Planet Hate, page 9
Domi put the couple to the back of her mind, making her own way up toward the dark clump of trees that waited patiently in the middle distance. Among the smaller deciduous trees, a crop of towering redwoods stretched into the air, their colossal trunks as wide as whole buildings. Between them, much lower to the ground, poplars and beech trees populated the soil, so much shorter than the redwoods that they seemed almost like toys. As she stalked through the grass and up into the tree line, Domi saw churned earth hither and yon, signs of the damage that the subterrene had wrought just a few months before. An underground boring machine, the subterrene had created a crack in the earth that had plunged Snakefishville into a crater. But its effects had stretched out farther than the fallen ville itself, disrupting portions of the ground for miles around. Even now, the immediate area was still prone to cave-ins.
As she walked, Domi engaged her Commtact, a radio communications device hidden beneath her skin along the line of her mastoid bone. The subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, even a user who was completely deaf would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device. Like most of the members of the Cerberus field teams, Domi had had the Commtact surgically embedded beneath her skin as standard, a relatively minor operation that allowed her to keep in real-time contact with her companions and home base in any given situation.
With the Cerberus personnel now scattered across the continent and beyond, the hidden communication devices had become more crucial than ever, but the decision had been made early on to use them sparingly. Lakesh had tasked his right-hand man, computer expert Donald Bry, to create a scrambler for the devices, disguising Cerberus’s radio communications with a randomizer. With the group now wanted by Ullikummis and his expanding New World Order, it had seemed prudent that the Cerberus personnel do their utmost to keep their communications untraceable.
“Hello, Cerberus,” Domi said, her voice barely above a whisper. The Commtact would pick up and boost any spoken word, thus limiting the necessity to speak loudly when engaging the device.
For a moment there was silence from the hidden Commtact, and Domi struggled over a churned-up ridge of dirt before wending between the trees beyond. A wide crack ran across the soil here, opening two or three feet wide in places.
Then a familiar voice spoke to Domi, seemingly from just beside her ear as the Commtact relayed the signal. It was Lakesh. “Hello, dearest,” he said, genuine concern clear by his tone. “How are things going out there in Snakefishville?”
“Kind of weird, but everything went okay,” Domi told him, speaking softly as she made her way through the filtered lines of sunlight cast amid a dense copse of deciduous trees. “Just leaving the site now and on my way to pick up the interphaser. By my chron, I’ll be ready to phase back in about six minutes. Can you remind me of the coordinates?”
Lakesh related the coordinates of Shizuka’s winter retreat, roughly ninety miles north of Domi’s current location, reminding her of the code for the local parallax point that her interphaser would need to target.
Committing the coordinates to memory, Domi crossed the broken ground and made her way into the forest to the place where she had left her interphaser and its carrying case, well hidden from view.
THE SUN WAS HIGH in the sky, casting abbreviated shadows like freak-show people on the ground as Kane made his way out of the winter lodge guarded by Shizuka’s Tigers of Heaven. The lodge sat in its own grounds, overlooking the angry Pacific at a sheer cliff face, where the waves crashed against it with the relentlessness of a hornet trapped behind a windowpane.
Kane pushed open a side door and stepped out onto a low wooden veranda that ran all the way around the building. The building itself was mock-Japanese in style, imitating the vast manses from the seventeenth century, with a harmony of sloping roofs that looked like upended books left open at their center pages. An elaborate balcony penned in the veranda, its carved woodwork like filigree lace, a red-painted circular banister across its top. Kane looked at the barrier for just a moment before placing a firm hand on its banister and launching himself over it in a swinging movement of fluid muscles. He landed in the garden below, his booted feet crunching against the shinglelike gravel that formed the path.
Kane peered down a moment, saw that one foot had crushed a tiny, mosslike fern, its pale green leaves arranged in pairs that seemed to stand in opposition to one another. When Kane sniffed at the air he could detect just the faintest scent of mint, and he removed his foot from the plant with a muttered and self-conscious apology.
Above him, several members of the samurai-like Tigers of Heaven stood guard, patrolling the balcony in slow sweeps. There would be more in the vast grounds, Kane knew. It didn’t matter—he just needed a little time to himself, where no one would bother him.
The winter lodge was set in its own grounds, and a delicate herb garden had been tended at the rear of the lodge itself. Kane stalked through the garden with the prowess of a jungle cat, glancing briefly back at the lodge to assure himself that no one was following.
Finding a small wooden bench tucked behind the masking fronds of a fern, Kane took a seat, staring off into the middle distance as he gathered his thoughts.
Something strange had happened as he waited for Grant to engage the interphaser back in the hostile village. And it wasn’t the first time, either. Something had been bothering him for a week or so now, his muscles tensing up when he had least expected. He was becoming aware of a dull ache in his face, too, across the left side, not a pain so much as a lack of sensation. That jump dream hadn’t helped, that vivid tale of burning inside his eye.
