Читать книгу Cradle Of Destiny - James Axler - Страница 9

Gongs reverberated throughout the Tigers of Heaven dojo in the heart of New Edo. Though the transplanted Japanese had access to technology such as radios, they were also traditionalists. Alarm Klaxons produced by loudspeakers were not an improvement over the classic padded hammer striking a gigantic dish of bronze. The loud, air-shaking noise drew attention and focused it like few other sounds could.

Instinct pushed Grant and Shizuka to grab their weapons, the big ex-Magistrate sliding the Sin Eater holster over his thick right forearm. Shizuka slid her katana through a single loop of the sash around her waist, slung a quiver of ya arrows over her shoulder, and scooped up her kumi samurai bow. Every member of the Tigers of Heaven was trained in the arts of the samurai, so that even with a wild supply of automatic rifles and handguns, they were still deadly with their “primitive” weaponry. The penetration ability of a ya launched was insufficient to spear through the polycarbonate plates of full Magistrate assault armor, but Shizuka’s aim was quick and accurate enough to slip her deadly arrowheads in the gaps between those panels and through the Kevlar and Nomex underneath.

Still, the exchange of technologies and ideas between New Edo and the Cerberus redoubt had been enough for the Japanese archers to utilize shafts and bows of carbon fiber over a laminated wood core, and stiff nylon supplemented turkey and swan feathers to make the ya fly true. While Grant himself was a man who appreciated powerful firearms like the Sin Eater or his Copperhead, Shizuka had been teaching him kyudo, the samurai’s “way of the bow.” His upper-body strength was more than sufficient to handle a kumi with an eighty-eight-pound draw and keep the bowstring nocked and on target with very little vibration. It was a slow process, however. Grant was familiar with the basics of marksmanship, but it was akin to the early six months of training that he had been given on the dangerous, lightning-fast Sin Eater machine pistol. He could hit a bull’s-eye given a few moments, but he was not adept at utilizing the bow in combat. Shizuka, on the other hand, could nock, draw and launch a ya shaft in the space of a second.

A 20-round, full-auto machine pistol firing armor-crushing 240-grain 9 mm slugs would have to do for now, Grant mused. He paused and looked at his folded Magistrate trench coat. Shizuka had already slithered into the bamboo-and-polymer-plate armor, and Grant was loath to go into action without some protection. He had left behind the shadow suit at Cerberus redoubt, but the protective long coat was sufficient armor, its leatherlike material interwoven with polycarbonate strips and ballistic-resistant cloth, and extremely comfortable. The duster fluttered as he picked it up, whirling it like a cape around his shoulders as he shrugged into the roomy but supple garment.

“You really need to wear that with your shadow suit,” Shizuka spoke up. “You look magnificent with your coattails flapping.”

Grant managed a smile. “I sometimes worry about snagging this thing.”

“Have you ever?” Shizuka asked.

Grant thought about it for a moment as he and the samurai commander prepared to rush to the Tigers of Heaven’s small fleet of motorized launches. “Nope, but I don’t wear this much.”

The two lovers exited Shizuka’s Spartan dwelling and at the railing saw the gong ringer, his brawny arms and shoulders glistening with sweat as he swung the hammer to alert the city. As the gong was centrally placed, everyone could quickly get their bearings by the row of lanterns mounted on the support beam that the great bronzed dish hung from. Grant could see that the lantern indicating trouble on Thunder Isle had been ignited.

“Shit,” Grant muttered.

“We’ll get to the boats,” Shizuka said. She pulled her radio from its place on her sash. Now that the Tigers of Heaven had been alerted, they would be waiting for indications of who should respond and where they should go. “Nagumi, harden the perimeter in case this is a diversion. Ichira, Honda, bring your squads with me to the island. Full force.”

Grant knew that “full force” was not inconsiderable. Twelve samurai warriors with composite armor, high-tech bows and arrows and thousand-folded pure steel blades with nearly monomolecular edges were easily a match for Magistrates with submachine guns, grenades and bulletproof armor.

