Outlanders 39 Hydra's Ring, page 21
Lakesh released her hand, flinging it away in sudden anger. "Before we reach our destination you had best make your choice so my friends and I will know how to deal with you. I can promise you one thing—it will be the most important decision of your life."
Chapter 24
The early-morning sun rose above the flat blue horizon like a fiery jewel, as if it had been disgorged from the depths of the Yangtze. The open river at dawn was beautiful with the reflected sunrise shimmering on the surface.
Kane, Brigid, Grant and Lakesh gathered on the aft deck, using a bale of cargo as a makeshift table-and a collection of small barrels and kegs as chairs. The Cerberus warriors had slept in hammocks in the crew's quarters and been awakened at dawn by the odour of hot food. Breakfast was a mixture of white rice mixed in with bits of fish, slices of orange and thick gravy. The four of them brought plates up to the deck and tried to eat with chopsticks.
Unsurprisingly, only Lakesh and Brigid showed any facility with the wooden utensils. After dropping more food on their laps and on the deck than in their mouths, Grant and Kane ended up scooping it out of the plates with their fingers. They glared at Brigid and Lakesh in the process, silently daring to them to criticize. Wisely, both people elected to discuss other topics than table manners.
"Has anyone seen Erica this morning?" Brigid asked.
"The great lady has yet to emerge from her boudoir," Kane replied dryly. "She's probably waiting for someone to draw her a bath of milk and honey."
Lakesh frowned at him in disapproval. "I don't think you understand the extent of physical and emotional trauma inflicted upon her. She's wounded in both body and spirit."
Grant eyed him suspiciously. "Do you have some inside knowledge about that?"
"I don't need any to realize Erica requires our understanding and time to heal. I doubt we'll see her for hours, if at all."
As if on cue, Erica van Sloan chose that moment to make her entrance topside. They were all surprised into momentary speechlessness by her appearance.
Instead of the disheveled and pain-racked creature they had seen the night before, Erica was stunning in a red silk blouse embroidered with heavy golden thread depicting coiling dragon forms. The high collar did not detract from the long, slender column of her throat.
Her black hair was smooth and sleekly brushed, framing the calm, sculptured beauty of her face. If not for the scratch marring the alabaster perfection of her cheek and the black patch covering her right eye, none of them would have guessed she had incurred so much as a stubbed toe the day before. A square of white gauze was barely visible at the edges of the patch. Only the dark fires glinting in her left eye denoted any emotion.
Erica strode across the deck, taking long measured strides, not responding to the deferential bows and whispers of "Tui Chui Jian" directed toward her by the sailors she passed.
When she reached the makeshift table, she nodded regally. "Good morning, my friends. I trust you slept well."
Kane extended the middle of his right hand to which a clump of stewed fish clung. "Care to join your friends at breakfast?"
Erica did not respond to the sarcastic query. "The captain informs me we'll reach our destination by late afternoon, so it's best we discuss how to proceed."
"Just what destination is that?" Brigid asked.
"A temple in the Wuxia Gorge region. But that's only where we will disembark. The next leg of our journey is overland."
"Do tell," Grant said gruffly, pushing a keg toward her with foot. "Take a pew and start talking."
Annoyance at the big man's casual tone flashed in Erica's eye but as she sat down she asked, "Do you have the ring on you, Mohandas?"
Lakesh produced it from a pocket of his field jacket, holding it out to her on the palm of his hand for inspection. She reached for it, but he closed his fingers around it.
"I'll keep hold of the only ring Wei Qiang doesn't yet have in his possession, if you don't mind," he said.
Her shoulders stiffened at his tone, edged as it was with recrimination. "It's my property."
"The hell it is," Kane said. "God knows who it originally belonged to, but nothing in that pyramid is yours. You didn't even inherit it."
"More than likely," Brigid stated, "Huang-ti was the original owner. And if Wei Qiang is really the Yellow Emperor, he's only reclaiming what is rightfully his."
"Perhaps so," Erica retorted coldly. "But I don't think he can activate the Kai Bu Xiu with only eight of them."
