Dragon City

by James Axler

  THE MOMENT PASSED. The swirling pattern of the interphaser dissipated around Kane and he found himself looking around the mat-trans chamber, its familiar walls of brown-tinted armaglass shimmering into view.

  Kane placed a hand to his head, rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand for a moment, feeling the pressure there. “What hit me?” he muttered.

  Taking a deep breath, he looked around the mat-trans chamber. He had used this mat-trans unit numerous times in his role as a Cerberus field agent; at one point it had formed the main route in and out of the hidden mountain redoubt. The mat-trans was a system of teleportation developed by the U.S. military in the twentieth century, and a number of similar units were located across the country. The interphaser had been rigged to access this same point, allowing the Cerberus operatives to utilize the same location despite the differences in the technologies.

  The chamber looked much as it always had, tiled walls and ceiling with its pocks and vents for expunging the gas created by matter transfer. The armaglass looked subtly different, Kane noticed, seeing the vinelike creepers that clung to the exterior like grasping fingers, each one made of rock. There was rock, too, along the edges of the chamber, running where the walls met the floor, piling high in the corners like sand in a beach house left open to the elements. Kane ignored it, reaching for the exit door, automatically powering the Sin Eater pistol into his hand from its hidden holster beneath his sleeve.

  The official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Unfolded to its full extension, the automatic pistol measured less than fourteen inches in length and fired 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 for the weapon 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 as one 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.

  Clutching his Sin Eater in his right hand, Kane used his left to tap in the mat-trans door code. He waited, listening to the door’s faint hiss as the seal unlocked. Warily, he stepped out into the antechamber room beyond, Sin Eater poised in front of him.

  Kane relied on something that had been referred to as a point-man sense, an inherent ability to detect danger before it became readily apparent. It was this sense that had made him so crucial on field missions back when he was a hard-contact Magistrate, and it had ensured his survival countless times. However, while it may have appeared supernatural, Kane’s point-man sense was actually a shrewd combination of the traditional five senses, promoting an almost Zen-like oneness with his surroundings and allowing him to pick up on anything that didn’t belong.

  Right now, however, it seemed almost that the whole room didn’t belong. This was the operations center of the Cerberus redoubt, or at least it had been. The room should have been familiar to Kane; he had walked this vast chamber numerous times over the past few years. Once dominated by twin rows of computer terminals, the sleek lines of technology had been replaced with the roughness of stone, its patterns not carved but eroded, a harsh product of nature.

  The vast chamber was faintly lit, traceries of volcanic magma glowing in the walls like veins, bringing a dull orange light into the area. Rock covered every surface, the twin aisles of computers buried beneath its suffocating grasp. Even the floor had been replaced, its smooth surface overwhelmed by the jagged roughness of a layer of rock, all of it colored a dull brown like mud.

  For a moment Kane was overwhelmed, too, his senses reeling from the familiar made sick, twisted upon itself and turned into nightmare. The security, the sanctity of his base—his home—had been breached, changed, besmirched and left in ruins. Kane had seen it before, almost two months ago when he had explored this place under its other name, when it had been Life Camp Zero, prison for the New Order of Ullikummis. Even so, it still shook him to see it like this. It was like revisiting a childhood nightmare, its potency still vibrant years after the dreamer believed it conquered.

  Kane’s eyes twitched left and right as he searched the ruined room for company. There had been guards here once, troops loyal to Ullikummis, but they had been ejected along with the Cerberus rebels when the place had been evacuated. Deserted, it appeared as if it had simply been left to rot.

  But there was someone there now, waiting in the chair that had once belonged to Lakesh Singh, its lines obese where the stone had lashed to its sides like runnels of rainwater. Humanoid, the thing’s bulbous head lolled at an angle, the grayness of its skin darker than the last time Kane had seen him, wide, upslanting eyes narrowed as if half asleep, their glossy black wells bottomless as ever. When standing, the pale-skinned creature was about five feet in height, and he wore an indigo smock, a simple item of sheer fabric that reached down his short legs to his feet. There was a two-inch hole in the center of the smock, the material clinging there to the creature’s chest, congealed blood sticking to the ruined tunic, plastering it to the creature’s chest. Despite his wound, the figure had a stillness about him, but that had ever been so from the first time Kane had met him.

  “Balam,” Kane said, speaking the creature’s name like a curse.

  “Kane,” Balam replied weakly. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  Chapter 12

  Rosalia’s dog was barking frantically, and it sounded loud in the enclosed space of the covered passageway. Grant ignored it.

  “Everyone back,” he ordered. “Right now.”

  The dog continued to bark, peppering its noise with plaintive whines as the watery thing began to form three feet in front of it. The dripping water was coming faster now, pooling on the floor in swirling circles dark as an undertaker’s diary. There were pools all around them now, Grant saw, subtle drips from the ceiling creating a patchwork of tiny puddles across the hard white cobbles of the ground. Grant could see the first figure emerging from the pool in front of Rosalia and her dog, the water rising impossibly from the puddles and creating limbs and a torso, the whole swaying thing wending in place as it rose and took solid shape.

