Planet Hate, page 11
“New disguise for the new world,” Grant explained as he took a position close to Lakesh.
The long-lived cyberneticist had brought his laptop computer over and was tapping out a sequence on its flat keyboard. “I was speaking with Domi not five minutes ago,” Lakesh explained as the Cerberus team settled around him. “She had been investigating the state of play at Snakefishville.”
“Isn’t that nothing more than a burned-out shell now?” Kane asked.
“It appears not,” Lakesh said, “but that is not the reason for this gathering. Domi was making her way to the parallax point via which she planned to join us here on the Pacific coast when she stumbled upon what she described as a flock of monstrous birds. From what she told me over the Commtact, these creatures are almost as big as a man and they appeared to have turned on Domi. Her communication link to me halted abruptly at—” Lakesh checked the computer display “—15.03, prior to which she sounded as if she was in considerable distress. I would ask you, as my friends and as Domi’s, to investigate this matter immediately while I try to raise Domi again over the Commtact.”
The room was silent for a breath as Kane and the others considered Lakesh’s words. Then there was a flurry of movement as everyone began to get ready for departure while Grant made his way across the room to grab their interphase unit.
As he picked up his Sin Eater and holster, Kane looked over Lakesh’s shoulder, peering at the display map that showed the location of Domi’s transponder. “How close is she to the parallax point?” the ex-Mag asked.
Lakesh tapped a key and an overlay map appeared on-screen, showing the nearby parallax points as flashing red beacons. “We’re talking yards rather than miles. She would be no more than two minutes’ walk, by my reckoning,” he explained frantically.
Kane put a reassuring hand on Lakesh’s shoulder. “Easy, old man,” he said, “we’ll be there before you know it. It’s probably nothing, just a glitch on the comm.”
“I think I should…” Lakesh began but Kane stopped him with a look.
“If you’re going to say ‘come with you’ then you can forget it,” the ex-Mag said grimly. “Let us do the dirty work while you man Cerberus Mark II here, okay?”
Reluctantly, Lakesh nodded, turning his attention back to the Commtact as he tried to raise Domi.
Shizuka spoke up then, her voice tranquil in the rustling urgency of the room as the others prepared themselves. “Domi’s my friend,” she explained. “I’d like to join you.”
Kane shook his head. “You’re needed here, Shizuka,” he explained. “Lakesh has to concentrate on the new setup, and he may need you and the Tigers of Heaven if he runs into trouble.”
Reluctantly, the petite samurai woman took a single bow. “Your words are wise, Kane.”
From close beside the still-open French doors, Rosalia’s dog barked joyfully. Rosalia leaned down, scratching the mutt behind its flea-bitten ears.
Busy strapping on the wrist holster that contained his Sin Eater pistol, Kane looked up at the woman and her dog. “What’s got into him?” he asked.
Rosalia’s eyes shone as she looked at the thing hanging from Shizuka’s belt. “Still be handy having a sword with us,” she suggested.
Shizuka smiled at the woman’s words. “You are trained in the use of the katana?” she asked, surprised.
“A little.” Rosalia shrugged noncommittally.
Shizuka issued a brief order to one of her guards. With a bow of his head, the man immediately unbuckled the sword he wore at his belt and laid it flat across his palms, presenting sword and sheath to Rosalia.
Rosalia bowed her head graciously before accepting the sheathed blade. As the others readied themselves, Rosalia drew the blade and tested its weight. The katana sword was the traditional weapon of the samurai, twenty-five inches of tempered steel honed to a razor sharpness. The blade was solid but felt light and perfectly balanced, making it easy to wield. Rosalia weaved it through the air for a few seconds, getting a feel for its weight before she resheathed it and strapped the sheath to her waist, leaving the sword’s hilt at an angle low to her hip like an old-style gunslinger. The hilt itself was decorated with an intricate gold pattern between strips of wound red leather, creating a striped pattern of crimson-and-gold like a hornet’s abdomen.
At his computer terminal, Lakesh was speaking into the Commtact, once again hoping to elicit a response from Domi. Embedded beneath her skin, the Commtact did not need sound to activate, Lakesh knew, which meant that Domi should be able to subvocalize her response if she was in a position where silence was paramount. Lakesh waited an anxious few moments, yet still there was no reply.
