Death Cry, page 15
There was ground, then indigo sea below them, rushing past at a blur, eerie because it was soundless, lit by a sky that held the tint of green, the color of plants, of life.
Suddenly Rabbit in the Moon indicated below, dipping from his high altitude just beneath the rushing clouds, speeding like a meteorite back down to Earth, a trail of fire left in his wake across the sky. Neverwalk dipped to follow the other members of the strike team, his body holding the arrowhead shape as it cut through the air. The sea disappeared as he approached it, replaced by the rush of land colored the yellow of sand.
Beneath him Bad Father, Cloud Singer and Rock Streaming brought themselves in to land, their feet slapping against the dirt. Neverwalk spun his body, thrusting his legs forward, bent at the knee to take the shock, and suddenly he was on solid ground once more, stumbling as his speed slowed. He staggered across the ground for fifteen steps, feeling the jarring impact through his knees before finally falling down to a stop. A few paces behind him, he saw Good Father lower himself to the ground, grabbing the handle of the bull roarer as it whirled through the air beside him.
The others looked across the dirt to him as Good Father helped his young apprentice up from the soil. It felt like flecks of dried rice there, little pieces of ground that could get caught under your fingernails. And it was empty and silent. The only living things in this world, the world of the Dreaming, appeared to be the strike force.
“We’re here,” Good Father explained as Neverwalk let go of his hand and stood quietly beside him. The spinning of the bull roarer slowed, and with it the furious rushing of the clouds above them.
The burst of fire came again then, jarring Neverwalk at the top of his spine where the implant resided, forcing him to close his eyes to hold back the tears of pain. When he opened his eyes they were in a desert, three bony goats looking up at him, the rising sun still low in the sky.
“Africa,” Good Father stated.
They were back in Realworld. The whole journey of seven thousand miles had taken less than ten seconds.
Chapter 15
“The trouble that we are in?” General Serge mocked as he looked at Brigid’s helpless form hanging from the chain before him. “I fear that your assessment of the situation is back to front, Miss Baptiste,” he told her with a braying laugh.
Brigid gritted her teeth against the pain in her stretched muscles, the aches where her body had taken punishment at the hands of Serge and Krementsov. “Be that as it may, General, I really must insist that I speak with Dr. Djugashvili,” she told him firmly.
“You are hardly in a position to insist upon anything,” Serge shot back hotly, anger rising in his voice.
At that moment, a voice came from the doorway as Dr. Djugashvili himself took a half step into the room. “I think that, with all due respect, we would be wise to listen to her, General,” he said quietly, his determined look adding weight to his words.
The general turned to pierce him with his fierce gray-eyed glare. “Must I remind you that I am running this facility, Doctor?”
Djugashvili held his gaze, and Brigid wondered if this was the first time that the doctor had actually stood up to this bullying military man. “Even you are not immune to the ravages of time, General,” he stated, “which is the message that I fear Miss Baptiste here came to give us.”
Serge exploded, his face flushing red. “What are you talking about? You accept the word of, what, a counterrevolutionary, Doctor? A spy?” General Serge’s hand fumbled to unclip his holster, and he seized the Tokarev pistol and thrust it into Djugashvili’s belly. “Perhaps you are in league with her. Is that it, Anastas?”
Djugashvili shook his head, his once firm tone turning to whining. “Please cease this foolishness, General, for all our sakes,” he requested. “The barbaric treatment of the woman avails us nothing. If she is, as you suspect, a counterrevolutionary, then you may execute her at your leisure. But if she has come here with information, we would both be fools to dismiss it out of hand without so much as listening to her tale.”
Brigid urged Djugashvili to say more, to press his point, but he had made his stand and she could see his body slowly retracting into itself as he took up his traditional position of cowering before the ogrelike general.
A half minute passed as General Serge pressed his Tokarev against Djugashvili’s gut. He finally relented, pulling the weapon away and holding it firmly in his hand. “Fine,” he snapped. “We shall listen to her, and then we shall decide on the appropriate course of action.”
