by Mel Odom
“Bernice has found another cave a short distance ahead.” The rigger merc nodded down the tunnel and to the right.
Doyle called a halt. “How far?”
“Hundred twenty-three point nine-two meters.”
“Anything moving?”
“Nothing Bernice has tracked.” Childers shook his head. “Place looks crazy, though.”
Rachel wished the armor didn’t hide his face. If she could only see his features, things might not seem so bad.
Professor Fredericks rocked impatiently. “What do you mean? What do you see?”
“Statues and stuff.” The man shrugged. “Some kind of gathering place.”
“Well, Miss Gordon, it appears your instincts regarding this place were very good.” Professor Fredericks grinned. He looked a little nervous, but his hopes for a spectacular find were evident.
Despite her fears, Rachel’s excitement grew, but she didn’t say anything.
The professor tried to proceed, but Doyle held him back with a hand against his chest. “Wait, sir. Beaumont, do you sense anything?”
Beaumont was quiet for a moment. Rachel thought she saw the air shimmer around the man for a moment, but she couldn’t be sure.
After another moment, he shook his head. “I can feel the magic, stronger than here, but it isn’t coming from anything definite. It’s just stronger.”
Doyle dropped his arm from the professor. “Single file. I got point. Beaumont, you watch out for the professor. Childers, stay with Miss Gordon.”
As soon as she stepped into the room, Rachel felt the wrongness, and it was stronger than ever. Danger was hiding here, but she couldn’t identify it. Her heart rate jacked up as adrenaline flooded her system, with every instinct telling her to flee this place right now.
“What is all this?” Doyle asked, actually sounding impressed for once.
“I have no idea . . .” Fredericks replied, his mouth hanging open as he stared all around.
“Me either,” Beaumont said. “Trophy room? Effigies of the creatures the Shadowman defeated or killed?”
“Maybe . . . but effigies of what?” the merc leader asked.
No one had an answer for him, not even Rachel.
As Childers had stated, the room held a number of strange statues. Most of them were two and half and three meters tall, but Rachel just knew they weren’t life-sized. The monsters they represented were much larger. Even though the artists that had created the images had been skilled, she knew they hadn’t completely captured the ferocity of the inhuman beings.
Every one of the creatures was misshapen and terrifying. Some had too many arms, legs, or mouths. Some had too many heads. Gemstones glowed a rainbow of colors over the bodies of the things cast in black and blue stone. For an insane moment, they looked like game pieces, but Rachel knew the creatures had once—maybe still—lived.
What’s more, she feared them. Even though she had never seen them before right now, somehow she instinctively knew they were the enemy.
She tried to bolt, but Childers wrapped a big arm around her. No matter how she moved, she couldn’t get away from the sec man. His grip was firm and certain, almost bordering on painful.
“Easy.” Childers held her. Pain flashed through her hands as she beat her fists ineffectually against his armor.
Doyle stepped toward them. “What’s wrong with her?”
Professor Fredericks wandered away, drawn by the contents of the room. “I don’t know.”
“Has she acted like this before?”
“No.”
I have! You’ve seen me! Every time I came out of my nightmare! Rachel wanted to scream the truth at him—at all of them—but couldn’t. She’d been terrified before, but this time she had no control over her body. That was a first.
Childers reached up and captured her wrists. “Take it easy. Relax. Nobody’s going to hurt you. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Being restrained only made the panic clamoring inside Rachel worse. She threw her head at Childers, attempting to bite, and kicked at him, but only injured herself. Her lip split and she tasted blood, while her foot now throbbed inside its hiking boot.
Childers gripped her tighter. “I think we’re going to have to slap-patch her. Get her to calm down. She’s going to get hurt.”
Rachel heaved and struggled against the rigger’s implacable hold, but couldn’t break free. Doyle reached into a chest pouch and took out a slap-patch. She couldn’t let him put it on her.
If he did, she’d be trapped in her nightmare . . . and dead soon after.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“This is who we came for?” Flicker didn’t sound amused. “A beetle-head?”
Crouching in the jungle a short distance from the dig site, Hawke grimaced at the relayed image playing on his comm-link. Flicker had tied in video from a miniature drone she’d piloted into the cavern and passageway. The drone now clung to the wall near a spider’s web, and had a clear view of events unfolding in the second cave. The web’s strands, arrayed in front of the camera lens, looked wispy and huge.
“She’s not a beetle-head.”
“You mean Mr. Johnson’s notes didn’t mention that?”
Watching Rachel Gordon struggle, Hawke had to admit the young woman was acting like a Better-Than-Life chip-user going through a serious meltdown. But usually those people were burnouts, ruptured psyches dragging the remains of their meat bodies around ’til they got their next fix. Up to now, Rachel had looked healthy and mentally stable.
Until she’d entered the second cave.
“And we both know a Johnson wouldn’t lie.” Flicker’s tone dripped derision.
Hawke ignored her tone. “Is your little friend picking up anything else in the cave?”
Flicker was silent for just an instant. “No.”
“No odors or auditory stimulus?”
