Shadow Box, page 12
Smarts had leaped for the carrying case of the interphaser, grabbing it from the rear step of an open-backed chariot and swinging the solid box around until it connected with the side of another Incarnate’s head before slamming into the back of the albino woman’s own head. As the white-skinned woman sank to her knees, Smarts had shoved the case straight down, bluntly knocking into her skull again to be sure that she was out.
By that time, Rosalia had already disarmed the next Incarnate and was just landing a face kick to the wooden helm of the one beside him before she flipped the first Incarnate’s stolen staff and jabbed it into its owner’s solar plexus.
Smarts remembered standing in awe as he looked at the devastation that Rosalia had caused in a matter of seconds. Three well-built, armed men had fallen to her blows. He himself had taken out another one along with their female jailer.
As he stood catching his breath, the dark-haired woman had let out that penetrating whistle once again and grabbed the case containing the interphaser from his hands.
“Quickly, before they awaken,” she instructed, bringing him out of his daze.
Together, the pair of them had mounted separate chariots and gunned their engines before heading to the west at top speed. Rosalia had rested the Incarnate’s staff beside her in her chariot as they took off.
Now, Smarts checked behind him, confirming that the swells and drops of the uneven desert had given them cover from the settlement and its monster. He held his hand aloft, indicating to Rosalia that they needed to halt.
“We’re not far enough from them,” she shouted to him over the rush of wind from their passage.
“We don’t know where we’re running,” Smarts called back, powering down the throttle and killing his speed.
Rosalia sped on for a moment before setting her chariot into a tight turn and drawing it to a halt beside him. When she joined him, Smarts already had his pocket chron out and was adjusting it to provide a range finder for them.
Rosalia’s dark hair blew over her face, and she tossed her head back before speaking to him. “Where are we, Axel?” she asked.
“Not far from a safehouse,” he assured her. “Just let me work out…” he said, his sentence drifting to nothingness as he began the calculations in his head.
She butted into his thoughts after a moment, an urgent tone to her voice. “What was that thing? Did you see?” she asked.
“I saw it.” He nodded, his tone evincing deep concern.
“What was it, Axel?” she asked again.
“I have no idea,” Smarts admitted. “It would appear that Señor Kane and his compadres involve themselves in many things that I do not as yet understand.”
“It looked like it was attacking them,” Rosalia stated. She and Smarts had begun their attack almost as soon as the monstrous thing had begun to move, just after it had swatted the horse aside, when all their captors’ attention was focused on it. They had not stayed around long enough to see what happened next; it was simple speculation from Rosalia.
Even so, Smarts nodded slowly in agreement. He had seen the thing shriek as it turned to face the three Magistrate men and their troops. He was fairly certain that he could guess what had followed.
“We need to circle around,” Smarts told Rosalia as he closed his pocket chron. “There is a dugout entrance in this direction, three and three-quarter miles—” he pointed “—but we can’t leave tracks like these. It will lead Señor Kane and his people straight to us.”
“We dump these primitive vehicles, then,” Rosalia said dismissively. “They’ve given us some distance already. I’ll run the rest.” She hoisted the carrying case and stepped from the chariot, passing him the procured silver staff.
“You may be able to, dear Sweet Rose,” Smarts said, “but I am afraid that that is more than a little beyond my capabilities.”
“Follow,” she told him as she began running in the direction he had indicated. “I will bring reinforcements as soon as I can.”
Smarts bowed his head in acknowledgment as the woman began running across the sand at a fast jog. “We may not need them, if that monster was successful.”
Rosalia’s long strides seemed to eat up the desert, and Smarts watched as her right arm pumped forward and back with each graceful stride. In her left she held the solid carrying case away from her body, careful not to knock it into her leg as she ran toward the horizon. Reluctantly Smarts glanced at the sun beating down overhead before beginning the long walk in the same direction as his colleague, using the staff as a walking stick to assist his progress over the shifting sand.
KEB AND DECARD were the first to tend to their fallen colleague, while Brigid and Kane followed. When Keb removed the crocodile mask, the wounded Incarnate’s face was a tapestry of blood. A shard of wood was jabbed through his cheek, and he would be unable to close his jaw until it was removed.
“What the hell did we just see?” Kane asked, eyeing Decard warily.
“I don’t know, Kane,” Decard told him hotly. “All I know is that I have a man down here. What, you think I brought you into this knowing that…thing was going to turn up?”
Kane checked himself, scanning the horizon. “You’ve got four more wounded,” he told Decard after a moment. “There was a prison break while we were all involved with the floor show here.”
Decard swore as he glanced at his team over by the chariots. Brigid laid a consoling hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take a look at them,” she told him before striding toward the other wounded. Decard followed her a moment later, after checking with the medic tending to the fallen Incarnate in the crocodile mask.
Kane watched for a few more seconds as Keb worked at the hurt Incarnate. His wounds looked bad, and the man was shrieking with pain.
Kane shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts before he turned to Domi and Grant who waited by the side of the nearest building.
“What now?” Domi asked, all sign of wooziness gone from her voice.
“Didn’t I tell you to get after Smarts and Rosalia?” Kane growled.