Serge turned to Brigid and raised the pistol to aim it at her head. “You, Baptiste. Speak,” he instructed.
Djugashvili took a step forward into the room. “Come now, General,” he said, “look at her. Your men have been—” as Serge turned his fierce glare back to the doctor, Djugashvili judged the words carefully “—very efficient,” he finished. “We must let her sit, clean her wounds. And I imagine that she is thirsty also.” He looked at Brigid and she nodded.
“I’m not interested in her well-being, Doctor,” the general growled.
“Perhaps you should be,” Djugashvili responded ominously.
Brigid could see the conflicting emotions cross the general’s face. He was a brute who only truly understood brutish behavior, and the notion of allowing his prisoner any comfort, however minor, unsettled him greatly. “Fine,” he barked after a moment. “My men will unchain her and we shall conduct the interrogation in your office, Comrade.”
Brigid breathed a sigh of relief. It was a step in the right direction at least.
GRANT RETURNED FROM his discussion with Cerberus to find Kane waiting for him in the doorway to the little, brightly lit office. When he looked past Kane he saw Brigid was still in her cross-legged position on the floor, her eyes closed with her chest rising and falling slowly as she breathed. Beneath her nose, her face was cobwebbed with blood, and a trail of spittle drooled from her slack mouth. The beginnings of a black eye had formed over the left side of her face, and he could see a reddening patch of skin over her right eye where a bruise was forming.
“What did Lakesh say?” Kane demanded anxiously as Grant walked into the office.
“He says everything is fine,” Grant stated, hardly believing his own words as he looked at the battered face of his seated colleague. “Transponders show Brigid’s in no actual danger. All this stuff may look bad, but it has to be superficial.”
“Superficial my ass,” Kane spit. “Something is very seriously messed up here.”
Grant dipped his head. “Sure looks that way,” he agreed. He leaned closer to Brigid and saw there was blood along the edges of the fingernails of her right hand. He wondered what other damage she had suffered that he couldn’t see.
“We both know that Lakesh can be a tricky bastard,” Kane stated. Lakesh had had a hand in orchestrating Kane’s and Grant’s hasty exit from their previous lives as Magistrates in Cobaltville, which was just one example of the underhanded techniques he had used to pursue his personal agenda. “You figure if he wants this Death Cry badly enough he’d tell us not to disturb Baptiste despite the consequences?”
Still looking at Brigid’s bloody face, Grant considered Kane’s words for a moment before he shook his head. “Lakesh is a pretty straight shooter these days, especially when it comes to Brigid,” he reasoned.
“But a leopard never changes its spots,” Kane reminded him.
“Yeah,” Grant agreed, “and I can believe that Lakesh would throw us to the lions if it meant getting something as important as a weapon to stop the whole war. But I don’t believe that’s what’s happening here.”
Kane stood beside the open door, his breath loud in the silent underground base. “I can’t look at her like that and still think straight,” he admitted before turning away from Brigid’s bruised and blood-streaked face. He left the room and paced down the unlit corridor, finding his way in semidarkness down the little flight of steps that dropped the sunken base lower into the mountain.
Grant remained crouching by Brigid, studying her wounded face before he stood and followed Kane. When he reached the doorway he saw Kane turn back from just outside the canteen, a grim smile on his features.
“What about if the readings are wrong?” Kane suggested as he walked back toward Grant.
“Say what?” Grant asked.
Kane tapped at his inner wrist as though searching for his pulse. “What if the transponders are supplying bogus information and Lakesh doesn’t realize it? What then?”
Grant shook his head. “I don’t know, Kane. Is that likely?”
Kane walked up the small flight of steps and joined his partner at the doorway to the lit room. “Take a look at her and you tell me,” he said, gesturing to Brigid. “Does she look in good shape right now? Honestly?”
Grant looked across the room at Brigid, then back to Kane, concern creasing his brow. “Even if that were the case, would it make waking her any less dangerous?”
