Dragon City

by James Axler

  But it hadn’t really been Brigid Baptiste, had it?

  Kane lay in the bed, alone in the private room that had been set aside within Shizuka’s winter lodge for his recuperation. Sunlight lashed across the bedsheets that arched over his firm chest, bright shards of yellow-white drilling into the room through a tiny break in the drapes. Kane looked at those dazzling yellow strips for a long moment, thinking about Brigid Baptiste and all that had happened in that hidden cavern.

  She had shot him. Brigid Baptiste, his anam-chara, his “soul friend” through eternity, had shot him full in the chest, emptying a whole clip as if there could be any doubt about her intention. But had she really been Brigid Baptiste? That was the real question tugging at the forefront of Kane’s mind.

  An operative for Cerberus, Brigid Baptiste had been Kane’s and Grant’s field partner for as long as they had been a part of the organization. And more than that, they were friends and she and Kane were eternally linked by their anam-chara bond. But seven weeks ago, during the attack on Cerberus, Brigid had disappeared; her biolink transponder somehow shut down, rendering her untraceable. For six weeks Kane had waited for a sign, a hint that she was still alive as he knew she must be, as that thing deep inside him, that bond they shared, insisted she must be. But that woman in the cave, with her fiery red hair and emerald eyes, that woman who had emptied the entire contents of her blaster into his chest, that had not been Brigid. It had been something wearing her like a suit, mimicking her actions. She had stood differently, spoken differently, acted differently. Not a clone, but a suit of flesh.

  Kane stared at the shaft of sunlight, listening to the growing commotion outside his room. That was what had awoken him, he realized. Something was going on out there, raised voices and clattering feet, people talking over one another in the way of frantic decision makers. Slowly, begrudgingly, Kane pushed the covers from his weary body and hefted himself from the bed on unsteady feet.

  He was a muscular man, well built with a powerful torso and arms, the legs of a sprinter. His dark hair was messy now, brushing past his collar, and stubble darkened his jaw, the start of a beard. He moved slowly, as if weary, heavy.

  How long have I been asleep? he wondered. It felt bad, cloudy, as if he’d been drugged. Maybe he had—he had taken a chest full of bullets and even the armored weave of the shadow suit could only do so much to cut down that physical trauma, even if it had saved his life.

  His eyes ached, and he turned away from the brightness that lanced through the drapes like a blade, rubbing at his face. It felt hard, his face, like bone. There was a ridge there, across his left cheek where the scar had been, a ragged hunk of something reaching out above his brow. His vision wasn’t good, either, he realized, testing himself for a moment by running his pointed index finger in front of his nose. He could see, to a reasonable degree at least, out of his right eye, but his left was just a blank, the waggling finger disappearing behind a screen as it passed his nose.

  “Shit.”

  Beneath the ridge, his jaw remained the same, bristly now with days-old beard, sore and itchy and dry, as if the remnants of paste had been stuck there. What’s more, he was thirsty, his mouth tasting bad like dead things rotting.

  The noises outside the door were getting louder, or maybe he was just becoming more aware of them. Men were talking in raised voices, then a woman’s voice, the pitch higher and calmer at the same time. Kane felt like death warmed over as he reached for the robe lying on the chair beside the bed and made his way to the door.

  He stepped through the door on unsteady feet, clinging tightly to the handle while he waited for the feeling of nausea to pass. Beyond that, a corridor lined with wood paneling, neatly tooled with a simple but graceful design of lines and curves. The corridor seemed lit by the evening sun, the illumination turning it all orange and tan, the colors of autumn.

  Kane hurled himself along the corridor, throwing his body forward and willing himself to—dammit all—stay on his feet. He was fine; he just needed air or food or both.

  There was a guard at the end of the corridor, a stern Asiatic face peering querulously at Kane as he stumbled toward him. “Do you require help, Kane-san?” the man asked.

  Kane tried to speak, swallowed, tried again. “I’ll be okay,” he said, each word feeling like concrete being poured down his throat. He brushed past the guard, recognized him as one of Shizuka’s warriors. Then he pushed through the twin doors that waited at the end of the corridor, finally locating the source of the kerfuffle.

  * * *

  “BUT IT’S LUDICROUS,” Donald Bry insisted. “No, more than that—it’s impossible.”

  Lakesh fixed his usually dour assistant with the cold stare of reason. “Impossible or not, it behooves us to investigate it.”

  “Investigate what?” Kane asked from the door, grogginess in his voice.

  Everyone in the temporary ops center looked around, surprised to see Kane standing there, surprised to see Kane standing at all. Reba DeFore was the first to speak, hurrying over to Kane at a swift trot, her braided hair swinging to and fro as she did so.

  “Kane, what are you doing here?” she began. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.” There was clear concern in her voice, not just the clinical concern of a physician but that of a friend.

  “I can stand,” Kane said, brushing her away, “so I’m on my feet. My legs aren’t broken unless you want to tell me different, Doc.”

  “But, Kane…”

  He held up his hand, halting her midflow. “Investigate what?” he repeated, fixing the others in the room with his steel-cold stare.

