Chapter 1
“You know what the difference is between grave robbers and tomb raiders, Milo?”
“I dunno—to get to the other side or something...?” Milo replied uncertainly in his deep, rumbling voice. A big man, Milo leaned down with a shovel in his hand, working at the hard soil of a hillock some twenty miles outside what used to be the ville of Beausoleil.
Standing beside Milo, Jake was thinner with a girl’s shoulders and a pencil mustache. His dark hair, thinner now at forty than it had been at twenty, though the style remained unchanged, was slicked back.
It had been over three hundred years since Queen Victoria met with Professor Howard in the underground bunker at Windsor, three hundred years during which the whole world had been devastated by two World Wars before an apocalyptic third, in 2001, had turned the United States of America into the radioactive Deathlands. The population was culled to one tenth of its size, and the survivors struggled to eke out their lives in an irradiated wasteland where muties roamed the dust-swept streets of abandoned cities. For some, that era had seemed to go on forever, but eventually humankind had clambered out of that self-made hell pit. Under the Program of Unification, civil North America was governed by nine ruthless barons who split the land into great chunks, which they oversaw. Each baron commanded a ville named after him- or herself—and all demanded absolute loyalty from their subjects. But in the past few years, the balance of power had been upset when the barons had revealed themselves as reborn Annunaki, a race of lizardlike aliens who had walked the Earth once before at the dawn of man, when they had been revered as gods. The Annunaki had planned to take control of the decimated populace, the thinned herd that the nuclear exchange had created two hundred years before, but their plan had crumbled thanks to a combination of infighting and the intervention of a brave band of rebels working under the banner of the Cerberus organization. With the barons-turned-Annunaki now departed, the world itself seemed up for grabs, a future just waiting for guidance. And perhaps that guidance would come from a most unlikely source.
“‘To get to the...’ What?” Jake spit, glaring at his broad-shouldered companion in disbelief. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I dunno,” Milo admitted. “It’s a joke, right?”
Jake’s withering look was lost in the faint illumination of the overhead stars. “I swear to Cobalt, you are one dumb son of a mutant. I’ve had dumps that showed more intelligence than you.”
Milo looked up, offended.
“Just keep digging, huh,” Jake told him. “I’m trying to make a point here.”
Milo got back to digging, working at the spot that Jake had indicated. It was located amid a thick group of trees. It was the kind of place you’d go to bury a body, and the thin crescent of moonlight did nothing to assuage that feeling in Jake’s mind. He wondered when was the last time anyone had actually walked up here, between this particular cluster of trees, way out beyond the farmland.
“So, what is it?” Milo asked as he shunted another shovelful of earth aside. He was a strong man and, even though they hadn’t been here ten minutes, already he was down four feet into the heavy soil and showing no signs of tiring. Jake had to credit the guy with that—whatever he lacked in brainpower, Milo worked like one of them old-time slaves; that’s why they remained partners long after Jake had become permanently impatient with the dumb son of a bitch.
“The difference,” Jake explained, waving his arms theatrically in the air, “between grave robbers and tomb raiders is the reward. See, Joe Grave-Robber, all he cares about is the money. He finds a nice gold wrist-chron or a pretty necklace and he figures he’s made a big score. But for tomb raiders, it’s all about the history. We don’t do it for the money, Milo, my friend, we do it so that the people of the future can look back at the past and go, ‘Hey, those old people wore clogs on their heads. Who knew?’ You get me?”
Milo shook his head but didn’t slow down his digging. “Not really, Jake. I thought you said that we’d be paid handsomely for what was waiting in this place.”
“That we will,” Jake assured him, “but we ain’t in this for the money, are we?”
As usual, Milo was confused. “We ain’t?”
Jake clapped his hands together and smiled. “Men like you and me, we’re better than that. We seek knowledge, understanding, great...things. And if we happen to discover a treasure trove of artifacts that we can sell on, well—that’s the almighty baron’s way of telling us we done good, we deserve it. See?”