"Activate?" Grant echoed. "So you think the Armor of Immortality, if it really exists, is some sort of machine?"
"Of some sort," Erica said dryly. "A machine of the Annunaki, I'm betting. It's either a version of or the template for various magic cauldrons that figure in ancient legends."
Kane frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"The Cauldron of Daghda provided food for everyone," Brigid said, "and the Cauldron of Bran the Blessed conferred rebirth. In Greek mythology the priestess Medea restored people to youth in a magic cauldron."
"In the case of the Cauldron of Bran," Erica interposed, "it could only restore the dead to life as long as the Nine Rings of Eternal Return were worn upon the fingers."
"Are we going to look for a cauldron or a suit of armor?" Grant growled impatiently.
"Both, maybe," Lakesh said.
Erica nodded, her manner becoming a bit less formal. "During my time in the pyramid, I tried to catalogue all the relics and artifacts stored in the vault, indexing them in the correct cultural and chronological order. It wasn't easy because so much of it was derived from Annunaki and Danaan technology."
A rueful smile creased her lips "Imagine trying to put together a huge jigsaw puzzle, with all the pieces manufactured in different epochs, different lands and different societies and none of them having more than the most general idea of the final picture."
Lakesh chuckled. "The confusion was probably engendered deliberately, you know. That way mere humans couldn't put the artifacts to use for their own purposes or benefit."
"Probably," Erica agreed. "But all of us here know that the Annunaki selected certain humans, certain genotypes in extended family groups for eugenics experiments. Over many generations, over a period of centuries, they sampled, reordered and realigned their DNA in tiny details. They isolated particularly desirable genes and spliced them with others. They preselected the makeup of the entire genetic blueprint. The individuals subjected to this process passed on this set of precisely planned characteristics."
"And those individuals became the first god-kings, the Annunaki intermediaries," Brigid declared. "So you postulate that Huang-ti was one of those?"
Erica nodded. "One of the first in this part of the world. I think Enlil took a special interest in him."
Grant narrowed his eyes. "Why do you think that?" She favored him with a smug smile. "First-hand experience, Grant. Only Sam knew the nature of all the artifacts within the vault in the pyramid. And since Sam was Enlil—"
"And Enlil was Changhuan, the Yellow Emperor's guardian dragon," Brigid blurted in sudden excitement.
"Exactly," Erica said matter-of-factly. "I'm positive Enlil is responsible for sending Wei Qiang to oust me from the pyramid, using the rings and the promise of restored youth as an inducement."
She cut her eyes sideways over to Lakesh and added lowly, "And some of us know how powerful an inducement that can be."
Grant's expression was indefinable, but his tone was heavy with irony when he asked, "And you expect us to believe that Enlil all of a sudden decided to evict you and he raised an army for Wei Qiang so he could do it?"
"Why not?" Erica asked crisply.
Kane said, "If Enlil is behind this, he depended on the Millennial Consortium to do all the hard stuff...the fact that the soldiers are armed with Calicos proves that much."
Lakesh tugged at his nose contemplatively. "Assuming that's the case, why is he using Wei Qiang for this? Why not do it himself?"
Kane and Grant exchanged glances, then looked expectantly over at Brigid. "That's a good question, Baptiste," Kane said. "What do you think?"
Slowly Brigid said, "I think—and I'm only speculating—that Enlil wants control of China again, but he's too overextended to embark on a war of conquest with his own forces. Who knows, he may not want the other members of the Supreme Council to know what he's doing. Therefore, he's using Wei Qiang to do the conquering for him, like he did in the old days, but the Millennial Consortium is supplying the army. Enlil is manipulating them both."
Grant blew out a disgusted breath, shaking his head. "Goddamned arrogant snake faces. They're sneakier now than they were as barons."
No one disagreed. For the past three-plus years, Lakesh, Kane, Brigid and the movement had struggled to dismantle the machine of baronial tyranny in America. They had devoted themselves to the work of Cerberus, and victory over the barons, if not precisely within their grasp, did not seem a completely unreachable goal—and then unexpectedly, a little over a year before, the entire dynamic of the struggle against the nine barons changed.
