Immortal Twilight (17 page)

“T
RACKING
SOMETHING
,” Brewster Philboyd said. He was sitting at his monitoring station in the main operations room of the Cerberus redoubt, watching the live satellite surveillance feed as it identified and zeroed in on an unexpected shadow over by the West Coast. Philboyd was a tall and gangly man with blond hair swept back from a gradually expanding forehead. He wore black-framed glasses above cheeks that showed evidence of acne scarring from his youth. Philboyd was an authority on astrophysics and had been deeply involved in securing access to the satellites that Cerberus had come to rely on for data. Cerberus used two satellites, repurposed from their original launch years before. One, the Keyhole Comsat, provided a communications relay for the Commtacts, while the Vela class brought a live visual of the globe from its steady orbit. Both satellites could be adjusted from the Cerberus ops room to be employed for a variety of surveillance tasks, but remained restricted by their positioning and by their simple lack of numbers.

The Cerberus team relied on plenty of other systems to complete their monitoring, from remote, unmanned stations that measured seismic disturbances to people on the ground who fed the ops room reports on a regular basis. However, the object that Philboyd’s feed had spotted had been part of a specific computer-aided sweep as he scanned the areas where the Dorians had previously been seen, gradually expanding the surveillance window to try to identify anything that seemed out of place.

It was needle-in-a-haystack work, and everyone on the team knew that. But even a needle can be found, given enough time and personnel. This particular needle had taken three days to locate—and that was assuming it was the right needle.

Lakesh looked up from his desk at the rear of the ops room. “Mr. Philboyd?”

Brewster Philboyd ran his hand idly over his nose and chin as he analyzed the live information coming through from the satellite feed. “We have a shadow showing on the scan in the Luilekkerville region,” he said as Lakesh strode across the room to join him. “Large. Could be an aircraft of some type.”

Lakesh pulled over a spare seat from the empty desk beside Philboyd and sat, his eyes fixed on the monitor screen. The screen showed an overhead shot of the West Coast area, split roughly 70/30 between land mass and ocean. Although the clarity of the shot was remarkable, with the deep blue of the ocean and the tan-and-yellow mainland clearly defined, it took Lakesh a moment to spot the shadow that Philboyd had identified. At this scale, it was tiny, just a little stripe no bigger than his little fingernail, and shaped rather like a cigar.

“That’s Hope, isn’t it,” Lakesh stated, recognizing the coastline of the fishing village.

Philboyd nodded. “Increasing magnification,” he said matter-of-factly as he entered a command on the computer keyboard, manipulating the image before them.

“What is it?” Lakesh asked as the image drew focus on the dark line hanging over Hope’s shore.

“Comparative analysis suggests it’s about a hundred feet long,” Philboyd said, “and it’s moving.”

Without realizing, Lakesh squinted as if to get a better view of the object on screen. “Are you certain of that?” he asked.

Philboyd tapped at his terminal again and the image on screen split off into a smaller window as he brought up several moving shots of the same area from the past thirty minutes. Each shot showed the same coastline with a time code reference in the bottom corner. Two of them showed the mass located farther out to sea, while the third did not show the object at all. “It’s taken a curved path from the north to bring it out over the ocean and approach from the west,” Philboyd said, “keeping the sun behind it.”

“A classic military maneuver,” Lakesh stated absently. “Who do we have down there? Anyone?”

“Nobody at this time,” Philboyd stated dourly. “The last of the cleanup crew left Hope over twenty-four hours ago. We have no one on the ground.”

“Get Kane, get Grant, get Brigid,” Lakesh instructed. “This is what they’ve been looking for. I feel certain of it.”

Philboyd eyed Lakesh with concern. “It would take thirty minutes to scramble a team out there,” he said. “By that time the...whatever it is, will have passed.”

“No,” Lakesh said with certainty, “it’s traveling too slowly for that. Even if it leaves Hope it won’t get far, and now that we have it we can track it.”

“What if it’s nothing?” Philboyd asked. “It could pose no threat and be completely unrelated to—”

“Alert Kane,” Lakesh said, cutting the man off. “Scramble CAT Alpha and get them out there. We’ll let them answer the ifs and maybes, Mr. Philboyd.”