  After a few seconds’ pause, Lakesh finally spoke up, making his way toward Kane to greet him. “It is good to see you up and about, Kane,” he said. “You had us all quite worried.”

  “You’re still worried,” Kane assessed. “Cut the fat and give me the meat.”

  “We have had an emergency beacon from a rather unexpected source,” Lakesh explained.

  “The source being Cerberus,” Brewster Philboyd added from his position at one of the three laptop terminals in the room. Something blinked on his screen.

  “Cerberus,” Kane repeated.

  “It’s impossible,” Donald Bry insisted, pushing a hand absentmindedly through his ruffled copper curls. “Cerberus was evacuated after the attack. It’s empty and most of the equipment is offline, unusable.”

  Kane thought about it for a few seconds. He had been based at the redoubt set in the Montana mountains for so long that it was still difficult getting his head around the change of location. “Was the emergency alarm unusable, Donald?” he asked.

  Bry shrugged. “Hard to say. I do have an inventory sitting around here somewhere showing what worked and what—”

  “Well, it works now and someone pressed it,” Kane reasoned, cutting him off. “Which means someone needs to take a look, right?”

  Lakesh agreed and, after a moment, both Philboyd and Donald nodded, too.

  “In which case,” Kane said, “suit me up and let’s get the interphaser fired up.”

  “Kane, you cannot be serious,” Lakesh scoffed, and Reba DeFore added her own concern, too.

  Kane ignored them. “I may have been out of it for a little while, but unless something major has changed you don’t have a whole lot of field operatives to send,” he said. “Check on an alarm—that’s a one-man op. I could do it in my sleep. You want me to take Grant with me, that’s fine…”

  “Grant’s out in the field,” Lakesh explained, “along with Domi, Rosalia and several Tigers of Heaven. But I could easily request one of the Tigers go look into…”

  “I know the redoubt,” Kane said. “I’ll go.”

  “I thought you were…blind,” Bry noted, feeling terribly self-conscious as soon as he’d made the point.

>   Kane held his hand up, rocking it through the air just a little like a teeter-totter. “Comes and goes,” he said. “But right now, I figure you don’t have many other people to send, though. From what I’ve heard, it’s not like Edwards is going anywhere.”

  Lakesh placed a gentle hand on Kane’s arm, the ex-Mag’s muscles bulging against the material of his robe. “Kane, you do not need to prove anything to anyone in this room,” he said. “While your gesture is appreciated, no one here expects you to investigate this personally. I shall arrange for one of Shizuka’s people to step in while we are undermanned. Their report will be more than sufficient.”

  Kane stood in front of the older man, his expression hard, the bumping protrusion by his eye looking like a smear. “I’m going,” he said. “I woke up for a reason. That call you got, that’s Baptiste.”

  Reba DeFore took a loud breath as if to speak, but Lakesh turned to her and, with an infinitesimal movement of his head, warned her not to.

  “I hope you are right,” Lakesh said instead.

  With that, Kane turned to get ready for a field mission, while the Cerberus ops team prepared everything for him as best they could. Kane was among the best field operatives Cerberus had ever had, probably the best. Even functioning at less than one hundred percent, he was still nothing less than formidable. If anyone still felt that this mission was foolhardy, none of them said a word.

  Chapter 10

  Grant arrived in the white-walled courtyard like a monsoon, bringing with him an air of tension and barely suppressed rage. He was accompanied by the two Tigers of Heaven, Kudo and Kishiro, who in contrast displayed no trace of emotion. While the Tigers of Heaven checked the area surrounding the hexagonal courtyard, Grant joined Domi and Rosalia where they waited beneath the covered passageway at the side of one of the crookedly towering buildings. Like the others here, this one had no door, just windows that had been boarded up with thick sheets of plasterboard. The whole passageway smelled of wet dog.

  “What the heck happened here?” Grant muttered as he looked around the covered passageway, examining the man-shaped stain on the wall and the discarded radio equipment. Domi was just righting the radio unit, propping it back up and turning a handle to power up its internal dynamo-driven generator. “Where’s Hassood?”

  Standing beside him, Rosalia fixed Grant with her exotic eyes. “You’re staring at him, I think.”

  Grant looked the man-shaped stain up and down more carefully, as if trying to fix a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle in his mind. Behind him, something started dripping, water plink-plinking down from the low ceiling. “What happened to him?”

  “We heard screaming,” Rosalia said, “sounds of a struggle. When I looked…” She stopped, finishing the sentence with a befuddled shrug.

  Behind her, Rosalia’s dog whined, trotting a pace forward and sniffing at the air. Grant wondered if the dog was distracted by the musty smell of tobacco in the area. He looked around and saw a little clutch of cigarette butts in the corner, three crumpled white tabs like teeth made of paper.

  Kneeling by the radio unit, Domi flicked several of the knobs and spoke quietly into the microphone, checking its functionality. “Radio’s still working,” she told Grant. “Whatever came for Hassood did so real quick and they didn’t care about nixing his communications. That suggests they moved fast, even though we didn’t hear any shots.”

