by James Axler
“And yet you still don’t give me any slack despite my changes,” North argued.
“They’re powerless and frightened at this moment,” Grant continued.
“Powerless, with the rifles you handed them,” North reminded him.
“Shows you their essential good nature. They’re hanging with us, not plotting against us,” Grant insisted.
“So you assume,” North said. “And you know the old saying.”
“When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption,” Grant countered. “A little trust goes a bit of a way, but we’re not completely stupid.”
North’s eyes narrowed.
“Oh, you want to know if we’re spying on the consortium, and how,” Grant stated. “That we’ve come up with some pearl, some stratagem that gives us the advantage over those survivors.”
North squinted even more, and sure enough, he tuned out momentarily. Whatever technological abilities he had, he was accessing them, and Grant simply waited.
Suddenly, the archaeologist’s gaze locked back on him. “They’re staying quiet. No communication with the band of marauders they’ve hooked up with. The same goes for Thurpa’s comms. They’re...”
Even as the man’s voice trailed off, Grant remained impassive. Inwardly, he was surprised at how easily North had fallen for this ruse.
“Son of a bitch,” he growled.
“Consider yourself vetted, too,” Grant stated. “You legitimately checked on them to keep an eye out for us. Shows that you’re genuinely trying to work alongside us.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t fabricate a lie?” North asked.
“Because you acted too spur-of-the-moment. Those nanites might increase your sensitivity, they might give you access to a huge database, but they can’t improve your acting ability,” Grant told him. “Getting pissed off at me right now also clinched it.”
“Expect you to play dumb, and I end up the idiot,” North growled.
“Come on, let’s go check with the others and see what they’ve found out about whatever is linking this station with Kariba,” Grant suggested.
“You think that the complex of power stations along the Zambezi River is all interconnected?”
“If you’ve got data showing otherwise, I’d love to know,” Grant returned.
North dipped into his knowledge base, though not having to scan frequencies, his concentration didn’t waver. It took only a few moments for his features to change expression, and realization give way to fear.
“Damn it. Damn it!” he growled.
“What?” Grant asked.
“The facility...this was supposed to be a supercenter,” he said. “A one-stop shop. The mat trans, a time trawl and cloning facilities.”
“Cloning...” Grant repeated. He activated his Commtact. “Command override power-off. Domi?”
“They’re in!” he heard the feral girl shout, moments before he lost contact with her.
Grant’s Sin Eater snapped into his grasp, and he took off running.
Chapter 17
Domi and Edwards moved easily through the halls. One of many things that the Zambians had done with this facility was take good care of it. The floors were clear of clutter, dust and other impediments to movement. Thelights were well-regulated, making it easy to navigate and maneuver, even in the underutilized depths of the redoubt.
“So, what do you think Grant’s gonna do with North?” Edwards asked.
“Talk to him,” Domi answered. “Until it’s time not to talk.”
“In other words, ‘shut up, Edwards,’” the big magistrate veteran replied.
“Nah.” Domi shook her head. “Grant’s not gonna attack someone not hurting him, or anyone else he’s protecting. It’ll be up to North to make the first mistake.”
Edwards smirked.
“Listen, just because I walked to Kariba with the others doesn’t mean I think you and Sela are second rate as a team. In fact...”
“Don’t worry about it,” Edwards returned. “And this ain’t a woman’s “don’t worry” where you have to spend the rest of your days looking for the mines she buried. This is just a one-moment-I-thought-shit-was-up, but now I know it isn’t.”
Domi smirked. “You know I’m not that kind of a woman.”
“The answer is probably yes, but do you smell that?”
“Dead body,” she muttered.
Edwards grimaced.
Domi pulled her pistol, as did the big man. She had been steadily leading them toward the scent of rot down the hallway. “You picked up on it quick. I’ve only smelled it for a minute.”
The two continued down the hallway in silence, their senses peeled, keen for any signs of opposition in the depths of the facility. Conversation now would only make it harder to anticipate the presence of opposition. The four of them—Grant, Domi, Sinclair and Edwards—had been correct about the potential of an underground path between the redoubts along the river. The thing that kept them on edge was whether it had been the kongamato who had created the corpse, or some other faction. And would the nonhuman monsters be able to track the scent of the deceased all the way here.
Domi and Edwards finally stopped, finding the source of the odor. It was a body wedged in a door, bullet holes in its chest. The corpse was of a millennialist, his jumpsuit and insignia prevalent despite bloodstains and tears on his uniform.
Domi pointed to the gunshots and Edwards took a closer look. As a magistrate, he had been at the scene of many a murder in the Tartarus. He’d be able to tell the difference between the kinds of wounds, at least in terms of the gear most Millennium Consortium men had, versus the locals.
“Not shot by his buddies. These aren’t pistol rounds,” Edwards said softly as he probed one bullet hole. “This is a rifle round. You can see the fractures in the skin around the entrance wound. The rifle noses are smaller than pistol bullet noses, but when they hit flesh and bone, they upset more, stretching the skin inward into the crater blown by metal expanding or fragmenting in soft tissue.”
