Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 11
Wearily, he said, "You didn't go to all this trouble to contact me just to repeat yourself, Fand. Show yourself."
The sea began to boil, bubbles roiling and ripples spreading. Fand did not so much rise to the surface as seem to be lifted from the depths. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was and sleek and beautiful, with the look of a lioness about her. Her narrow face was finely chiseled, with prominent cheekbones, and her full lips held a secret, faintly amused smile.
Her skin had the blue-white hue of skim milk, and her golden, unbound hair tumbled down past her thighs like a flaxen waterfall. She was as naked as he was, her high, firm breasts like opals, her body slender with a catlike grace. Great physical strength showed in the arching rim of her rib cage and her flat, tautly muscled belly. The fine hair at the junction of her smoothly contoured thighs was like threads of spun gold. She held a long wooden staff in her right hand, enwrapped with vines and many turnings of silver wire. An ivory knob, like an oversize egg, topped it.
Fand seemed to glow, to sparkle like a creature of sunshine and meadows and deep forests. Her huge, tip-tilted eyes, golden with vertical slit pupils, never left his.
Her full lips parted and in a liquid voice, in a language he had never spoken but understood, she said, "Do you know where you are, my darling Ka'in?"
Stolidly, he replied, "I'm in gateway transit, suffering from a jump dream. I've had them before."
Fand moved lithely toward him, her delicate feet not touching the sea or even the rocks. "How can you he so sure?"
"For one thing," he retorted gruffly, "I'm naked." She laughed, the sound a musical trilling. "Naked is the best disguise, my darling Ka'in."
"I told you the first time we met," he growled, "the name is Kane, not Ka'in, not Cuchulainn or any variation thereof."
She continued walking to him. "This is Skatha, the Land of Shadows, where the spirit of Ka'in resides."
Fand pressed up against him, and with a faraway shock he realized he could feel the hard nipples of her breasts pressing against his chest, feel her heartbeat, the heat of her body. With a sense of dismay and not a little embarrassment, he found himself aroused, his throat and other parts of his body tightening.
"This is not a dream," she said breathily, her molten gaze locked on his. "It is a summons, a call for help. Our destinies are ever intertwined, even if we are not meant to be together in these incarnations."
Her words struck a chord of memory. "Yes," he said. "So you've told me. Something about our transplanted souls."
He paused and though his throat felt constricted, he added coldly, "What makes you think I give a shit about any of that?"
Fand did not seem to be offended or even to have heard him. Her fingers lightly caressed the hairline scar on his left cheek, inflicted there only a few months before. "Some things have changed since we last saw each other."
He caught her arm, noting how his hand easily encircled the long, narrow wrist. "Not everything. You still think you can invade my mind and screw with my perceptions whenever you feel the urge."
She surprised him by laughing in genuine amusement. The Fand he had met before, more than half a year ago, would have been enraged by his grim observation. That Fand was tempestuous to the point of madness, flipping from loving passion to homicidal fury in between eye blinks.
"I felt the urge to contact you many, many times, Kane," she said quietly. "But I restrained myself. I respected your wishes."
He realized she had spoken his name without the annoying insertion of the glottal stop. "You call invading my mind without my permission respecting my wishes, Fand?"
"I would never have done so unless the matter was urgent." The golden light in her inhumanly huge, in- humanly beautiful eyes dimmed. "More than urgent. You saved Eire once, Kane. You saved me. Now the stakes are far higher and can affect every corner of the globe."
He frowned at her, knowing she wasn't being deliberately melodramatic. "What do you mean?"
Her full lips turned down at the corners. "This was a wild land, with terrible feuds raging among the clans. Blood of my people was spilled here, which is a tie that forever binds my soul to this island. Your blood was spilled here, too—and that of Balor."
Before he realized it, Kane blurted, "Old Evil- eye?"
She nodded. "I stirred your spirit so you would remember him."
"Why?"
"Because his spirit stirs again, drawing you to him to settle the feud that was not resolved more than fifteen hundred years ago."
Kane said nothing. He had heard Fand's doctrine of soul transmigration and reincarnation before. It was part and parcel of her religion.
Lifting her slender left arm, she extended it straight out, so the hand was parallel with the horizon. A small, fragile-looking orb nestled in her palm. It looked like a tiny globe of spun glass, though it was not transparent.
Fand lowered her arm, and the sphere remained in place, floating in midair, balanced on the faint line of demarcation between the ocean and the sky. She stated, "Out there lies England, the Imperium Britannia."
"Strongbow's empire."
Fand shook her head. "Strongbow's no longer. But his absence has not improved the relations between our two nations. It has worsened. My people openly war against the Imperium, but the war goes badly for both parties."
"What's that got to do with me?" Kane demanded. "Look at the orb of orichalcum."
"The orb of what?"
"Watch, Kane."
