Milo nodded, pulling himself away from the river nymphs.
The two tomb raiders followed the tunnel where it burrowed through the earth, detecting a subtle downward slope as they walked its grand length. The passageway ended in a wall where two smaller tunnels diverged, each narrower and with a lower ceiling, but still wide enough to accommodate three or four men abreast. Jake picked one, holding the gun up close to his shoulder as he strode gingerly down the sloping corridor. Like the broad tunnel, this one was lit by gas lamps, their flickering illumination making shadows play across the pale walls.
A few steps in, Jake stopped and held up his free hand to warn Milo to silence. “You hear something?” Jake whispered.
Milo thought about it, making a grand show of looking this way and that. “Like what?” he asked.
“Like ‘I don’t know’ is like what,” Jake growled. “What am I, a bat? It’s a sound, like the sound of a movement. You hear it or don’t you?”
Milo listened again. At first he didn’t hear anything, but he strained, stilling his breathing as he peered down the flickering corridor. There was something. Not a movement sound—it was more rhythmic, almost like music. Unconsciously, Milo began tapping out the rhythm against his leg. “It’s a tune,” he said. “Like...uh...la-la, la-la-la...”
“Yeah, okay thanks, Chopin,” Jake hissed, commanding Milo to silence. “Enough already.”
They continued warily down the curving tunnel, and saw a side door waiting to the left. The door was open and whatever lay beyond was dark. Jake stepped over to it, bringing the snub-nosed .38 up in a ready position.
“Jake,” Milo urged. “I don’t like this.”
“Me, either,” Jake whispered, peering into the darkened doorway. Beyond it lay a room, twelve feet in length and cluttered with junk. The room was mostly dark, just a small table lamp lit in the far corner, where a figure sat.
His shoulder pressed against the door frame, Jake peered at the figure from his hiding place. It was a man with long dark hair that reached down past his collar. He wore a swallow-tailed velvet jacket the rich red color of sunset, and beneath that a white shirt with an open collar, dark pants and shoes. The shoes had been polished to catch what little light was cast by the flickering table lamp. Evidently unaware of the presence of the spy, the man was toying with something in his hands, and for a moment Jake took it to be a child. He stifled a gasp, focused his eyes on the thing in the man’s hands as he placed it on the floor. A moment later the figure began to walk, taking three steps forward before moving back again like a film on rewind. It was a puppet, Jake realized, the kind that hung down on strings from a rig held by its operator. Weird.
“Jake, look,” Milo whispered, pointing at something in the room.
Jake’s heart stuttered at Milo’s words and it took him a moment to recover. Then, shooting a look of warning at his partner, he peered where Milo was pointing. There were frames there, burnished gold with tooling, like picture frames. And not just one or two—there had to be a dozen in the stack Milo was indicating, and ten times that scattered around the rest of the room. Paintings. Paintings that could be sold, maybe.
Jake scanned the area more carefully as he remained hidden beside the door. Initially, he had been distracted by the man, so it was the first time he properly looked over the stuff he had at first dismissed as “junk.” There were paintings there and statues, delicate alabaster carvings of figures draped in silks and robes, some wearing nothing at all.
Jake had a good eye for this stuff, and he was already assessing the room for items of value. Maybe it was junk, but it was artsy junk and there was always a market for that—especially these days with the fall of the baronies leaving so many people resettling in different spots as if they were starting from scratch. All those planners and designers and doctors, all of them wanting their new place to look wealthy like the places they lived in back in Beausoleil and Snakefishville. Yeah, he could sell this stuff if he could get it out of here. But as long as the puppet master over there was waiting, it was a definite no-go. Best to come back, deal with this when the place was empty.
“Why don’t I know you?” It was a woman’s voice, sharp with an accent like cut glass. His eyes fixed on the puppet man, Jake couldn’t process it for a half second.
“What—?” Jake said, turning.
There was a woman standing there, just eight feet down the corridor. “You, I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you here before.” She was beautiful with flawless skin that made the vexation on her brow all the more charming. She had blond hair that trailed halfway down her back and she was wearing the kind of dress that Jake associated with fairy-tale princesses, splaying out at floor length with a cinched waist and a low-cut bodice that drew the eye to her milky pale cleavage. “Well?”
Beside him, Jake could hear Milo trying to speak. “W-w-we...”
