain, not enough to rupture anything vital, but the sudden rush of fluid was overwhelming enough to interrupt the raider’s consciousness.

Sinclair looked up in time to see Kane using the toppling form of one of the consortium mercenaries as a brace to swing both feet up, one boot cracking the man’s jaw, the other spearing his breastbone. The millennial gunman’s head rebounded off the wall, and then he crashed face-first into the floor, a numb, groaning sack of insensate thug. Kane landed on the balls of his feet as his “support” folded to the ground, landing on his knees and vomiting. Kane turned and jammed a knife-hard hand into the stunned gunman’s neck, ending his suffering for the time being.

“Sinclair, make sure he doesn’t choke,” Kane ordered, gathering up the unconscious men’s firearms.

Sinclair knelt next to the man, dragging his head from the puddle he’d made after Kane struck him hard in the sternum and groin. She left him lying on his side, then took a rag from one of his pockets to clear the remaining bile from his mouth. He wouldn’t choke. It might be a waste of time, especially since these three hired guns may have been responsible for the deaths of a Tiger of Heaven sentry on the island. If they were murderers, their heads would roll.

Still, the Tigers of Heaven had a stringent code of justice, and the samurai were loath to kill incapacitated opponents, just like the Cerberus warriors. There was time for ruthless slaying ability, but cold-blooded murder didn’t live in the hearts of the two societies.

“He’ll live,” Sinclair announced.

“If he deserves to,” Kane replied, voice low and grim. The Sin Eater hissed into his hand, lightning swift. “These three are our last free lunch for a while.”

“I didn’t sign on for an easy time,” Sinclair answered, drawing the Beretta from her hip holster. She took a moment to affix a suppressor to the extended barrel. Kane latched a stealth module, a squared, vented device as opposed to the round pipe on her Beretta, onto the nose of his Sin Eater, as well. Neither gun would be whisper quiet—the enemy would definitely know that firearms went off—but they wouldn’t give away their positions so easily due to the alteration of the weapons’ acoustics.

“Bry, tell me you’ve cracked the security cameras,” Kane said into his Commtact.

“I have, but the millennialists are staying out of sight,” Bry answered. “These guys aren’t stupid…oh, my God… Grant!”

Sinclair could see Kane stiffen at the alarm in Bry’s voice. Then the Cerberus warrior exploded into motion, and she had to push herself to keep up with Kane.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA MOVED like shadowy wraiths among the corridors of the Operation Chronos laboratories. They had barely ducked out of sight when a group of millennialist gunmen hurried to the hall where they’d entered the base. They avoided notice, and as soon as they were out of earshot, Shizuka got on the radio to her Tigers of Heaven allies. The samurai would deal with the millennialists, bringing them down swiftly and silently.

The two people had the option of going right at the commander who had taken control of the installation, but the fear for the safety of the hostages, if there were any, kept them moving with silence and speed. They had to verify any captives the millennialists had taken and insure their safety. Grant thought of the difference between the consortium and Cerberus. The consortium would sacrifice their hired guns, cutting and running or blasting the facility to oblivion in a scorched-earth campaign. Grant, however, couldn’t write off an ally. These were friends, and if there was one thing that the ex-Magistrate had developed, it was loyalty to the people of New Edo, enough that he’d risk his life for them as readily as he did for his family at the Cerberus redoubt.

Grant frowned, deepening the angle of his gunslinger’s mustache as he mentally reviewed the map of the Operation Chronos labs. When he spoke to Shizuka, it was softer than a whisper. “Two places where they could be holding people.”

Shizuka nodded. “Specimen storage and the temporal dilator itself.”

“They save ammo by tossing the hostages…where?”

“When,” Shizuka corrected. “Prehuman times. The nuclear winter after skydark. Lots of eras would be fatal to modern humans.”

Grant sneered. “It’s scary that we can imagine the actions of sociopaths.”

“We’ve encountered enough to expect the worst,” Shizuka answered.

“I’ll scout specimen storage,” Grant said. “Call me and wait if you see anyone.”