Kane sighed. “Well, there’s the rub.”
BRIGID SAT IN SILENCE in Dr. Djugashvili’s office as a handsome young lab technician called Yuri dabbed antiseptic on her cuts. She had removed her jacket to look at her arms, but other than the ridges in her wrists where the chains had cinched into her flesh, they had remained blessedly free from harm. Her legs and torso, she could feel, were a different matter, but she wasn’t about to do a striptease for the lecherous General Serge now that she was finally in a position where he might actually listen to her.
Brigid winced as Yuri dabbed at the cut over her right eye, muttering to her that a nasty bruise was already taking hold. “I’m sure it will not leave any lasting damage,” he told her thoughtfully. “It would be very sad to mar such a pretty face.”
Brigid felt herself blush and she looked down at her lap for a few seconds, avoiding eye contact with the handsome lab assistant. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
Besides herself and the lab assistant, General Serge and Dr. Djugashvili sat in the room, the general breathing loudly through his nose. Two sentries had been placed outside, standing on either side of the open doorway.
Djugashvili had complained that they were unnecessary. “She’s just a lone woman,” he told Serge. “What harm can she do?”
“She very nearly killed Krementsov,” Serge reminded him in an ominous rumble. It wasn’t true—she had only knocked Krementsov out, and that had been in self-defense, but she was very much regretting her reaction. Had things gone differently, might Krementsov have brought her to the general as a lost soul found walking the bland corridors of the vast astral factory? Somehow she doubted that Serge would have done anything differently.
“Okay, enough,” Serge snapped, dismissing Yuri as he attended to Brigid’s cuts. “Come, Miss Baptiste, join us.”
Brigid shifted on her lightning-bright chair and edged a little closer to the general and Djugashvili at the desk. “I should begin by thanking you for your hospitality, General,” she said without a trace of irony. The general nodded and allowed her to continue. “Before our own discussion, I was speaking with Dr. Djugashvili concerning the status of this research facility.”
“You mean that you were probing him for information on this facility.” General Serge looked knowingly at Djugashvili, sitting on the other side of the desk.
“No,” Brigid replied, “you misunderstand. I was trying to establish what year he thought it was.”
“It’s 1929,” Serge responded immediately. “This is preposterous. What point are you hoping to make with this foolishness, Miss Baptiste?”
“It’s not 1929, General,” she told him, holding his gaze with her own. “Not by a long shot.”
Serge looked to Djugashvili, who nodded briefly in encouragement. “I fear that what she says is true, General,” he stated.
“So,” the general continued, addressing Brigid once more, “what year is it, then, Miss Baptiste—1930, 1931?”
“This facility,” Brigid said, deliberately addressing Djugashvili as she spoke, “has somehow become trapped in a mockery of time. When you came here in the spring of 1928, you gave up your physical bodies for a continued existence in this astral realm, hidden in an upper level of human consciousness.”
“She knows too much,” Serge growled through gritted teeth. “I shall shoot her now and be rid of the witch.”
Djugashvili raised his hand in a halting gesture. “Let her speak, General.”
Brigid took a deep breath, wondering whether her audience was ready for the proverbial bombshell. “It is the twenty-third century,” she told Djugashvili and Serge, “and the world has changed beyond recognition.”
“The twenty-third—” Serge spluttered in disbelief.
“At the start of the twenty-first century, about seventy years after you began your work here—” Brigid gestured around at the lightning-bolt surroundings “—a brief but deadly war erupted between the two most powerful nations on the planet, Russia and the United States of America. The war brought untold devastation, culling the global population and leaving the once fertile environment a deathland. Two hundred years later, we finally discovered why.”
Dr. Djugashvili had edged forward in his seat as he listened to Brigid’s recital, and even General Serge had quietened his bluster.