His face set grimly, Kane led the way to the open doors with Grant and Rosalia following just a few paces behind him, the woman’s straggly-looking hound trotting along at her feet, tail wagging and its engorged tongue hanging out of its mouth with excitement. All three were armed now, their workaday clothes augmented with the armored weave of the shadow suits once more, and Grant had shirked back into his protective Kevlar duster. As they passed Lakesh, the elderly cyberneticist informed them of the coordinates of the parallax point that was closest to Domi’s current location.
“Keep in touch,” Kane said. “We’ll be the ones on the ground, but you’re our eyes and ears once we get there.”
Lakesh nodded as CAT Alpha left the winter lodge and made their way out through the garden at a fast trot. It had taken upward of a dozen personnel at any one time to man the Cerberus control room and keep the field teams safe. Now, in reduced circumstances, he was expected to monitor all the feeds from a single laptop, advising his team and protecting them from harm. That was a tall order in itself, but to make matters worse, the life of his lover was at stake. Lakesh bit at his lip with nervous anxiety as he brought up the map and satellite feed of the Snakefishville area and its immediate surrounds.
DOMI HAD FELT the bird’s claw strike her head as she plummeted between the thick leaves of the redwoods, poplars and beeches. Something had snagged her, plucking her from the air even as she hurtled toward the ground. It had all been over in the space of a second, perhaps not even that long, and she had blacked out before she had even been able to order her thoughts. Now, the albino girl woke dazedly, feeling something jabbing into her side. She was lying on a rough surface, the sound of the wind in the trees all around her.
She moved, slowly at first, her muscles tender. Beneath her body it felt as if she was lying on a bed of thorns, sharp protrusions jabbing into her soft flesh. She opened her eyes, and was reassured to find that the sun still lit the sky. It was darker here, the thick cover of the leaves forcing the sun’s rays to cut like the strike of a flashing sword wherever it discovered a gap.
How long have I been out of it? Domi asked herself.
The ground beneath her had sharp edges and she stared at it for a moment, trying to make sense of what it was she saw. It looked like a bed of branches, plaited one against another to form a vast bowl with high sides. The torso of a gutted wolf lay by the rounded stick wall, teeth bared, dried blood on its fur.
Domi heard something moving behind her and she whipped around to face it, reaching for her knife where it should rest in the leather sheath at her ankle. The knife was gone, dropped at some point after she had blacked out.
A clutch of eggs waited behind her, three in all, blue-shelled and each one a little larger than her torso. One of the eggs was wobbling, and Domi perceived the crack that was widening on its surface. She was in a nest, the nest of one of those gigantic birds she had struggled with in the forest.
“Domi? Dearest, are you there?” Lakesh’s voice came from the internal mechanism of her Commtact, sounding loud as it reverberated through her reeling head.
“Moment,” Domi replied, her voice low. A child of the Outlands, Domi had slipped into the abbreviated patois of the true outlanders.
Lakesh expressed his relief over the Commtact, and instructed her that Kane’s team was coming to join her shortly. As she listened, Domi made her way stealthily to one of the bowl-like sides of the ten-foot-wide nest, glancing overhead to see if any of the colossal birds was approaching. A moment later she was pulling herself up the side of the nest and peering over it.
The nest sat in the fork of two branches of one of the giant redwoods, presumably better to hold its weight. The branches stretched off left and right, each one as thick as the widest part of Domi’s torso.
“I’m inside a bird’s nest,” Domi explained when Lakesh had finished filling her in. “Big as a room.”
Her movements punctuated by the sound of Lakesh’s astonished gasp, Domi climbed over the edge of the nest until she was crouched on the ridgelike branches that formed its side. Two of the mighty birds were spiraling a little way below her, fighting over some bloody hunk of meat while several more feasted on the gore-drenched remains of their brethren—the ones Domi had caused to crash into the trees.
IN THE TRANQUIL GARDENS surrounding Shizuka’s winter retreat, twin cones of light suddenly blossomed as if from nowhere as Grant, Kane, Rosalia and her dog waited. Lakesh glanced up for a moment from his position in the back room of the building, watching through the glass of the French doors as the interphaser opened a window through quantum space and sent his three teammates on their way.