  “Get back,” Grant ordered again, recalling the Sin Eater to hand from its hiding place in his wrist holster. The fourteen-inch-long muzzle appeared in his hand instantaneously, its parts clicking into place as the mechanism shot it from its hidden guard.

  The water figure shimmered, the moonlight playing off its lines and contortions as it grew taller, its body filling it with a roar like pouring rain. Wide shoulders appeared, curving downward like waterfalls, its limbs long and malformed, the hands shaped like the paddles of a rowboat. It was headless still, twisting in place as its legs expanded out of the pooling water beneath it.

  Domi and the twin Tigers of Heaven had shuffled backward, easing themselves swiftly through the rounded archways along the left side of the covered passage and out into the hexagonal courtyard. The light was brighter out here, where all around them the fractured buildings pushed against one another as they grasped for the narrowed eye of the moon.

  Under the portico, Rosalia’s dog barked, lips pulling back to show its teeth as the water thing grew in stature, swirling in place. The figure was six feet tall now, more than that as its calves and ankles took shape, its feet sucked out of the pooling water like a man dragging himself from quicksand. A sluicing of water broke at its neck—or where its neck should be—the frothing waves twinkling with spindrift as the moonbeams played across them. Grant took a shot at it then,
his Sin Eater spitting a single 9 mm bullet at its still-forming head from just seven feet away. The bullet cut the air, the sound of the blaster loud in the enclosed space, and drilled into the wall behind the forming man shape.

  “That’s the only warning you get,” Grant called, apprehensively recalling the terrible demise of Hassood on the video record.

  The mongrel growled and barked, showing its teeth to the forming figure of water. Rosalia grabbed the hound by its scruff, pulling it back.

  Grant sighted the figure as Rosalia pulled her dog back, trying to make it out. It appeared silver in the moonlight, strips of nothingness, an ever-changing dimension to its body. It was water, clear through, rushing water whose ebbs and flows twinkled like witchfire.

  Rosalia was at the line formed by the archways, pulling at her dog’s neck, holding it back as best she could. She watched in dismay as the figure made of water stepped forward. No, stepped was the wrong word—it flowed, moving with all the grace and temerity and persistence of a raging river bursting its banks.

  “We saw you hurt our friend,” Grant called. “I’m not going to hold off shooting you if I have to.”

  The water thing ignored Grant’s warning, rushing toward him with the force of a downpour. Grant snapped off a swift burst of fire as it approached, watching as the bullets passed harmlessly into its body, only to emerge on the other side, wet but otherwise unmarked.

  The transparent figure glided across the paving stones toward Grant as he backed away, upon him in a second. Grant snapped off another burst of bullets, cacophonous in the tight-walled space, as one of the thing’s watery arms cleaved the air toward him. The paddle-like hand struck Grant hard across the chest, lashing against his breastbone and knocking him backward so that he went stumbling into the far wall. Grant lost his footing, kicking out and back as he crashed into the wall, knocking the radio unit flying as he fell to the ground. His chest was soaked, his shirt wringing wet and the shadow suit he wore beneath it clinging to his skin.

  He looked up, bringing his Sin Eater out in front of him as the shimmering water man washed through the space between them like rain, sluicing toward him in an unstoppable torrent. Grant’s Sin Eater spit again, unleashing another clutch of bullets as the figure hurtled toward him.

  Rosalia’s dog was barking angrily now, the hair on its back standing up, its tail pointed and stiff as an arrow, and she had to pull it back by the scruff of its neck, keeping it from being hit by Grant’s gunfire. The bullets whizzed past both of them, cutting through the first of the water creatures in splashing streaks, cutting lines from its liquid body as they zipped through it and into the crumbling wall behind.

  Incredibly, the liquid monster gave no reaction to the bullets cutting through it. Instead it just hurtled on toward Grant where he lay by the radio, its body instantaneously re-forming where the bullets had tried to wound it, leaving no more trace than a stone dropped into the ocean.

  Grant rattled off another blast, unable to fully appreciate the strange creature in the insubstantial lighting beneath the portico. In the instant before the thing reached him, Grant saw it as a man drawn in twinkling silvery lines, incomplete thanks to the darkness of the shadows, a blur in the air. And behind that figure, Grant saw something else moving, another of the watery figures emerging from the pools that littered the floor beyond the covered passage.

  * * *

  LESS THAN TEN FEET FROM Grant’s position, Domi, Kishiro and Kudo found themselves facing their own menaces. Unnoticed, pools of water had formed in the hexagonal courtyard that led into the covered passageway. They lay there, shimmering darkly in the moonlight as if from a heavy rain. When Domi and the twin Tigers of Heaven had backed out into the courtyard, those pools had suddenly begun to stream upward, forming more of the waterlike men with whom Grant was struggling.

  Alerted by some uncanny sense, Domi spun in time to see the first of them wind out of the ground, swirling into shape the way water streams down a drain when one removes the plug. Each of the creatures formed like that, five of them shimmering into ghostly shape as they clambered from the pools in a wash.