Grant held up a hand. “Whoa,” he told Kane, “you may want to back down a little there, partner. Domi just damn near saved all our lives with that little stunt she pulled.”
Kane’s body was tense with frustration. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, Domi. I’m just real annoyed at losing that whatever-it-was.”
“We’re all annoyed,” Grant told him. “You got pretty close there, Kane. Get a good look at it?”
Kane pointed off vaguely into the distance. “We’ll talk about it later,” he instructed. “First, you and Domi get our ‘jackalopes’ back.”
Domi and Grant ran off in the direction of the chariots. As they caught up with Decard, Grant explained that they were going to borrow two vehicles.
“We’ll be down to five,” Decard lamented, “and I still have a fifteen-man crew to take care of out here.”
Domi smiled, glistening white teeth amid chalk-white skin. “We’ll bring them back,” she assured him.
A moment later, Grant and Domi were racing off into the distance, following the wheel ruts left by their prisoners’ escape. As they tore over the sand dunes, bumping up into the air and landing heavily in a manner that the chariots had never been designed for, Grant called Cerberus headquarters over his Commtact.
“This is Grant. Fix on my position and give me a satellite sweep.”
A moment later Brewster Philboyd’s voice piped into Grant’s ear over his Commtact. “Grant, this is Brewster. What can I do for you?”
Brewster Philboyd was another of the trusted inner circle of the Cerberus operation. Philboyd was an astrophysicist by discipline, aged somewhere in his midforties. A scientist first and a fighter very much last, Philboyd worked shifts at many of the desk jobs, helping out where he could at the Cerberus redoubt.
“Long story short,” Grant explained, “our two prisoners have absconded on solar-powered chariots on a westerly heading. They won’t have got far. Can you find them?”
There was a pause, and Grant imagined that Philboyd was working the computer keys to access the data.
“Bear with me,” Philboyd muttered.
Grant snarled as his chariot crested another hillock of sand. These street thieves may think they’ve got all the answers, but they reckoned without the resources at our disposal.
“I’ve got one,” Philboyd said triumphantly. “Turn a little more to the north and you’ll see two abandoned chariots, maybe two miles ahead of you. There’s a figure making its way from these toward the west.”
“Keep scanning,” Grant told Brewster. “There should be a second one out there.”
As their chariots reared up another of the steep dunes, Domi cried out in surprise, “I see them, Grant! The buggies.”
Grant saw the two little dark blots on the landscape. He fed the throttle of his own chariot more power, urging the little vehicle ahead.
Philboyd’s voice came over the Commtact once again. “I’ve spotted a second figure,” he explained, “moving at some speed in the same basic direction. He’s put quite a distance between himself and the first.”
“She,” Grant corrected automatically. Somehow he knew it was Rosalia. There was something about that damn woman that was more than anyone had expected on first look.
Domi looked across from her chariot, raising her voice to be heard over the whining engines, the rush of wind and the churning sand in their wheels. “I’ll take the nearest,” she shouted. “You keep on, okay?”
They whipped past the abandoned chariots and could see the struggling figure of Señor Smarts as he used the staff to walk briskly away to the west, glancing over his shoulder every dozen or so paces. When he saw Domi’s and Grant’s chariots, he began running, changing his direction and heading for a dead tree that sprouted from the hard-packed ground to his left.
Grant ignored him, standing high in the chariot as he continued off to the west, determined to catch up with Rosalia. His head flicked to his left as Domi’s chariot peeled out of formation and she prepared to run him down.
“Be careful, Domi,” Grant warned. Then he was racing away, narrowed eyes scanning the horizon.
The wheels of Domi’s chariot kicked up sand as she bore down on the running Mexican. “Keep away from me, Señorita Magistrate,” Smarts shouted as he ducked behind the dried trunk of the tree.
The back of Domi’s chariot fishtailed as she applied the brake, swinging her from side to side as she clung to the steering column. The vehicle was still moving forward, zipping past the dead tree, when Domi leaped from it in a tuck-and-roll across the sand. She saw now that the man before her had a familiar silver staff in his hand, one of the Incarnate’s strange weapons, and he was frantically fiddling with the controls as he tried to work the thing.
Domi’s hand reached for the Detonics Combat Master tucked into her waistband, and she brought it up in a fluid movement as she got to her knees. “Drop it,” she shouted.
Smarts ignored her, finding the correct button at last and blasting off a stream of energy from the twin prongs atop the Incarnate’s staff. The blast went up into the air, shimmering like heat haze, its noise reverberating against Domi’s eardrums. Then Smarts brought the staff down, aiming its near invisible beam at the albino woman.
Domi was rolling without conscious thought, moving herself out of the beam as it cleaved the air toward her. Her finger pulled at the trigger of her handgun, and a single bullet blasted from its chamber, cutting through the air and burrowing into the fleshy upper part of Smarts’s left leg. With a howl, Smarts toppled, falling hard on his left shoulder, the staff still blasting energy in a crazy arc as it swayed in his hands.
