by James Axler
She smiled at that decision.
“I must away, handsome one,” Neekra said to the fallen prince. She leaned in close to him, her lips brushing his cheek easily, as she was taller than the men carrying him. “Be well.”
“Yes,” Durga responded.
With that, the red-skinned woman turned and stepped into the brush. Thurpa expected to follow her movements, given the sheen of her flesh, but within moments, she, too, had disappeared.
“I’m starting to get a little tired of how easily these people can fade into the jungle,” Thurpa grumbled.
“Goddess,” Durga interjected. He waved one of his clawed fingers toward the stretch of forest where the woman had faded.
Thurpa glanced to Magruder and then Makoba, who had remained quiet during the whole exchange. “Can we trust her?”
Durga locked eyes with his minion. “Must.”
Of course we have to, Thurpa thought. The woman was a mind reader.
Any attempts at duplicity against her would be seen through almost instantly. Thurpa made the choice to go along with her, to project nothing but confidence in her relationship with Durga. Anything else would be tantamount to suicide should she discover his true feelings about her.
And again he had that sensation in the pit of his stomach. Neekra was a dangerous woman, but her beauty and grace, the succulent tones of her voice, were almost hypnotic. Legends said that cobras could enchant their prey, freeze them with something beyond fear, to produce the kind of heat and light that would draw in victims like moths. This woman, this queen of Africa, possessed those abilities and then some. He could easily envision her as a snake charmer.
Neekra.
“Enough,” Durga spit.
“I apologize,” Thurpa responded.
“To Kariba,” Durga ordered.
Thurpa glanced sidelong toward Makoba, who remained stony-faced. Whatever he thought about Neekra seemed as if it would stay deeply buried. Maybe beneath enough layers that the woman couldn’t get to it.
Thurpa realized that he was pondering way too much about this. He had to shut down his thinking. Too many doubts would be hard to hide, make him vulnerable if Neekra was a true danger, able to turn him into her prey.
There were enough dangers in Africa to be concerned about. And one of those dangers was approaching with a staff of ancient power, the only tool that could bring his liege back to full life and strength.
Chapter 10
The decision of who was going to be on the exploration team seemed smart and simple in the end, but the discussion about it had gone on for a couple hours, until Kane felt as if he were on the verge of shooting out a window and bounding into the jungle by himself.
Domi and Nathan would be joining them on this excursion, leaving Sela Sinclair in charge of the Cerberus delegation staying behind at the Victoria Falls redoubt. Sinclair was a black woman, which might make things more diplomatic, and with a background as a United States Air Force officer, she was as good a leader as any. Colonel Sinclair and the hulking former Magistrate Edwards would prove to be worth a small army, given the Cerberus redoubt weaponry that they had brought, and Sinclair’s African-American features would make the culture shock of newcomers less jolting should Zambian reinforcements arrive to bolster Lomon, Jonas and Shuka.
Kane also felt better with a smaller troupe. Fargo North would be tagging along, which was something Kane didn’t enjoy, but if they were overrun by kongamato, Domi was a good fighter to have on hand. While Lakesh often spoke of the efficacy of the trinity of Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste, the Cerberus explorer was fully aware of the value of the feral little albino woman. Her senses, her ferocity and her instinctive wits had helped to balance nearly impossible odds before. If Lakesh envisioned Kane, Grant and Brigid as the Three Musketeers, then Domi was their D’Artagnan. She had grown from the wild child who went from illiterate wilderness waif, stuck in a hell pit where she was forced to sell her sex, to a girl who’d learned how to read, and was willing to risk her life for the safety of others.
With Lakesh and Brigid as her teachers, Domi’s education could expand. In five years, she’d developed plenty, but her future, thanks to those two, would be phenomenal.
Right now, she was crouched next to the unmistakable depression of a grenade blast crater. Her nose was wrinkled with disgust.
“Grenade blast. Was it a battle?” Kane asked. So far, they’d been following the tracks of a procession of men. By first count, it seemed as if there were at least forty of them, but up ahead, the group seemed to diminish in size. Since the foot traffic showed no sign of any backtracking, Kane was certain that the force had split into two. One was continuing on toward the Kariba power station, while the rest had broken off and melted into the jungle around them.
“Not a battle. Just cruelty,” Domi answered. She held up a tuft of bloody fur. “Gren blew up rodents.”
Kane nodded, suddenly aware why her nose was wrinkled in disdain. Someone had utilized a hand grenade to eliminate a pest for no other reason than to blow it up. A grenade toss wasn’t the ideal means of taking meat for the night’s cooking pot. There would be more fragments than actual chunks of flesh. The small creatures had been blasted into confetti. He looked around, and was certain that the act must have been done by newcomers to this region. There was little sign that the bandit hordes that surrounded the city-state of Harare had the resources to eliminate rats with precious weaponry, and the millennialists that Kane suspected North was still allied with were similarly stingy about their high explosives.
The cruelty of using the grenade and the “freedom” of wasting it pointed toward one force: Durga, or one of his people, had destroyed the small rodents. Kane was acutely aware of the Nagah prince’s penchant for referring to humans derisively as mammals. It wasn’t too far removed to extrapolate that spite for mammals to one of his followers.
