Читать книгу Planet Hate - James Axler - Страница 10

Chapter 1

“That’s our point of entry, all right,” Kane mused as he checked the calculations he had scribbled on a small map. The fold-out map looked tired and worn, and so did Kane. He also looked irritated as hell.

Kane was a tall man in his early thirties, well-built with broad shoulders and long, rangy limbs. His dark hair brushed at his collar, tousled atop his head as the wind caught it, and the dark trace of a beard was beginning to show on his square jaw. There was a thin line by Kane’s left eye where something had cut him recently, and he brushed at it in annoyance as the breeze played against it.

“So what do you suggest we do?” asked the woman to Kane’s side. “Run away like scared little girls?” In her mid-twenties, the woman had an olive complexion, with long dark hair that trailed halfway down her back, and a wicked glint in her chocolate-brown eyes. Rosalia had been Kane’s almost-permanent companion over the past few weeks since an altercation up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.

The final member of the group—an imposing man with dark skin, short hair and the grizzled look of a fighter—chuckled at that, turning to the woman. “If you really believe that then you don’t know Kane so well, Rosie,” Grant said, his voice a deep basso rumble. “Me, either,” he added after a moment. “We never ran away from anything.”

Grant had been Kane’s combat partner for longer than either of them cared to admit. A little older than Kane, Grant still deferred to his colleague in moments like this, trusting the other’s uncanny instincts to keep them safe. He brought his hand up, brushing it against the drooping gunslinger’s mustache that he wore over his top lip, feeling the dark growth of stubble that was forming all around it.

Brushing her hair from her face as the wind caught it, Rosalia shot Grant a contemptuous look. “From what I’ve seen so far, all you Magistrates are the same. Big men when you’re safe in your villes with your special armor on and backup just a street away, but you run like schoolgirls when you’re faced with anything you didn’t plan for.”

The three of them were hunkered down at the edge of a ridge overlooking a ramshackle settlement constructed of wood and sun-dried clay bricks, with several struggling fields as its surround. Made up of two dozen buildings, the little run-down town was locked in the gully between two towering cliff faces, their sandy orange sides bright in the midmorning sun. A thin ribbon of river wended its way through the center of the town like a main street, and people could be seen moving along its edges.

The trio on the cliff top wore shadow suits weaved from a high-tech armorlike material that could deflect blunt trauma and act as a self-contained environment, keeping its wearer hot or cool depending on the needs of their surrounds. Over the shadow suits, the three of them were dressed in indistinct clothing that showed the wear from long days on the road. Kane wore a beaten leather jacket in a tan color turned dark with sweat and dirt, Grant a long black duster with a bullet-blunting Kevlar weave in its thread, and Rosalia was wearing a beaten-up denim jacket with loose threads dangling from its cuffs and collar and a light summer skirt that swished just above her shapely ankles, which in turn were encased in black leather boots.

Kane checked the map again, running his hands across the creases to brush away the dusty sand that had blown across it. “Damn ville wasn’t on the map. Must have sprung up in the last eighteen months. But our next closest parallax point is fifty miles eastward,” he explained. “We’re looking at a heck of a trek, and we’d have to find a way across the Rio Grande.”

“The big villes have been vomiting out people for a while now, forcing little shitholes like this to crop up all over,” Rosalia told them both, pushing her dark hair out of her face as the wind snatched at it. “You Magistrate men seldom notice what’s going on in front of your eyes,” she added contemptuously.

Kane shot her a look before turning back to watch the people moving around in the ravine below them. Twenty-four buildings meant maybe seventy people in total, he guessed, could be more as a refugee settlement, but it seemed as if it had taken a while growing up. The structures certainly looked sturdy, perhaps it had been here for years—who could say?

Grant turned his eyes from the settlement below to Kane. “Let’s keep our heads down and act friendly to the locals,” he rumbled, pointing to the little town between the cliffs.

With that, the imposing ex-Mag pushed himself up, snagging the cloth knapsack sitting behind him in the dirt and hooking it over one of his massive shoulders before leading the way down the steep path that led to the gully. The others followed a moment later, but Rosalia stopped at the top of the path for a moment, peering behind her.

“Come on, stupid,” she huffed, irritation in her voice.