The Cerberus warriors learned that the fragile hybrid barons, despite being close to a century old, were only in a larval or chrysalis stage of their development. Overnight, the barons changed. When that happened, the war against the baronies themselves ended, but a new one, far greater in scope, began.
The baronies had not fallen in the conventional sense through attrition, war or coups d' &at. No organized revolts had been raised to usurp the hybrid lords from the seats of power, nor had insurrectionists met in cellars to conspire against them.
The barons had simply walked away from their villes, their territories and their subjects. When they reached the final stage in their development, they saw no need for the trappings of semi-divinity, nor were they content to rule such minor kingdoms. When they evolved into their true forms, incarnations of the ancient Annunaki overlords, their avaricious scope expanded to encompass the entire world and every thinking creature on it.
The Cerberus warriors had hoped the overweening ambition and ego of the reborn overlords would spark bloody internecine struggles, but in the months since their advent, no intelligence indicating such actions had reached them.
Of course, the overlords were engaged in reclaiming their ancient ancestral kingdoms in Mesopotamia. They had yet to cast their covetous gaze back to the North American continent, but it was only a matter of time.
Before that occurred, Cerberus was determined to build some sort of unified resistance against them, but the undertaking proved far more difficult and frustrating than even the cynical Kane or the impatient Grant had imagined. Even long months after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a day-by-day basis.
"Let me get this straight," Kane said "Enlil wants to take possession of China again, but he wants Wei Qiang to be his puppet on the throne?"
Brigid nibbled her underlip reflectively. "Apparently, that was the same deal he cut with Huang-ti and all of his other alter egos down through the centuries. At some point, he and Huang-ti must have had a falling out. At the very least, he no longer had access to the Nine Rings of Eternal Return and the Armor of Immortality and so he began to age...apparently very slowly, but age he did."
"Which strongly suggests," Lakesh said, "that periodic treatments are required to maintain a relative level of youth and vitality. Apparently, when both the armor and the rings work in tandem, it makes the human organism immune to disease or breakdown of the cellular structure."
Kane narrowed, then widened his eyes as he tried to comprehend all the implications. "Are you saying Huang-ti can never die?"
"Oh, he could have his throat slit," Erica stated, "or be clubbed to death in his bed. That may be the source of the tales of Sin Huangdi's paranoia about assassination. But if he didn't suffer any accidents; and chance worked in his favor, he could conceivably live for what seems like forever."
"Why didn't Huang-ti retrieve the rings and armor before now?" Grant demanded.
Erica shrugged, then winced, gingerly massaging her injured shoulder. "He may not have known where the rings were...or if he did, how to retrieve them. And of course, the armor is useless without the rings."
"With only one of them," Kane pointed out, "the armor is useless to us, too."
The corner of Brigid's mouth lifted in a smile. "Even with all nine rings in our possession, the armor won't do us any good, either. I'm certain it's programmed to interface only with Huang-ti's genetic structure."
Grant's brows drew down, turning his face into a ferocious mask Angrily, he snapped, "Then why the hell are we on the opposite side of the world trying to lay claim to the damned thing?"
"So we won't have to contend with an immortal plenipotentiary of Enlil," Lakesh shot back impatiently. "Besides, the less Annunaki technology floating around free, the better it is for us—for humanity."
Brigid's eyes suddenly acquired a hard emerald sheen as if a notion had just occurred to her. "Better for you personally, too."
"What do you mean?" Lakesh asked tersely.
Brigid gestured to Erica and to Lakesh. "You two are probably the most brilliant human scientific brains currently alive. Erica is an expert on nanotechnology and you know more about quantum physics, both theoretical and practical, than anyone in the last two hundred years."
"So?" Kane wanted to know.
Brigid's slight smile widened, but it didn't soften the hard gleam of suspicion in her eyes. "They think they can reprogram the rings and the armor to work on them."