Kane narrowed his eyes, watching the way the sunlight played in and out of the shadows cast by the swaying fronds. His right eye adjusted to the bright green effect of dazzling sunlight as it smashed against the rods and cones that painted imagery for the brain. But his left eye seemed duller, as if watching the same scene through a haze, a subtle clouding of the lens.
The burning after the jump dream had been like an allergic reaction, as if something had become caught beneath his eyelid and made it swell, clouding his vision with a web of mucus. Heat and mucus, man’s defense mechanism against infiltration.
Kane opened his eyes wide once more and the mist abated, returning to the very edges of his vision, hiding in the corners of his left eye.
Just a few weeks ago he could have asked Reba DeFore, the Cerberus physician, to check over his eyes, identify and treat whatever infection he had picked up. Now, with the Cerberus redoubt abandoned and their forces in disarray, such resources were no longer within easy reach.
“Damn,” Kane muttered, shaking his head in irritation.
It had all become so very complicated.
DOMI HAD WISELY hidden the interphaser a long way from the road, further assuring it would be safe from casual discovery. With her heightened senses, she would have little trouble locating where it sat in its protective carry case again among the dense forest of towering redwoods and poplars. But as she clambered over a fallen tree, Domi spotted movement up ahead. Instinctively, the albino warrior adopted a crouch, reaching her hand to the hidden blade sheathed at her ankle, her nose twitching with alertness. The hilt of the blade appeared in her hand as she warily peered all around her, flashing as a stray beam of sunlight glinted from its edge. It was a combat knife with a wickedly serrated nine-inch blade, and it was the only memento that Domi had kept from her time as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville.
For a moment the forest was eerily still, just the shushing sound of the wind as it caressed the leaves in the trees. Domi waited, her ruby-red eyes flitting back and forth, searching for signs of movement she felt sure were there. She heard traipsing footsteps off to her left, crunching against the covering of decaying leaves.
Then suddenly, a noise from close by echoed to Domi’s ears. It was laughter, high-pitched—a girl’s giggle. Domi inclined her head toward the sound, searching for its source amid the dense cover of the forest. After a second Domi spotted a flash of white material between the tree trunks, a woman’s dress. Domi moved silently, taking just a single step in a crouch so as to get a clearer view, peeking over the gigantic, lopped-off limb of one of the redwoods where it lay in the dry brown leaves that covered the ground like skin. The tree limb was colossal, larger across than a grown man’s torso. Domi peered over it, watching that flash of white amid the greens and browns of the forest. It was the girl with the black hair, clapping at her boyfriend’s back as he gave her a piggyback through the undergrowth. She laughed gleefully, and her head bobbed back and forth as she clung to her boyfriend’s back. Then the daisy crown fluttered free, tumbling past her shoulders and dropping to the ground even as the pretty girl reached for it.
The lad was laughing now, too, almost losing his footing as he spun around and around, whirling until he finally slumped over with dizziness. When he did so, the black-haired girl fell with him, giggling again as she rolled on the soft leaf cover that carpeted the ground, her joyful giggling echoing through the forest like a bird’s cry.
But wait. There was another sound, too, Domi realized, and it really was a bird’s cry—harsher than the girl’s laughter, with an angry, discordant edge. Even as Domi’s eyes searched for its source, a large shadow dropped out of the upper limbs of the trees and swooped down at the young couple.
The diving bird cawed once as it plummeted at the couple on the ground beneath it. Its movements were so swift that Domi could just barely get a sense of its enormous size, and she estimated that the wingspan was eight feet or more. Then the grotesque bird’s vicious claws snagged at the girl’s bright dress, tearing it and pulling her up into the air, even as she began to cry out.
“No.” Domi pounced forward and charged toward the couple.
Chapter 7
Domi sprang forward with the fluidity of a jungle cat, leaping over the fallen limb of the redwood that lay in front of her and sprinting for the gap in the forest where the young couple had stopped. Domi could see the bird more clearly now, and though the surrounding redwoods gave a false impression of the creature’s size, she still viewed it with trepidation. Its wingspan was over eight feet from tip to tip, the wings swooping back like vast sails. The wings were covered in a russet down that looked leathery—more like a bat’s wings than the feathered limbs of a normal bird. Its clawed talons had grabbed hold of the teenage girl, one of them hooked around her arm while the other jabbed into her torso, spilling blood as it pierced the flesh. Each of those clawed feet was as large as the girl’s head, the vicious-looking toes striped in red and black.
The pretty girl cried out, struggling as the bird pulled her up, mighty wings flapping as it sought to pluck her from the ground. Next to the girl in the white dress, the bearded young man was waving his arms back and forth, trying to shoo the monstrous bird away. It ignored him.
The bird cawed once again, an angry screech in the enclosed covering of the forest, its vast mouth opening wide to unleash that discordant shriek as it pulled the girl off the leaf-covered ground. Its beak looked like a pair of twinned scythes, their great hooked lines over a foot in length, snapping together with a mighty savagery that chilled the bone. Above that vicious implement, two beady eyes the color of midnight glared straight ahead, no emotion in their soulless depths.
