Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 7
Cursing, Kane kept the trigger stud of his Sin Eater mashed down. He knew that sustained full-auto bursts only wasted ammunition, but his focus was on driving the jinn back, not scoring lethal strikes. Although he cycled through the entire magazine, he achieved his objective.
Hissing and shrieking, the creatures scattered, running with a scrambling, scampering gait into the murk, ducking down behind the cube-shaped cages. They left over a dozen of their brethren dead, leaking viscous fluids onto the floor.
The four people ceased firing, and swiftly Kane ejected his pistol's spent clip and toggled home a fresh one taken from his war bag.
"Anybody hurt?" Grant asked hoarsely.
He received negative replies and a panting Brigid said, "We can't stay here. For all we know there are enough of them to keep coming until we're out of ammunition."
Reloading his own Sin Eater, Grant said curtly, "We're all wide open for suggestions."
Brigid reached into her war bag and brought out two cylindrical concussion grenades of the Alsatex series, flash-bangs developed by the military two centuries ago for crowd control. Hefting them, she said, "Judging by the size of their eyes and the fact the overhead lights were broken out, the jinn have very sensitive optic nerves. Their hearing may be equally acute."
Kane nodded uncertainly. "Those grens might buy us some time, but—"
He felt a tug on his pant leg and glanced down at Suliedor, his stomach slipping sideways. The flesh around the wound on the sheikh's neck was puffed and swollen, streaked with ugly strands of red, parts of it so purple as to be almost black. A yellow pus oozed out of the three punctures.
"Kane, give me a weapon," Suliedor croaked.
Yusef knelt beside him. "Dad, we'll get you out of here." His voice was thick with the effort of controlling his emotions.
"I would only slow you down," Suliedor half gasped, glassy eyes darting from Yusef to Kane. "Give me a weapon and at least let my death serve a purpose."
Blinking back tears, Yusef gazed up beseechingly at Brigid. "Don't you have any medicines that can help him?"
She shook her head sadly. "Without knowing the properties of the toxin, anything I could give him would either have no effect or make matters worse."
Yusef swallowed hard and clutched Suliedor's wrist. "I won't leave you, Dad."
Suliedor lifted a trembling hand toward his son's face. Instead of a caress, the hand impacted sharply against this cheek. "Yes, you will, you lazy git. You have a responsibility to our clan. I'm dead anyway."
Fixing his eyes on Kane's face, he grated, "Cold-cock him if you have to, Kane. You spared his life when you could've taken it, so now he owes you."
Not responding, Kane reached into his own war bag and brought out an incendiary grenade. He shoved it into Suliedor's right hand, folding his fingers around it and saying tersely, "You hold it tight in one hand and pull the spoon with the other. Squeeze the safety lever to keep the striker in place. When you think the time is right, let go."
"What will happen?" the sheikh asked faintly.
"It has a thermite-and-phosphorus filler," Kane answered dispassionately. "If the explosion doesn't kill you instantly, the incendiary will."
"I'm not interested in what will happen to me," Suliedor snapped impatiently. "What about the Djinn?"
"If we're lucky," Kane replied, "you'll take out at least four of the things and maybe blind twice that many. If we're lucky."
Suliedor nodded, glanced from Kane's face to those of Brigid and Grant and said, "I wish we had met at some other time."
Fixing his gaze on Yusef's face, he intoned. "Go, my lad. Lead well. Allah akabar"
Shapes shifted in the murk and a sibilant hissing arose, like a score of tea-kettles building rapidly to a full boil. Kane tapped Yusef's shoulder. "We've got no more time. I'm sorry."
Slowly, Yusef rose, eyes on his father. He whispered,
"Allah akabar."
Chapter 8
Brigid tweaked out the pin of the flash-bang. "Everybody look away. Once this thing goes, we need to start running and not stop."
She lobbed the metal-shelled grenade underhanded toward the pallid figures emerging from the gloom. It struck the floor and bounced. The four people turned their faces away just as the Alsatex detonated with an eardrum piercing bang. The eruption of white light turned the shadows into high noon.