Flicker consulted her readouts. “None.”
“Then whatever’s triggering her reaction is astral in nature.”
“If you wanted to be sure of that, you should have brought a mage.”
“Out here, I figured it’d be an easy grab and go. Rapid transit back to the border, and a hand-off with Mr. Johnson.”
“The sec men upped that ante.”
Hawke shifted in the shadows. His chameleon suit concealed him in the shadows, as long as he didn’t move too quickly and no one got too close. The onboard sensor suite altered the suit’s polymers to reflect the surroundings from proper perspectives to fool the naked eye. Cybered vision was harder to fool, but the brain still interpreted the feed. The problem was the heat down here seemed like a living thing that had crawled into the suit with him.
“The sec men are a problem, but I’m not worried about them.” Sweat rolled down Hawke’s back. The chameleon suit didn’t come with a cooling system, because that would have made it pop out on a thermographic scan.
“I know the Johnson’s offering a lot of cred for this job, but we can’t spend it if we’re dead. It’s not too late to pull out.” Flicker sounded neutral, playing devil’s advocate. “We can eat our expenses on this one and be back across the border in a few hours. I’ll even split the loss with you. Won’t take us long to find something else.”
Hawke magnified his view of the gem-encrusted statues. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’ve never seen the inside of a dragon’s stomach either, but I know I’m not that curious about it.”
Hawke showed her a crooked smile. “No sense of adventure?”
“Adventure and curiosity don’t offer big payouts. A guy named Katar Hawke told me that once upon a time.”
Hawke grinned in spite of himself. Normally his curiosity never got high enough to get him killed. It wasn’t that high now, but they were still on the sidelines. Watching cost nothing at this point.
“Incoming.” Flicker’s voice was suddenly quiet and deadly serious.
“Where?” Slowly, Hawke eased to a standing position, giving the c
amouflage suit time to wiz the surroundings and keep him concealed. He unlimbered the Nitama Optimum II assault rifle he’d chosen as his lead weapon.
During the Japanese occupation of San Francisco, General Saito’s Imperial Marines had made the rifle immediately recognizable in the screamsheets and trideo. Its magazine carried thirty rounds, and the shotgun mounted underneath held five. The combination offered a lot of sudden firepower when necessary.
“I just marked ground troops approaching this location.”
Hawke accessed Flicker’s new feed through his comm and caught the overhead view from the aerial drone she’d put into the sky before they’d approached the campsite last night. At least two-dozen bogeys showed up on the screen. As Hawke watched, the drone’s Identify Friend/Foe system lit up three more. They moved like seasoned pros, stalking through the jungle like big cats.
“Who are they?” Hawke watched the men as they converged on the dig. The native laborers had hunkered down in the shade and started talking.
“You know what I know. We’re in Aztlan. Aztechnology usually stays close to anything going on in their territory.”
“They granted the excavation permits.”
“And they’re probably keeping an eye on things, too.” Flicker sounded irritated. “Let the professor invest his time and cred, and prove his find first. If someone else is willing to do the grunt work, why not let them, and then step in and take whatever’s here?”
Hawke shifted on his feet, readying himself. “If Aztechnology is after whatever is here, it’s gotta be something worth having.”
“They’ve got a lot of troops in the field, not to mention a couple helos in the air. Taking whatever it is—and that’s a problem right there—would be hard. They look like they’re ready to geek anyone that gets in the way.”
The comm video shifted and pulled back. This time Flicker’s high-flying drone watching their backs and the surrounding terrain threw orange warning circles around two Aguilar-GX attack helicopters. Both hovered above the treetops behind the line of advancing men, close enough to be called into immediate assistance. Attention drawn by the thunder of the rotors, the dig crew looked up at the helos.
“GXs.” Flicker cursed, sounding impressed at the same time. “Whatever this is, Aztechnology isn’t holding back on the firepower.”
“Gimme an ETA on the ground units. The helos won’t sweep in until the groundpounders are in position.”
Flicker looked at him and lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re still thinking about doing this? Have you been mentally wiped?”
Hawke kept calm and thought it through. “If Aztechnology goes big on this op, do you really think we’re going to slide out of here without being noticed? If we’re getting fragged on this thing, I’d rather go down looking for the win.”
“They’ll bury you in the same hole.”
“Are you in or out?”
Flicker was silent for a moment, but made up her mind quickly. Time was working against them. Hawke knew she liked working with him because he stuck even when the going got rough.
“Present rate of ground travel puts them at the dig site in two minutes thirteen seconds.” Her voice was professional, free of the anxiety that had been there a moment earlier.
“If you get the opportunity and things go totally south on this, get clear.”
“I will. You knew that going in.”
“See if your drone inside the cave can find another way out of there, just in case I can’t come back out the way I’m going in.” Hawke brought his assault rifle up across his chest, activated his wired reflexes, and sprinted out of the jungle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Seated in her specially-modified ATV, Flicker watched the action unfold. Wired directly into the vehicle, the onboard components augmented her senses and made her feel more alive than any time in the meat world. These days, she seldom went anywhere without being wired into a drone through her PAN, mostly because she didn’t like a single perspective.