Shizuka nodded and disappeared. Grant didn’t worry about her. If the Japanese woman didn’t want to be noticed, she wouldn’t be. And he had stressed that they were only doing a reconnaissance, not taking action. That didn’t mean either of them would sit still if a hostage was threatened with death, but the two of them were in contact with each other. One call for help, and the other would be with them in a heartbeat.

Grant slunk down the hall to specimen storage, where the scientists who ran Operation Chronos had deposited time-trawled people and animals, like the raptors that they had just encountered, and even larger creatures like the carnotaurus they had met on one of their first visits to Thunder Isle. The trawl could easily accommodate the one-ton, fifteen-foot-long predator with the unusual, almost demonic horns adorning its broad, powerful skull. Temporal disorientation made it easier for the Chronos whitecoats to control even the strongest of beasts.

The population of prehistoric animals on the island indicated that the scientists were prolific in their efforts. The breadth of specimen containment’s cells was another clue, a dozen cages of various sizes. On quiet feet, Grant looked into the darkened prison, listening for signs of habitation.

The hostage takers might have cast the area into shadows, but there was no way that they could muffle the nervous shifting and breathing of captives. Grant tossed a pocketed pebble into the hallway to make certain, but no reaction left him with the impression that this place had been cordoned off and abandoned. He turned away to rendezvous with Shizuka and spotted a half-dozen consortium soldiers moving with purpose toward the Chronos trawl.

“Shizuka, you’ve got company on your six,” Grant warned over the radio.

“Busy,” came the hissed reply.

From the grunts transmitted over her hands-free microphone, Grant knew that he was going to have to hustle. From stealth to explosive acceleration, the big man charged down the hall, his long strides ending in loud thumps on the tile floor of the laboratory, each footfall loud enough to be a gunshot. If things were going to hell, Grant wanted to draw attention away from Shizuka.

“Hey!” shouted one of the group of soldiers who’d passed only moments before, hearing the ex-Magistrate run.

As Grant rounded the corner, he saw that three of the millennialists were in midturn, the front half of the group continuing on its path. Three Calico submachine guns would still have the potential of causing Grant injury through his armored coat, so there was no pause on the brawny titan’s part. Leg muscles surged, and he sprinted forward like a human bull, his arms swept out like the horns of a steer. Instead of making himself a smaller target, Grant gambled on causing as much disruption as possible. His wide, sweeping limbs struck each of the three gunmen, bowling them over.

Grant could feel the jaw of one mercenary dislocate as his melon-sized shoulder slammed up against it. His fingers disappeared into the wet mushy holes in an other’s face as he sunk them into eye sockets. The last of the trio’s throat thudded hard against his right forearm, wrapped in the hydraulic forearm holster, and there was a dull pop as the gunman’s larynx collapsed and his neck bones separated. It was a brutal assault, and there was at least one fatality in the attack. It was necessary; if any of the three had managed to get their fingers on the triggers of their machine pistols, the resultant gunfire would have alerted all of the hostaged Chronos facility.

Things were already going downhill, and there were three more hired soldiers to deal with. The crash of Grant against their compatriots was now enough to draw the lead group’s attention. Two stunned men and a corpse fell to the tile floor as they turned. Grant snapped off a hard punch with his left fist, the blow crushing the cheekbones of a millennialist, the impact enough to toss the man insensate to the ground. The second of the gunmen swung his Calico up, but Grant launched the Sin Eater into his grasp by flexing his wrist tendons. A heavyweight 9 mm slug exploded through the stealth module on the machine pistol’s muzzle, making a throaty pop that was matched by the bursting of ribs and lung tissue. The mercenary jerked violently backward as 240 grains of high-density bullet turned his internal organs to froth and shattered his spine.

The last of the consortium thugs managed to aim at the center of Grant’s chest, the Calico only the blink of an eye away from opening up. Grant took another gamble, shoving his torso hard against the submachine gun’s muzzle. The contact range blast against his armored coat muffled the noise that the weapon would have made. The impact of the rounds hurt like a hammer to the ribs, but the gunshots were far quieter than even a silenced pistol. The thrust of Grant’s chest against the barrel had the added bonus of jamming the enemy’s weapon.