Chapter 18

Devastation. That was what Kane saw when he clambered out of the Manta and stepped onto the beach that ran along the once-beautiful shore of Hope. It was beautiful no longer. Now the sand was turned a dark shade of pink where blood had been muddied into it, pouring from the victims of the bizarre attack.

The victims lay groaning, their pleas wafting across the beach against the relentless swish of the waves. Their faces were covered in blood. It seeped from every orifice—ears, eyes, nostrils, mouth—rilling down their necks and across their shoulders, their chests. It looked as though someone had thrown dye over them, a rich scarlet so dark it was almost black. Kane drew another breath as he looked at the damage, estimating there were close to seventy victims lying here on the beach or bobbing on the waves.

“We need to check these people first,” Brigid said as she hurried across the beach. “Find out what it is that we’re facing here.”

Kane wanted to argue but he held himself in check. She was right, much as it frustrated him to have to do still more waiting. His eyes scanned the body-littered beach, people’s faces racked in agony staring back at him at every turn.

Brigid Baptiste was crouching by a nearby body—a man of perhaps twenty with a shaved head—and she ran a penlight over the wounds to better see them in the dusk.

“It’s okay,” Brigid soothed as she ran the beam over the man’s bloody features. “It’s over now.”

The man tried to respond but he just began spluttering, blood catching in his throat. He hacked the blood up, retching until a crimson line was spat across the sand beside him.

How Brigid had settled on him and not one of the numerous others, Kane didn’t know. Bodies were strewed all across the beach and more limp forms floated in and out with the tide where they had fallen into the ocean. Twenty yards away, one of the piers was piled with bodies, one woman hanging over the side, dangling from fishing lines like a string puppet, her red-gray hair fluttering in the breeze.

“What happened here?” Grant asked as he made his way across the beach to join his allies. “Are they dead?”

“No,” Brigid confirmed without looking up. “Not yet.”

“So much blood,” Kane muttered, his gaze sweeping across the darkened sand. He had seen terrible things in his life, both as a magistrate and in his field role with Cerberus. Man’s inhumanity to man seemed boundless, and that was before factoring in the insane peccadilloes of alien infiltrators and the numerous other monsters Kane had faced and beaten. But this—this was on a scale he had rarely seen, and it wasn’t like the bombing raid that had taken Beausoleil a year ago, leveling the ville in the space of a few minutes. No, there had been something understandable in that action and in the other travesties he had witnessed, something almost clinical and artificial in the way in which the attacks had been performed, the lives had been taken. But this was an attack on individuals, dozens of them, each left bleeding from the face.

While Brigid examined another victim, Kane trotted over to the pier and clambered up one of its struts until he reached the dangling figure of the woman. Close up, he could see the streaks of dried blood traced like webbing across her face, her mouth open, eyes closed.

“Ma’am, you okay?” Kane asked, ignoring the other groaning figures sprawled on the pier. “Ma’am?”

She didn’t answer, not even when he prodded her. She was dead from massive brain trauma, the blood leaking from wherever it could as her brain collapsed in on itself.

Pulling a knife from its boot-mounted sheath, Kane cut the woman free from her fishing lines, watched as she tumbled into the ocean. It wasn’t respectful, but it was better than where she had been left, hanging like that from her own fishing line.

Grant had made his way to the edge of the beach where it met a paved road, and he stood with one foot up on the foot-high stone barricade that marked the delineation between beach and road, gazing down the streets that led into Hope. The airship was waiting there, looming over the roofs of the houses like a storm cloud, its sleek lines turned a burnt-orange by the ebbing sun. He and Kane had not been able to land the Mantas any closer than the beach, the settlement had become so built up with the influx of refugees over the past twelve months.

Not everyone had been caught up in the human destruction. A number of people wandered about the streets in dazed confusion, while some had stopped to administer medical assistance or to simply give comfort to the wounded. Grant recognized one of the helpers as Mallory Price, a tall, gangly woman in her early fifties with disheveled blond hair cut close to her head. Price was a local physician who had worked with Cerberus before. When she spotted Grant standing at the edge of the beach, she nodded to him and beckoned him over, unwilling to leave the patient whose face she was suturing.

