by James Axler
Edwards tried his Commtact as they exited the mat-trans chamber. “Brewster, you read me?”
Nothing.
He tried again, but again there came no response.
Sometimes the Commtacts did not work in certain circumstances; deep underground was one such circumstance.
“We’re on our own for now, people,” Edwards said grimly, reaching for his flashlight. “Keep your eyes open.”
Beneath flickering overheads, the trio trod quietly through the waterlogged ops room and beyond into a corridor that was almost entirely lost to darkness. Edwards flicked on his flashlight, bringing the bland, gray-walled corridor to bland, gray-walled life. There was moss growing on the walls, showing where the stagnant water had idled for months. The water was dark, almost black, and it smelled of rotten eggs.
“What happened here?” Domi asked, keeping her voice low.
“Kane’s team flooded the place,” Edwards explained, “to stop the release of a biological weapon that had been developed here.”
“Flooded,” Domi repeated as her feet swished through the water. “Huh.”
“Water diluted the biological weapon while it was still in the nurturing aspect of its growth cycle,” Edwards said. “Saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.”
“Sounds like Kane,” Sinclair said as they trekked away from the mat-trans ops room and into the belly of the redoubt.
* * *
THE CORRIDOR RAN for two dozen yards, rooms running off it, each one waterlogged like the ops room. They reached a T junction at the end, where a cross corridor ran perpendicular to the one that the Cerberus teammates of CAT Beta had started in, and a bank of elevators, including a wide-doored goods elevator, was before them. A map located beside the elevators showed the different levels and areas highlighted with different colors.
“Which way?” Sinclair asked. “Left or right?”
Edwards ran his flashlight over the map, reading from the key.
BO51...
BO52...
BO53...
Beside Edwards, Domi listened. Domi’s senses were keener than the average person’s, and she sometimes seemed more animal than human. But even she could detect little in the flickering light or over the smell of mold and stagnant water, only the near-subliminal sound the ripples of water made where the group had disturbed it.
After a moment’s thought, Edwards pointed to the right where a heavy fire door was situated. “Stairs,” he said. “We’ll head up and see where the action is.”
Sinclair agreed, though she felt uncomfortable with Edwards’s turn of phrase. Something about these Magistrates left them hungry for action sometimes, and she worried that made them reckless.
The group moved to the indicated door, stepping through and into a stairwell that was pitch-black apart from those things the beam of Edwards’s flashlight illuminated.
The stairs were hard concrete, as were the walls. The whole place felt cold and it echoed every movement into an orchestra of thumps and swishes. There was water on the steps, pooling on the lowest one, with just a sheen of it on the first few, and more pooling where they reached the next level.
Edwards waited at the door, peering warily through the small grilled-glass window located at eye level in its center. He had a Sin Eater pistol hidden in a wrist holster under his sleeve, and his fingers twitched a little in nervous anticipation at the thought of drawing it. Gently, silently, he pushed the door open.
* * *
THE CERBERUS WARRIORS checked two more levels and found nothing, just water, mold and fritzing lights. There were bodies here and there, dead bodies, long rotted, just skeletons really, though the grimy water made them bob and move, giving them the illusion of life in the flickering light.
On the third level up from the lowest subbasement they found the woman. She was young, dark skinned and wearing leopard-print shorts, black boots and a calfskin jacket. She sat on the edge of a stage-like platform in a large motor pool, and when Edwards pushed open the door from the stairs, her head twitched and she looked up at him through her wild halo of ringlets.
“Oh, bless you, sir,” she said in a voice heavily accented with French Creole, “you have found me. I thought maybe you never would.”
Glancing left and right, Edwards led the way into the motor pool with Domi and Sinclair holding back just a little as they followed him. There were broken-down vehicles here, all of them military—jeeps and flatbed trucks with rotted tires that bloated flatly in the thin carpet of water.
“You’re expecting me?” Edwards asked gruffly.
The woman smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said, her white teeth bright in the infinite darkness of the room. “You’re here to take me back to the surface, aren’t you?”
“You’re lost, then?” Edwards asked, feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the disconnect between the girl’s story and her joyful expression.
“Perhaps,” the woman replied, pushing herself to her feet. She had long legs, Edwards noted, the legs of an athlete.
“I’m Edwards,” Edwards told her. “And you?”
“Nathalie,” the woman replied, taking a step forward as Edwards and his allies came to meet her. There was something on her hip, strapped there, glinting in the beam of Edwards’s flashlight as it played across her taut, muscular body.
“How did you get down here?” Edwards asked, walking to meet with the woman.
“How did you?” she shot back, smiling to take the edge off her words.
Edwards shook his head with obvious irritation. Beside him, Domi and Sinclair had spread out, keeping their distance, surveying the darkened room. Anything could be hiding there—anything.
“If you want my help, you’re going to have to talk to me,” Edwards said, trying to keep the irritation out of his tone.
The woman was standing ten feet from Edwards now, her hands held loosely at her sides. “Who said I needed your help, Cerberus?” she asked.
