Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 14
Her senses staggered under the force of the blow, even though she had glimpsed his intention a few seconds in advance. She heard his ponderous footfalls and felt one of his hands close tightly around the back of her neck, nearly encircling it. His index finger and spatulate thumb met at her windpipe.
Morrigan gagged for air immediately, too consumed with the desperate need to pry open his steely fingers to stop his other hand from ripping the clothes from her body. Within seconds she was naked, as helpless in his grip as a kitten in the hands of a sadistic child. His hot breath scalded the side of her face, and over the pounding of blood in her ears she heard him grunt, "Destiny, you arrogant mutie bitch. This is yours."
Quayle devoted only a moment to roughly squeezing her breasts and probing between her legs before undoing the snap on his trousers. He forced her to her knees. "Pull them down."
Morrigan tugged at his pants, sliding them down the hairless pillars of his legs. His turgid member sprang out, the bulbous tip brushing her cheek. She tried to lean backward and away, but Quayle's clasp was inexorable.
"Aubrey—" she said in an aspirated whisper.
"Captain!" he half shouted. "Captain Quayle, Captain Evil-eye. You'll obey my commands, every one of them, as soon as I give them. Understand?"
Morrigan didn't reply, and his huge hand tightened around the slim column of her throat again. "Do you understand, damn you?"
"Yes," she managed to gasp.
He cuffed her across the top of her head. "Yes what?"
"Sir. Yes, sir."
Quayle grunted in satisfaction and relaxed his grip a trifle. With his free hand, he began stroking himself. "Right. Now take it. No, not in your hand. If you perform that assignment properly, I'll only bugger you. Now snap to it."
Chapter 13
Kane lay on his bunk and tried to think of anything but the pain. It had not abated in the hours since his return to Cerberus. Instead, it had slowly built into what could only be described as a crescendo of agony.
It came in waves. Some of the surges were bearable; others were so intense he felt as if the walls of his skull would fly apart. The pills given to him by DeFore had done very little to control it, and if the pain increased, he intended to go to the dispensary and get something stronger—whether DeFore liked it or not.
As a Magistrate, Kane had been taught a technique to manage pain, but he wasn't a Mag anymore. He realized bleakly he had experienced more periods of pain in the year since his exile than during his entire sixteen years as a hard-contact Magistrate.
Swinging his legs over the side of his bed, he sat there and cradled his throbbing head in his hands. He hadn't felt such agony since the time he jumped from Tibet with the three pieces of the Chintamani Stone in his coat. As he recalled that incident and those that followed, he felt a frown tugging at his lips. Lakesh had postulated the so-called jump dreams might not be hallucinations at all but inchoate glimpses into other lives and other realities.
It was possible his vision of ancient Ireland was one of those glimpses into a past life he couldn't consciously remember. Fand had always maintained that was the truth. At the time, he'd sneered at the possibility, but now he wasn't so sure.
As a new needle of pain stabbed through his temples, Kane pounded his fist into his pillow, then lay back down, closing his eyes and breathing deeply and regularly.
Although sleep didn't come, the dreams did. A mist rolled over him, thickening and swirling like a maelstrom. In the center of it curled a black staircase, spiraling off into infinity He fell down the stairs, tumbled through a kaleidoscope filled with a shifting pattern of colors. A small part of him panicked, but another part of his mind said confidently, "It's all right. We've done this before."
Out of the darkness, a glowing nebula formed and acquired a definite shape. It spoke to him, a voice he recognized. The underscoring vibrations sent a thrill to the core of his soul.
Fand's eyes were a pair of blazing suns, her words a cascade of gold and silver that caressed his every nerve ending. "Ka'in, my darling."
For an instant, he forgot everything in his life, including the pain. The beautiful Danaan princess with eyes burning like stars filled his world. "Ka'in, I knew if I called, you would hear me. Come to me. Time is growing short."
Her inhumanly beautiful eyes flickered, like a candle flame caught by a draft. He felt her urgency, shivered from her own terror. "What you experienced before was not a dream, nor is this. I need you. The vision you saw was a true one."
Her shimmering image retreated toward black eternity. It swallowed her up and, as she vanished, pain lanced through his temples. Faintly, her voice a gossamer wisp of music, she said, "See what comes soon, Ka'in. Time grows short."
The universe seemed to unfold as a vast blossoming explosion tinted in the colors of hell. Sheets of flame roared across skies, burning, scorching, obliterating—
Kane shoved himself upright in the bunk, eyes squeezed shut, feeling sweat flow down from the roots of his hair. Then the pain in his head gave a great surge and vanished—just like the image of Fand.
Still, he felt weak and slightly sick to his stomach. He heard repeated knocking at his door. "What?" he called hoarsely.
"Kane, are you all right?" demanded DeFore. "Yeah," he replied, managing to stand up on numbed legs.
"Let me in."