Grant and Shizuka took their places aboard the Gamera-maru, the same vessel that the two of them and their samurai allies had been on when they’d prevented an assault by the barons on New Edo when the island colony was first discovered by the Cerberus explorers. It was unofficially the flagship of the New Edo fleet, and as such, it had been upgraded with new motors on the aft. While the engines had been designed for twentieth-century inflatable rafts called Zodiacs, they had easily been adapted to the rattan-hulled craft. The increase in speed from traditional outboard motors had been dramatic, enabling a quicker response to a crisis on Thunder Isle.

Grant perched on the bow of the Gamera-maru as the twin Mercedes engines pumped out hundreds of horsepower, producing rooster tails of white, frothy spray, writing the massive energy impulse in twelve-foot-high jets as the craft accelerated from its berth. Two other craft, each laden with a quartet of Samurai, as well as their crews, had started only moments apart, but that was sufficient for Grant and Shizuka to achieve a twenty-foot lead on the other boats.

The two archers assigned to the Gamera-maru strung their bows, the composite nature of their laminated-wood-and-carbon-fiber cores building enormous potential energy. The mist of seawater coming over the rail of the speeding sea craft wouldn’t affect either the resin-lacquered bows or the inelastic cord, which couldn’t be warped by absorption. A bowstring that stretched under any conditions lost efficiency in transferring the potential energy of the bow to the arrow. Pig tendons and horsehair were two of the materials that the Tigers of Heaven had used, and even late twentieth-century polymers provided by Cerberus hadn’t improved on the archers’ capabilities.

The boat archers used larger bows than Shizuka wore, as they were not expected to wade in close. The Japanese warriors had called them “two-man bows,” as they were the height of one man riding on the shoulders of his friend—about eight feet tall, given the average diminutive stature of the Asians.

“Grant,” Kane’s voice crackled over his Commtact from a thousand miles away. “Bry told me you were on the way to Thunder Isle. Don’t go ashore.”

“Too late. We’re on our way to a four-gong emergency,” Grant answered. “Why?”

“Baptiste just called me to say she found one of our off-duty Mag coats buried under around five thousand years of sand in some sort of tomb,” Kane told him. “Thunder Isle’s one place we know of that has an operating time-travel machine….”

“Mag coats?” Grant asked. He looked at the armor-laced duster, its tails flapping from his hips. “I’m wearing mine right now.”

“Damn it, Grant,” Kane growled. “Baptiste thinks one of us—”

“Well, if she found the damn duster buried for a few thousand years, then we’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole,” Grant answered, cutting him off. “Nothing’s going to change that. Did she find any bones sticking out of the sleeves?”

“No, but she only found a piece of it sticking out,” Kane replied. “That doesn’t mean our carcass isn’t nearby.”

“Let me know if she finds any bones. Otherwise, what’s happened has happened,” Grant said. “We’ll be jumping at shadows every time we get called here.”

“Grant…” Kane’s voice was laced with frustration, but Grant knew that there were people in danger; otherwise the alert wouldn’t have sounded on New Edo.

“Kane, we can discuss this all you want later, right now, people who are our friends may be dying,” Grant grumbled. “Or am I worth more than them?”

Grant knew that Kane’s answer would be a hard choice. The two former Magistrates were closer than brothers, bound by blood, sweat and tears, but Kane was driven by the same selfless urge to protect innocents that had made them the finest enforcement team in Cobaltville.

“You don’t have permission to die,” Kane said. “If you do, I’ll drag you back to life and beat you to death again.”

“It’ll take a lot to get me out of your life. If I don’t see you for five thousand years, you’d better behave. Remember, the more you complain, the longer you live, and five millennia ain’t going to be shit off the bitching I’ve done,” Grant answered.

There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the Commtact. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Grant managed a smirk, seeing the shore of Thunder Isle. “Grant out.”

THOUGH HER HEADBAND was meant to keep the sweat and her flowing red-gold hair out of Brigid Baptiste’s eyes, she still needed to mop her eyes as she paused. Her hands had been callused from her years of adventure, but the effort of prying apart the sunbaked sandstone with a foot-long utility knife was raising new blisters on her fingers. The pebbling on the Micarta Fiberglas handle had worn a red patch between the base and knuckle of her index finger.