The cones of light spread wider in front of his eyes, one expanding up into the air while the other seemed—counterintuitively—to expand into the very ground itself. The light was multicolored, as if cast through a prism, and witch fire played deep within its eerie, oily wash.
As suddenly as it started, the light abated, closing in on itself until nothing remained, not even the three people and the dog who had stood there moments before.
“Good luck, my friends,” Lakesh muttered, “and Godspeed.”
DOMI DUCKED BACK as one of the flying birds pulled suddenly away from the other with an angry squawk, yanking the bloody morsel away with a splatter of blood and flesh. Then the huge bird lunged upward with a majestic sweep of its vast wings, cawing as it did so. The bird held something beneath its belly, clutched in its claws.
Domi crouched inside the nest, pushing her back to the side and wishing she hadn’t lost her combat blade. To her right, the bird’s flapping wings became louder as it cut through the air back to its nest. In a moment, its dark shadow obscured the sun, wings flapping like mighty sails as it brought itself in for a landing.
Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact in that moment, an oasis of calm amid this world turned upside down. “Kane’s team have just opened the gateway now,” he said. “Is there any message you want me to pass on?”
Domi watched as the bloody torso of a human being dropped into the nest from the claws of the huge bird, rolling beside the dead wolf. Both legs were missing as was one of the arms, but Domi recognized it, even with the white material of the gossamer dress turned red with spilled blood. It was the pretty teenage girl who had been prancing in the woods when the birds had appeared. She stared at Domi with lifeless eyes, a bloody streak obscuring one half of her face.
“Tell Kane to be quick,” Domi whispered as the girl’s body rolled against her feet. “Tell him it’s urgent.”
THE JOURNEY was instantaneous. A moment before, the three of them had been standing in the cliff-side gardens of Shizuka’s lodge. Now, just a single heartbeat later, they stood in a wooded area that overlooked the vast settlement of Luilekkerville, its towering structures jutting into the clear blue sky like shoots from a nascent plant. And as for the space in between—it was a nonspace, an impression, a blur, like stepping through an emotion.
The transition was smooth enough, but as the Cerberus team emerged from twin cones of inky light with arcing thunder in their fractal depths, Kane unleashed a terrible cry of agony before slumping to the ground, his hands to his face. It was so sudden, so quick, that it took Grant and Rosalia a few seconds to react, momentarily disoriented as they were from the journey through the quantum ether. Beside her, Rosalia’s dog let out a yelp and hurried across to Kane’s side, sniffing at him as he rolled on the leafy ground. Kane was breathing hard through his clenched teeth, rolling this way and that like a man on fire trying to put out the flames.
The swirling light of the interphaser was still churning behind him as Grant hurried over to his partner with Rosalia just a step away. Rosalia reached down for the dog, pulling it away from Kane by the scruff of its neck. “Come here, animal,” she cursed, “give him space.”
“Kane? What is it?” Grant demanded. Automatically, Grant’s Sin Eater blaster had shot into the palm of his hand from its hiding place in his sleeve, and he was scouring the area with narrowed eyes.
Kane remained doubled over on the bare soil, his body shaking and his hands clutched to his face as he rolled back and forth on his back like a stranded turtle. Had he been shot?
Grant could not detect any immediate threat. Warily he lowered his pistol, keeping it in a ready position. Close by, Rosalia was already checking the area, sprinting around the immediate circle of trees to ensure no one was in hiding, the dog at her side.
“Kane?” Grant urged, the rising concern clear in his voice.
Still lying atop the mulch of the leaves and soil in the clearing amid the woods, Kane turned his head to face his partner. For a moment he held his hands in front of him still, and Grant could see thick beads of sweat washing down his forehead with the force of a cloudburst. Then Kane tentatively pulled his hands away, and Grant saw his face properly for the first time. The right side of Kane’s face seemed normal enough, tousled hair behind the ear and the dark trace of stubble lining his square jaw, his blue-gray eye peering out from beneath his dark brow. But the left side seemed locked, immobile, just the occasional spasm like a man in the midst of some terrible stroke. And there, just above Kane’s cheek, his left eye had turned darker, a gray the color of rain-slick slate.
