Immortal Twilight (22 page)

“Attention, people of the colonies,” Hugh said, his voice booming loudly above the droning sounds of the ship’s rotor. “Today you shall be civilized and become that greatest of all works of art—a society. Hear my words and love them.”

Poised thirty feet below in the shadow of the airship, the people of Luilekkerville did not know what to make of the stranger’s announcement. They stood and waited, wondering what would come next.

Hugh strode back into the passenger compartment and nodded once to his tiny audience of two. “Our tale begins with the ephemeral bubble that is man’s civilization,” he explained. “So fragile.” He took up his position on the golden throne, brushing the loose strands of hair from his face where they had become dislodged by the wind.

“Create something, Hugh,” Cecily urged. “Something we all can be proud of.”

“No.” Antonia laughed. “Create something scandalous that we might be magnificently ashamed of instead!”

Hugh smiled that terrible smile once more before closing his eyes to begin the mind meld. “As you will it.”

Chapter 24

Luilekkerville was at war.

For the second time in almost as many days, the sleek, bronze-colored silhouettes of twin Manta craft swooped over the city’s golden towers as Kane, Grant and Brigid hurried to the site of new devastation. Even from this high up, the high-walled settlement had become a picture of bloody carnage, smoke pouring from the buildings, men, women and children openly fighting in the streets. The populace used whatever they could find to maim one another, hunting lone unfortunates in packs, surrounding them and kicking or beating them to death before turning on one another, all sense of community and loyalty forgotten. They used knives and blasters if they had them, sticks, broom handles or merely their own blood-caked hands to kill their enemies. And their enemies were anyone who wasn’t them—even their own children, husbands,
babies.
It was sheer, unmitigated hell. And above it all, watching from the slowly drifting silver bulb of their airship, the four Dorian soldiers applauded as each new horror emerged, as each travesty was committed by man on his fellow man.

Kane powered down the jets and brought the sleek-looking Manta around for a closer look, his mind in turmoil. “It’s hell down there, Baptiste,” he told his colleague.

“I see it,” Brigid replied, her voice ringing with a kind of emptiness that Kane could detect even through the Commtact. Kane brought the Manta around toward the airship where it loomed above the cathedral.

“I’m going in,” Kane instructed over the Commtact.

Grant’s aircraft followed in a wide, well-spread pattern, keeping distance while remaining close enough to protect Kane should things go awry.

There was no indication that the airship was playing any role in the destruction below, no great beams of force or thrum of noise or music. The airship simply waited above the ville, soundless, its rotors spinning as it remained stationary.

* * *

A
BOARD
THE
AIRSHIP
,
Hugh was sitting in his broad-backed throne. It had been repainted from something that Antonia had found among the homes near Cecily’s pleasure garden, and she had turned her artistic flair to it just to give this moment the appropriate sense of occasion.

Hugh’s eyes were closed in deep concentration, manipulating each of the citizens-turned-madmen in his grand spectacle below, his tribute to man’s inhumanity and the ephemeral beauty of war from which civilizations emerged. “How does it look?” he asked.

Cecily and Antonia peered from the open windows while Algernon continued to work the pilot’s controls, holding the great airship in place.

“It looks glorious,” Antonia assured her lover as the devastation spread across the walled city. The pleasure in her face was absolute, and Hugh could detect that joy in her voice. “A thoroughly modern marvel!”

“I like when they kill their own babies,” Cecily remarked, fanning herself delicately with a hand fan of gold and lace. “Such a perfect comment on the senselessness of war, how it taints the very future they fight to hold.”

Hugh nodded. “More baby death,” he said with a grin. “Yes, let us see what we can do.” He turned his attention to the youngest mewling babies he could detect in his mindscape, transforming them into figures of hate in their mothers’ eyes.

Below, mothers turned on their children with wild abandon, stabbing them with kitchen cutlery, bread knives, carving knives, gouging their eyes with spoons.

Cecily squealed as she felt the waves of hate crash against her mental buffers. “Delightful.”

* * *

T
HE
LEAD
M
ANTA
streaked toward the airship like a bronze blur. Inside, Kane was analyzing the heads-up displays, magnifying specific areas of the airship as he did a quick scan on approach. It was a beast of the air, huge as a battleship, with protective spines dotted across its surface. An air assault would not be easy; it would take split-second timing and a whole load of luck to pierce the craft with his harpoon.