  “Look sharp, people,” Domi instructed. “We’ve got trouble.”

  As she spoke, the first of the weird creatures reached the completion stage of its formation, and immediately it was running at her, attracted by her scent or noise or…something. Quite why these water creatures had been attracted to the Cerberus warriors—and to Hassood before them—was a mystery right now, but immediately Domi realized it may go some way to explaining why the city seemed deserted, its populace hidden within their locked homes as though in a state of siege.

  Like Grant, Domi’s instinctive reaction was to pull her gun—in her case, a Detonics .45 Combat Master. The Combat Master was a compact revolver finished in metallic silver, its sleek lines flashing in the moonlight as she pulled it from the holster at the small of her back. Domi reeled off her first shot even before she had her target, bringing her weapon around as she ducked and spun away from the onrushing figure of the human carved from flowing water. With a flash of ignition powder, Domi’s bullet shot across the courtyard, snagging the otherworldly figure through the top of its left shoulder in a splash of spilling water. The creature didn’t slow for a second; it just kept charging at Domi as she flung herself out of its way like some demented jack-in-the-box.

  Behind Domi, the twin Tigers of Heaven warriors had set themselves in fighting stances at her warning, taking up defensive positions as the strange water creatures grew in stature all around them, their bodies wending into shape from the spilled pools of water. Both Tigers had drawn their katana swords, each blade over twenty-five inches in length and stored in a decorative sheath slung low at their hips. The blades sang as they exited their sheaths, the metal vibrating infinitesimally to create an eerie note that ran around the courtyard in a mournful echo like a tolling bell. Every member of the Tigers of Heaven was a highly trained warrior, intimately versed in the traditional fighting techniques of the samurai. However, while the warriors could appear traditionalist in their ways, they were also exceptionally competent in the more modern arts of combat, able to employ handguns and automatic rifles with breathtaking grace.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder, both fearsome warriors readied their blades as the first wave of the water creatures rushed them.

  Kudo took a pace forward, stepping into his attack as he swung the two-foot-long blade through the air, cutting into the nearest water warrior roughly where its third and forth rib would be. The sword slashed into the water form, its keen edge cutting effortlessly across the figure and slicing a line straight through it. However, even as the sword was passing through the thing’s body, the water was reknitting behind it, sealing its path over with the speed of thought.

  Surprised, Kudo stumbled slightly as he found his blade cutting through the creature with no more effort than plunging it into the contents of a filled bath. As he did so, the water creature reached out, its shimmering arm glistening as moonlight played across its seemingly solid surface. Kudo ducked, throwing himself out of the path of the creature’s thrusting attack even as he regained his balance.

  Beside him, Kishiro had favored a two-handed grip on his own katana, and he plunged it at his own foe from above his head, the blade cutting downward from an almost horizontal position of rest. The katana drove into the humanoid figure’s head, driving a line through the center of its forehead and drilling through the water in a rush of foam and splatter. Drops of water spilled from the thing’s half-formed face, the moon’s silvery rays painting in the suggestion of eyes, mouth and nose where the water rippled across its surface.

  The sword remained in the thing’s head for a moment, cutting deeper with a minimal effort on the part of its wielder. Then the shimmering figure shoved out with both arms, its curving, malformed hands driving outward until they slapped against Kishiro�
�s chest with the force of a waterfall. Kishiro tumbled backward in a wash of water, losing his footing and slamming into the cobbled road with a fierce exhalation of lost breath. The front of his shirt was soaked through and he splashed against the ground where, all around him, a puddle had formed.

  Then, Kishiro began to struggle as he found the water pulling him down, dragging him against the cobbles in a magnetic grip, down into the solid mass of the road itself. His grip slipped on the katana, and he felt it leave his grasp, skittering away from his hand.

  Kishiro was a brave warrior, trained and disciplined in the art of fighting honorably. He did not scream as the water sucked him down with the power of quicksand; he barely even called for help as he felt his body drawn impossibly down through the solid mass of the street itself.

  “Help me, I require assistance,” he said, conscious that his companions were already engaged. “Please, someone…”

  Kudo turned at his colleague’s eerie disappearance, dropping as his own foe swung one of its heavy arms at him. The arm made a sloshing sound as it swept through the air, dappling Kudo’s black hair with a sheen of dewy water.

  Without turning, Kudo slashed out with his katana blade once again, cutting low, slicing through the strange creature’s ankles. The thing’s left ankle split, the water parting as the blade hacked through it, and it lurched to one side.

  Kudo paid it no mind, driving himself onward to where his fellow Tiger of Heaven was disappearing beneath the surface of the dark pool of water in the street. “I’m coming,” he assured him as his feet slapped against the cobblestones.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, JUST A DOZEN feet away beneath the portico, Grant lay on his back, squeezing his Sin Eater’s trigger as that furious deluge that was shaped like a man came hurtling across the ground toward him, a dark trail of damp in its wake. Rosalia was watching in trepidation as Grant’s shots cut through the watery creature lunging at him, her hand deep in the fur at the scruff of her dog’s neck as it strained to get closer.