Milo didn’t see, but then more often than not he didn’t really have a clue what his partner in crime was talking about. Jake was the brains and he was the brawn; that was the arrangement they had always had, and Jake had always seen him right once the sweat work was over and they cracked open whatever the heck it was that Jake had heard about through his admirable network of contacts. One time they’d gone diving to a shipwreck off the Samariumville coast where they’d found so much gold they hadn’t had to pull another job for eighteen months. But funds dried up eventually, so here they were again, looking for another big haul. How had Jake described it? A man had offered him a map, something military, he thought, that showed an ancient redoubt, the kind of place where the prenukecaust people would hide armaments, vehicle specs and crappy food that had turned to dust. It wasn’t a shipwreck, but it was something.
Clunk!
“Found something,” Milo muttered, his beaming smile shining in the filtered moonlight. This kind of work was best done by moonlight, as it didn’t pay to attract attention when you were acquiring unclaimed property. There were too many groups around, these days, from one-man operations all the way up to big outfits like the Millennial Consortium, all of them wanting a piece of the historical pie. Those Millennial bastards were the worst, Milo knew—he and Jake had gotten themselves mixed up with those whackjobs once, and Jake wound up losing a thumb and two fingers during the interrogation before he had finally squealed about their find. That was a long time ago now, back when Jake had still been married. What was her name? Belle? Was that it?
Jake snapped his fingers in Milo’s face. “Hey, wake up, dumbbell.” He was leaning forward, his other hand pressed against his thigh as he studied the thing that Milo’s shovel had clanged against. The object glinted mysteriously as it caught the moonbeams.
“I can’t see shit in this light,” Jake muttered, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. A moment later he produced a penlight, running its narrow beam across the hole that Milo had just finished digging. Beneath the pencil-thin beam the two men saw a metal plate that seemed to bulge a little out of the soil.
“Hey, help me move this stuff, huh?” Jake ordered, kneeling down on the slope and brushing away loose soil.
Milo brought his shovel down against the metal plate, working over it in sweeps that gradually uncovered more of its surface. Revealed, it was roughly three feet across, circular with a convex design that brought the center up in a raised mound like a shallow, upturned cone. There were rivets around the edge of the circle, and beyond its lip was a second circle of steel, this one much thinner than the top, reminding Milo of a sink plunger sitting in a drain. In the center of the circular “lid” was a handle, a simple bar like the kind you might find on a fire door, next to which was an inset panel that showed six interlinked cogs. The workings were black with dirt.
“Move these,” Jake muttered, running his hand over the cogs, “to open that. Simple.”
“Looks like a door on a submarine,” Milo opined as Jake worked the cogs, testing how they interacted. “You know what you’re doing, right, Jake?”
Jake looked up at him with that winning smile he used on the ladies. Milo always liked that smile; sometimes it meant he’d get laid, too, if he kept quiet while Jake worked his charm. “Hey, ’course I know what I’m doing. Just need to think it through a little, that’s all. Why? You in a hurry?”
Milo laughed. “Heh-heh, not me, Jake. No, sir.”
Jake worked the combination for a few minutes, figuring how each part affected the others until finally he heard a click and knew he had the door unlocked. His old man was a jugger—a safe-cracker—and he had shown him the tricks of the trade. Mostly, it was down to patience and a steady hand; that’s what Jake’s old man had told him.
“You want to give me a hand with this?” Jake asked, working dirt from the ridge around the sunken manhole.
Milo leaned down, and in a few minutes the two of them had the door free, wrenching it out of the ground with a groan of ancient hinges. The door pulled out a few inches before folding back on a sliding mechanism. The mechanism jammed a couple of times, but Jake used a little canister of oil to work it free, and Milo’s brute strength did the rest.
Below, it was dark, and Jake played his tiny beam over the gaping hole, running it back and forth until he saw what appeared to be tiled floor beneath. Looking down there reminded Milo of the old wishing wells his late mom had taken him to sometimes, and he laughed. “Want to make a wish, Jake?” he asked.
Jake glared at him, muttering something under his breath. “I’ll go down first,” he said, “and you follow.”
“I dunno,” Milo said. “Looks like a big jump.”
“That’s why I’m going first,” Jake told him. “You’re good for a lot of stuff, Milo, but you’ve got the agility of a brick, I swear.”
Milo didn’t argue, but that was mostly because he didn’t understand. Besides, Jake always went first—that was their arrangement.