From close by, a dog came tromping out from behind a crop of drooping bushes, their leaves wizened from lack of water. The carcass of a cony lay behind the bushes, and the dog had been sniffing at it, wondering if it could still be eaten. The dog was a mongrel with mottled fur and a long snout, and Rosalia suspected that it had more than a hint of coyote in it. Most remarkably, it had the palest eyes that she had ever seen, their irises a creamy washed-out white like mozzarella cheese. She had “owned” the dog for seven months, finding the creature wandering alone out in the Californian desert. In all of that time, the woman had never given the animal a permanent name, hoping to avoid any attachment.

“Stupid mutt,” Rosalia cursed as the dog trotted along at her heels down the dust path. “Always thinking about your stomach.”

A dozen paces ahead, Grant was talking with Kane, polychrome sunglasses protecting their eyes as they walked into the sun, keeping their voices low.

“You look worried, old friend,” Grant observed as Kane fiddled with the Sin Eater pistol he habitually wore at his wrist.

Once the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Even at full extension, this remarkable pistol was less than fourteen inches in length, and it fired 9 mm rounds. The holsters reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard; it had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The absolute nature of this means of potential execution was a throwback to the high regard with which Magistrates were viewed in the villes—their judgment could never be wrong. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days as one in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand.

Grant, too, had one of the remarkable blasters hidden beneath the sleeve of his Kevlar duster, though he carried other weapons, as well, secreted in the lining of the long coat. Primary among these, Grant carried his favored Copperhead close-assault subgun, tucked just out of sight.

Kane shrugged at Grant’s observation as the pair shuffled sideways along a narrow section of the steep pathway. “I just don’t like entering new places these days,” he said. “Seems things are getting more and more hostile.”

Then, as Kane spoke, his booted heel slid on a loose stone and he began to slip toward the edge of the path. “Whoa!”

Grant instantly reached out, grabbing his friend in a firm grip just above his left wrist. “No need to expect trouble,” Grant said as he pulled Kane back onto the path. “And I’ve always got your back if things do turn nasty.”

“Humph,” Kane grumbled. “We used to say the same thing to Baptiste—and look how that worked out.”

“We’ll find her, Kane,” Grant assured his partner. “If she’s out there, we’ll find her.”

Kane nodded. “Damn straight we will.”

Until recently Brigid Baptiste had been the third member of their field team, accompanying Kane and Grant on numerous adventures across the globe and beyond. Baptiste was a gifted archivist with remarkable talents. However, in a recent attack on the Cerberus redoubt—the headquarters from which Kane and his companions had operated—Baptiste had gone MIA. Despite their best efforts, her current whereabouts remained unknown.

The gradient of the path eased for the last thirty yards, and Kane had returned his Sin Eater to its hiding place beneath the right sleeve of his jacket by the time the trio reached its foot. They walked three abreast, with the dog skulking at Rosalia’s side as they made their way along the last part of the dusty roadway that led into the hamlet itself.

A single thoroughfare dominated the village, running parallel to the thin river. People dressed in light clothes were walking along that main street, a few youngsters paddling at the stream’s edge. A bearded man in simple clothes was leading a mule down the street, its back laden with two great baskets full of the leaves of some edible root crop or other. It seemed normal enough.

As they neared the closest of the buildings, the companions could hear the tink-tink-tink of a blacksmith at work. Kane turned and saw an open-fronted shed beside the single-story house. Inside a man worked at shaping a horseshoe that glowed white-hot at the end of his tongs. The man peered up from his work as the companions passed, eyes narrowing as he watched the strangers entering the village.

“By my reckoning,” Kane told his companions, keeping his voice low, “our parallax point should be in the northwest corner of this place.” He pointed. “Over by that storage silo, maybe?”

Parallax points were a crucial part of a system of instantaneous travel that was employed by the Cerberus rebels. The process itself involved a quantum inducer called an interphaser, which could fold space upon itself, granting its user immediate teleportation to another location, either on Earth or beyond. Though portable, the interphaser units could only be engaged in set locations. The units tapped into an ancient web of powerful, naturally occurring lines of energy stretching right across the globe, much like the ley lines of old. On Thunder Isle the Cerberus crew had discovered the Parallax Points program, which encoded all the vortex points. The interphaser relied on this program, and new vortex points were fed into the interphaser’s targeting computer.

Frequently the specific sites of interphase induction had become sacred in the eyes of primitive man. However, over time many of these parallax points had become forgotten or buried beneath the rise and fall of civilizations. As such, they often turned up in the most unlikely of locations.

