Читать книгу Shadow Born - James Axler - Страница 12

Chapter 4

It didn’t take Brigid much longer into the night to determine the location of the tomb—the city known as Negari for the entity imprisoned within. She was asleep after noting its whereabouts on her map and managed to get several hours of good rest until sunrise. Kane and Grant traded watch shifts and were surprised to see Brigid poring over her figures after first light.

“Not sure?” Kane asked.

Brigid looked up from her map work. “I don’t want to have us looking and running around in circles while Durga and Neekra get there ahead of us.”

“Neekra’s still a threat,” Kane said. “We destroyed a body she took over, but she’s still a free-roaming psychic entity.”

Kane lowered his eyes to the ground. She’d spent most of a day inside of his skull, and due to her command over his perceptions, the witch goddess made him feel as if he were wandering the multiverse for months, making his concern over the friends he was separated from even deeper. His struggle to return to his body was made even more desperate by the danger of Grant and Brigid in front of both Gamal’s militia and a horde of winged monstrosities without him. That urgency overwhelmed him, and all he could imagine was the horrible tortures and destruction they faced without him to assist them. Being separated from them also meant that he was alone, without someone to act as a beacon to return him to his body.

That anxiety ate at him, concern grown out of love and friendship that was deep and enduring, that had lasted across other universes, across several incarnations throughout the history of humanity. That loyalty had brought earlier incarnations of himself to death for the defense of those others.

It was an emotional layer of scar tissue that Neekra had exacerbated when she had the necropolis “erupt,” separating him once more from Brigid and Grant and leaving them at the mercy of the dark goddess and her corpse-stealing, bloblike spawn. Kane’s nerves were scraped raw, tender to the slightest thought of either of them in peril.

That threat from Neekra, forever lost from his beloved friends, sat freshly in his mind and threatened to drive him to distraction. And then he’d seen, more and more, like the petals peeling from a flowering bud, what the evil entity could do. The latest nightmare, dredged up from the depths of his genetic memory, was simply the icing on a cake of evil. Neekra, separated from her body, had left her “mortal” form as an insane, terrifying force, a beast armed with natural weaponry that it used to rend healthy, fighting men limb from limb.

That body, combined with her intellect and cruelty, would be menace enough across a heavily depopulated, technologically impaired planet. With the addition of Neekra’s ability to produce corpse-reanimating soldiers, the combination was a global scale threat.

Nothing new there, he thought grimly. We’ve been dealing with that since we got out of Cobaltville that first day.

Sooner or later, he realized, their luck was going to run out. Adding to the sudden jolt of harsh realization was that he knew that Neekra was not simply the goal. No. Her body had been left in that tomb as a sentry, one capable of slaughtering almost anyone, human or Annunaki.

Whatever she guarded was something so terrifying that not even Enlil dared leave it unguarded by anything less than a living juggernaut.

“You’ve got us pinpointed?” Kane asked her.

Brigid nodded. “Within a radius of five hundred yards.”

“Pretty good,” Grant said with approval. “We’ll make an adventurer out of you yet.”

Brigid snorted. “The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in time.”

Kane and Grant pored over the map, crowding her a little bit, but she didn’t mind. The three of them had been shoulder to shoulder for years, in much more confining conditions. She ran her finger across the map. “We have two days of travel ahead of us, barring interference or further attack.”

“Two days,” Kane murmured. “No shortcuts?”

Brigid pointed toward one sector of the map. “This was part of my recalculations. This area seems fairly empty, but I had Bry run some cameras over the region.”

“Radioactive?” Kane asked.

“Seismic wasteland,” Brigid replied. “Put on your faceplates and I’ll give you two some visual data.”

Kane and Grant tugged their hoods over their skulls, then affixed their shadow suits’ faceplates. Almost immediately, the same map that had been a mere flat image a moment ago was now a relief sculpture, wrought in first a wire mesh frame following the contours of the broken land, then filling in, showing off rivers of whitish-yellow lava trickling back and forth through the uneven terrain.

“No radioactivity is present, but ever since the earthshakers went off on skydark, they broke the continent,” Brigid said. “You can see this is an accelerated animation of last night. It’s still in dynamic flux.”

Kane looked at the undulations, tilting his head as it allowed him to see around the area. “Can we get a real-time feed?”

“For what?” Brigid asked.

“We could cut our trip time down to half a day,” Kane answered.

“Driving through the streams of molten rock and constantly opening and closing chasms?” Grant asked. “So we have the equal opportunity to be either burnt to a crisp or flattened like rotten fruit?”

Kane nodded.

