Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 4
Brigid raised an ironic eyebrow. "Oh? Does your father hope the jinn up there will eat our souls or something?"
Yusef tried to smile, but it wasn't easy with a swollen and split lip. "Dad doesn't really believe there are jinn up there and neither do I. No, it's busy with strange men and stranger machines, and from what I've heard, they're worse than any soul-stealing devils."
The young Bedouin saluted the looming pillar of black rock, now silvered by the full Moon. "But, hey— you're more than welcome to see for yourselves."
Chapter 4
They stared up at the black bulk of stone stretching into the sky above the tumbled crags. On the very summit, they could barely make the out the ruins of an old structure. They saw only a collapsed roof, a few support posts and several stretches of crenellated and buttressed walls outlined against the gleam of the Moon. Through compact binoculars, Brigid, Grant and Kane silently studied the stronghold.
"What the hell is that up there on the top?" Kane inquired.
"An ancient Byzantine monastery," Yusef answered. "Don't be deceived. It may look deserted, but it isn't." A strip of bandage showed whitely on the back of his neck, covering the superficial knife wound inflicted by Kane.
"The jinn have claimed it," Suliedor announced flatly, crossing his arms over his chest.
Lowering his binoculars, Grant cast the man a sour glance. The sheikh's burned face glistened with analgesic ointment applied by Brigid. "What the hell are jinn anyway?" he demanded.
Suliedor's lips curved in a superior smirk. "I don't expect infidels, feringhi no less, to know anything about our beliefs—"
"The jinn," Brigid stated in a crisp tone, "are creatures that are half human and half demon from pre- Islamic times. Originally, they were spirits of nature that caused madness in humans. They differ not much from humans—they reproduce, they have the same bodily needs and they die, although their life span is much longer.
"The Arabic word jinn, which means 'spirit,' is neutral—some of the jinn serve Allah, while others do not. There are five orders of jinn—the Marid, the most powerful, the Afreet, the Shaitan, the Jinni and the Jann.
"All the jinn are capable of good and evil acts. They're mischievous and enjoy punishing humans for wrongs done them, even unintentionally. Accidents and diseases are considered to be their work. They are composed of fire or air and they can assume both animal and human form. They exist in air, in flame, under the earth and in inanimate objects, such as rocks, trees and ruins."
She waved a hand in the direction of the top of Djebel Kif. "So I can understand how a superstition could arise about the place being haunted by jinn."
No one gaped at Brigid in astonishment, but Kane repressed a laugh at the disconcerted expression crossing Suliedor's face. A trained historian, Brigid had spent over half of her thirty years as an archivist in the Cobaltville's Historical Division, but there was more to her storehouse of knowledge than simple training.
Almost everyone who worked in the ville divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid Baptiste's secret was more arcane than the commission of petty crimes or manipulating the baronial system of government for personal aggrandizement.
Her secret was the ability to produce eidetic images. Centuries ago, it had been called a photographic memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and detailed visual memories. When she was growing up, she feared she was a psi-mutie, but she later learned that the ability was relatively common among children, and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare among adults, but Brigid was one of the exceptions.
Since her forced exile, she had taken full advantage of the Cerberus redoubt's vast database, and as an intellectual omnivore she grazed in all fields. Coupled with her eidetic memory, her profound knowledge of an extensive and eclectic number. of topics made her something of an ambulatory encyclopedia. This trait often irritated Kane, but just as often it had tipped the scales between life and death, so he couldn't in good conscience become too annoyed with her.
Recovering from his surprise, Suliedor said doggedly, "That may be, but it is no superstition."
Yusef sighed. "Ah, come on, Dad—"
The sheikh ignored him. "Only six months ago some Bedouin of another clan wandered up there, looking for an old well rumored to be at the top. Only one of the men came back, and everyone thought he had been struck mad by exposure to the sun, judging from the tales he told. When I heard of this, we came into this region and looked for this man. I found out he had died, but I was told he never stopped babbling about the jinn that haunt Djebel Kif."
"And at what point," asked Kane, "did you meet up with the false god who offered you a job as a night watchman? Before or after you heard about the babbling man?"
When Suliedor didn't immediately respond, Kane cut his pale eyes over toward his son. "I may not know what a jinn is, but I damn well know your old man didn't come here to find out if the stories about devils were true."
Yusef nodded slowly, reluctantly. "You're right. The man raved about the jinn but he also talked of men and of machines up there."
"And guns, I'll bet," drawled Grant.
"And guns, yes."
Kane glanced over at Brigid. "Like you said, he's a businessman first."