The ATV stood three meters tall, four meters wide, and ten meters long. Covered in ablative armor and bristling with weapons and tech, it was a beast, but it was Flicker’s beast, designed to meet her every demand. The ATV’s skin contained camouflage nanites that helped blend it into urban or, as now, jungle environments. With the tech cloaking on, it was hard to detect from even a few meters away.
Getting the vehicle into Guatemala near the dig site had been difficult, but between them Hawke and Flicker had managed to pay off all the right people and sneak by all the wrong ones.
Right now she listened to several distinct levels of noise, tracking the encrypted radio buzz coming from the Aztlan sec men, Hawke’s hurried breathing inside the camouflage suit, and the idle conversation of the laborers wondering what was in the hole the professor and the pretty señorita had discovered.
Her vision multi-tasked as well, picking up signals from the onboard systems as well as the drone in the cave and the airborne drones she had in the area. She cycled through the various perspectives and visual spectrums, hitting infrared and thermographic inside the cave as well as the telescopic views offered by the flying drones. She was inside the ATV as well as outside it.
When she’d gotten her first cyber implants and started driving, the sensory impressions from her body as well as the vehicles, then the added layers of the drones, had almost overloaded her mind. But she’d adapted. Now she could study them all separately or spin them all together and make sense of what she was seeing. When she wasn’t jacked into a vehicle, she felt like she’d gone partially blind and deaf.
And she moved so slowly.
Now she was a tiger, coiled and ready for action.
Hawke broke cover and the laborers saw him. On unassisted video, Flicker only picked him up as a shimmering blur sprinting across the open country. Even the thermographic spectrum failed to tag him. Video acuity, aided by motion sensors, locked onto him and recognized him for what he was.
The Azzies would have that as well.
One of the GX helos lifted slightly.
Flicker blanketed the motion detector sensors the GX aimed at Hawke by agitating the intervening space with microwaves.
“You’ve been spotted. They’re locking onto you.”
Hawke didn’t reply, saving his breath for running. A few laborers noticed the blur streaking across the open country. Whispers of angry spirits and awakened demons reached the ATV’s audio pickups. Some of the men picked up shovels and axes. All of them retreated from the hole, fear tightening their faces.
Desperately, Flicker searched through the background geological material she’d dug into on the area. “In and out, my eye. You’re one step away from getting fragged.”
The ATV fed chems through her meat body and kept her chilled out. For the moment she was cold and hard and powerful, totally the ATV. She was wide and low to the ground, sitting on six oversized tires, waiting to be unleashed.
A few of the dig sec men started lifting their weapons. Flicker broke into their unit PAN and blasted them with a warning about the approaching Aztechnology troops.
“Who is this?”
“Stay off this freq!”
“Why would Aztechnology be here now?”
Dispassionately, Flicker watched the Azzies close on the sec men. They didn’t bother declaring their identities or their intentions. They just opened fire.
Bullets and flechettes chewed through the trees and brush. Shredded vegetation drifted to the ground as the laborers and the remaining mercs dropped like felled timbers. Unarmored, the laborers practically exploded, bursting into bits and pieces across the terrain.
Flicker brought up her weapons array, but calmly held her fire. The time to cut and run without getting involved passed in a heartbeat.
Hawke threw himself the last few meters toward the hole. “What intel do you have on that tunnel?” His groan carried over the comm when he hit the ground.
“Nothing. It’s new to the data I have.”
> “Gimme something I can use, Flicker.”
Using one of the overhead drones, Flicker watched Hawke plunge into the hole, and couldn’t help thinking it looked like an open grave. She flipped through the survey maps of the area she’d lifted from government, corporate, and military databases.
“There’s an underground river that runs parallel to the tunnel farther in.” Flicker took the incoming information from the cave drone and overlaid it onto the geo-maps.
“Drowning isn’t a viable option.”
The line of Azzie troops burst through the trees and arrived at the dig.
“You’re about to have company down there.”
Hawke cursed, but kept going.
Flicker plunged into his vidstream and saw the world as he saw it. He raced across the initial cave toward the passageway where the professor, the girl, and the three sec men had gone. His breath huffed in her ears.
“Close the door behind me.”
“You don’t know if you can get out the other way.”
“I know we can’t shoot our way through an Azzie attack team.”
Flicker “felt” the hard jabs of a snooper prog banging into their comm freq. She fended it off automatically, shifting smoothly through the channels, and taking Hawke’s comm with her. That wouldn’t last long, though.
“Understood.” It was times like this that Flicker wished she wasn’t tweaked into hyperfocus by the chem suite. She knew her voice was cold and distant, not the voice of a friend. “Closing the door.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Flicker armed a quartet of missiles—two fragmentation and two high-explosive rounds—in the ATV’s cannons. She ordered four anti-vehicle rounds into the second rotation, auto-locked those targets, and opened fire.
The initial salvo of rounds sped through the air in a low trajectory. The GX helos spotted them and tried to jam her signals as they warned the ground troops.