  “No shots,” Grant mused. “Then what…?”

  “Wait,” Domi added as she tinkered with the radio unit, “there’s something. Give me a minute here.”

  “Wall’s still wet,” Rosalia told Grant, pressing her hand against it before showing him her palm. The wall appeared sodden to her touch, and her hand came away covered in a watery sheen like dew.

  Grant pressed his own fingers against the wall and sniffed them. It smelled of water, which is to say it didn’t really smell of anything. There was certainly no scent within it to distinguish it as anything else. He looked back at Rosalia’s scruffy mutt where the cur was sniffing at the air, and he wondered if perhaps the dog might be able to smell something that they could not. “What do you think spooked the dog?” Grant asked after a moment’s thought.

  Rosalia shrugged. “He does as he pleases,” she explained. “Who knows why he came down here.”

  As if on cue, the dog whimpered, tilting its head sideways and staring up at the ceiling with its wickedly pale eyes. As he did so, another droplet of water dripped down from the ceiling, landing between his forepaws with a splash. There was a small puddle forming between its feet, Grant saw, swelling like an inky gloss of black beneath the darkened portico.

  “Grant?” Domi said, drawing his attention. When he looked he saw that she had activated a tiny screen light on the top of the radio unit. “Camera.”

  “Still working, too,” Rosalia acknowledged as she joined Grant and Domi.

  “Hassood was recording things,” Grant realized, gently nudging Domi aside. While Domi was good in the field, her ability with technology could be a little primitive. Grant balanced the radio unit on its back edge, examining it in the moonlight. After a moment his thick fingers reached for a recessed panel in the top and a viewscreen flipped up into position, roughly three inches by two. Pictured in real time on the viewscreen, Grant saw his own face, with the ghostly image of Domi’s visage peering over his shoulder.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” Grant muttered as his fingers played across the controls at the side of the communications unit. After a moment the image on the screen blurred slightly as a pop-up menu appeared over it. Grant selected Playback and the trio waited as the internal recording device backtracked through its footage, running backward ten minutes under Grant’s instruction.

  Ducking a drip of water from the ceiling, Kudo stepped back under the portico while the three companions crouched around the tiny flip-up screen, informing Grant that the area appeared clear. Grant acknowledged that, then turned back to the screen and pressed Play.

  On screen, a man’s face appeared, bulging out where he was too close to the tiny camera. The man had dusky skin and a dark beard laced with silver where he was going prematurely gray. He spoke with a thick accent, not bothering to look into the camera, and after a moment Grant recognized the conversation—he had been on the other end of it last time, as the man instructed Grant’s team to meet him at the stone needle. Automatically, Grant glanced back over his shoulder for a couple of seconds, admiring said needle in the moonlight. Another drip of water cut through his vision as it fell from the ceiling above, missing Grant’s nose by just a couple of inches. Rosalia’s pale-eyed dog was standing just a step behind her, back arched, its muscles held taut; the mongrel obviously sensed something and was worried.

  Grant turned back to the screen, watching the tiny time display in the corner as it marched onward, seventeen minutes behind current time. Grant and the others watched the screen, transfixed. Hassood’s hand passed close to the camera lens clutching something metallic.

  “Microphone,” Domi observed.

  Once he had placed the microphone back on its hook, Hassood got up and for a moment the recording showed the familiar image of the covered passageway, the tight arches running along the right of the picture, moonlight through the far end making the automated white balance flicker as it tried to accommodate its inconsistencies. There was a lot of “dirt” to the image, a hazy blue mist across the shadows where the camera could not pick up enough light. Occasionally a scarlet glow would run over the image and it would break up where the laser blast lit the skies above, bathing the covered area in its blood light. For almost three minutes Grant and his allies watched as Hassood paced back and forth, his torso passing the camera from left to right and back again.

  Another minute passed, then another. Kishiro joined the group as they watched, transfixed by the image on the s
creen. Something fizzed to the side of the screen, and again the white balance winked, trying to accommodate the sudden change. Illogically, Grant found himself leaning just a little closer to try to see what was happening, and he realized that the others had done the same, all but Rosalia, whose attention was being diverted by the restless dog at her side. Then Grant saw Hassood’s flank at the right side of the image, a puff of smoke wafting across the camera, and he realized the shock of brilliance had been the man lighting a match for his cigarette.

  For another minute there was nothing, just the dark shape of Hassood as he smoked his cigarette, rocking impatiently as he waited for the Cerberus team to arrive.

  Suddenly, with no warning, the dusky-skinned man came rushing back to the camera, his hand blurring across the image as he grabbed the microphone, frantically peering over his shoulder. Then he was looking at the camera and the whites of his eyes were visible all around the dark pupils. They watched as Hassood spoke into the microphone, his voice fearful, breathless, the words rushing out like water over a burst dam.

  “Mr. Grant, they’re coming,” he said. “They’re coming now.”

  Grant’s voice emanated from somewhere off camera, tinny with static at its peaks. “Back up there, man,” they heard Grant say. “What’s coming? What are you talking—?”