The airship’s rotors were turning slowly, and Kane figured it should take a few seconds before they could be brought up to full speed. That might give him the window he needed,
if
he could get his hit in on the first pass. The Dorians hadn’t given any indication that they had spotted him or Grant yet. If he moved quickly, stealthily, Kane might just be able to snag the top front of the craft with his harpoon and tow it away from the city. There was a small gap in the bristling spines there, enough that he could wedge the harpoon in if he could just get the right angle.

“Kane, look!” Brigid gasped from behind him.

“Where?”

“The underside,” Brigid said, tapping Kane’s shoulder to roughly indicate where she meant.

“I don’t see...” he began, but he stopped. He saw it, all right. There was a shaft hanging beneath the body of the great airship, tubular and approximately the length of three men standing on each other’s shoulders. “What is that?” Kane muttered. But he already knew.

“Bomb,” Brigid said, confirming Kane’s fears. “That’s what I’d guess, anyway. Why else would it be placed underneath the craft like that?”

Veering to port, Kane brought up a magnification on the bomb, studying it with trepidation. A metal tube with fins, the thing looked a lot like a nuclear warhead. But its body was covered in a strange coating of jutting, cream-colored bands, and it took Kane a moment to figure out if they were of practical use or simply for decoration. Then he realized what they were, recognizing them from his prior experience with skeletal remains. They were ribs, piled up one after another, creating a kind of eerie protective cage around the length of the missile in sickening precursor to the death it was designed to bring.

“It’s a bomb, all right,” Kane confirmed as he dipped his craft down and away from the airship.

Over his Commtact, Kane heard Grant’s voice raised in concern. “Kane, what’s going on? You’re veering off course.”

“We’re aborting,” Kane instructed.

“Not me,” Grant told him. “These sons of gene glitches almost killed Shizuka. I ain’t about to let them get away....”

“We’re aborting,” Kane repeated. “Grant, they have a bomb. It’s too risky.”

There was a long pause over their linked Commtacts and Kane could feel the weight of the decision that Grant was having to make.

Finally, Grant’s rumbling voice came over the Commtact again. “Following your lead,” he confirmed. “Mission aborted.”

Behind Kane, Brigid was analyzing the scope where Kane had patched through the scan feed of the missile. “The design is familiar,” she said, drawing from her eidetic memory. Kane had seen her do this trick too often to be surprised. Sometimes it seemed that the distaff member of their little crew had an insight into just about everything. “That’s an atom bomb. Rejigged a little, and the decorative flourishes are pretty way out-there, but the basic design is nuclear.”

“Where would they have found that kind of device?” Kane wanted to know.

“Same place they got the airship,” Brigid replied. “Built it themselves. They’re geniuses, remember? Show them the designs for something and these supersoldiers can assimilate and recreate it, improve on it, even completely retool it so that it functions for another purpose.”

“So, chances are we have a live nuke on our hands,” Kane grumbled. “Well, that’s just terrific.”

* * *

A
LGERNON
WATCHED
THROUGH
the pilot’s viewport as the twin Manta craft arced away from him. “It appears that we have some company at our little exhibition,” he informed the others.

“Art for the masses,” Cecily chirruped excitedly. “And they’re just in time for your grand finale.”

Algernon’s hand wavered over the release control for the atom bomb, but he hesitated. “Not just yet,” he announced. “Let’s allow Hugh his moment in the sun before we create a second sun in the sky, shan’t we.”

The immortals watched as the Mantas whirled away like fireflies, their golden chassis catching the sun like glistening streaks of lightning.

* * *

“L
IVE
NUKE
,” G
RANT
REPEATED
as he absorbed Kane’s assessment over the Commtact. “This week just keeps getting worse, don’t it?”

“Sure does,” Kane agreed.

Grant’s Manta followed Kane’s path through the smoke-smeared sky, dropping close to Luilekkerville’s walls.

Kane shook his head in irritation. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” he muttered as he watched the expanding bloodshed below. The knock-on effects of a nuclear detonation would be catastrophic, never mind the immediate loss of life it would cause.

Kane spotted a group of young women attacking an old man who had been shot in the leg by a local magistrate as he tried to escape. The mag watched, smiling as the old man fell to the savage kicks of the young women—not one of them over fifteen—before turning his gun on the nearest of them and transforming her skull into a red smear atop her spurting stump of neck.