“Good woodsmen,” Domi mentioned. “Disappeared quick. No tracks.”
“Up until this point, they didn’t care if anyone noticed them,” Kane agreed. “But something happened just after that gren went off.”
“Started talking. And look.” Domi pointed toward the earth. Kane, with his point man’s instinct, was able to notice the depression there and a disturbance in the long grasses leading from a copse of trees. It was a faint trail, nothing like the trampling of forty sets of feet on a dirt road, but he was certain there were few who could have picked up the subtle difference and variations as well as either he or Domi. At times Kane thought the albino girl was half wildcat, as much of a hunter as any of Sky Dog’s tribe. Kane had already been a great tracker during his time as a magistrate for Cobaltville, and only sharpened those skills among the Lakota.
“Someone new arrived,” he mused.
The millennialists must have encountered some of their own allies. Thus reunited, they could have sent the other group, likely a local militia, off to form a secure perimeter for whichever trap was being set. Kariba station was too obvious a location for the kongamato to not be some sort of bait. Anything the Millennium Consortium was involved with stank to high hell, part of the reason why he had such loathing for Fargo North.
The technocrats had little concern for human life, only that they had subjects to rule.
“Should I go hunting?” Domi asked. Her hand rested on the rubberized handle of her knife. Though she had a suppressed Copperhead, the feral albino girl was by far one of the deadliest human beings alive with a length of sharpened steel. Granted, Kane was certain that Shizuka won in pure swordsmanship, but he’d seen Domi handle multiple opponents, grown men easily twice her weight, and take them down brutally.
Kane was fully aware of the explosive violence that she was capable of, and he often was glad for that razor-sharp precision of hers. But this wasn’t the time to split the group. Five people were already a small enough force
tactically. Further dividing them on a hunt for a potential group of trappers that might or might not be hiding out would be dangerous.
Especially considering that it would be Domi fighting against vastly superior odds, and against men with massive firepower. She would have to keep from making a single mistake, and they would turn on her in a flash.
Kane didn’t want to risk her on such a dangerous side mission, not when they had their ace in the hole back at the Victoria redoubt. If a local militia did surface, Kane would activate his Commtact, and Edwards, Sinclair and the Zambians would take them hard and fast.
It was a ruthless tactic, but Kane and Domi had confirmed that at least twenty-five men had dispersed into the woods. Those kinds of numbers were plain deadly.
And that wasn’t counting the predatory kongamato.
“No. No hunting,” Kane said. “In fact...”
“Calling Sela and Edwards,” Domi finished for him.
* * *
KANE WAITED UNTIL Brigid, Grant, Nathan and North caught up with them. Kariba station was still a couple miles away, and they had the cover of the intervening forest. Kane kept his eyes and ears peeled for signs of the militiamen who were in the brush, but their leader probably was too smart to leave his force close enough to the dirt road to be noticed except by the sharpest of eyes. Both Kane and Domi made an effort to trail the soldiers, but they were good.
Too good.
Given some of the rifles that Kane saw available, they could be three to four hundred yards distant, cushioned from discovery even by his and Domi’s razor-keen senses, yet still visible targets to those snipers.
“So, what did you two little scouts find out poking in the dirt?” Grant asked.
“I found out that you’re in no big hurry when it’s up to us to look for trouble,” Kane said.
Grant smirked. “Did you see any bat-winged horrors swoop down on you?”
Kane’s lips curled, and he squinted one eye. “No.”
“You are welcome,” his friend answered.
Kane rolled his eyes at his joking. There were times when the two men actually did get on each other’s nerves. But they had been together for so long that Brigid likened them to an old married couple. “Fine. I’ll give you the rundown.”
With that, Kane gave his partners a quick summary of what he and Domi had tracked and recovered from prints on the dirt road. The presence of a split force and a rendezvous with another, smaller group brought looks of concern to all present, except for North, which Kane had expected. However, contrary to his belief that North was still a patsy of the consortium, the archaeologist’s face was screwed into a mask of pissy annoyance.
Kane made a mental note to decide whether he cared at all about North’s ire. As it was, it was a sign that the man was at cross-purposes with the millennialists. However, Kane was fully aware that North had played fast and loose with his alliances during their first encounter at Garuda. Maybe the sudden onset of grumpiness could be attributed to his disgust at their incompetence, or to the sharp senses of Kane and Domi in detecting the group. Either way, Kane wasn’t going to ease up on him.
“I told you, Durga was with the consortium,” North said.
“And I told you that sounded like a convenient story,” Grant snapped. “Just because it has elements of truth doesn’t mean shit.”
North bristled at the insinuation, and Kane wondered if the slightest notion of violence on the untrustworthy archaeologist’s part would summon a ham-sized fist into his face. So far, Kane and Grant had been playing with kid gloves in regards to the man, but North’s history of maiming and murder was long and gruesome. Though he claimed to have turned over a new leaf, this “blossom” before them was grown in soil soaked with blood and pain. The sins of his past bore a heavy cost, and if there was one thing that the explorers of Cerberus redoubt believed in, it was justice for all, even those they had never met.