He did as she said, fixing his gaze on the little ball. From the sea beneath it, thrusting up like a finger, rose a great stone pillar, a greenish monolith dripping with seaweed. He could make out the bas-reliefs carved into it. It lifted from the ocean until its tip seemed to touch the bottom of the sphere.
"What. is that?" Kane asked.
"A city, an outpost of the Atlantean Empire. It was known to my people by many names—Poseidia, Lyonesse, Lethosow. After aeons incalculable, it has risen again, torn loose by the cataclysms birthed by the holocaust of two centuries ago. Within its deep vaults is the means to finish what the nuclear apocalypse started. Watch the orb, Kane."
The tiny sphere suddenly turned scarlet, seeming to swell, ripping open the vast backdrop of the sky as if it were rotten, old cloth. The translucent orb burst open from within, releasing a bloom of hellfire. A sheet of flame paled the sky, surging outward and upward. The waves of the sea divided, and the orange-yellow flare poured into Kane and filled him to the backs of his eyeballs.
A coruscating wall of fire scorched across the ocean, riding a booming shock wave, pushing the ocean ahead of it in an overlapping series of mile-high tsunamis.
Kane tried to squeeze his eyes shut, but he felt paralyzed, rooted to the spot like a statue. A vast mushroom cloud towered from the horizon, shot through with arcing skeins of blinding, destructive energy. A wall of smoke swept over him, obscuring the shoreline and Fand, but he could still hear her.
"Hell is rising anew from an ancient tomb beneath the waters. History will be repeated if you do not heed me. And if you do not play your preordained role, this time there will be no survivors. Anywhere."
The wall of sooty smoke enveloped him, blinded him, and he saw nothing more. For an eternity, he felt suspended in a pocket of infinity, of nothingness, of nonexistence.
Then, very faintly, he heard the hurricane howl.
Chapter 11
Judging by the flashing icons on the monitor screen, Lakesh realized he should steel himself to accept the loss of another Cerberus recruit.
Banks touched the screen and said tensely, "Cotta flat-lined half an hour ago. No change." He was a youthful, trim black man with an earnest manner.
The telemetry transmitted from Kane's, Brigid's and Grant's transponders scrolled upward. The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it down to the redoubt's hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetric signals using special human biological encoding.
The digital data stream was then routed to the console on Banks's right, through the locational program, to precisely isolate the team's present position in time and space. The program considered and discarded thousands of possibilities within milliseconds.
Lakesh didn't respond. The icons representing Brigid Baptiste's bio-signs flashed and jumped in a manner neither he nor Banks had ever seen.
"Perhaps it's just a glitch in the system," Banks said uneasily, as though he didn't quite believe his own words. "Like the kind we had a couple of weeks ago."
Lakesh nodded as if he were seriously considering the suggestion. Actually, he was thinking about sitting down. As a man who was chronologically a shade under 250 years old, he felt he was justified. Although he didn't look his age, he looked old enough. A long- nosed, wizened cadaver of a man, he wore thick- lensed glasses with a hearing aid attached to the right earpiece. His hair was the color and texture of ash.
Upon his revival from cryogenic sleep, Lakesh had undergone several operations in order to prolong his life and his usefulness to the Program of Unification. His brown, glaucoma-afflicted eyes were replaced with new blue ones, his leaky old heart and lungs were exchanged for sound new ones. The joints in his knees were not the same as those he had been born with, either. Though his wrinkled, liver-spotted skin made him look exceptionally old, his physiology was that of a fifty-year-old man.
"It's not that," Bry said from the main ops console of the Cerberus redoubt. He had short, curly copper hair and was a round-shouldered man of small stature. "What happened then was solar flares, completely interrupting the satellite signals. We have solid transmissions now."
Lakesh glanced around the central control complex of the trilevel, thirty-acre facility. The room was long, with a high, vaulted ceiling. Consoles of dials, switches, buttons and lights flickering red, green and amber ran the length of the walls. Circuits hummed, needles twitched and monitor screens displayed changing columns of numbers.
A huge Mercator relief map of the world spanned the far wall. Spots of light glowed in almost every continent, and thin glowing lines networked across the countries, like a web spun by a radioactive spider.
They delineated locations of all functioning gateway units in the Cerberus mat-trans network. At present, none of the lights flickered, which would register activity in the network.
Exhaling wearily, Lakesh pressed an intercom key on a desk. "DeFore," he called. "Are you there?"
Her crisp voice responded quickly. "I am. What's up?"
"Please bring a med kit and a gurney to the ops center."
"Who's hurt?"
"I just need you to stand by." He cut off further questions by releasing the key. He cast a worried glance through the open door of the ready room to the jump platform. The six-sided chamber was enclosed by slabs of brown-tinted armaglass to confine quantum energy overspills. All of the official Cerberus gateway units of the mat-trans network were color-coded so authorized jumpers could tell at a glance into which redoubt they had materialized.