Grant smirked. “Sounds like fun.”

“We should ask our compatriots if they wish to endanger themselves in that manner,” Brigid offered. “We can arrive for certain...”

“Or we can get there in time to stop my father and his bitch,” a voice cut into the three people’s discussion. They turned and saw Thurpa, standing alongside Nathan and Lyta, forming a strange mirror image to their own group. They were younger, not that Kane, Brigid and Grant were among the elderly by a long shot. However, for the “locals,” they didn’t quite have the half decade of experience that the Cerberus expedition possessed, though Nathan and Lyta both had grown up in the harsh, often unforgiving frontier of the twin city-states straddling their common border of the Zambezi River, and though likely only a year old chronologically, Thurpa had the memories of Durga as a young officer, fighting alongside his father against an expedition sent by the barons into India.

“The three of you weighed in on this?” Brigid inquired.

Thurpa glanced to Nathan to his left, who clapped the young Nagah clone’s shoulder in support. He turned toward Lyta, who laced her fingers with his and squeezed for support. “Yup.”

“I could end up wrecking our truck,” Grant offered. “And then we’d be running on foot through a volcanic wonderland.”

“Better than dying of boredom or getting taken over by a psychotic blob woman,” Nathan countered.

“Too many lives are at stake to take the scenic route,” Lyta added. “Though, I have to admit, the idea of going through a half-molten desert sounds pretty interesting.”

“This isn’t a game,” Kane warned.

Thurpa frowned. “Oh. Like three-hundred-pound mutants and the Panthers of Mashona were only coming over for a game of chess? We get it. This is serious as cancer. Worse, because every living human remaining on the surface of the planet will end up infected.”

“The longer we spend debating the point, the closer Durga gets to his goal,” Grant threw in. “Either we plunge through the fire and the flames, or we do nothing.”

Brigid nodded in agreement.

“Then it’s unanimous,” Kane said.

Thurpa and Nathan turned immediately to begin packing. Lyta nodded to the three members of the Cerberus team, then turned to join her friends.

“And this is the one we were worried that could betray us?” Grant asked.

“I hate being suspicious of him,” Brigid answered, looking as if she’d sucked a lemon dry. “But we’d all be best on our toes around him.”

Kane looked grumpier than usual as he removed his hood and faceplate. She could tell that something was digging at him.

“What’s wrong?” Brigid asked.

“I just hope we’re not damning them like we did Garuda,” Kane said.

“We’re making up for that,” Grant told him.

Kane thought about the city of the Nagah. Even Durga’s attempt to usurp the family tree of the new queen and her consort, Hannah and Manticor, had been a misfire.

The three Cerberus warriors set about loading up the pickup truck. They hadn’t done much in terms of unloading for the night, just enough to sleep and to keep comfortable. Within a few minutes, the truck was packed, and the six people returned to their spots in the vehicle.

It was time to dare the volcanic plain.

* * *

GRANT AND BRIGID looked out over the hood at the wasteland before them.

“Still think this was a good idea?” Grant murmured.

“You were all up for it,” Kane responded through the window at the back of the cab. “And it’s not as if we’re seeing anything new.”

Grant nodded. All three of them had been on a virtual “fly through,” but this was an imposing scene before them. The ground heaved and shifted, and whereas the computer-generated imagery was soundless and scentless, here on the smoky plain the stench of sulfur hung thick in the air and the grumble of grinding stone and burbling steam and bubbling lava was a constant companion.

The three adventurers had sent a message back to Cerberus redoubt in the wake of their battle in Neekra’s necropolis. Their shadow suits had been damaged greatly, and Kane and Grant both agreed that leaving their allies, Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa, unprotected by the unique uniforms was an unnecessary risk, unlike the journey across this field of lava, crumbling stone and thick, noxious gases.

Fortunately, the shadow suits were environmentally sealed when all pieces were in place. Usually, they could be hooked to a portable air supply, but they could also filter out environmental toxins for a good amount of time. The suits’ polymers would protect from impacts, intense heat or biting cold. But the truth was, even the non-Newtonian reactions of the suits couldn’t hold off a point-blank rifle shot and would provide only a few seconds of protection from searing lava. There was a difference between heat that could induce heat stroke and the incredible temperatures of rock that flowed as freely as a mudslide. In fact, Grant even doubted that the shadow suit would do anything to lessen the liquefying heat inside. It had taken them two hours out of their way to get to the replacement garments via interphaser rendezvous, but the thickness of the sulfur and steam made them fully aware of how smart it had been.