“Wha—?” Edwards spat in shock.
The woman called Nathalie had pulled the knife from its sheath at her hip even as he reacted, drawing and throwing it in one swift, well-practiced action. The knife was long and broadened along its length to a wide tip. It flew from Nathalie’s hand in an arc, cutting the air and darkness before embedding in Edwards’s chest with a sickening thump.
Edwards half scrambled, half dropped backward, his shocked utterance turning to a scream in his throat even as he sank to the floor in a splash of water. For a moment the room was thrown into disarray as Edwards’s flashlight left his grip, painting long shadows across the ceiling, the jeeps, the water, in a deranged dance of confusion.
Nathalie moved instantly, even as Sinclair shouted a command and both she and Domi tried to track the woman with their blasters. Nathalie had crossed the distance to Edwards’s fallen form in a second, reached down as she ran, snatched her knife’s bone handle and pulled it from the ex-Mag’s chest. As she did so, Sinclair fired her Colt Mark IV, launching a .45 mm hollow-point bullet out into the semidarkness at the woman as she scrambled across the deck. The bullet missed, going wide of its target in a burst of angry sound.
As she plucked the knife from Edwards’s body, Nathalie had launched her legs into the air, flipping over Edwards as Sinclair’s bullet went hurtling past. She twisted her lithe body in the air so that she was facing the direction she’d come from...and facing Sela Sinclair, who had trained the Colt Mark IV on her.
“Drop the knife, lady!” Sinclair shouted as the woman landed on her booted heels with a splash.
Nathalie paid her no attention; instead she was running like a whirling dervish, spinning and launching her long knife again in a whip-fast toss even as Sinclair’s gun spit once more. The bullet went rocketing past Nathalie, missing her by inches rather than feet, closely followed by a second shot.
Domi fired, sending a 9 mm slug charging toward the gymnastic woman as she bounded away from Sinclair’s falling body. The bullet went over Nathalie’s head as she landed on the slick decking and dropped down into a panther crouch.
An instant later, having never stopped moving, Nathalie scampered back to where Sinclair was lying and reached for the handle of her blade. Sinclair was moaning, clutching at her side where the knife had pierced. There was enough quick-acting poison on the blade that it slowed down Nathalie’s opponents when it got into their bloodstream. Sinclair was alive right now, as was Edwards, but they were barely able to move.
Domi tracked the woman with the sight of her Combat Master, waiting for the moment. Domi’s night vision was superior to the average person’s. But here, with the rolling flashlight beam and the occasional flicker of the overheads, it was hard to keep track of Nathalie, let alone keep up with her.
Nathalie was on her feet again, spinning up from the ground, kicking up splashes of water as she bounded and leaped and sprang across the decking, cartwheeling to create a constantly changing target profile.
Domi fired, the noise from the Combat Master echoing loudly in the motor pool.
There was a spark in the air, a sound of metal striking metal, and Domi realized that the other woman had deflected the bullet with her knife, cutting it out of the air.
Nathalie kept charging toward Domi, an ugly, cruel smile of determination on her face. Domi squeezed the trigger, fired again and again.
Now the woman was fifteen feet away.
Bang!
Now she was twelve.
Bang!
Now eight, seven, six.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
And then the Combat Master clicked on empty and Domi simply let it drop, no time to reload. Domi knew instinctively that the empty Detonics would have been a hindrance for what came next.
Nathalie drove the knife at Domi, point first. It gleamed as it caught the beam of the dropped flashlight, a momentary flash of white in the air.
Domi sidestepped, left arm up, meeting the knife hand at the wrist, deflecting it. Hits and misses would be measured in fractions of an inch now, strikes and blows and flesh on flesh as the petite Domi and the statuesque voodoo warrior clashed.
Nathalie jabbed with her knife, driving it toward Domi’s face. Domi ducked her head to miss the cut, then charged forward, butting the taller woman high in the chest with her crown. Nathalie stumbled back, but regained her balance in an instant.
In that brief respite as her foe was wrong-footed, Domi drew her own knife from its sheath at her ankle. It was a combat knife with a six-inch, serrated blade. She had had this knife when she had lived in Cobaltville as a sex slave to Guana Teague, had used it on her master in a frantic escape attempt that, tangentially, had led to her joining the Cerberus team. She had lost any reckoning of the amount of blood spilled by its edge, the bodies it had defiled. Now, Domi ran at Nathalie, taking three long strides before driving the knife at her gut.
Nathalie leaped back, launching her left fist around in a vicious swing which almost caught Domi in the face. It didn’t—instead, Domi reacted in the flickering darkness by dropping her head forward until her chin met her chest, the blow sailing over her, ruffling her hair.
As her punch missed, Nathalie continued the swing, keeping up her momentum and kicking out and back with her right heel. The heel connected with Domi’s chest, knocking the albino girl backward into the water.
Nathalie did not stop moving; she just kept coming for Domi like an out-of-control freight train. The heel strike was followed by a spin into a vicious double kick. Domi rolled out of the way of the first, but did not move fast enough to avoid the second, getting clipped across her right ear by Nathalie’s booted foot.