Despite the fact it seemed an inefficient method of differentiating one installation from another, only personnel holding color-coded security clearances were allowed to make use of the system. Inasmuch as their use was restricted to a select few of the units, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.
Lakesh usually felt a small flush of pride whenever he looked at this particular gateway unit since it was the first fully debugged matter-transfer inducer built after the prototypes. It served as the basic template for all the others that followed. But today he eyed the jump chamber with trepidation, even a touch of fear.
He was afraid of what might materialize in it at any moment.
DeFore entered, followed by her aide, Auerbach, who was pushing a wheeled gurney ahead of him. Stocky and buxom with deep bronze skin that contrasted starkly with her intricately braided ash-blond hair, DeFore's brown eyes cut over to the medical monitor. They widened when she saw the icons and data scrolling across it. Instantly, she stood over Banks.
"How sure are you of these readings?" she snapped.
With a touch of asperity, Bry said, "Ninety-six percent probability they're accurate."
DeFore's full lips pursed contemplatively. "Cotta's totally flat-lined. Maybe the transponder itself was damaged."
Without waiting for anyone to agree or disagree, she went on curtly, "Baptiste's blood pressure is well below normal systolic levels. Her heart rate is irregular. All the symptoms of deep shock."
She cast a hard glance in Lakesh's direction. "Where did you send them this time?"
Lakesh quashed his sudden flash of angry resentment. Tapping his narrow chest, he declared, "I didn't send them anywhere. I no longer have the authority to do that, as you know. The decision to make the jump to the Antarctica unit was reached among Kane, Brigid and Grant."
DeFore swung her around, scrutinizing the webwork of light crisscrossing the Mercator map. "I don't see a gateway there."
"Because it's unindexed," Lakesh retorted, irritated by how defensive he sounded. "It wasn't part of the official Cerberus program. It's apparently one of the mass-produced modular units. Brigid found the codes by searching the database."
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the jump chamber. "It obviously was functional. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been able to achieve a destination lock."
Auerbach spoke for the first time, in a slow, faltering voice. He was a tall, burly man with a red buzz cut. "But because the unit isn't indexed, you won't know when they'll be returning?"
Lakesh inclined his head toward the map. "That's right. If it was indexed, the mat and demat process would be registered there."
Crossing her arms over her ample chest, DeFore said irritably, "So you just want me to stand by in here for God only knows how long? They might not return for hours, for days. It makes more sense for me to put together a comprehensive med kit and jump there myself."
Lakesh self-consciously cleared his throat. "I considered making that proposal to you, but after your recent sufferings in Louisiana—"
She cut him off with a short, sharp gesture. "My injuries weren't serious. And if it's my emotional state you're concerned about, you can just go and—"
Suddenly, lights flashed and needles wavered on the consoles. All of them spun as a humming tone vibrated from the gateway chamber.
"Incoming jumpers," Bry announced.
DeFore ran through the anteroom, past Lakesh and Auerbach and came to a stop facing the armaglass door. Bright flares, like bursts of distant heat lightning, arced on the other side. The droning hum climbed rapidly in pitch to a 'hurricane wail, then dropped down to inaudibility as the device cycled through the materialization process.
Grabbing the handle, she wrenched up on it. She was nearly bowled off her feet by the door flying open on counterbalanced hinges, pushed by Kane's shoulder. He leaned against it for a moment, eyes glassy and unfocused. Both DeFore and Lakesh winced when they saw him. His thermal suit hung in tatters, his face blood-streaked and bruised, hair in disarray.
Hoarsely, he barked, "Get her out of there!"
IT WAS BARELY controlled chaos for a moment as Kane stumbled from the platform, catching himself on the edge of the table. Grant followed, equally unsteady and bloody.
DeFore and Auerbach pushed their way into the jump chamber, fanning away the dissipating tendrils of vapor.
"Where's Cotta?" Lakesh demanded.
Hanging his head, respiration labored, Kane said, "We had to leave him behind."
"What happened to him?"
Before either Kane or Grant could answer, Auerbach and DeFore emerged from the chamber, carrying Brigid on the makeshift stretcher. As they laid her gently down on the gurney, Lakesh caught sight of the bloody bandages wrapped around her head. He blurted something in a language no one understood and rushed to her side.
Peeling back one of Brigid's eyelids, DeFore asked, "Who bandaged her up like this?"
"I did," Grant replied a trifle gruffly.
"You did a good job," she stated. "Her pupils aren't contracting. Can you and Kane make it to the dispensary under your own steam?"
Both men nodded.
"Let's go then. Banks, I'm going to need you on this."
Banks was not brought into Cerberus to act as a medic. For the past couple of months, he worked under the tutelage of DeFore while Auerbach languished in a detention cell on the bottom level of the installation. He had been confined there when his participation in a scheme to murder Kane, Brigid and Grant was uncovered. Because he had been duped, Auerbach had only recently been released and returned to his duties on a form of parole.