So far, she’d gotten the sleeve out to the shoulder, and from the tailored length of what she’d freed, there was no doubt as to the owner of the duster. She sat back, a wave of nausea rumbling in her stomach.

Brigid raised Kane on her Commtact. “Did you warn Grant?”

“Yes,” Kane answered. “His response was that you’ve found the coat, so he’s already destined to go on a trip to the ancient past. You’re sure it’s his coat?”

“By now, absolutely,” Brigid answered. “No one else in Cerberus has arms as long as he does.”

Brigid glanced to one side, and saw Domi’s ruby-red eyes locked on the armored leather spilling out of the crack in the temple remnant.

“You heard what Kane said?” Brigid asked.

“Was on party line,” Domi answered, her diction returning to the abbreviated Outland form of speech. It was a sign of nervousness or heightened stress, and Brigid could feel sympathy for the young albino. Usually, when her words became terse and tense, she at least could engage in combat to deal with what had gotten under her skin. When Domi couldn’t utilize the energy pumped into her bloodstream by the fight-or-flight reflex, Brigid could see her grow morose and withdrawn.

Domi was walking an emotional edge, especially considering how close she had grown to Grant since he had first saved her life back in the Tartarus slums under Cobaltville. Grant had been the first person in a long time to show the wild woman kindness. Domi had gone from fighting, literally tooth and claw, for survival to being one of pit-boss Guana Teague’s prostitutes. Gentleness and humanity had been a rarity in her life, and Grant’s act of protection had earned her undying loyalty, first demonstrated when she stopped Teague from strangling Grant to death.

There’d been a brief period when Domi had thought their relationship was sexual in nature, but it eventually settled down that she had found a father figure. When Cerberus was a much smaller staff, before the influx of lunar staff, she had finally found her family. The added freezies from the Manitius Base had made her uncomfortable, intruding on her sense of community, which only drew her closer to Grant, Kane, Brigid and Lakesh.

Brigid didn’t want to think of the pain Domi would be in if Grant was gone forever.

“We know roughly when he was transported,” Brigid said. “And this place has none of the traditional indications of a Sumerian crypt.”

“So not cemetery,” Domi muttered, looking around. “Not much temple.”

“Not now, but we have millennia of erosion and deterioration that’s removed most of what this place used to be,” Brigid answered.

“Erosion?” Domi asked. Her face screwed into a mask of skepticism. “Or bombed.”

Brigid frowned as she looked around. “We’ve only been digging for a few minutes—we can’t tell.”

“Snake-faces ruled here,” Domi mentioned.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that,” Brigid answered.

“Never forget anything,” Domi agreed. “But didn’t say so.”

“You’re trying to say that I’m keeping information from you?” Brigid asked.

Domi looked away from the sleeve, the first time in the several minutes since they’d discovered the armored garment. “No. Softening news. Maybe. Not say lying.”

Brigid rested her hand on the diminutive albino’s shoulder. “We would have found skeletal remains if he was killed here. This was just a memento…buried and lost in time.”

“Too hot for long coat here, even then?” Domi asked.

“Absolutely,” Brigid answered.

“News is getting better,” Domi said, recovering some of her language skills, stress lessening.

“Plus we’re not even sure he’s going to be tossed through time just this minute,” Brigid said. “It could be some time in the next thirty years, for all we know. Or even Grant’s son, if he has one.”

Domi snickered. Brigid tilted her head.

“Remembered line about assumptions,” Domi said. “You make an ass out of you and umption.”

Brigid nodded.

“Because, you know, I’m pretty big, too,” Edwards interjected from his overwatch of the temple dig. “Grant could have lent me his coat.”

“Too fat,” Domi replied.

Edwards grimaced. “That’s muscle.”

“You want to get punier?” Domi asked.

Mariah Falk let out a sigh. “Brigid, I thought that you wanted to see the chamber that this coat seems to be walled into.”

Domi tilted her head.

Brigid explained for her friend. “That device she has is a sonar locater. It registers echoes off loud noises returned from objects of heavier density.”