He glanced at the chron on the bedside table and saw, with a sense of astonishment, it was nearly 8:00 a.m. He had been sleeping for almost ten hours. DeFore's coming to him at this time of the morning didn't portend good news. Wrapping a sheet around himself, he stumbled to the door, turned the lock and opened it.
The medic stood there, fist poised to rap again. "It's about time When you didn't respond to the trans-comm, I thought you might have—"
"How's Baptiste?" he broke in.
"No change in her condition. She's stable." She eyed him curiously. "How about you?"
Kane shrugged, swaying a little.
"Go ahead," DeFore said curtly. "Sit down before you fall down."
Kane walked over to the bed and half collapsed on it. DeFore eyed him critically. Slipping a pen flash from a pouch on her bodysuit, she shone it into Kane's eyes.
"Knock it off!" he snapped, jerking his head away. "I'm okay. I just got groggy from those pills you gave me."
DeFore gazed at him stonily. "How many did you take?"
His brow knitted thoughtfully. "All of them."
"All of them?" she echoed incredulously. "One of them should have been sufficient to make you sleep. No damn wonder you dozed through comm calls."
"Why were you trying to raise me?"
"Just checking on you." Her lips twitched in a mirthless smile. "That's what doctors are supposed to do with their patients."
Kane nodded, running a hand through his hair. "Has there been any discussion about retrieving Cotta's body?"
"A little. As you can imagine, nobody's anxious to do it without either you or Grant. Domi has volunteered."
He nodded again, then haltingly asked, "Will you know when Brigid is waking up?"
DeFore shook her head. "It could be a gradual process, over a period of hours or days. Or she could just snap back to consciousness like she was waking from a nap. There's no way to tell."
"Then there's nothing you can do for her?" A hint of a challenge lurked in Kane's tone.
DeFore sunk her teeth momentarily into her under- lip and replied with frustration, "I'm not really a doctor, Kane, not by the predark definition of the word. My training was superficial, down and dirty."
Kane gazed at her steadily, not allowing the surprise he felt at her admission to show on his face.
"I'm not a specialist in any one field of medicine," she went on sadly. "In the twentieth century, people like me were called general practitioners. A century before that we were called sawbones because the answer to every injury was to amputate.
"There are some things I know how to do well, and there are a lot more I know next to nothing about. Catatonia and injuries involving the brain are two of those."
She inhaled a deep breath. "So to answer your question, there's absolutely nothing I can do for her without the proper training. I'm sorry."
"I'm not blaming you, DeFore. Everyone here has suffered from the deliberately limited ville educational system. It's one way the barons control the herd so the pigs, geese and cattle won't realize they're owned and start questioning it."
DeFore forced a humorless smile to her face. "I don't know if I'm comfortable with that analogy."
She turned toward the door. "Sorry to have disturbed you. Go back to sleep if you can."
"I'll try...Doctor."
DeFore threw him a fleeting, appreciative smile over her shoulder. As soon as she closed the door behind her, Kane strode to the closet and pulled out a one-piece, formfitting bodysuit, the standard duty uniform of the Cerberus personnel. Quickly, he slipped it on, zipping up the front and fastening the Velcro tabs on the boot socks.
See what comes soon, Ka'in. Time grows short. The Fand he remembered might have been mad, but she wasn't a liar. Cautiously, Kane opened the door and peered both up and down the corridor. Stealthily, on almost soundless feet, he padded down the hall, around the corner and to Brigid's door.
He wasn't surprised that it was unlocked. Back in the villes, doors to the residential flats didn't come equipped with locks. Since every possession was considered more or less on loan from the baron, theft among the citizens was virtually unknown.
Pushing the door open, the overhead track lighting system flashed on automatically, tripped when the floor-mounted photoelectric sensor was triggered. He swept his eyes over the interior, realizing he had never visited Brigid's quarters before.
There wasn't much to see, since what few personal items all of them possessed had been left behind when they escaped Cobaltville. On the built-in bookshelves, he saw big photographic reference books she'd taken from a storage room. She had told them they were once known as "coffee table" books. On the bedside table, he saw a pair of eyeglasses, wire-framed with rectangular lenses. They were her former badge of office as an archivist in the Historical Division of Cobaltville, even though she claimed she needed them to do up-close work. The sight of them sent a jolt of pain through him, but not in his head.
He turned and took a seat at the comp-equipped desk against one wall. The small machine was another item Brigid had found in storage. She had hooked up a direct feed to the main database in the ops center.
Kane was only moderately familiar with computers. To him, they were simply sometimes useful machines, and their more arcane workings held little interest for him. Besides, there were other people in the redoubt to perform the comp work for him. But this time, he didn't want to share his investigation with anyone.
He switched the comp on, the screen juiced with an electric pop and the menu layout appeared. He manipulated the mouse to access the historical files. He browsed the selections, found what he was looking for and carefully, using two fingers, he typed a single word.
"Atlantis."
Chapter 14
The precipice plunged straight down a thousand feet or more. Lakesh could see very little by gazing over the edge except the blue-and-white ribbon of the rushing stream, now almost a river due to the meltwater from the higher peaks.