Without a word, Kane, Grant, Brigid and Yusef kicked themselves into headlong sprints.
Kane leaped over two whimpering jinn as they. writhed on the floor, paws over their eyes. The other creatures blocking the way to the door were stunned and dazzled, stumbling and staggering half-deaf and half-blind.
Voicing a warbling cry, Yusef charged forward, his Copperhead's killdot dancing from oversize head to underdeveloped torso. The subgun beat out a drum roll, the rounds punching dark periods in pale flesh. The jinn lurched away, not knowing what hit them, wild with pain, dazed from the shock of the multiple impacts, tendrils of blood squirting from their bodies.
The sounds uttered by the jinn were a mad babble, mingled cries of outrage and terror. Claw-tipped fingers and skinny arms hauled at them from all sides. Kane applied the frame of his Sin Eater like a bludgeon, trying to fend them off. Grant kicked and stamped and Brigid beat away the clawed hands with the butt of her TP-9.
Just as they reached the door, the entire room shuddered with a brutal thunderclap. A roaring white flash lit their way, casting their elongated shadows on the floor and wall ahead of them. They felt a scorching wave of heat and heard little yipping screams. As they piled through the doorway, a cloud of smoke billowed after them, bringing with it a scent like scorched pork.
"Your father is—was—a brave man," Grant managed to husk out to Yusef as they sprinted through the office suite.
Yusef didn't reply.
As the five people made for the entrance hatch, more of the jinn swarmed out of doorways and wedges of shadow, a milling mass creeping to intercept them. Brigid shouted a warning to her companions and hurled her other flash-bang into the shadows ahead of them.
The grenade detonated with a bone-jarring crack, like the breaking a of giant tree limb. Although they shielded their eyes, amid the blaze of light and the eardrum-slamming concussion, they caught fleeting glimpses of hideously misshapen bodies.
They fired their guns, clearing a path with a scythe of lead. Maimed and blinded creatures staggered into their comrades and jostled them from their feet. The jinn turned on each other, squealing like crazed rats, talons sinking into flesh. The entire horde fell upon one another in a terror-fueled fury.
When they reached the hatchway and the entrance shaft, the four people paused to catch their breath. Yusef demanded hoarsely, "So we have escaped them—now what? Can the ugly little bastards breed and overrun this land?"
Brigid raked her hair away from her face. "I doubt they can procreate, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're practically immortal. Extreme longevity is the usual methodology of Overproject Excalibur experiments."
Glaring into the darkness behind them, Grant gulped air and asked. "If this place is powered by a mini fission reactor like we have in Cerberus, there has to be a way to speed up the reaction, right?"
Both Kane and Brigid swiveled their heads toward him, eyes and faces registering alarm. Brigid said, "If the cooling system malfunctions, we can probably initiate an uncontrolled fission reaction."
"What would happen?" asked Yusef dubiously.
"Extreme high temperatures," she answered curtly. "Anything organic in the vicinity would be cooked in their tracks."
Kane shifted position uneasily. "Including us?" "Maybe," she admitted. "It would depend on the speed of the fission reaction."
"What about an atomic explosion?" Grant inquired, grimacing as he put weight on his wounded leg.
"That's a little less likely," Brigid responded. "But not out of the realm of possibility, depending on the instability of the reactor core. And if an explosion is triggered, it would be relatively small. It might not bring down Djebel Kif but it'll never look the same again."
The Cerberus warriors eyed each other speculatively. After a moment, Kane said, "If we just seal this place up and go, Utu could come back at any time and make the place impregnable. I don't know what he wants with the jinn, except as a renewable source of cannon fodder, but I don't want them left to seed."
"Me, either," Yusef agreed fervently. "Tell me what I can do."
"You're not doing anything but getting out of here and returning to your people," Brigid said severely.
"We'll take care of this," Grant assured him, peering into his war bag. "I've got an ounce of C-4. What about you two?"
Kane and Brigid checked the contents of their own bags and found five incendiary grenades between them. "This should be enough to knock out the reactor's cooling system and set off an explosive reaction,"
Brigid stated matter-of-factly.