* * *
I
T
WAS
A
DROP
of twelve feet to the floor, not a lot for a tall man like Jake, and once he was down there he saw the ladder-style rungs that worked up the curved side of the wall. Milo followed, clambering like a monkey to reach for the rungs as Jake speared them in the spotlight of his flash.
They were in an alcove, a tight square room with barely enough space to hold two grown men, a little like the narthex lobby of a church. Milo’s shoulders brushed against the wall as he endeavoured to give Jake “room to think.” There was no door to this area, which was delineated purely by a short flight of steps that led down into a lower tunnel. Jake peered down the steps, listening carefully to the echoes. There was no reason that anyone should be down here—hell, that combination lock on the door above them had been sealed for centuries—but it didn’t pay to get reckless.
Jake couldn’t hear anything coming from the narrow tunnel, so he led the way along it with Milo dogging his heels, the little penlight illuminating the careful brickwork of the tunnel in a tiny, moving circle.
“What do you think is down here?” Milo asked eagerly.
“Your grave if you don’t button your lip,” Jake warned him in a whisper. “Keep it down, okay?”
The brickwork was neat, creating a low arch that ran along the full ceiling of the tunnel, finished in a sandy yellow color. There were markings on the walls here and there, perfect sketches of the female form rendered in intricate pencil. Jake played his penlight over the pictures, and Milo let out a low whistle when he saw them. The sketches looked ancient, the delicate lines worn to a muted gray that reminded Jake of cobwebs.
There was a sharp bend in the tunnel and then it widened. Suddenly, Jake and Milo were standing in a much wider tunnel. This one had a more gentle curvature to the ceiling, wide enough to hold two Sandcat vehicles side by side. And the strange thing was, a whole series of lights ran the length of this tunnel, illuminating the tiles and the grand painting that dominated one wall.
Milo walked across to the mural, examining it with widening eyes. It was a scene of nymphs at play by the waters. A great horse-drawn chariot emerged from the stream in a cascade of water, each droplet perfectly rendered in gouache. The nymphs were shown naked, some of them artistically draped with silks or flowing water. The illustration was life-size.
“Phew,” Milo muttered as he stood, hands on hips, before it. “Some ladies, huh, Jake?”
Jake ignored his partner. He was more concerned with the lamps that illuminated the scene. They were gas lamps, ornate brass stems holding onionlike bowls that flickered with a warm yellow glow. “Someone’s lit these,” Jake said as he reached into his jacket pocket.
“What?” Milo asked, still admiring the women in the painting.
“Milo, wake up,” Jake growled as he pulled his pistol free from its hiding place in his pocket. “Someone’s here—they lit the lamps.”
Milo scratched his face in thought. “The door was locked,” he reminded Jake.
“That it was,” Jake mused.
“Could be something automatic then,” Milo said, grinning.
The two of them had scouted an ancient military redoubt once before, where they had discovered the lights worked on an automated circuit that activated whenever anyone entered the place. Jake looked around, his eyes following the line of lamps that ran along one long wall, flicking across to take in the mural. Maybe it was automated, like Milo said. Could be.
Jake checked the safety on his blaster, a snub-nosed .38 based on the old Smith & Wesson design. The six-shot weapon drew a little to the right on firing, he recalled. One time Jake had used it on a map collector who had discovered Jake rifling through the locked drawers of his study. There had been a flash of light, a shout of discharge and the old man had sagged to the floor clutching at his chest. Jake still thought of the man now and then. He hadn’t wanted to kill him. His safe-cracking dad would have called that a complication, and an unprofessional one at that.
Jake steadied himself, flicking on the safety. He would keep the blaster out, right on show in case they bumped into any trouble. But he didn’t plan to use it unless he absolutely had to.
Milo was back admiring the mural. “You reckon we could take this with us?” he asked. “I mean, it’s really pretty. Someone would probably pay a lot for it.”
Jake glanced at the artwork. Milo was right; it was an excellent piece of work, though the stylized figures looked almost three-dimensional. “What are we going to do? Chip it away piece by piece? Come on, there’s probably some other stuff down here, the kind we can put in a sack and haul back up to the surface for now.”