Also, all six members of this expedition remembered having to navigate through nearly impossible, darkened necropolis with either flashlights or the advanced optics. The team’s equipment was further enhanced by the addition of headset radios for Lyta, Nathan and Thurpa, hands-free communications that put them much more easily in contact with the Commtact-equipped Kane, Grant and Brigid.

Better vision and better “ears” would give the team a distinct advantage in the near future. They had been only limping along in that deadly encounter, and if there was one thing about the Cerberus explorers and those who had proved brave and resourceful enough to side with them, it was that they could all learn from their mistakes.

“We’ll be fine in the back here,” Kane said, knocking on the roof, even though they could easily hear him over their communications network. “The suits should be able to filter out any noxious fumes. Think that will have any effect on the engine, Baptiste?”

Brigid looked back through the rear window. “Will the smoke have any effect on a standard Toyota internal combustion engine?”

Kane nodded. “It won’t, right?”

“No, the smoke won’t harm the engine,” Brigid replied. “I’m more concerned about spraying bits of lava. If one lands in or on the truck, it’s likely to burn through the chassis, or it’ll burn our suits if it lands on us.”

Grant scanned the terrain ahead, matching it up to the map, which was quickly becoming more and more obsolete as he observed it. He threw the truck into a lower gear, revved the engine and pushed forward. There was no warning as he advanced, but none of the rest of his group expressed dismay at the sudden lurch of the vehicle. One way or another, they had to make their first move onto the plain.

The truck rocked as a chunk of the “cooled” obsidian glass crumpled under one of the tires, and Grant put everything into the brake. Kane swiftly leaped from the cab and padded cautiously forward.

“It’s a hollow tube,” Kane announced over their communications network. “It looks about five feet deep, and we cracked through what must have been a thin spot.”

“How thin?” Grant asked.

Kane knelt and looked at the tire. “Looks like it was an inch at the edges of the break.”

“The tire?” Grant pressed.

“No cuts that I can see,” Kane offered.

Grant put the truck in Reverse and backed from the hole he’d inadvertently punched.

“Things aren’t going to be easy, are they?” Grant murmured.

“If they were, we wouldn’t be paid the big money,” Brigid answered.

“You get paid?” Grant remarked.

Brigid elbowed him in the biceps.

Grant tried to remember the “look” of the tunnel on infrared so he could avoid such thin spots in the near future. One thing that the big, cooled flows of obsidian provided was a fairly unbroken, if somewhat slick and uneven, terrain that wasn’t through the middle of lava.

“You’ll want to head forward by five meters, then hang a left to return to our course,” Brigid directed.

Grant nodded, glad to have the woman’s eidetic memory to rely upon. He followed her directions, and Kane popped over the top of the cab, firing a single shot into the ground before them. As soon as the bullet struck the obsidian glass, it burst like a bubble, producing a circular gap, dropping down into another lava tube. This was dark and empty, thankfully, but the shattered surface now had a hole three feet in diameter. The pickup could span it, but Grant looked at what each side of the truck would be rolling through. The last thing he needed was to drop and crash through the hole and break an axle, but he also didn’t need to put the tires on anything less than sure ground. He hit the optic zoom, switching from infrared to see if there was any sand or other particulate that could compromise their traction.

“Okay, that’s going to be bad,” Nathan spoke up over the line.

Grant glanced to the bed of the truck. “What?”

“I’m picking up something flying,” the young man from Harare said. “Bat-like shapes are the best I can make out through the smoke and from this distance. No way to gauge their size.”

“Bat-like,” Grant repeated. He tromped the gas and shot toward the small hole before them, gritting his teeth and hoping that the lava tube around the burst bubble could hold them. If it didn’t, then he hoped that the sheer speed of the pickup could keep them from getting stuck.

The obsidian beneath the truck’s tires held, and the pickup didn’t suddenly lurch as its two tons of weight cracked into the lava tube beneath them.

Good—they were back toward a plateau of solid rock, not solidified and cooled lava, and Grant hit the brakes before he got too close to the edge. He glanced back. “Kane, any updates?”

“Kane?” Grant repeated, his concern evident in his tone.

“They’re Kongs!” Thurpa shouted. “Kane’s gone bye-bye!”

Grant looked back into the bed, seeing his friend sitting ramrod still and staring straight ahead.

“Bad enough we’ve got those goddamn terror-dactyls, but Neekra’s attacking him now,” Grant growled.

Brigid whirled and saw Thurpa lunge back toward Kane, who lifted his gun, aiming it toward them at the pickup’s cab.

Chaos erupted, just as gouts of steam burst through sections of lava tubes weakened by the truck’s passage.