Domi smiled with comprehension. “So when Mariah set off the boom stick on the ground, she was looking through the sand.”

“When did you start getting so smart?” Edwards asked.

“Boyfriend cuts holes in universes as shortcuts,” Domi noted. “Brigid friend is living encyclopedia. Six years hanging around with them, knowledge rubs off, newbie.”

Edwards smirked. “Attitude rubs off, too.”

“It’s not attitude if you can back it up,” Brigid countered. The archivist walked over to Falk, who had put another image on her portable tablet computer. “You’ve double-checked this?”

“I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with in this time, but I didn’t get assigned to Manitius by being sloppy and second-rate,” Falk answered.

“Point taken,” Brigid said. “My apologies.”

“None necessary,” Falk replied. “I just wanted you to know who you were working with.”

“How deep is that pit supposed to be?” Edwards asked.

“From ceiling to floor, we’re looking at thirty feet,” Falk explained. “The overall floor space looks to be the size of four football fields blocked together, with pillars that could easily be five feet in diameter.”

“Football fields?” Edwards asked. “Say it in postapocalyptic terms for those of us without a frame of reference.”

“Two hundred yards long, and we’re looking at about fifty yards wide,” Falk translated. She snorted with amusement.

“What’s so funny?” Edwards asked.

“First time I knew more about football than someone who is so stereotypically a jock,” Falk said. “Football was a game full of men who wished they were as big as you or Grant.”

Edwards smirked at the obvious compliment. “You know, instead of fucking around with knives and shovels, why don’t we blow a hole in the side of this thing?”

“We want to see what’s inside, not collapse the whole damn place,” Brigid explained.

“The roof’s thick, easily two yards,” Falk said. “And the support pillars are thick and intact according to the sonar.”

Brigid frowned as she thought about it.

“I’m not talking about a nuclear blast,” Edwards said. “A controlled, focused explosion. Back when the Magistrates had to get into a place without bringing down the whole shantytown, we used loops of detonation cord that cut through walls without a blast wave that would level huts around our target.”

“Kane generally just throws grenades,” Brigid mused.

“He also was a pilot on a Deathbird gunship,” Edwards told her. “Firepower is its own solution for those guys.”

“I guess the old saying is correct,” Brigid said.

“There’s no problem that can’t be solved with the application of high explosives?” Edwards asked.

Brigid nodded. “And not to judge a book by its cover.”

Edwards shrugged his huge shoulders. “Don’t attribute it too much to brains. Just a good memory and some damned impatience.”

“Do you have that kind of explosive power?” Brigid asked.

Edwards scooped up his war bag. “I can roll my quarter kilogram blocks of plastique into det cord.”

“Why do you have them separated into quarter kilogram blocks?” Brigid asked.

Edwards smiled. “Sela told me about her time with Special Forces who made these things called ‘eight balls.’ A wad of C-4 with a detonator made a big stunning sound without throwing shrapnel all over the place. You could deafen a room full of bad guys with one of these, maybe even knock them cold, but they’re still useful enough for ripping shit apart when packed properly.”

“Then set it up and let’s see what this place really is,” Brigid said.

The explorers worked together to open the ancient underground temple, hoping to learn when and where their friend Grant lost his coat in this foreboding tomb.

BRONDA STRODE along the perimeter that the Millennial Consortium had placed around the Thunder Isle facility. The barrel of his 9 mm Calico submachine gun rested on his left forearm, and his finger lay on the frame above the weapon’s trigger in an effort to keep the weapon safe but ready to go. One twitch of his finger, and he could start spitting out bullets from the Calico’s 100-round helical magazine, sawing an opponent in half.

He reached the end of his patrol circuit and saw Lonmar. Where Bronda had been a grim, brutal raider who had attacked caravans that crossed the Outlands, Lonmar was a tall, powerful giant who was once been a Magistrate from Beausoleilville, a violent enforcer who obeyed the whims of the bitch-goddess who had evolved into the merciless Annunaki overlord Lilitu. These were the raw-muscled head breakers who the millennialists had known were the backbone of their effort to set up a technocracy over the shattered Earth. Both men were given power and the freedom to utilize it in service to that scientific cabal.