Gazing directly Suliedor, Brigid Baptiste challenged, "You thought the man might have found a pre-dark stockpile, didn't you?"
Suliedor blinked, perplexed. "How did you know?" "It's a major vocation in our country," Brigid answered. "Or it used to be".
Looting the abandoned ruins of predark villes was not only an Outland tradition; it had become a family business. Many generations of outlanders had made a career from ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe.
Finding a well-stocked redoubt, one of the many underground military installations seemingly scattered all over the nuke-ravaged face of America, assured a trader a life of wealth and security, presupposing he or she didn't intersect with the trajectory of a bullet that had his or her name on it. Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally one hitherto untouched would be located. It stood to reason there would be rumors of such hidden caches of pre- dark wealth in other countries.
"What about the god who charged you to guard this place?" Kane asked. "When did you come across him...or was it a her?"
"Him," Yusef said. "There are secret ways into the cliff and though no man of our tribe came here because they thought it was an accursed place, we found the entrance. And that's when the 'god' showed up." The young man crooked his fingers to indicate quotation marks and rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"I take it you weren't as impressed as your old man," Grant observed snidely.
"Neither one of us was born here," Yusef said, ignoring the hostile glare directed at him by his father. "My mom was Arabian and she had been kidnapped by privateers working for the Imperium Britannia and brought to England when she was just a girl. She taught my dad her language and then me.
"We sailed here from England when I was about ten, to join a trading colony set up by the Imperium in Khartoum. The colony didn't get the support we were promised and most everybody left. But we stayed and were accepted into my mom's Bedouin clan. She died seven years ago."
"I became the sheikh, the hetman, when the old chief died," Suliedor put in, his tone and expression registering irritation. "Okay, so maybe I'm laying it on a little thick about devils and gods, but some kind of entity appeared, warning us not to defile the holy tabernacle of the Annunaki—"
"Figures," grunted Grant.
"—and that we would reap great rewards if we safeguarded it from infidels and interlopers."
Kane nodded as if he had expected to hear nothing else. "What was the entity's name?"
Yusef shrugged. "He never said."
"You saw him, too?" Brigid inquired.
The young man sighed heavily. "Yeah...or I saw a clever bit of trickery. I think the old term used to be... holograms? Is that the word?"
Brigid, Kane and Grant all exchanged swift glances. "It is," Brigid confirmed. "But a hologram of which overlord, I wonder?"
The transcomm in her pocket suddenly warbled and everyone jumped. She fished out it out, murmuring in embarrassment, "I forgot we'd been called—"
"You forgot?" Kane asked with wide-eyed mock incredulity. "I can't wait to put that in my diary."
Ignoring him, Brigid put the palm-sized comm to her ear, flipping open the cover and opening the channel key. "Baptiste here."
For a few seconds she heard only a faint hiss of static and then a discordant squeak, which told her the signal was being relayed from a distant handset to the Comsat in high orbit, then to the tight-beam receivers in the pair of Manta TAVs, hidden beneath camouflage tarps several miles away. She knew there would be a short lag in response time.
"Brigid?" came Reba DeFore's husky, worried voice. "I tried reaching you earlier—"
"We were a little preoccupied," Brigid replied wryly. "What's the situation, Reba?"
A couple of seconds later, DeFore said, "I saw him, just like Princess Pakari said. It's Utu."
Brigid stiffened, feeling a cold finger of dread brush the buttons of her spine. "In the flesh?"
She waited impatiently for the reply. "Not exactly," the medic answered at length. "A hologram projected from one those disk-ships that Enlil used to attack Cerberus. The ship killed two of the Waziri as an example."
"What does he want with the Waziri?"
Static filled Brigid's ear and she almost repeated the question and then DeFore stated, "Something called the Collar of Prester John. Does that mean anything to you?"
Brigid's eyebrows knitted at the bridge of her nose as she hastily flipped through her mental index file. "Only a little," she admitted. "I'll have to get back to you on it."
"Pakari's half brother Laputara has thrown in with Utu, for some reason, too."
"He's not there in the village, is he?" Brigid asked. "No, but according to Utu he'll be arriving shortly." Brigid started to reply, but Kane caught her eye and
tapped his wrist chron meaningfully.
Nodding to him, Brigid asked, "Are you all right there for the moment, Reba?"
"For the moment," DeFore retorted a bit peevishly. "At least until Utu comes back, which won't be for a few days. I'd very much like not to be here when he does."
Smiling, Brigid stated, "Understood. I'll contact you when we're on our way. It'll probably he just a couple of hours. Until then, call Cerberus. Lakesh can probably tell you more about the Collar of Prester John than I can right now. We have our own overlord problem."
