God War (5 page)

Distantly, Grant was aware of Bry’s words trailing off over the Commtact receiver and he engaged the microphone pickup. “Thanks for the heads-up, Donald,” he said. “We see it. And it ain’t pretty.”

Chapter 3

Some fifteen minutes earlier, the temporary Cerberus ops room had come to excited life as a communication was received from Kane. Accompanied by an old ally of the Cerberus team, Kane revealed that he had finally discovered the location of Bensalem, the fortress island that Ullikummis had designated his headquarters.

The Cerberus operation was connected to the external world via a web of communication and surveillance devices, the core of which was made up of two satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Cerberus employed concealed uplinks that chattered continuously with these orbiting satellites to provide much of the empirical data its operatives relied upon. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists at the original Cerberus redoubt. Now the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat.

Speaking in real time to Kane, Brewster Philboyd accessed the reconnaissance satellite to track his position. Aged somewhere in his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a long-serving Cerberus desk jockey. His lanky six-foot frame seemed hunched as he sat at the laptop and fed information to the satellite following Kane’s instruction. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles about two years earlier, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. His dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had helped reveal the operating secrets of the interphaser. While he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering problem.

As Brewster worked, Donald Bry took over the communication feed, discussing the situation with Kane. As he spoke, Lakesh walked into the sunny back room that had been transformed into the operations center.

Lakesh was not a tall man, but he stood with a regal bearing. He had dusky skin, thick black hair with slight hints of white at the temples and above the ears, and a refined mouth beneath an aquiline nose. He looked to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age, but in fact Lakesh was far older. Having spent more than a century in cryogenic suspension, Lakesh was truthfully a man of 250 years of age, and until quite recently he had looked to be exactly that. A contrivance of circumstances had served to allow Lakesh to renegotiate his age, bringing him back to a healthy fifty-something after a period of accelerated decrepitude. A physicist and cybernetics authority, Lakesh had been present when the U.S. military had first begun testing the mat-trans system. Not given to panic, Lakesh provided leadership that formed a calm center around which the Cerberus operation rotated.

“What has happened?” Lakesh asked, having heard the raised voices as he approached from the corridor outside.

“It’s Kane,” Bry explained.

“Put him on speaker,” Lakesh instructed. Though he seemed outwardly calm, a range of conflicting emotions vied for attention in Lakesh’s mind. Kane was a long-trusted member of the Cerberus team, one of the most gifted field operatives Lakesh had ever known. However, he was suffering some kind of infection that created a paralysis of his face and was affecting his vision, causing him agonizing moments of blindness. Right now Kane should be restricted to bed rest, but with personnel so thinly spread the brave ex-Magistrate had volunteered to check out an alert beacon detected coming from their old headquarters roughly six hours earlier. It was there that Kane had found their old ally Balam, with whom he now traveled.

“Kane?” Lakesh said, clipping a portable microphone pickup over one ear. The pickup angled before his mouth like a hard plastic straw, capturing his every utterance and relaying it to Kane. “This is Lakesh. Donald is just bringing me up to speed now.”

Hidden speakers on Donald Bry’s computer terminal resounded with Kane’s calm voice as the field agent replied, “Just tell me when you can see it,” he said.

There was a momentary discussion while Donald Bry explained to his mentor what was going on, and then the satellite feed on Brewster’s terminal screen centered on an overhead view of a vast island of slate-gray rock. The island was like an insect dropped into the ocean, hard, jutting planes reaching out at nightmarish angles, hooks and narrow channels dotting its brutal lines. Lakesh guessed that those channels would be almost impossible to navigate by boat.

“What is it?” Lakesh breathed, his words just about audible. “What have they found?”

“Do you see it?” Kane asked over the speakers, ignoring or not hearing Lakesh’s query.

“Yes,” Lakesh replied instantly, “but what is it?”

“Ullikummis’s home,” Kane stated matter-of-factly, his words somehow lacking the impossible gravity with which Lakesh expected they would be expressed.