Although summer had yet to give way to autumn, the mornings were still chilly at such a high altitude. Lakesh seemed particularly susceptible to cold temperatures and he wasn't sure if it was due to his advanced age or was a metabolic legacy from the century and a half he'd spent in cryostasis.
He gazed down at the foaming torrent of water. The rusted-out carcasses of several old vehicles were completely submerged. They had lain in the streambed since at least the days of the nukecaust. Also down there, completely invisible among the rocks bordering the stream, lay the three pieces of the Chintamani Stone, the shining Trapezohedron.
In an act of impulsive self-righteousness, an act Lakesh still bitterly resented, Kane had dumped them down there like so much garbage. More than once, Lakesh had contemplated climbing down the cliff face to search for them. Not only would the effort be exceptionally hazardous, but it would also be futile. Even if he managed to retrieve the three black stones, he would never be permitted to put the dimensional- rifting properties to use again.
With a sigh, he backed away from the brink of the precipice and glanced around. The late-morning sun flooded the broad plateau with a golden radiance, striking highlights from the scraps of the chain link enclosing the perimeter. The air smelled fresh, rich with the hint of verdant growth wafting up from the foothills far below. He had spent most of his adult life laboring in installations like the Cerberus redoubt, and the natural world had held very little appeal. There was a dismal irony in the fact that it was only after the Earth had become a rad-scorched hellscape that he had come to appreciate the small things about nature.
Lakesh had single-mindedly devoted his life to science, to dispelling the unknown, reasoning that was the only way to save the half-insane world from itself. Thus he had studied most of his life, learned twelve languages and left the country of his birth to work for what he truly believed was the only endeavor that would restore sanity on Earth. Though his devotion and belief had been utterly and thoroughly betrayed by the fact of the nukecaust, he still labored to arrest the tide of extinction that threatened to engulf the human race.
He crossed the tarmac toward the partially open sec door. When Lakesh had reactivated the Cerberus installation some thirty years before, the repairs he made had been minor, primarily cosmetic in nature. Over a period of time, he had added an elaborate system of heat-sensor warning devices, night-vision vid cameras and motion-trigger alarms to the surrounding plateau. He had been forced to work in secret and completely alone, so the upgrades had taken several years to complete.
Still, with its vanadium radiation shielding still intact, and powered by nuclear generators, Cerberus could survive for at least another five hundred years. Lakesh had taken great pains to make sure the installation was listed as abandoned and unsalvageable on all ville records.
As he entered and passed the luridly colored illustration of Cerberus, he gave the second of the hound's three heads an affectionate pat. Proceeding on down the wide corridor, he met Farrell at the T junction. The middle-aged man's goateed face was drawn and haggard, his eyes netted with red as if he had been weeping.
Farrell had taken the news of Cotta's death very hard. Both men were from the same ville and had arrived at the redoubt within days of each other. Without preamble, he said, "I'm ready to go and recover Cotta's body."
Quietly, Lakesh replied, "We can put together a detail once I speak to friends Grant and Kane—"
Farrell made a scornful spitting noise and waved away Lakesh's words. "To hell with them. We don't need to discuss it with either one of them, particularly Kane. Auerbach and I can do it."
Lakesh blinked in mild surprise, a bit taken aback by the edge of hostility in the man's voice and bearing. "I think either he or Grant should accompany you. They know their way around.".
"Yeah," Farrell snapped. "Kane knows it so well mebbe he can get the rest of us chilled, too."
"What happened wasn't Kane's fault," Lakesh retorted, feeling odd to be speaking in Kane's defense. "Deaths are bound to happen in this line of work."
Farrell squinted at him "In the two and a half years I've been here, we didn't have a single fatality—until Kane and Grant arrived."
He ticked off the names on the fingers of one hand. "Adrian, Davis, Beth-Li, Cotta and now maybe even Brigid."
Lakesh didn't bother correcting him on the details of Beth-Li Rouch's demise. She had been killed by Domi when the outlander girl uncovered her plot to murder Brigid, Kane and Grant.
"Besides," Farrell went on, voice rising in anger, "I thought the whole fucking point of bringing those fucking Mags here was so they could take the flicking risks—not the technical-support staff."
What Farrell said contained more than a nugget of truth. The people Lakesh had recruited to staff Cerberus were primarily academics, technicians and specialists in a variety of fields. Farrell, like Cotta and Bry, received his training in cybernetics, and Wegmann was an engineer. All of them had led structured, sheltered lives in their respective villes. Until the arrival of Grant, Brigid, Domi and Kane, the Cerberus resistance movement had consisted of little more than intelligence gathering.
Kane and Grant acted on that intel, performing as the enforcement arm of Cerberus. In that capacity, they had not only scored a number of victories against the barons, but contended with other threats, as well.
As resentful as he felt toward Kane at the moment, Lakesh knew Farrell's assessment was unjust.