“Look, sister,” Jake cut in, stepping in front of Milo protectively with the gun held loose in his hand, “your crew got here first, we get it. Salvage rules, we both respect that. But there’s plenty here, just in that room alone. Maybe we can split it, you know? Cut a deal.”
“What are you talking about, you strange, creepy little disease of a man?” the woman demanded, taking a brisk step toward him. Behind her, a little farther around the bend in the corridor, Jake spotted another man approaching, blond like the woman and wearing a puffy white shirt with a lace-up collar, dark pants that clung to his legs as if they’d been sprayed there. Neither the man nor his girlfriend looked much older than twenty, maybe twenty-five at most.
“Look...I—I—I... What did you just call me?” Jake asked. Already he was raising the .38 in his hands, bringing it level with the woman’s forehead as she took another step, thumbing the safety.
The blond-haired woman reached out in a blur, swiping the weapon aside with such force that it leaped from Jake’s startled grip. “I asked who you were,” she said, the words perfectly formed by her pretty mouth. “You cannot answer a question with a question. That’s not the way the game’s played, is it, Algie?”
Behind her, the blond-haired man in his shirtsleeves shook his head. “No, Cecily,” he averred. “It’s a simply beastly way to upset the game.”
“Game?” Jake spit. “What damn game? What the fuck are you two...?”
The woman’s hand was around his throat in a flash, the grip so tight that suddenly Jake could not breathe. “What deplorable language to use in front of a lady,” she said. “Shame on you.”
The woman called Cecily shoved Jake away and he staggered back, his hands reaching to his burning throat. “Wh-wha—?” he began, before sinking into a fit of coughing.
As Cecily rounded on Jake again, Milo stepped in, interposing his bulk like a prison door. “Hey, you don’t just...”
Cecily turned her attention to Milo and her face held a thin smile. “You’re a large one, aren’t you? Do you like girls or boys?”
“Um...wh-what...?” Milo began.
“Honk!”
the blonde woman shouted in his face, her smile becoming broader, a malicious twinkle in her eye. “Hesitation. You mustn’t hesitate—it’s against the rules.”
Jake saw what happened next but he couldn’t quite process it, not straight away. The woman lashed out with her arm, moving it so swiftly that it actually hummed as it cut the air. Only, it didn’t just cut the air, it cut Milo, too, splitting between the slats of his rib cage before emerging from somewhere close to his spine. Her hand was covered in Milo’s blood, wearing it like a scarlet glove as she pulled her arm back out of his body.
Holed like a ship, Milo sank down the wall in a splutter of blood. Bubbling, foamy red liquid appeared between his clenched teeth as he collapsed to the floor, the red stain blooming across his ruined shirt. The woman stood over his fallen figure and smiled.
“It was hesitation, wasn’t it, Algie? Do please tell me it was.”
Still standing by the bend in the tunnel, the blond man nodded his head slowly in agreement. “It was.”
“Good,” the woman replied, “because I don’t think he’ll be able to play again. I think perhaps I broke him.”
“What the hell?” Jake muttered as the woman turned her attention away from his fallen colleague and back to him. He was scared now, more scared than when he had shot the map collector in his own home, more scared than when those millennial bastards had taken his fingers.
“Let’s try again, shall we?” Cecily cooed as she wiped Milo’s blood from her hands on the beautiful silks of her skirt.
Jake sobbed, assuring her he would answer everything.
“And no st-st-stuttering this time,” the blond-maned Algie taunted.
Chapter 2
Brigid Baptiste was wired on glist with her foot rammed hard against the accelerator of the Turbo 190. There was a sweet taste in her mouth, like something from her childhood. The drug buzzed in her veins while the engine roared all around her, its sound like caged thunder as it rumbled through the chassis of the cherry-red sports car while the car’s life pulse beat a tattoo against the sole of her foot where it held the accelerator down against the floor.
“Keep heading north,” she reminded herself through gritted teeth. “Remember the plan.”
Brigid was a beautiful woman in her late twenties with flame-red hair and bright emerald-green eyes. Her full lips suggested a passionate side, while her high brow inferred intelligence. In reality, Brigid encompassed both of these traits, though it was her fearsome intellect that had gotten her into this jam. A warrior for the Cerberus group, an organization established to protect humanity from threats both extra- and intraterrestrial, Brigid Baptiste was an ex-archivist from Cobaltville who had stumbled upon a conspiracy to delude the public about man’s history. Her eidetic—or photographic—memory allowed her to retain information in precise detail, even after just a glance, and it was this ability that made her such a force to be reckoned with.