Lakesh stared at the image from the satellite feed for a long moment, unaware that he was holding his breath. “Are you there now?” he asked finally.

* * *

S
EVERAL
HUNDRED
MILES
away, just off the coast of what had once been New England, two figures skulked through the throne room of Ullikummis. Crouching together in the shadows of the stone castle, the two figures could not have been more different.

The first was Kane, a powerfully built man in his early thirties, battle hardened with a tension in his body that came from years of combat readiness. A dark beard shaded his chin and jowls, while his dark hair had grown long, reaching past his collar in trailing curlicues like snakes’ tails. Kane was an ex-Magistrate turned warrior for the rebellious operation known as Cerberus. His clothes looked worn and dirty, and his denim jacket was frayed at the edges where the cuffs and hem had begun to unravel. There was something else about him, too, a bony protrusion that stabbed out from his left eye like a half-buried seashell on the beach, arcing down his cheek and marring his otherwise handsome features.

“Yeah, we’re here,” Kane said quietly, his voice picked up by the hidden Commtact implant he wore. He checked the open window as he spoke, peering out into the dark, uninviting waves that crashed through the narrow channels that cut their labyrinthine way through the island from the sea. Those would be hell to navigate, he realized.

Crouching beside Kane was the shorter figure of Balam, humanoid but not human, with a bulbous head and black eyes like limpid pools of water. Hairless, Balam’s skin was a pallid gray-white, the color a human might associate with seasickness. In contrast to Kane’s tattered combat clothes, Balam wore a long, shapeless robe that reached almost to his ankles. The robe was woven of a soft material and dyed the indigo color of a summer night’s sky. It had no pattern beyond the weave itself, but close to the collar, a darker patch showed around a frayed section where the robe had been torn during a scuffle. The dark stain was blood; Balam had been shot in the chest six days before when his charge, the foster girl known as Little Quav, had been taken from his protection by Brigid Haight.

Now Balam had joined Kane in his quest to find Quav and Brigid. The two of them had discovered this place utilizing an alien artifact in Balam’s possession, a chair that could navigate through space.

Balam watched Kane as the taller man walked warily through the empty throne room, discussing with his colleagues over the Commtact.

“We’re going to do a recon,” Kane explained to Lakesh. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

With that, he cut off the communication link, and Balam was suddenly aware that Kane was staring at him, blue-gray eyes piercing into his.

“How is your sight, friend Kane?” Balam asked, his voice reedy and eerily alien in pitch and delivery.

The thing that lay in Kane’s flesh seemed to have disrupted his vision, throwing him into bouts of temporary blindness, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations of another life—the life of his foe, Ullikummis. These problems were exacerbated by teleportation travel, be it through interphaser or the more traditional mat-trans, and Balam had speculated it was linked to the breakdown and re-forming of Kane’s molecules at a quantum level, that shock event somehow triggering the stone fleck that had become embedded in Kane’s face. The problem was so serious that, when they had met up earlier that day, Balam had proposed a mind-link that would grant Kane a clarity of vision, albeit one that was alien to his normal perception. The mind-link operated by proximity, which meant it would fail if Kane and Balam became too far separated. Even now, Kane was utilizing Balam’s link to see more clearly, to overcome the effects that the shard of rock was generating in his own vision. However, how well that was working was anyone’s guess—Kane tended to play these things close to his chest.

“I’m okay for now,” Kane replied noncommittally. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Without waiting for Balam to answer, Kane led the way through the chilly throne room, commanding the Sin Eater automatic pistol he had hidden in a wrist holster into his hand. The Sin Eater had once been the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself so that it could be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Unfolding to its full extension, the automatic pistol was a little under fourteen inches in length and equipped with 9 mm rounds. Kane’s holster reacted to a specific flinch movement of his wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into his hand. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features would ever be required since the Magistrates were considered infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in Cobaltville, and he still felt at his most comfortable with the weapon in his hand. It was an extension to his body that seemed second nature now, like the comforting weight of a wristwatch. By contrast, Balam was unarmed, his brief use of a blaster indirectly causing him to get shot.