Folding the transcomm and returning it to her pocket, Brigid turned toward Grant and Kane. "Reba confirmed Princess Pakari's story," she announced flatly. "It's Utu, or at least his hologram."
Grant scowled. "What the hell does a reborn Sumerian god want with native Africans?"
Brigid gestured to the sky, to the rock formations all around them. "Keep in mind that the Annunaki established their first colony on the African continent nearly half a million years ago. The Supreme Council divided the mines, agricultural outposts, even scientific monitoring stations among the overlords. It stands to reason Utu would have had some of his own holdings here."
"What are you talking about?" Yusef demanded impatiently.
"It's complicated," replied Kane distractedly. "The false god you saw is an enemy...one of nine enemies, actually. We've been fighting them for several years in one form or another."
For the past three-plus years, Kane, Brigid and Grant as part of the Cerberus resistance 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, didn't seem a completely unreachable goal. Then unexpectedly, nearly 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'etat. 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, of utter chaos with various factions warring for control on a day-by-day basis.
Speculatively, Grant eyed the black craggy tower of Djebel Kif. "Can you show us the way up there?"
"It is death," Suliedor said gravely. "You are brave people, but that courage might be an affront to Allah."
Kane regarded him with a mocking smile. "I thought you were more worried about offending this false god of yours."
Suliedor glowered at him. "I was only trying to warn you. Yes, there are secret ways into the mountain."
"I'll go with you," Yusef volunteered. "I'll show you the way, if for nothing else but to prove there are no such things as Djinns and devils."
Kane nodded. "Thanks."
Despite Suliedor's earlier treachery, he found himself liking the English rogue and his straight-talking son. "We're ready to go now, if you are."
"Djebel Kif is my responsibility!" Suliedor protested. "Then come with us, Dad," Yusef said in irritation. "It is the home of Shaitan."
"Dad," Yusef said in exasperation, "the only devils up there have feathers and wings and live in a nest."
Suliedor Entwhistle nibbled at his lower lip contemplatively, then shook his head in resignation. "I can't let you go alone, Yusef. You might need me to bail you out of the vulture's nest."
Chapter 5
Less than hour later, as the five people walked around the boulder-littered base of Djebel Kif, the Moon burned in the sky with such a silver brilliance they didn't need to use the Nighthawk microlights they'd taken from their war bags.
No animals or insects stirred among the rocks. The only sound was the crunching of their feet as they moved over a thick layer of shale. Kane felt small and insignificant in the wasteland, made even more oppressive by the suspicion that madness and egomania waited for them on the summit, far more evil than any creatures spawned from Islamic myth.
Nor did he care to trail after Yusef and Suliedor walking point was a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate because of his uncanny ability to sniff out danger in the offing. He called it a sixth sense, but his pointman's sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing.
The sloping sides of Djebel Kif weren't as steep as they appeared from a distance. Narrow paths, little more than goat runs curved up between outcroppings of stone and beneath overhangs. Yusef and Suliedor led the three outlanders toward the nearest trail.
Before they fell into step behind the bedouin, Grant and Kane made sure their Sin Eaters were secure in the rather bulky holsters strapped to their forearms beneath the right sleeves of their field jackets. The Sin Eater, the official side arm of the Magistrate Divisions, was an automatic hand-blaster, less than fourteen inches in length, with an extended magazine carrying twenty 9 mm rounds. When not in use, the butt folded over the top of the blaster, lying perpendicular to the frame, reducing holstered length to ten inches.
When the weapon was needed, a flexing of wrist tendons activated sensitive actuator cables within the holster and snapped the pistol smoothly into the waiting hand, the butt unfolding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eater had no trigger guard or safety, the auto-pistol fired immediately upon touching a crooked index finger.
Clipped to the outlanders' combat harnesses were abbreviated Copperhead subguns. Less than two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, the extended magazines held thirty-five 4.85 steel jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing one-handed use.
Optical image intensifier scopes and laser auto-targeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating full-auto bursts.
Brigid Baptiste carried a Copperhead, as well as her TP-9, snugged in a slide-draw holster at her hip. The war bags each one of them had slung over their shoulders contained Nighthawk microlights, night-vision glasses, extra magazines, as well as a variety of grenades, and as added insurance, a single block of C-4 explosive.
Brigid brushed back her fall of hair and touched the Commtact attached to the mastoid bone behind her right ear, making sure it was adjusted to identical units worn by Grant and Kane. Steel pintels embedded in the bones connected to tiny input ports on the small curves of metal. The Commtacts had been found in Redoubt Yankee and were state-of-the-art multiple-channel communication devices.