“Next one takes head off scrawny shoulders, wide boy,” Domi shouted as Smarts struggled to regain his composure. “Not fooling.” In her anxiousness, Domi’s speech patterns had reverted to the clipped, broken form of English that was a legacy of her wild past.
Smarts cursed as he tried to swing the staff around, the burning pain of the bullet wound throbbing in his leg. Suddenly, he heard the loud report of Domi’s pistol once again, and a bullet whizzed just past his ear, burying itself in the sand above his head.
“Drop it!” was all he heard her say.
His hazel eyes looked down the length of his body, seeing the strange albino crouched there, poised with her pistol aimed between his legs. He flipped the switch on the side of the silver staff and tossed it to one side, raising his hands in the air.
The barrel of Domi’s gun followed the deactivated staff as it dropped, then whipped back to point at Smarts as he lay there in the sand, blood seeping from the wound in his leg.
“I had to try,” the Mexican said with a disarming grin. “It’s the rules of the game, is it not, señorita?”
Domi’s ruby eyes narrowed as she held the gun on him. “Just don’t move,” she advised him.
BACK AT THE DESERT hamlet, Brigid Baptiste and Keb the field medic had rounded up all the wounded Incarnates in the shade of one of the shacks and were checking on each in turn. The four Incarnates who had been with Domi when Smarts and Rosalia had made their break for freedom were okay barring a few scrapes and bruises, and one of them had had his bloodied nose strapped down with gauze.
“Next time, you’ll wear your helmet strapped tight when in the field,” Decard told him sternly, and the man nodded in silent agreement.
A fifth Incarnate, the man who had tussled with the monster itself, lay unmoving, his breathing coming in a painful wheeze.
The other Incarnates had helped shift all of the strangely altered locals into one shack, so that they could be more easily guarded and monitored.
In another of the shady rooms within the shack, Brigid and Keb compared notes on the strangely disoriented people. Their conclusion was depressingly familiar. “We’re no closer to knowing what this thing is,” Brigid stated.
Kane looked sour as he stood against the wall, the baying calls of the infected a haunting sound in his ears as they wailed in the neighboring room. “We need to do a proper laboratory examination,” he grumbled.
“Using what?” Brigid asked. “We don’t even have a means of transport right now.”
“A temporary setback,” Kane said firmly.
Brigid’s emerald eyes held his as she looked at him in utter seriousness. “These people don’t have a lot of time, Kane.”
Kane bit back a curse, looking at the closed door to the next room. His gaze shifted and he addressed the medic. “Keb, how far are we from Aten?”
Keb shook his head. “I see what you are thinking, Kane, but Decard wouldn’t allow it.”
“You have facilities there,” Kane told him. “We need to nail down what this thing is.”
Brigid looked at Kane sadly. “No, Kane, Keb’s right. We made a deal with Decard that he wouldn’t have to take this back home with him.”
Kane nodded sourly, making clear that this didn’t sit well with him. “I didn’t come here expecting the monster from the depths,” he grumbled.
“No one did,” Brigid said, pacifying him, resting her hand on his arm, her face close to his.
As they stood there, considering their next move, there was a sudden cry from outside and Keb rushed to see what the disturbance was. A look passed between Brigid and Kane before they followed.
Outside, at the shady spot by the wall of the shack, the four wounded Incarnates had all moved away from their companion—the one who had been tossed aside by the dark-skinned monster less than thirty minutes before. The man was tossing around like a beached fish, his bent body flipping despite his broken limbs. And he was screaming, issuing guttural sounds that began from somewhere deep in his throat.
Decard was rushing across from where he had been examining the tunnel at the edge of the settlement, his limping more pronounced now after all the action of the day. “What happened to him?” he asked.
One of the wounded Incarnates spoke up, pointing to his fallen colleague. “He just started screaming, moving about. It’s like he woke up all of a sudden,” he explained. There was a distinct note of fear in his voice.
Kane stepped closer, looking at the fallen man as he writhed on the ground. His teeth snapped together, and his eyes balled tight as he moaned at his pains. “It’s okay,” Kane told him. “Help’s here, we have painkillers.”
The Incarnate ignored him, and then Kane heard words amid the man’s shrieks of agony, words that chilled him to the very marrow.
“Get off the planet, ape-thing,” the Incarnate said in a voice not his own, a voice coming from deep within his throat. “Make room.”
Kane crouched, using his left forearm to hold the writhing man still. With his right hand, the ex-Mag reached for the man’s face.
“Kane?” Decard cried. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Kane ignored him, snatching at the man’s forehead to hold his head down. He shifted his weight, holding the writhing, howling Incarnate as still as he was able. It was like holding an enraged steer, and Kane was thrown about a little, his booted foot and knee shifting in the sand as he was tossed around.
With a swift movement of his hands, Kane grabbed the man’s head and shoved him back, right hand reversed, its heel pushing against the man’s forehead. With the fingers of his right hand, Kane dragged at the indentations below the man’s eyebrows, forcing him to open his eyes. Kane remained there a moment, looking at the man’s eyes as the Incarnate continued to howl in agony.
Kane’s head turned to Decard, Brigid and the others as they moved closer. “Look,” he instructed. “Look at his eyes.”