Domi leaped as the bird took off, kicking her bare feet against the hard-packed ground and launching herself up into the air. Domi twisted in the air, and her body slammed against the flailing form of the girl, knocking her from the monstrous creature’s grip. The girl swung for a moment, her dress still hooked on one of the bird’s wickedly sharp talons as it ascended with mighty beats of its huge wings. With a slash of her knife, Domi cut the material of the girl’s dress where it was caught, and—twelve feet above the ground—the two of them plummeted earthward. Domi and the girl caromed toward the ground in a tangle as the bird cawed in irritation, taking flight as it was relieved of its burden.
The girl cried out as she crashed against the ground. Her dress was covered in blood, its white turning red as she bled from the wounds she had suffered with the talon attack. Domi rolled away as she landed, coming up in a crouch, the knife poised in her hand.
“What th—?” the lad asked.
Domi didn’t bother to look at him. “Get back, find cover,” she ordered. Her eyes were fixed on the high branches of the trees, watching as the red-black bird became lost in the shadows there.
Then Domi spotted movement above as the bird adjusted its flight path and began to swoop down at the people below once more. Only this time it was accompanied by seven more of the gigantic creatures, each of them unleashing an unearthly cry as they lunged for the trio on the ground.
IT WAS LATE afternoon when Rosalia finally pushed herself up from the bed. After working at the stone that lurked beneath the skin of her wrist, she had sewn up the rip in her skirt, pleating it subtly to disguise where it had torn before lying back on the bed, enjoying the quiet. But her dog was becoming restless stuck indoors, and it whimpered as it lay by the door, watching her with its eerily pale eyes until she finally relented.
Reaching for her jacket, she made her way out into the corridor, the dog trotting along at her heels. She shot it a look as she shrugged her arms into the worn sleeves of the denim jacket, the dark material of her skirt swishing against her ankles. “Always after something, aren’t you?”
A guard stood rigidly at one end of the corridor, his leather armor polished and his sword held in its ornate hilt at his waist, eyes locked straight ahead as the beautiful woman and her dog marched past. Woman and hound made their way through the lodge, Rosalia’s natural sense of direction bringing her to the main room, which in turn led to a set of French doors that opened into the gardens surrounding the construction. Lakesh had set up a small notebook-type computer at a desk by the wall, and he was tapping at the keys furiously as Rosalia strode past, a portable Commtact hooked over his ear. The computer was a rather dated DDC model, with scrapes and wear showing across its casing, but its memory had been augmented with a card insert, granting the user a phenomenally powerful network in the deceptively small unit. Lakesh glanced up for a moment, offering a few polite words of acknowledgment before returning to his furious work at the computer terminal. He was resetting the Cerberus uplinks that controlled the surveillance satellites they relied upon, running a subroutine so that their access point could not be traced. Rosalia left him to it, observing the lines of code running across the flip-up screen in a single glance.
At the far end of the room, ornately beaded twin French doors had been propped open, allowing for a pleasant breeze to run through the room. Rosalia’s dog peered up at her hopefully with those strangely expressive eyes and she nodded, following as the mongrel ran through the doors and out into the warmth of the garden air beyond.
The lodge was set in its own grounds that covered more than two acres in total. A line of trees at their edges provided additional privacy from prying eyes on the side away from the cliff. Several more of Shizuka’s guards, the Tigers of Heaven, patrolled the area, marching in long circuits through the main gardens and its surrounds.
The lodge itself was set on raised wooden housings, lifting it a couple of feet above the ground with a wood balcony running its full perimeter. An abbreviated flight of five simple wooden steps led down into a small garden that smelled of herbs and was enclosed by low walls. Beyond the low walls stretched a vast expanse of land dominated by carefully trimmed grass and pruned trees. The dog leaped down the wooden steps and rushed to sniff at the plants and low trees there, so eager it couldn’t seem to stop moving to the next thing. Rosalia followed, moving with a little more dignity as she made her own way down the stairs. She spied the figure sitting alone in the garden area immediately, despite the masking effect of the shrubbery. It was Kane, sitting on a two-seater wooden bench, gazing down at his feet in contemplation.
A stone path wound languidly around the garden area leading to a simple water feature by one of the walls, a bubbling stone in a waterfall arrangement that stood three feet high. Rosalia’s dog scampered up to this, lapping at the clear water that drizzled into the pool at its base for a few moments. Then, its thirst quenched, it ran on, leaping through the neat rows of herbs until it was at the nearest of the low walls, peering out into the open area beyond.
As Rosalia approached, the dog barked once, looking up at his mistress for confirmation. She swept her arm out, pointing vaguely past the low wall to the area beyond, and the dog yipped before hurrying off to explore. Rosalia left the dog to it, instead making her own way toward where Kane sat.
Kane looked up as Rosalia’s shadow crossed over him. “Penny for your thoughts, Magistrate Man?” she prompted.
“Don’t waste your money,” Kane dismissed, his steel-gray eyes meeting with hers for just a moment.
He hadn’t shaved yet, she saw, instead sporting a rugged stubble across his jaw, with his dark hair still in disarray.