Right now, however, she was racing down the busy streets of an Australasian city called the Hoop, urging more speed from the roaring engine of the Turbo, even as the glist surged through her blood. Around her, neon signs blurred as she sped past them through the ville’s central square, a tribute to futurist architectural design.
It was daytime, the sun high in the sky, and she was tearing along one of the Hoop’s broad streets, weaving through the moving traffic as if it was stationary, her eyes fixed on the road. Like the car’s a part of me, Brigid told herself as she pumped the accelerator, urging even more speed from the powerful engine. What was it, eight hundred horsepower? Like eight hundred stallions caged beneath the hood, each one straining at the reins.
People and neon rushed by in a flickering display of shadows and brightness, advertising hoardings, an intensity of trivial information, over and over.
People.
Neon.
On and on.
Her hands felt slick in the driving gloves, sweat clinging there in glistening, silver rivers. But that didn’t matter. She was one with the automobile right now, a techno-organic synergy of thought and speed.
The Turbo 190 took the corner at speed, charging at the on-ramp and hurtling up its incline in a growl of barely restrained power. Around it, the city had become a blur, the other automobiles something sensed as much as seen. A wag swerved aside as her cherry-red sports car whipped by, the driver hurling obscenities at her as he mounted the sidewalk.
Behind Brigid, three security vehicles were following, gunning their way through the traffic, sirens wailing, their thick bullbars knocking aside anything that didn’t move out of their path in time. They were armored like tanks, with triple axles to carry the weight without compromising their speed. Their sirens echoed across the elevated off-ramp, their Doppler song bouncing from the hard concrete barriers that lined its edges. Brigid ignored them. She could think two, three moves ahead, anticipate what the other vehicles would do, where the next pedestrian was coming from.
This high up, Brigid could see the edge of the coast where it abutted the ville’s limits. The elevated street made a shallow curve toward it before banking back again. She gunned the engine, teasing another notch of speed from those eight hundred stallions, her Turbo just a red blur on the high-up roadway.
In her mirror, Brigid saw the tanklike pursuit vehicles take the ramp at speed as they struggled to keep pace with her. Then, as she watched, the foremost of the pursuit vehicles popped something out of its roof, a blister bubble with two dark protrusions emanating from its midpoint—a gun turret. Brigid yanked on the steering wheel as the first shot was fired, a ruby-red laser blast that cut a great swathe in the blacktop in a sizzle of burning tarmac.
“Crap!” Brigid shouted as she pulled the steering wheel hard to the left, driving the Turbo so close to the crash barrier that it scraped it in a rush of white-hot sparks.
Maybe stealing an unarmored car hadn’t been such a great idea. Definitely stealing the encrypted data from right under the noses of the local authorities had been a lousy one. Lousy and dangerous.
* * *
K
ANE
HAD
BEEN
TREKKING
through Hope for over an hour, cutting a labyrinthine path through the hodgepodge of streets that made up the refugee-camp-cum-shanty-town, making triple sure he wasn’t being followed. Built of junk and salvage, the streets were tightly crammed and they stank of human detritus. Feces scarred the surface here and there, wild dogs, rats and other animals stalking the alleyways in search of the rich pickings that the hungry humans left behind, sometimes making a meal out of an unlucky person who had strayed too far from safety.
It was morning. Kane had gotten here a little before sunrise, trudging across the desert from the hidden parallax point that his interphaser unit had opened. The interphaser was a teleportation device based on ancient plans devised by an alien race. Kane’s colleagues in the Cerberus organization had spent many man-hours figuring out how the units worked before they had been put into field operation.
Kane was on a mission for Cerberus even now. A tall man with broad shoulders and rangy limbs, Kane was said to have something of the wolf about him. He was both a loner and a pack leader as the opportunity arose. His short dark hair was cropped close to his skull, and his gray-blue eyes were the color of gunmetal. Kane had once been a magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville, a post he had abandoned after a run-in with the baron years ago. That had been before Baron Cobalt had been revealed as a hybrid in thrall to the Annunaki, a jealous race of space aliens. The Annunaki had once ruled the Earth in the days before the Bible, when they had been mistaken for gods. Then, as now, their power was circumscribed only by their own infighting.