“The nukecaust was orchestrated by an alien race called the Annunaki. We are still piecing together the full story, but as we understand it the Annunaki have long prized the Earth as a playground full of wonderful toys to corrupt and manipulate. Those toys are us—the human race.” Brigid looked at them, grateful that these people had been indoctrinated into a firm belief in aliens as a threat. “Evidence of the Annunaki’s dabbling in human affairs reaches back over millennia—they were responsible for the Great Flood that appears in the Bible, and their influence on human affairs has been wide-reaching and almost always deadly. They have come back to subjugate humankind and use them as slaves or…I don’t know what.”
General Serge placed a hand on his brow and rubbed at his eyes thoughtfully. “You spoke of two great nations, Russia and the United States of America, going to war,” he stated. “Which nation do you represent, Miss Baptiste?”
“I represent the resistance movement that opposes the Annunaki in their most recent incarnation as the overlords,” she told him. “Borders are irrelevant.”
“America, then,” he decided. “You think I am stupid?”
“I think you need to listen carefully,” Brigid corrected. “This facility, Project Chernobog, was tasked to design and hide a weapon that can be used against a significant supraterrestrial threat. That threat has arrived, and if you want to play patriot games with an outdated notion of national borders that has had no relevance for almost three centuries, then I’m going to have to assume you’re just too damn scared to do your job, General.”
General Serge’s left hand whipped out and he slapped Brigid across the face, knocking her from the stool. “Watch your tongue.”
As Brigid got up from the floor, the side of her face stinging, she saw Dr. Djugashvili stand up behind the desk and address General Serge. “It seems to me, General, that the young lady has a point,” he stated firmly.
“And what point is that, Doctor?” Serge snarled, watching Brigid reseat herself.
“We have had no communications with the outside world in many months,” Djugashvili pleaded, “and if, as Miss Baptiste proposes, time is running differently for those within this facility, then it is entirely plausible that the reason for this is a massive world upheaval about which we know nothing.”
“But this concept,” Serge wondered, “that time is somehow stuck in this facility…”
“When asked, I told Miss Baptiste that I thought it was perhaps 1929,” Djugashvili explained fearfully, “but when I thought about it I could not, for certain, say that this was the case. It is like trying to remember a dream, trying to pin three-dimensional facts on a two-dimensional picture. Time and memory seem to be somehow ephemeral, unreal.”
“These concerns have never bothered us before,” Serge stated.
“They bothered Laynia Krylova,” Djugashvili stated, “before you killed her. That was why you shot her, wasn’t it? She had begun to ask questions that you didn’t have answers to.”
“You would do well to remember where you are,” the general said ominously, his hand playing with the catch on his holster, “and who is in authority here.”
Djugashvili sat back down, taking a steadying breath. “I am sorry, General.”
Brigid spoke up again as the general glared at Djugashvili. “I think it’s time to exercise your authority, General,” she told him, “and bring the Death Cry into play.”
GRANT LOOKED AT BRIGID’S static form in the bright light cast by the xenon beam as he considered the dilemma. “I don’t know, Kane,” he admitted. “My fear is that by waking her we could make a bad situation worse.”
Kane stood beside him, looking down at their deathly still companion. “She’s still breathing,” he decided. “That’s got to be a good sign.”
Grant pointed at the cut on Brigid’s forehead where the bruise was forming above her eye. “Looks like her wounds are scarring over, and she’s no longer losing blood.”
“She vomited earlier, while you were away,” Kane told him. “Just a little, but I cleaned it up.”
“Maybe we should clean up the cuts, too,” Grant proposed, “so long as we don’t disturb her. If the transponder’s not giving Cerberus accurate data, then waking her might be a good thing. I just don’t want to disturb Brigid if she’s on the verge of a big discovery.”
“Agreed.” Kane nodded.
“So we clean her, we monitor her visually, but we don’t wake her,” Grant concluded.
“It blows, but it’s a plan I can live with,” Kane declared.
“Let’s hope she can,” Grant muttered. “Do you have a medi-kit in that bag of yours?”