A wry half smile creased Kane's face. "I can't say I' m wild about this plan, but we don't have many alternatives."
Grant nodded brusquely. "Let's get it the hell done." Yusef hesitated at the hatch. "I feel like a coward—" "Don't," Brigid broke in. "Your father, your chief, charged you with a duty and fulfilling it is your first obligation."
"Yeah," Kane said dryly. "And blowing things up is our first obligation."
"We don't intend to sacrifice ourselves to destroy this place," Grant stated. He glanced toward Brigid with narrowed, quizzical eyes. "Right?"
She shrugged. "I wish I could say there's not much risk to us, but I don't want to lie to you."
Kane shook his head in weary exasperation. "Just once I wish you would." He waved Yusef toward the ladder rungs on the inner wall of the entrance shaft. "You should get moving."
Yusef inclined his head in a short, respectful nod, touching his lips and forehead with the fingers of his right hand. "Allah be with you. I hope we will be reunited soon. If not here, then in heaven."
"Let's all try to put that reunion off as long as possible," Grant rumbled.
Yusef stepped into the shaft and pulled the steel door closed behind him. Brigid, Grant and Kane walked stealthily down the corridor until they found a door marked with a sign reading Environmental Control.
The door opened onto a concrete stairwell that pitched downward at a steep angle. They descended the stairs, noting how arrows painted on the walls at each landing pointed downward. Each arrow was accompanied by the circular, black-and-yellow radiation warning symbol. The flight of steps wasn't long, but Kane noted how Grant winced as walked down the risers, favoring his injured leg.
"You'd think there'd be a gateway unit here if it's a Totality Concept–related installation," Grant remarked.
"There probably is," Brigid agreed, "but I don't think the jinn will give us the time to find it."
"Besides," Kane said, "even if there is and we used it to gate out of here, we'd be abandoning the Mantas."
In the decade preceding the nukecaust of 2001, the gateway system had been set up all over the globe. By then, even the Totality Concept itself had begun to schism along factional lines. Certain project personnel decided to hedge their bets, putting gateways in places other groups didn't know about to further their own partisan agendas.
The stairwell led to a narrow corridor that ended a hundred feet away at a vanadium-steel door recessed into the wall. Affixed to the wall beside it was a sec code keypad. Beneath it was a plastic sign bearing red lettering: Radiation Hazard Beyond This Point! Authorized HazMat Personnel Only!
Brigid punched in the entrance code on the keypad. No matter how different the layout of the many redoubts they had visited, the one constant in every Totality Concept installation was the numerical sequence to release a security door's lock-3-5-2.
A combination of gears and pneumatics rumbled and hissed, and the heavy metal panel rolled aside. As it did, a shimmering haze of blue light spilled out into the corridor. Carefully, the three people stepped through the doorway and onto a balcony overlooking a pool of clear water. A wall of light shimmered all around it, turning it into a beautiful shade of cerulean blue.
Heat so intense it was almost suffocating rose from the surface of the pool in waves, but the water wasn't boiling. A pair of half-ovoid, metal-shelled generators rested on an elevated platform above the pool. They filled the chamber with a penetrating subsonic hum of power.
Squinting her eyes against the eerie luminance, Brigid said, "Cerenkov radiation. It appears there's already a cooling-system malfunction. Maybe the Nephilim was responsible, removing the carbon control rods so radiation poisoning would kill the jinn over a period of time."
Kane peered down into the pool at the cube-shaped reactor core. From what he could see, it looked almost identical to the one buried beneath the Cerberus redoubt—a big lead-lined block submerged in about twenty feet of water with three control rods projecting from its flat top, extending up to the underside of the platform supporting the generators.
"So what do we do now?" Grant asked.
Brigid nibbled at her underlip then said in a guilty rush. "I don't know. This is a breeder reactor, which uses neutrons generated by a fission chain reaction to convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239. We could dump all our grens and the C-4 into the cooling pool, but whether we'll get the desired effect or a case of the cure being worse than the disease, I just don't know."
Kane and Grant gazed down at the reactor for a silent few seconds, then Kane withdrew two grenades from his pouch. "I'm setting the timers for forty seconds."