That Lonmar and Bronda got to engage in their heartless excess of cruelty was icing atop a cake whose ingredients were pay, logistical support and the backing of an army of like-minded brutes.

The guards and scientists who were manning the Operation Chronos time trawl facility had given a modicum of a fight—they had even brought down a couple of millennial mercenaries—but it hadn’t been enough to slake the two sentries’ blood thirst. There was a little hope, though. A radio message had gotten out to New Edo.

The Tigers of Heaven had received that call.

Bronda took a deep breath, and nodded to Lonmar. “Any sign of those primates?”

“The samurai are going to be sneaky,” Lonmar answered. “I heard from Snakefishville about a raid their Mags went on. They had their asses handed to them.”

Bronda’s crooked scar of a mouth turned up at one end. The other side had been immobilized by scar tissue and nerve paralysis when he’d been slashed across the face on one of his first caravan raids. “Scared?”

Lonmar’s bushy eyebrows wrinkled, inching together like hairy caterpillars over his black, soulless eyes. “Snakefishville is full of pussies. If I’d been there, I’d have broken off their own damn swords up their asses.”

Bronda chuckled. “Keep your eyes open.”

“You, too,” Lonmar replied.

Bronda turned and went back along his section of perimeter. With the consortium, the former raider had found the closest thing he could call kinship and family. Maybe it had been a design by one of the technocrats, some form of social engineering that turned the mercenary thugs under their sway into a more cohesive fighting unit. Bronda liked people like Lonmar and the rest of the hired guns working with him. It might have been a form of manipulation, but Bronda didn’t mind. The group he fought alongside worked. Let the Tigers of Heaven come get them. When the Calico drained empty, the Outlands pirate would draw the wicked foot-and-a-half-long sword and show the primitive Japanese how to really carve up flesh.

There was the smack of fist on flesh from behind, and Bronda whirled. Lonmar staggered backward, recoiling from a punch hurled by a tall monster of a man dressed in a long black coat. Lonmar had been a physical giant, but the titan in the leather duster threw a follow-up punch that felled the ex-Magistrate like a rotted tree. Bronda didn’t think that anyone could have laid out the man, but the stranger whirled to look at the raider.

Seeing the skin of dark mahogany, the drooping gunfighter’s mustache and the swelling musculature shifting under the coat, Bronda had a moment of recognition.

It was Grant, one of the three who had escaped from Cobaltville, turning their backs upon the barons of the monolithic city-states. A jolt of panic passed and Bronda swung up his Calico to rip the bald, black giant in half.

The machine pistol stuttered out a short burst, and Bronda knew that he’d hit Grant, but the outlander ignored the impacts of his bullets. If Bronda hadn’t been distracted by a goose-feather shaft jutting from his rib cage, he’d have had the time to realize that Grant’s coat had been armored. Bronda looked at the end of the arrow that had transected his torso, then into the woods. The arrow had flown scant moments before Bronda had opened fire, his ability to recover from surprise only a moment quicker than the archer’s estimate.

For a brief moment, he saw a beautiful woman in samurai armor nock another arrow onto her bowstring, her hands moving swiftly. It had felt like minutes to the dying, shocked Bronda, but Shizuka had gotten off her second deadly missile in under a second, this razor-sharp point slicing through Bronda’s left eye, pinioning his brain.

Shizuka heard the ugly crunch of neck bones disintegrating, and she turned to see Grant rise from Lonmar’s corpse. The samurai wondered why Grant would have killed an unconscious man, but her eyes fell to the bloody scalps hanging off the millennialist’s belt. The broken neck was swift, painless justice, sparing the murderer potential reprisals in the form of torture.

Grant’s eyes met hers, and he jerked his head toward the entrance that the two millennialists had been guarding. Other cold-blooded killers were crawling the halls of the Operation Chronos laboratory. If there had been hostages, their captors would have been alerted by the brief stutter of automatic fire. Grant was spurred on by the impetus of imperiled lives.

With the silence and grace of a jet-black tiger, the big Cerberus warrior slipped through the side access.