“I am warning the two of you.” North spoke slowly. “I am fully aware of who I was when we first met. I am tolerating your low opinion of me. But I am not your enemy. Durga is. And if it comes to defending myself, when I have to, there will be no second chance for either of you to cause me harm. Ever.”
“We’ve heard that plenty of times,” Kane said. “We’re still here.”
North didn’t say anything more, but Kane’s bravado was only halfhearted. He knew that he and his partners were up to many challenges, but there had also been times when they had gotten through on blind luck and by the skin of their teeth.
Given the knowledge and power that North had obtained from the Nanite Matrix beneath Garuda, they could well be dealing with someone on the same scale as Maccan or Enlil. He was tolerating their abuse, maybe because whatever they were throwing at him glanced off him like raindrops against a Sandcat’s hull. North’s glaring eyes held menace and crackled with hatred. If he had been a cruel and vindictive scoundrel before his brain’s “upgrade,” what kind of a horror would he be if he cut loose and unleashed that power?
Every instinct in Kane told him that he should just raise the Sin Eater, press the barrel against the man’s forehead and blast it into a million pieces, emptying magazine after magazine into the splattered brain until not even pulpy, quivering bits of gray matter remained. He held off on that urge, if only for the fact that if the first shot didn’t work against North, there was no telling what kind of wrathful genie would be released.
“We’ll keep trusting you,” Kane said. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t be wary.”
“Trust me,” North repeated. “You should. Because if I wanted it, you would have been a corpse a thousand times over.”
Kane looked toward Nathan, who held the staff Nehushtan. The stick seemed to repel North, but he’d found a distance from it that he could tolerate, about eight feet. Nathan decided to save the day by stepping close to Kane’s side. North winced, backing away from the ancient stick.
“Behave. Both of you,” Nathan said, with an authority beyond his nineteen years.
Kane nodded. This was no time for squabbling. Grant had brought up a major threat that could strike from above, and there were likely militiamen in the woods, and an armed party of millennialists at the Kariba Dam power station.
Nathan looked especially at Kane and Grant. “Both sides, actually. No manhandling...unless you’re throwing me out of the path of a rampaging kongamato. Then toss me like a beanbag.”
Grant smirked. “You got it, Nathan.”
“Are we going to stand around all day yakking?” Brigid asked, impatience clinging to each word.
“No, we’ve got people to do, things to kill,” Kane replied.
North nodded. “We can’t give Durga a chance to explore any farther in Africa. The mines he seeks are where Suleiman imprisoned demons. The kongamato are the smallest, least powerful of those creatures. Considering that Suleiman was armed with an Annunaki artifact to drive them into their cells tells much about the horrors entombed within.”
Kane fought the urge to sneer, to engage in another pissing contest with the millennialist archaeologist. Something was nagging at him. North might have been granted the powers of the ultimate badass powerhouse, but the way he acted was just not right. Even before, North had done his best to keep himself ingratiated with the Cerberus explorers. This time he was rattling sabers just for the sake of getting on Kane’s nerves.
Was this part of some secret plan? Again, there were so many things around them, all manner of dangers, that taking the time to pick this apart would be stone-cold deadly.
“Let’s get going,” Kane said, agreeing with Brigid. As usual, the brainy, beautiful woman was the voice of reason. He would trust his instincts when it came to sudden, nearby threats, but not when he was sure that those senses were being tugged at for the sake of making him hair-triggered to go off half-cocked. There were pe
ople who needed help. The blood on the Kariba uniforms was real enough. Humans had died and parts of them had ended up in the bellies of the kongamato.
North, sinner or saint, would have to wait for his ultimate judgment.
Right now, there was a flock of carnivores with inhuman strength and the ability to fly threatening the countryside between Harare and Zambia. They had to be stopped, even if Kane had to tolerate the presence of the devil in his very own camp.
* * *
DOMI LOOKED BACK and saw that the others had caught up with Kane. She was itching to get moving. Standing around and talking, especially in enemy territory, was not her favorite activity in the world. The feral girl regarded North with a deep-down loathing based on their first encounter. North had been entirely too smooth and buttery in his first speech, tossing out compliments and condescension thick enough to drown in.
The man had been tangle-brained then, willing to whip the skin off the backs of innocent men and women in order to find trinkets from worlds dead for thousands of years. Now, he felt different to her, but it didn’t make her more or less comfortable around him. There was something unnatural about him, more than human. He had this strange, eerie calm. His eyes didn’t dart from face to face as someone was talking. He didn’t react to outside stimulus, and yet it seemed as though he missed nothing.
North claimed that the tiny bugs within his brain— nanites, Brigid Baptiste had called them—had enhanced his intellect and his senses. Kane said that the man was able to jam their communications, seemingly at will. Domi tried to put her finger on what unsettled her, but even as she tried, the thought was elusive. He just didn’t seem...human anymore.
Certainly, he sounded that way. He spoke normally. He walked, he breathed. But his head remained still. He didn’t tilt it, didn’t turn his gaze to speak to anyone face-to-face, to look at them. It was as if he was blind, and yet he navigated the world perfectly, never stumbling, never tripping, always aware of every movement about him.