Grant removed the rectangular block of C-4 from his war-bag and handed it to Kane. He attached the grenades to it with a loop of black electrician's tape. As he worked, Brigid said worriedly, "The water might already be so hot it'll set off the grenades prematurely."
Grant grunted. "Then that's why we'd better run like hell."
Kane stepped over to the edge of the balcony, flicking tiny timer switches on the grenades. Glancing over his shoulder at Brigid and Grant, he said, "Get to the stairs."
They did as he said, waiting for him at the foot. Balancing himself on the balls of his feet, half-turned toward the stairwell, he opened his hands. The taped together collection of explosives dropped lazily in the blue Borealis. By the time they splashed into the pool, he had already whirled away and started running. Grant and Brigid were ahead of him, pounding up the steps, taking the risers two at a time. The three of them surged upward in a wild rush.
"Thirty-eight, thirty-seven—" Kane counted down aloud as he ran, relying on the recitation of decreasing numbers to lend wings to the heels of his friends. The three of them raced upward, clinging and hauling themselves along by the handrail.
They retraced their route but weren't molested by the jinn. By the time they were in sight of the hatchway, hanging open as Yusef had left it, Kane panted, "Three...two. .. one!"
As they stumbled into the bottom of the shaft, Grant snarled angrily, "The god-damn grenades didn't go off! Something went wrong—"
Kane chuckled breathlessly. "I set them for sixty seconds. I didn't know how much you'd slow us up with your game leg."
Grant was too out of breath to swear at Kane, but he was the first one to the ladder. The Cerberus warriors swiftly clambered up the rungs, swarming hand over hand. They emerged through the trapdoor into the empty cell and loped across the rock-strewed courtyard of the monastery.
"Thanks for the consideration," Grant half gasped to Kane. "But I don't think it was necessary—"
The rest of his words were lost in the distant thunderclap of an explosion.
The summit of Djebel Kif heaved beneath them, knocking them off their feet, sending them sprawling. Black webwork patterns splintered the flagstones, bursting up through them from beneath. Smoke spurted out of the cracks.
The prolonged grating of stone grinding against stone underscored the muffled, subterranean cannonade. Fragments of the taller structures broke away. More cracks streaked through the basalt underneath them.
Kane, Brigid and Grant staggered to their feet, hanging on to one another, reeling like drunks. Kane glanced up into the sky and glimpsed a silver speck arcing overhead. For a distracted second, he wondered if it were a shooting star. Then the speck resolved itself into a disk. It braked to an abrupt stop directly overhead.
Its configuration and smooth, featureless hull reminded Kane of the throwing discus used by predark athletes—if the disks were twenty feet in diameter and coated with quicksilver. The craft hovered silently, the moonlight gleaming from its surface.
Gesturing to it, Kane snapped, "Looks like the landlord is pulling a surprise property inspection—it'd probably be best if he didn't find us anywhere around."
The three people began running for the mouth of the path as slabs of stone toppled from the monastery walls. Dust clouds rose, whirling, to coat their tongues and sting their eyes.
Lurching against a crumbling wall, Grant spit out grit and said to Brigid, "What was that you said about Djebel Kif not looking the same again?"
Brigid Baptiste didn't waste breath on a response.
She felt certain Grant's question was rhetorical, anyway.
Chapter 9
Domi lay on her stomach, her small body tensing like a bowstring. She tried hard to blend into her surroundings. With the charcoal-gray tank top and the high-cut denim shorts she wore, she knew she was only one more pattern of light and dark among many in the tree line. Long shadows lanced from the peak of the mountain towering high behind her.
The blazing glory of fusing sunset colors filled the Montana sky. Sunsets were always spectacular in the Outlands, due to the pollutants and radiation still lingering in the upper atmosphere. The rich palette was a beautiful sight, but the girl didn't notice.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb the brush around her, she undid the catches to the straps of her backpack and shrugged out of it. Removing a compact set of binoculars from their carrying case, she fitted them to her eyes, gazing down the face of the slope. She tried to locate the movement that had caught her attention a moment earlier.