“I can’t see,” Kane said with a trembling voice. “I’m blind.”
Chapter 9
The island sat low to the horizon, like the husk of a long-dead insect dried in the unforgiving sun. The boat seemed small by comparison as it rode the rolling waves of the Atlantic, two miles out from the eastern seaboard of the territory that had once been known as the United States of America. Once, the towering statue of a woman had stood in this bay, torch thrust aloft, promising liberty for all who visited these shores. Her torch and her city were long since departed, reduced to rubble two hundred years before when the nuclear hostilities between East and West had come to a head in a single orgy of radioactive fire.
The boat continued past the jutting struts of the old bay and out into the ocean. The boat was a forty-foot fishing scow that had been converted into a ferry barely a month before, its owner turning his life over to the glory of the New Order and his master, Ullikummis. The boat bobbed up and down over the blue-green waves, continuing away from the shore on its slow journey to the island of Bensalem.
The passengers numbered almost sixty in total, crammed on the deck like an old-fashioned game of sardines, leaving barely any space for the fisherman himself to guide his vessel to its strange destination.
Three months ago, the island had not existed. Back then, the ocean had stretched away from the shore in a seemingly endless line, swaying back and forth as the currents altered, rising and falling with the movements of the moon. Then Ullikummis had come, a mighty god from the stars, and he had reached out, speaking to the rocks that lay beneath the ocean in some archaic language only he seemed to know. Ullikummis had abilities far beyond those of mortal man, and if one needed proof that here stood a god, then this act was it. He had generated a psionic bond with the rocks beneath the ocean, calling them, teasing them, encouraging them to rush to the surface and do his bidding. The rocks had loosened themselves from the ocean bed and spun through the waters of the ocean, spinning over and over as they hurried to obey this clarion call. First one pebble, then two, then four until a veritable swarm of rocks had rocketed up from the ocean depths to surface in the baking rays of the sun. Under Ullikummis’s instruction, the rocks had massed, forming this strut of land where there had been no land before, the new island of Bensalem.
Almost two miles across, the island seemed like a fort, struck out in the ocean as if to defend the land behind it. The people on the boat had been jubilant as they boarded, but now they fell silent, watching as that monstrous island hove into view. Its stone walls were sheer, harsh lines jutting up from the water on all sides, high cliffs looming above the boat as if in judgment of its human cargo. The rock was mottled, browns and grays and chalk-white, like some huge calico cat reclining in the sea. The boat came closer, making its way through a channel that ran through a section of the stone island like a vein. Bathed in shadow, the channel was dark and it took a moment for the fisherman’s eyes to adjust to the sudden gloom. The fisherman had been down this channel several times, ferrying passengers to and fro in the name of his master. Down below, he knew there were juts of rock, poised like teeth beneath the surface, just waiting to rip through the hull of an unwary boatman’s vessel. Thus, he navigated the channel slowly, feeling as much as seeing the perils that lay beneath. His name was Alfredo and he had once believed in a different god.
Like his brothers and sisters, Alfredo had fallen into step with his mother’s religion, kneeling before the painting of the pale-faced woman with the headscarf and saying his prayers each night, thanking her for the bounty he had received. He had made a living as a fisherman, enough to feed his family and still have something to sell to the passing outlanders who often went on to sell it to the gated communities of the villes. Then, six weeks ago, Alfredo’s wife had been approached by a wandering nomad. The man had been dressed in rags and looked half-starved, but he had a steely determination to his gaze. A kindhearted woman, Alfredo’s wife had invited the man to join her and her family over a meal, and Alfredo had welcomed him, too. Despite his ragged appearance, the man had spoken long and eloquently about the world that was coming, of the fall of the baronies and the manner in which that had opened a gateway to utopia, to heaven on Earth. The man’s words had been encouraging and he had spoken then of the lord of this forthcoming utopia, a mighty god called Ullikummis. Alfredo had listened to the man’s words as his wife sang their firstborn child to sleep in his cot. The future had sounded wonderful, a place carved out of love where the world they came from seemed so full of hatred.