Kane glared first at Erica, then at Lakesh, barely able to restrain himself from grabbing the man by the throat. All the pent-up anger, the old resentments he still harbored toward Lakesh and the man's conspiratorial tactics, came fountaining up within him
Shortly after his resurrection from stasis, Lakesh had rifled genetic records to find the qualifications he deemed the most desirable to breed into potential warriors in his cause. Kane's family line possessed those qualities—high intelligence, superior adaptive traits and a resistance to disease. Kane wasn't a superhuman, but he was a superior one, one of the top candidates of the Purity Control program.
A few years before, Lakesh had arranged for Beth-Li Rouch to be brought into the redoubt to mate with Kane, to insure that his superior abilities were passed on to offspring.
From a clinical point of view, Lakesh's plan to turn Cerberus from a sanctuary into a colony made sense. To insure that Kane's superior qualities were passed on, mating him with a woman who met the standards of Purity Control was the most logical course of action. Without access to the ectogenesis techniques of fetal development outside the womb, the conventional means of procreation was the only option. And that meant sex and passion and ultimately, the fury of a woman scorned.
Kane had refused to cooperate for a variety of reasons, primarily because he felt the plan was a continuation of sinister elements that had brought about the nukecaust and the tyranny of the villes.
"Is that true?" he demanded in a voice made guttural by fury. "You two are in cahoots to make yourselves immortal?"
Lakesh calmly met Kane's enraged glare, unintimidated. "Don't be an ass, Kane." He swept Brigid and Grant with the same stare. "And that goes for you two. Erica and I are not in cahoots, but by working together it is possible we can change the system around so it will work on everyone."
"When were you going to tell us this was the plan?" Brigid snapped.
Erica sighed. "It's not a plan, Baptiste. Mohandas and I have not discussed it, but both of us had the same goal in mind. Who wouldn't?"
"That's a damned good question," Grant said darkly. "Because the answer would include the entire Supreme Council, not just Enlil and it's still only supposition that he has a claw in this particular pie, if at all."
"I agree," Kane stated. "It seems more like a consortium operation to me."
"I don't know anything about this Millennial Consortium of yours," Erica bit out. "But I know how Enlil's mind works...deception and diversion."
"Yeah, you ought to know all about that," Grant drawled. "He tricked you into thinking you were his mom."
Erica's lips peeled back over her teeth in a hard, humorless grin. "You're on my turf now, Grant. So watch your mouth."
Kane heard a faint, faraway whine and stiffened. "I hear something."
"Like what?" Brigid asked, puzzled.
Kane didn't answer at first, tilting his head back to scan the blue, cloud-flecked sky. "I've heard it before, We all have."
Brigid turned her head this way and that, like a foxhound casting for a scent. Quietly, she said, "You're right."
They stood up, shielding their eyes with their hands as they looked from east to west, north to south. A couple of crewmen stared at them in puzzlement, then they heard the whining drone. With a sudden shimmering, a section of the eastern sky rippled, like water sluicing over a pane of dusty glass and revealing an image behind it.
A glinting silver orb appeared an eighth of a mile away, a featureless disk of molten silver twenty feet in diameter. Perfectly centered on the disk's underside bulged a half dome, like the boss of a shield.
"Shit," Grant hissed. "They had their LOC working. They could have been following us since the second we arrived at Xian."
His friends knew he referred to the sky ship's low observability camouflage screen. Microcomputers within the smart metal hulls sensed the color and shade of the background and exactly mirrored the background image.
The disk shot forward on a direct course with the junk, skimming over the river surface like a discus tossed by an athlete. The water parted before it in a wide V, a foaming rooster tail following in its wake. The sailors howled in fear and ran in a crazed panic from starboard to port and back. From the wheelhouse, Sun Ilan shouted orders to which no one paid any heed.
When the disk was less than half a second away from colliding with the junk broadside, it executed a vertical manoeuvre and shot straight up, missing the tall mainmast by a matter of inches, not feet. The downdraft hit, and the ship rocked violently, the rigging swaying, die sails belling out.