The cold throne room was empty, and despite the sounds of the crashing waves and the caws of gulls from its open window, it seemed somehow abandoned to Kane. He had taken the lead because of his experience in the field—Kane was a soldier while Balam was, if push came to shove, nothing more than a glorified negotiator. Furthermore, going back to his days as a hard-contact Magistrate, Kane had been infamous for his so-called point-man sense, a near-psychic ability to detect danger before it happened. While that perhaps seemed superhuman to many casual observers, it was in fact a combination of Kane’s finely tuned five senses, creating an awareness of his surroundings that was almost Zenlike in its comprehension.

Right now, Kane didn’t detect anything much in the room, and he swiftly made his way out through the open doorway and into the corridor that lay beyond. Like the throne room, the corridor was empty, the stone walls cold and echoing the nearby waves as they crashed against the rough sides of the fortress island.

It was a strange feeling, walking through that corridor. On the one hand it was recognizably a corridor to Kane’s eyes. And yet, on the other hand, it also had the properties of something eroded through the ages, weathered rock ripped through by shearing winds or surging water, cutting pathways through it over the aeons. It felt cold, lifeless, charmless. Whatever had crafted this, it lacked any sense of artistry, any desire for anything beyond function. The floor was hard and rough and
unstable, the coolness of the stone so cold that it penetrated the soles of Kane’s scuffed leather boots. Window slits were hacked into the walls here and there, haphazard and open to the elements, green moss growing along their sills where the seawater had pooled.

Kane continued down the corridor on silent tread, efficiently peering left and right into open doorways that led off the tunnellike passageway. Balam kept ten paces behind him, trotting along as lightly as possible to keep his own steps quiet. Kane peered over his shoulder, checking that the diminutive alien was keeping pace.

“Don’t get too far behind,” Kane instructed in a whisper. “If I have to shoot something, I’m going to want you close by. Or something bad will happen.”

Balam looked at Kane apologetically. “I’m sorry, Kane,” he whispered. “I’m unused to the application of stealth in this manner.”

Kane nodded. “Just don’t get shot if it kicks off,” he warned, and then he continued on his way, hurrying down the corridor at a jog.

Following the ex-Magistrate, Balam was searching the vast fortress in his own way. A telepath, Balam had nurtured an especially close bond with his foster child, the missing Quav. He had sensed her essence here the very moment that they arrived, feeling it like some vibrant tapestry hanging on the stone walls. Little Quav was the culmination of the Annunaki experiments with rebirth, and she had been placed in Balam’s care shortly after her birth to protect her from forces that might use her for ill. In that way, Balam had acted as a neutral party, siding neither with the Annunaki nor humanity but rather shielding the child from the dark destiny contained within her genetic code. Losing the child had hurt Balam, and he knew he had been played for a fool by the wily Ullikummis, tricked by the familiar face of Brigid Baptiste when she had appeared in Agartha. Balam had swiftly realized that Brigid was an agent for an antagonistic party, but with supreme irony, his very seclusion to protect Quav had also meant he was out of touch with developments in the wider world.

Whether foreknowledge of the rise of Ullikummis would have changed things, Balam could not say. As things stood, Balam felt Quav’s loss like a scar, a wound on his own body that had cut far deeper than the bullet he had taken to the chest from Brigid Haight’s gun during the kidnapping. In this, Balam and Kane had shared a tragedy, for Kane had also been shot by Brigid in her new guise as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness. For Kane, that blow had cut even deeper. Physically, the bullet had left merely a bruise on Kane’s chest, failing to pierce his armor and hence his flesh. But he and the woman now calling herself Haight were linked, a spiritual bond that entwined both of them through time immemorial. They shared the bond of
anam charas,
or “soul friends,” and it seemed to carry over to different incarnations of the two of them, despite where they found themselves. To many, it sounded like mumbo jumbo, but Kane’s bond to Brigid was deep and semimystical, despite his own eminently practical nature.