The woman’s hair was shorter than Grant remembered and he commented on it as he walked over to join her. “What happened here, Mallory?” he asked.

“I honestly have no idea,” Price admitted. “One minute it was a normal afternoon, the next there was this noise—music—and when I looked out my window, I saw this thing hovering there in the sky.”

Grant scratched his shaved head. “Music? What kind of music?”

“Elgar,” Price said. “Seemed to be coming from speakers set up beneath the airship.”

Noting Grant’s lead, Kane and Brigid had joined him and they acknowledged Mallory briefly before she continued.

“Do you think the music did this?” Brigid asked.

Price shrugged. “Can’t say for sure, but whatever it was, it didn’t affect everyone. It wasn’t random, neither. It seemed to target specific people, more and more of them as it went on.”

“And what did they do?” Kane asked.

“They danced,” the local woman said, as if it was obvious.

Grant made a show of looking about him at the blood-spattered bodies. “Looks to me like they danced themselves to death,” he growled.

Thanking Price, the Cerberus trio began striding down the street toward where the airship loomed.

“Everyone put in earplugs,” Kane instructed as they hurried. “We’ll stay in contact by Commtact.”

Without hesitation, Brigid and Grant followed Kane’s lead, popping little earplugs from their field kits and slipping them inside their ears. After that, the moaning voices of the wounded dulled to a distant whine.

It had been just six minutes since they had landed the Mantas, and already it felt too long. Kane ran, leading the way down the tight street that led to the hovering airship, and Brigid and Grant kept pace. The streets were littered with wounded, just a few here and there, lying in bloody splashes as if caught in an explosion. Many of them were bleeding, red glistening on their faces, running down the side of their heads. They bled from the ears, the nose, the mouth, just like the people on the beach.

As they neared the airship, the Cerberus team saw fewer wounded. Instead, there were people standing and moving, jigging on the spot as if caught up in a grand dance. They twirled in place or spun together, taking one another arm in arm, fixed, rictus grins on their faces. Grant halted by one pair and put his arm between them, but they ignored him, batting his arm aside as they hurried through the intricate steps of their routine.

From overhead, it looked like a massive circle of dancers, each one moving in time, like peering inside the workings of a pocket watch. Several laughing figures strode through the center of it all at a wide junction where four streets converged. Kane drew back the moment he spotted them, hugging the outside wall of a sun-faded house and ushering his team to do the same with a motion of his empty hand. The Sin Eater had reappeared in his right hand automatically, though he held it high to his shoulder, analyzing what he could see.

“What is it?” Brigid whispered, the words boosted by the Commtact pickup and relayed to both Kane and Grant on an open channel.

“Two...no, make that three people, walking among the dancers, dressed kind of strange,” Kane said.

He watched the figures—two women and one man—stride through the group of frustrated, whirring dancers, laughing and pointing as first one, then another of the dancers dropped to their knees, clutching at their heads in agony.

“They’re our perps, all right,” Kane finished.

“Three of them, or four?” Grant checked, subvocalizing the question and trusting the Commtact to relay it to Kane.

“I see three,” Kane said. “Two hers and a him. Split up, we’ll try boxing them in.”

With a single word of acknowledgment, Grant and Brigid peeled away from the wall and headed in different directions, sprinting through the nearby streets, seeking alternate routes to the convergence.

Brigid took a right turn, then another, making her way around to the far side of the junction. She found a maintenance ladder attached to the side of a taller building used for storage and eyed it appraisingly. The ladder operated on a sliding system and had been bolted to the side of the building so that its lowest rung hung about nine feet above the ground, too high for the average person to reach with ease. Ideally, a workman would attach another ladder at ground level and climb up to the unit that was secured to the wall, but Brigid had no time for that. Figuring it for the most direct route to the Dorians, she ran at the wall and leaped, her firm muscles launching her with such force that she could snag the ladder’s bottom rung with one outstretched hand. She hung there for a moment, twisting in the air before pulling herself up.