“Zambians or Harare?” Domi asked.
“Could be,” Edwards said. “But I don’t think so. The military folks here use full-powered battle rifle rounds from Heckler & Koch G3s or FN FALs, in the same caliber as the SIG AMTs we have with us. These entrance and exit wounds look a bit smaller. Like AK rounds, same caliber, but a smaller charge so they don’t move as fast and hit as hard.”
“And since we haven’t seen anything bigger among the locals, he was shot by...bandits,” Domi surmised.
Edwards nodded. “I spent some time asking what the militia and marauders were carrying, just for reference. The Zambians told me that they use old AK rifles in a lighter .30 caliber. The bigger bullets are meant to make poaching easier, and they don’t have to worry as much about the quality of the bullets to get a punch. The Zambian military and police have a factory that can churn out good ammunition, as does Harare, so they go with the lighter, but more accurate ammunition.”
Domi quirked her lips. “Left body here. Bait.”
Edwards nodded in agreement.
She went around and took the corpse’s feet. Edwards hauled the body off the ground by the armpits. The two of them walked it down the corridor, letting the door shut behind them.
“Should we turn on one of our Commtacts?” Edwards asked.
“Not yet,” Domi said. “Grant’ll override and turn us on.”
“Great,” Edwards grumbled. He glanced back at the door leading to the Zambians’ redoubt. “So what should we do until he contacts us?”
“Look deeper,” Domi replied. “And kill any of the beasts we find in these corridors.”
“Good plan,” Edwards returned. “I’ll take point.”
Domi nodded as he paused long enough to m
ake certain the door was secured. He punched in the security code, then used a screwdriver to remove the keypad. Now, the only way they could get back in was by calling for help before getting to that door. It wasn’t a vault like the one up above, so every bit of security would be needed. Edwards added some cable ties to further secure it, but short of getting out a welder, there wasn’t much more he could do.
Once that was finished, he joined Domi in their advance.
Going back wasn’t an option, but the hallway seemed to be leading to other facilities via an underground conduit. This was an emergency subterranean access. Edwards paused and pointed to a vent with a ladder symbol.
“We can get out of the way, if necessary,” he said softly.
Domi nodded. “Pull them in there, too.” She opened the door and looked up. “Tight fit for you.”
“If we’ve got a dozen kongamato running at us, I can suck it in and get up that ladder,” Edwards stated. “If not, I’ll make a good clog in the drain. They won’t get past me, or any of their buds that try catching up to me before I run out of ammo.”
Domi smirked.
Just to be certain, Edwards went in and checked how quickly he could climb a few rungs. He wasn’t impaired by the tightness of the escape tunnel, and he found that he could turn on the ladder and face down to fight. Domi caught a glimmer of glee in his eyes, a smile dancing across his lips.
“We got this,” he declared.
Domi smirked again. “We got it?”
“We got it by the ass,” Edwards said.
She chuckled, remembering that line from an old vid that Sinclair had shared with them. “You sure you want to say that?”
“Why not? I’m not a shrimp,” Edwards returned.
Domi chuckled, feeling a little more relaxed. The two settled back into a state of grim readiness, having loosened up some. Being pulled emotionally taut was a quick road to ruin, as worries and scenarios clouded the mind. Domi had heard Grant’s beloved, Shizuka, say a Japanese term that expressed the epitome of the samurai warrior woman’s general being, and something Domi had never had the vocabulary to share.
Zanshin. Relaxed alertness The remaining mind. It was a state where the extraneous “what-ifs” were put aside, and the moment was experienced as it happened. Acting thoughtlessly was a good way to end up dead, but operating with too much thought was a way to distract yourself. Domi had lived that way for years, her keen senses and instincts operating, while the higher levels of her mind went into a more relaxed mode.
Her reflexes were honed and tuned to that, which was why her diction became more simple and primitive. Only things necessary to survival were paid attention to. She lived in the moment, focused on what was about her, not what had been or what could be.
It was enough to get her through the toughest of times. And sometimes the means of getting to that mental state was a simple thought, usually accompanied by a laugh. If there was one thing Domi cherished, it was the little laughs, the brief moments.
Right now she was at once focused and unfocused. Nothing put her senses into a tunnel, another bit of irony, as she herself was in one. Her ears picked up each crunch of dust beneath the boots she and Edwards wore, each drip of condensation, each buzz of a light fixture.
The two of them paused as they reached an intersection. It was more than a four-way. Domi was able to count nine tunnels spreading out from the center hub. She checked her watch, actually a readout screen on the forearm of her shadow suit, and found that they had traveled at least four thousand feet.
She was tempted to activate her Commtact and inform Grant about this linkage, and the potential for at least seven more unknown facilities being attached to the one the Zambians controlled, but depending on North, this information may have already come out. And if not...