The gunman cranked the trigger again in vain as Grant leveled his Sin Eater at his enemy’s face. The Magistrate weapon chugged once, very effectively, exploding the mercenary’s skull in a brutal spray of a stringy, sticky mess. Grant looked at his Sin Eater in dismay. The gun had fired once, but he’d flicked the selector to burst-mode.

This is why we never use the stealth modules on these things, Grant thought bitterly. The suppressor for the Sin Eater was notorious for robbing energy from the weapon’s cycles and trapping gunpowder in the action, keeping casings from ejecting from the breech and jamming them up. It had always been kept concealed in a pocket of Magistrate armor, and only the stickiness of a hostage situation made the silencers a necessity.

Grant retracted the weapon back into its forearm holster and scooped up a Calico. It was going to be noisy, and not quite as intricately balanced as the Sin Eater, but it would have to do.

SHIZUKA HAD the advantage of leverage over Allen, but only momentarily. The millennialist commander had Magistrate training, and as such, he knew many of the same tricks that Grant had used against her. She’d held him at bay for this long, keeping the consortium’s lackey from hitting the control panel for the temporal dilator. On the transmitter plates below them, a dozen bound men and women, bloody and helpless, were on the verge of being disassembled on a molecular scale and squirted through a wormhole to some other point in the cosmos and the history of humanity.

There was no way that she could rescue the captives before the dilator engaged, and she knew that despite her strength and skill, she couldn’t hold off Allen forever. He had easily one hundred pounds on her lithe frame, and he knew enough martial arts to begin to counter her grappling against him. Sweat drenched her forehead, sticking her silky black hair to her face. If she could see herself, her pale skin against the midnight void color of her tresses, and the strain on her features, she would have thought herself a porcelain doll in the process of shattering and cracking.

Only for the speed and skill of her bow did she manage to bring down the three other sentries with Allen. Three corpses sported ya shafts from their upper chests and throats, the deadly potential energy stored in her kumi spearing them through Kevlar body armor and bone to sever major arteries within moments.

One of the three dead consortium mercenaries was folded over the railing next to the wrestling pair. Allen had appointed this particular gunman to work the controls in case a rescue attempt had been made. He had been Shizuka’s first target, her ya piercing his windpipe and spine in one shot. Paralyzed and unable to breathe, all that the millennialist lackey could do was collapse and sputter as he hung half over a steel pipe. No nerve impulses could impel his unplugged limbs to hit the transmit button.

Shizuka had perforated the other two gunmen, but Allen moved with the speed of a panther, his Sin Eater having shattered the top bow of her kumi, rendering the weapon useless. Shizuka discarded the broken tool, the need to save lives overriding her sentiment for the crafted bow. They had met in the middle, and Shizuka hit Allen with a nerve punch and proceeded to restrain him in an armlock.

At first, it had been brute muscle against biomechanically balanced strength, but Allen was not an idiot. Even as Grant’s voice came over her radio, Shizuka knew that Allen was struggling to twist his way out of her grasp. He was an eighth of a ton of honed, sculpted sinew and might. Though the physics of leverage were on Shizuka’s side, he was working his way to loosen her balance and apply gravity’s pull on him to escape what would have been an unbreakable grapple.

Shizuka could feel the veins stand out on her neck, her locked talons of fingers bursting at the knuckles. Blood from her partially uprooted fingernails was mixing with that which seeped from Allen’s torn skin. He was growing more slippery, though he was taking a toll on his own muscles as the iron-claw technique refused to yield to Allen’s struggle against it. The man’s fingers stretched, yearning to tap the transmit button.

“Gonna break soon, bitch,” Allen growled.

“Break this, fucker!” a stentorian roar split the air.

Both combatants froze at Grant’s challenge, giving the Cerberus warrior the pause he required to hurl himself through the air like a human missile. Shizuka, Allen, Grant and the dead mercenary all sailed through the air, landing in a tangle of arms and legs on the floor only a few feet below them.