Sheathed in black leather, Brigid scrambled up the ladder like an insect up a wall, and within seconds she was atop the building’s sloping roof, arms outstretched for balance as she sprinted across it toward the convergence of streets ahead and below. Looming very near above her was the airship, poised like the mythical Sword of Damocles, and Brigid eyed it from up close for the first time. Its body was intricately tooled, with elaborate patterns sewn or printed into the silver material of the balloon, a true work of art. Gantries and scaffolds ran across the balloon’s surface like the rigging of a ship, with great pipes and spines poking from it in the manner of a surrealist hedgehog.

Brigid dropped down to the roof, snatching her TP-9 from its holster as she turned her attention to the street below.

* * *

M
EANWHILE
G
RANT
had turned left after he had departed from Kane’s position, and he rapidly lost himself in a network of alleyways that cut into one another like a maze. Grant took a steadying breath as he made his way down the alleys, keeping his mind focused on where he needed to be. Around and to the left would bring him to the crossroads that was his target; he just needed to find the path of least resistance.

Coming up on his left, Grant saw an open doorway in a white stucco wall, and he turned into it as he reached it, almost knocking down a man washing dishes at a grimy basin.

“Just passing through,” Grant said before the startled man could react.

Grant dashed through a doorway and into the next room of the building, finding himself in a large dining area. It was some kind of restaurant, the decor cheap and run-down, the food not much better, most likely catering to the influx of refugees that Hope had endured over the past year. As he hurtled through, weaving around the wide tables like a guided missile, Grant noticed one woman slump against the table, crashing headfirst into her meal, much to the astonishment of her fellow diners. Grant recognized the telltale traces of blood trickling from her ear holes, realized that the fatal music or whatever it was was beginning to affect the people in this place.

Keep moving, he told himself. Just get there
.

* * *

K
ANE
WAITED
,
back pressed against the wall, watching the eerie dancers as they whirled mindlessly to the soundtrack pumping from overhead. Despite his earplugs, Kane could hear the music, albeit muffled. The unwilling participants danced as if they had no strength in their limbs, moving like puppets. It was unsettling to watch.

The strangely garbed people in the midst of it all were laughing and talking among themselves.

“Look at the way they spin,” said blond-haired Cecily, “like something you’d see at a fairground.”

“Marvelous, is what it is,” Hugh agreed. “You’ve outdone yourself here, Antonia. Truly.”

The brunette’s eyelids fluttered as she held the many dancers in her thrall. “Do you really think so?” she asked, fishing for more compliments. “It’s challenging to keep so many whirling at once, like juggling batons.”

“Some have fallen,” Cecily admitted, a little embarrassed for her colleague.

“All part of the artistry,” Hugh corrected with a joyful click of his heels. “Behold the dance of death, its participants mere fruit flies, whose lives are cut—” he slapped the edge of one hand into his palm with a slap “—abruptly!”

Kane’s Commtact chimed to life as first Brigid and then Grant checked in. They were both in place, with a good view of the action.

Kane stepped forward, his Sin Eater held casually at his side. “Neat trick,” he said. “Care to tell me how it’s done?”

Cecily jumped with surprise, blushing delightfully as Kane stepped into view. “Mercy, have you missed one, Antonia?” she decried. “This one is not dancing, he’s threatening.”

“Yes, and the cad’s holding a pistol,” Hugh added, his keen eyes fixing on Kane’s handblaster.

“There’s another,” Antonia told them, her eyelids fluttering more intently, “watching from...just above us.”

Hugh turned his head, scanning the rooftops until he spotted Brigid crouched snugly on the roof of a white-painted building. “So there is,” he said. “Well, Antonia, I have to say that this rather ruins the effect.”

“And it was all going so elegantly, too,” Cecily scoffed.

Kane could just barely discern the words, his earplugs keeping out all but the loudest of noises. But he heard the airship’s speakers droning on, felt the thrum of the rotor blades as they kept it afloat in the sky. And he watched as the music played on, but everyone in the square—all thirty people there—suddenly dropped to the ground, clutching their heads in agony.