Domi sank back onto the deck, splashing into the shallow water, a femur bobbing beside her head, as Nathalie stood over her. But as Domi crashed down, she jabbed upward with her knife, stabbing it into Nathalie’s inner thigh and driving it there with all her might. Nathalie toppled backward with a shriek of agony, keeling over, Domi’s blade protruding from the inner thigh of her left leg.
Domi forced herself to get up. Her clothes and hair were damp, her back sodden—everything was slowing her down.
The woman called Nathalie could be seen in the tight beam of Edwards’s discarded flashlight, rolling on the deck in agony, her hands clutched around the protruding handle of Domi’s knife. As Domi strode toward her, she saw Nathalie sit up and yank the knife from her thigh, hissing painfully through her gritted teeth. Blood spurted out in a fierce jet, the result of a severed artery, its redness clouding the water as it slapped the pooling water and mingled beneath the surface.
Domi stamped down on the woman’s left leg—the same one where the blade had been buried—sending a new wave of pain through her attacker. As Nathalie shrieked, Domi kicked out with her other leg, cuffing the woman across the side of her head with such force that Nathalie crashed back down into the deck with a resounding splash and thud.
Still standing over Nathalie, Domi scanned the deck, searching for her knife. The blade shimmered like a silver-scaled fish where it waited just below the surface of the water. She reached for it and—
Jab!
Something pierced Domi’s side, striking her in the fleshy part just below her waist and above her hipbone. She shrieked; fell; hit the deck with a splash, blood pouring from the wound.
Nathalie was ten feet away, still on the floor, but sitting up and with one arm outstretched where she had thrown her knife. Domi saw her as water washed into her right eye where she had struck the floor. Pain seared down the whole of Domi’s left flank where the poisoned knife had embedded in her flesh.
“No...” Domi said weakly. “No...”
Chapter 12
Grant awoke in a small, poorly lit room with stone walls covered in carved hieroglyphs...and there was something else in the room with him. The room was cool and windowless. Grant was lying on a plain wood cot, just a plank suspended from two chains that held it against the wall.
Remaining motionless, he looked around through narrowed eyes, searching the room for clues as to what had happened and where he was. The reason he did not move was because of the other figure in the room, that something else that he had caught the moment his eyes began to scan across the hieroglyphics.
“You’re awake,” the man said in French.
Inwardly, Grant cursed before turning to him and opening his eyes more widely. The man was sensitive—real sensitive. He must have detected the change in Grant’s breathing.
The man was leaning back against a wall beside an open doorway, one whose lintel was low. He was of average height and build, in his fifties or sixties with mahogany skin and a buzz cut. On his left hip he had a gun—either a revolver or a pistol, judging by its length—held in a pancake holster whose top was sealed. He wore white clothes—shirt, pants, shoes—loose fitting to better alleviate the heat, which was doubtless warmer than this room. He wore something else, too, a narrow strip of ribbon that was strapped over his eyes and colored white as snow. The ribbon didn’t seem to affect his ability to locate Grant, for his face was angled toward him as though he were looking directly at him.
“I’m awake,” Grant said.
“An
glais?” his companion said, making it a question.
“American,” Grant replied tersely.
Speaking French, the man instructed Grant to get up. Grant remained lying down, looking at the man with an expression of confusion drawn on his face. His Commtact could, of course, translate the foreign tongue in real time, but Grant figured that was a secret he best keep to himself for now; in his experience, captors were often free with their words if they thought their captive could not hear or understand them.
The man at the door tried again. “Okay,” he said, “you get up now. We have places to go.” He was speaking English with a thick accent now, in deference to Grant’s seeming ignorance. “Don’t try anything rash,” he added. “We disarmed you—your knife is gone.”
Maybe my knife is gone, Grant thought, feeling the familiar weight of the Sin Eater resting in its hidden holster pressed against his wrist, but I still have an ace up my sleeve. Grant pushed himself up from the cot, taking in as much as he could of the hieroglyphs that marked the walls. It was as though someone had had a lot of time to graffiti the place, a prisoner perhaps, held here for a long duration.
Beside the doorway, Grant’s captor stood up straighter, watching the Cerberus man. “You have a name, monsieur?”
Grant turned and nodded. “Yeah. Grant.” His head felt heavy where he had been knocked unconscious, though damned if he could remember how. All he recalled was the bright flare in the dark pyramid room.
“Come, Grant,” the man at the door said. “Things you are to see.”
Grant nodded again, moving slowly, still taking in all the hieroglyphs. Though he was not an expert the way that Brigid was, he saw something he thought he recognized here: a symbol showing a sitting figure wearing a crown like an upturned sieve and dressed in a robe that came down to his ankles. The figure in the engraving had what appeared to be one enlarged hand that was shaped like a woman’s fan. Grant recognized it as an Annunaki, though he could not pull a specific name from his memory. Brigid would know; he just had to get the information to her without being noticed.