Domi fought her mind, pushing the “what-ifs” away. Something had niggled at the edge of her hearing, and she started looking down the halls branching off from this central hub. Edwards picked up on her change in demeanor, and began taking up the slack. Certainly, there wasn’t any threat coming from the tunnel they’d followed, so the two of them scanned the others.
The angry, batlike shriek of one of the creatures was faint, but it tripped Domi’s survival instincts.
At that moment, the Commtacts came on.
“Domi?” Grant’s voice cut in.
“They’re in!” Domi answered. She had to make a decision now. She and Edwards could run back the way they’d came, but undoing the door would take too long, and it would bring an angry horde into the depths of the Zambian redoubt. There was little doubt that enough of those creatures could hammer the door off its hinges.
She looked to the left and picked one of those tunnels, pointing it out to Edwards, who was busy setting two grens along the way back “home.”
“Why?” Domi asked.
“Animals don’t want to risk injuring themselves going the same route others wanted to,” he said. “If a gren blows every time they take that tunnel...”
Domi nodded. She pulled her knife and nicked the back of her wrist, drawing a small trickle of blood, smearing it along the way she intended to go. “Giving them a fresher trail to follow.”
“Smart,” Edwards returned. He was done setting his booby traps, and now the creatures’ sounds were growing louder.
The two people picked Domi’s corridor and hurtled down it.
She quickly activated her Commtact and apprised Grant of the plan.
* * *
DURGA LET OUT a scream of frustration. It felt as if the two of them had been traveling for years. Behind them, the universe spun away, still showing the wild spiral of their back trail, the space they’d churned through looking like the wake wash of a fast-moving motorboat, except instead of white-water foam, it was some kind of black-and-purple diamond-faceted ripple that made Durga nauseated.
“What’s wrong now?” Kane asked.
“We’re getting nowhere. And we’re taking forever to do it,” Durga responded. “We just keep following this thread. How do we even know it’s the right way?”
Kane remained silent as he weighed Durga’s question. Neither of them seemed to be making any progress, and he had been under the assumption that the presence of the thread was a way home. He thought back to his prior experience, but this was different. This was...
Now Kane could understand the frustration. When last he’d been “betwixt realms,” as Brigid had so poetically called it, he didn’t remember details, but knew that unless he was grounded in a reality, such as when he’d landed at the entrance to Hades, and spoke with two familiar seeming entities, he hadn’t felt the passage of time, nor space.
Here was something different. Here actually felt like a place.
“We weren’t thrown across the multiverse by that void,” Kane said.
“That’s what I was starting to think. It’s as if we’re running on a treadmill,” Durga replied.
Kane grimaced. “That’s the thing. Memories in this place... Have we really been here as long as it seems?”
“Without any proper sensory stimulus, we could have been trying to escape for just a few seconds,” Durga murmured. “And it’s not as if we have a body to pick up the information of time’s passage. I learned from some Nagah physicists that humans believe time is a biological illusion as much as anything else.”
“Biological illusion...” Kane repeated.
“You’ve got something?” Durga asked.
“I’m thinking it out. What if this is a biological illusion? Something feeding us epiphanies, like we experience while dreaming, but when we awaken, we realize that a brilliant answer was nothing but gibberish.”
“Where did you get that?” Durga asked.
“Skeptical articles on so-called psychic phenomena,” Kane replied. “When Balam began po
king around, communicating to me telepathically, I realized that I’d better educate myself about the field. I’m as far from an expert as you can get, but some things stuck with me, especially the means of debunking those phenomena.”
“Debunking telepathy, when obviously we’re in a telepathic trap,” Durga murmured. Kane felt his neck hairs bristle at the Nagah prince’s doubts, but held his tongue.
“Debunking is verifying what is and what isn’t possible,” Kane countered, keeping the taut impatience from his voice, but only barely. “Not being taken in by an illusion one way or another. It’s looking for facts, not jumping to assumptions. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“Jumping to assumptions,” Durga repeated.
“We’re probably still with our bodies,” Kane said. “But when we make contact with each other...”
“We feel it,” the cobra man concluded. “So there is that much reality present.”
Kane nodded.
“So...we’re floating in imagination,” Durga mused. “The only realities here are ourselves. But I felt your death grip on that silver thread connecting me to the distance.”
Kane looked down at his own. He touched it, trying to get some sensation of it. He had presumed that this thread, now that he realized he wasn’t on an astral plane, was just another illusion. But it had no depth, no texture, no weight. He couldn’t feel it himself.
“Grab the thread,” Kane said.
Durga narrowed his eyes.
“My thread,” Kane clarified. “I thought these were tethers that could lead us back to our bodies, but what if the opposite is true?”
“That they’re anchors keeping us here, and not in our normal forms,” Durga mused aloud.
Kane nodded.
Durga clasped his, or at least tried to. As soon as he did so it became ephemeral, his long-nailed fingers grasping only free flowing mist.
“The only way to break these is to attack the others,” Kane said. “I saw the pain you felt when I grabbed yours.”
“It felt as if you were strangling me to death,” Durga responded. “Unbearable pain.”