The Cerberus organization had several of the portable interphase units. When they had evacuated their redoubt headquarters, Kane’s team had taken one of the units for ease of transport while they went undercover. Right now, Grant carried the foot-high unit in its protective case inside the rucksack on his back.

Rosalia’s dog whined plaintively as the companions continued to stride along the dusty street. It was a simple path marked out on the ground by the basic virtue of repeated usage. A woman in her thirties sat in a weather-beaten rocking chair outside the front door to one of the tumbledown shacks, her fingers moving deftly as she knitted a pair of baby booties. Grant acknowledged her with a dip of his head, touching his fingers to his brow for just a second.

“Things don’t feel right here, you guys,” Rosalia said, her voice a whisper.

Kane looked over to her and a lopsided smile touched at his lips. “Weren’t you the one who was complaining about we ex-Magistrates skulking around like frightened schoolgirls?”

In response, Rosalia showed him her teeth in a sarcastic imitation of a grin. “Just an observation, Magistrate Man,” she said, subtly stretching her arms out as if to yawn. “Don’t jump at shadows on my account.” As she did so, she shifted two hidden knives that were located beneath her sleeves.

With the open stream running to the right of them, Kane continued on, making his way toward the crop silo he had pointed out a few moments before. “Keep the interphaser to hand,” he instructed Grant out of the corner of his mouth. “I want to be on our way as soon as.”

They were heading for a meeting high on the Californian coast. A coded message had been piped through to Kane a few hours before from their old Cerberus leader, Lakesh, providing them with coordinates of a meeting point where he hoped to set up a temporary base.

As the three of them rounded the corner of the silo and a simple lean-to building that stood at its side, Kane spotted a small chunk in the sandy dirt at the external edge of the silo itself. It looked like an ancient mile marker, a little hunk of rounded stone sticking up about eighteen inches from the soil. The marker sat in the lee of the lean-to, obscured by the shadow that the tall silo cast.

“Five’ll get you ten that that’s our parallax point,” Kane stated, indicating the marker stone half-buried in the ground.

As Kane spoke, a figure appeared from the far side of the silo fifteen feet away, striding into view before halting, his eyes locked on Kane and his teammates. The man was tall and wore a rough-hewn robe made of a dirty brown material that covered him from neck down to his ankles like a cassock. The robe featured a voluminous hood that the man had pulled up over his head, hiding his features in shadow so that only his eyes glinted in the fierce morning sunlight. His right fist was held loosely clenched at his side, and Kane could tell immediately that the hooded stranger was clutching something within that balled fist. The man’s fustian robe featured a red badge pinned to the left breast, and the insignia flashed as it caught the sun’s rays.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” the robed figure asked, challenge in his tone.

“We’re just passing through, friend,” Kane stated, feeling a disquieting roiling in his stomach.

Beneath the hood, the man closed his eyes for a moment, reaching out with uncanny senses. Kane and his companions watched as the strange figure shook his head infinitesimally as if confused by what he could feel. “Cannot…” the man muttered before opening his eyes once more. “This is a sanctified town, sirs,” the man said in an authoritative tone. “Are you faithful?”

Kane stared at the robed man in disbelief. “I…I…” How could he possibly answer that question?

“I suspected as much,” the robed man stated, his tone rising in fury. “Mr. Kane, is it not?”

Kane became aware that figures were massing behind him. Where moments before they had seemed to be wary of the strangers but simply going about their workaday lives, now the townsfolk appeared to be closing in, subtly blocking the street and hemming the Cerberus teammates in at the alleyway between the silo and the one-story lean-to beside it.

Kane took a steadying breath. “You seem to know me, but I don’t think I caught your name,” he told the robed figure at the farther end of the silo.

The hooded man nodded once in acknowledgment. “I am stone,” he stated.

Kane had heard the phrase before. It was something of a battle chant for an expanding class of warriors who fought in the name of a sinister being called Ullikummis. In speaking the phrase, the hooded figure had not merely confirmed his allegiance, but he had also entered a meditative state whereby his physical attributes would change.

Kane’s eyes darted to the subtle movement as the man unclenched his right fist and a simple cord of leather with a cuplike design at the farthest extension of its loop sagged from his hand.

“And you are an enemy of stone,” the hooded figure said. Even as he spoke, the leather cup whirled around the man’s arm as he launched a cluster of lethal projectiles at Kane and his teammates.