The ville was organized in a radial pattern around the central spire of the great cathedral, its single red-glass eye peering out across the current destruction like the sun seen through a haze of radioactive pollution. The “eye” was designed to remind people that they were safe, and it had been based on an older design used by the magistrates to represent the all-seeing eye of the authorities and so keep the population in check. Whatever they called it now, be it the eye of god or his grave, it overlooked a wide square within which hundreds of people were fighting.

“We’re landing,” Kane instructed Grant over the Commtact. “Let’s deal with each mess one at a time, see if we can’t bring some order to the chaos.”

With that, Kane brought the Manta down in a looping arc that settled it just outside the cathedral’s main entrance, giving the deranged populace only a few seconds to scatter or be crushed. It was a risk, but a little shock-and-awe theatrics couldn’t go amiss in a situation like this—get people thinking about something other than beating the living crap out of one another. He needed to capture their minds, snag them away from the influence of the Dorians the same way that Brigid had channeled the darkness in her past to force out the mind thief’s thoughts.

Kane tapped on the Manta’s external speakers and switched his Commtact to that frequency, using its pickup mic to relay his voice to the crowd. “Everybody cease and desist,” Kane ordered. “You’ve been duped into this fight. Return to your homes. I repeat—return to your homes.”

A moment later, Kane had the cockpit hatch open and his flight helmet off, and he and Brigid were scrambling down the wing toward the worst of the fighting. Brigid had shoved the interphaser into a backpack that she had slung over her shoulders. The weight would be an irritation, but she didn’t want to get too far from it right now. It was critical if they were to trap the Dorians in the Cerberus mat-trans.

“We need to split these people up,” Kane told Brigid.

“What do you suggest?” Brigid asked over the noise of chaos.

“You’re the smart one,” Kane told her.

“And you’re the ex-magistrate,” Brigid replied without missing a beat.

Kane thought about this for a half second before reaching into one of the pouches in his belt and plucking out a trio of small ball-bearing-like devices, each one approximately an inch and a half in diameter. “You have any flash-bangs on you?” he asked.

Brigid nodded. “And something better,” she said, pulling out a similar-looking device.

Kane raised an eyebrow querulously as Brigid revealed the device.

“Lab boys call it a tearjerker,” she explained. “Tear gas held in very dense mixture, expands as soon as the shell is broken.”

Kane nodded in appreciation. “Like it,” he said. “I really must start hanging out with the eggheads more.”

Brigid rolled the tearjerker explosives around in her palm, sealing filters in her nostrils with her free hand while Kane did the same. “On three?”

“Sounds good to me,” Kane said, leaping from the Manta’s wing and wading into the crowd.

A moment later the square erupted with explosive bursts of light and a cloud of tear gas, startling the crowds. Kane turned his face away from the first of the explosions, screwing his eyes tight as the second went off yards away.

The ball-bearing-like flash-bangs contained a tiny explosive charge but were not capable of making any notable damage. Instead, they generated a bright flash like a lightning strike coupled with an extremely loud bang. To the unwary, the result looked for all the world like a massive explosion going off and it served not only to startle opponents but also to temporarily blind and deafen them if they stood too close. The Cerberus field teams had employed the devices in a variety of ways, but right now Kane hoped that the illusion of a bigger attack than the one that the crowds were engaged in would serve to disperse at least a portion of the frenzied attackers who had become caught up in the dangerous mental thrall.

Brigid’s tearjerkers, meanwhile, generated an expanding cloud of smoke, irritating the eyes of anyone who caught a whiff of it. All around her, a whole section of the crowd doubled over, hacking and wheezing as their eyes began to stream with tears. Brigid watched as they tumbled to the ground, their immediate enmities forgotten.

Twenty feet from Kane’s craft, Grant brought his own Manta down to rest with a resounding clank of metal on stone. As the Manta settled, Grant checked the sensor display, which gave a full 360-degree view of the remarkable aircraft. There was a group of magistrates attacking another group made up of young people, many of them pushing baby strollers at their attackers like rams. The babies were out of the strollers, thrown at the mags like weapons, and Grant felt sick to his stomach as he watched two tiny figures slapped to the ground with a thud.

Grant reached forward, tapping the control board of the Manta and bringing the cooling jets back to life. Before anyone realized what was happening, Grant’s Manta spouted twin jets of air—using the same air-spike technology that powered the craft through the sky—sending the unwary assailants careening backward as if caught up in the grip of a hurricane. The move ended the battle in an instant.