“Get the hostages,” Grant ordered. His instruction to Shizuka was long enough for Allen to recover his wits and punch the big man across the jaw.

Shizuka knew better than to remain where she’d be a concern for Grant. She drew her tanto knife and raced forward, slashing through ropes with the precision of a surgeon. She tried to block out the sound of hammer impacts on meat and bone, but the rapid thuds and crunches were too quick and furious to ignore. All she could do was ensure the lives of the surviving Thunder Isle staff, hemp slicing apart against the finely honed edge of her forged steel.

“Shizuka!” Grant bellowed, a desperate warning that anchored her attention.

The console that Grant and Allen had been warring over was a spray of sparks, peppering them with burning embers of white-hot wiring and circuit board fragments. Shizuka glanced down to the alloy floor plates she and the last of the hostages were atop. The horns atop the central pylon glowed, and Shizuka saw fountains of odd light vomiting from their tips like volcanic kaleidoscopes.

“Move now!” Grant yelled, punctuating his cry by plunging Allen’s head into the gaping wreckage of the command console. The millennialist began a macabre dance as high voltage ripped through his nervous system.

Shizuka had shoved the last of the freed captives off the alloy floor plate when something gripped her. It wasn’t physical; it felt more like she was immersed in water, tiny pricklings running along the surface of her skin. The world outside of the odd glow and sensation fit her mind, but the people were rippling. Instead of moving, their limbs seemed to flow like quicksilver. She wanted to move, to speak, when she saw her hand above the surface of the event she was in.

Shizuka had experienced the mat-trans before, so she had a frame of reference for her body’s responses, but right now, the hand sticking out of the field seemed unseemly and alien. Fingers melted together, turning into a webbed fan or a smooth, featureless ball. It seemed like an eternity of watching her digits mutate crazily before she realized that she wasn’t watching her hand destroying and remolding itself but was instead experiencing her hand’s movement from an angle only available across a dimensional fold.

A strong arm gripped her hand. Shizuka wanted to cry out to the person coming to her rescue, but she saw the thick trunk of Grant’s thigh and lower leg press against the temporal dilator’s platform. If she could have made a sound—her lungs felt as if they were immovable despite the fact that she hadn’t needed a breath in what felt like hours—she doubted he could have heard her.

Shizuka grimaced as she was stretched across the event plane of the time field. When her head went through, it was as if she was being born again, parts of her brain exploding to life and normal status even as the rest of her mind reeled at its now disjointed nature. As soon as Shizuka’s head was in “real” time, she sucked in a ragged breath, trying to speak even though her larynx was seeming miles away.

Grant was half-submerged into the shimmering temporal disruption. His face was a grim mask as he struggled to push her to safety. She wanted to speak to him, but as she regained the ability to speak, his head subsided to the other side.

“Grant!” Shizuka cried.

Other hands grasped her free arm. She turned to see Kane and Sinclair hauling with all their might as Grant’s wall of muscle seethed from the other side of the time barrier. “Hold on to him!”

“We’re trying!” Kane snapped back. The muscles on his wolf-lean arms were swollen with effort. She noticed that Kane and Sinclair had anchored themselves by heavy electrical cable to the wall of the chamber. Grant had secured himself, as well, but the only thing left on this side of the malfunctioning platform was the cable and Grant’s right foot.

“No!” Shizuka yelled. Some instinct told her that if that last bit of Grant disappeared behind the wall, he would be gone, for no tether could resist the pull of currents across a dimension she couldn’t comprehend.

Suddenly, as if hurled by a tornado, Shizuka was free from the vortex. She collapsed to the floor of the chamber. She’d been birthed from seeming nothingness, her molecules yanked apart like taffy as she was drawn through a hole. If she hadn’t been one of the most physically fit people in New Edo, she’d be suffering a heart attack.

Instead, her heart broke as she knew that she was safe in the time she belonged, while Grant was gone, on the other side of the temporal event horizon. She looked and saw only an empty floor as the plates powered down, the shorn electrical cable that was Grant’s tether lying mockingly beside her.

“Damn it, Grant…”