Though the most recent threat from the Annunaki was past, the repercussions were still being felt. Indeed, this ramshackle refugee settlement that lurked outside the tiny fishing ville of Hope on the West Coast of America was one example of the disruption that the Annunaki had caused, uprooting numerous people as nothing more than collateral damage in a war between would-be space gods.
And in a roundabout way, Kane was here because of the Annunaki, too. One of their number, Ullikummis, a prince of the royal family, had staged a devastating attack on the Cerberus headquarters, imprisoning its occupants and destroying much of the technology that they had come to rely upon. Eventually Kane and his allies had rallied and dealt with Ullikummis, dispatching him via interphaser into the heart of the sun, a death from which even the wily Annunaki prince could never escape. But the Cerberus redoubt remained in a state of flux, operating at 60 percent efficiency with just 40 percent of its tech online. Kane was here in Hope to change that. Rumor had it that a cache of prenukecaust military-grade technology was being employed by one of the lowlifes here to gouge their fellow refugees.
Kane had dressed in a battered denim jacket with frayed cuffs, dark pants and a pair of scuffed-up boots that looked as if they had seen better days. It was an act, of course—beneath the tired clothes, Kane wore something better: his shadow suit. The shadow suit was a highly advanced environmental suit that could regulate his body temperature no matter where he found himself, and it had a weave with armorlike properties that offered protection from environmental threats. Still, it didn’t pay to look wealthy—or even comfortable—in a shantytown like this. Better to look as though you had nothing left to steal than to tempt the locals to come check.
Kane halted at the junction of four pathways, ramshackle two-story buildings lurking overhead in bent forms as if bowing in nightmarish salutation. Even at this time of the morning, with the sun just beginning to warm the Californian desert that loomed at the edge of the camp, the streets were busy with urchins and gaudies plying their trades. Unusual, underage, unfathomable—it was all freely available in places like this, and it didn’t take much effort to find it. As an ex-magistrate, the place sickened Kane. People deserved better than this. The Program of Unification had brought humankind back from the brink of barbarism; to see those efforts turned to naught in places like this left Kane angry and frustrated. The problems were too big here. Cerberus could rally against a space-alien attack, but it struggled to cope with the thousands of uprooted refugees with nowhere left to go and a burgeoning crime fraternity that was more than happy to prey on easy marks.
The place was up ahead, a twin-story joint, clad in mismatched sheets of corrugated steel with narrow windows that were little more than slits. There was a symbol painted across the only door—a heavy slab of steel-plated concrete with a tiny eye slit that could be pulled back to check who was outside. Painted in a vibrant yellow, the symbol showed a stylized cloud with two circles arranged beneath it, one above the other. Imagination.
From his spot at the junction, Kane looked at the door for a moment, guessed it was at least six inches thick. The whole thing probably had to be worked on cantilevers just to get it to move; there was no way of passing through it unannounced.
But then Kane wasn’t going in the front door.
* * *
T
HE
STEERING
WHEEL
felt like a living thing as Brigid wrestled with its faux-leather grip, pulling the Turbo around in a hard right as another laser blast cut the road just a few yards behind her. Her eyes flicked to the mirror, back to the road, then to the mirror again.
The skyway was forty feet above ground level with solid concrete barriers on either side and nothing but ocean beneath her. There was nowhere for her to jump out and no option to turn off until she reached the next exit, and that was another mile and a half away.
120 miles per hour.
At the speed she was doing right now, she’d hit that exit in under a minute, but she could sense that wouldn’t be soon enough. Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror once more. Behind her, another gun turret had appeared on the rooftop of one of the pursuing vehicles with a third just materializing atop the last. She winced as the lasers came to life, twin beams burning through the air in bloodred streaks.
How had she got herself into this situation? Something about stealing plans to some piece of tech for Cerberus, she couldn’t remember what it was. No, wait. That was wrong. Brigid had an eidetic memory, didn’t she? Which meant...
“Shit!” Brigid cursed as another streak of laser light burned through the air just six inches from her side window, disintegrating her wing mirror. They were closing in on her.
Brigid wrenched the wheel again, switching her foot to the brake at the same time and bringing the Turbo 190 into a skid at breakneck speed. The car hurtled sideways for two dozen feet as the laser beams streaked past it, before Brigid gunned the engine once more and brought its nose back in line with the road. A triple laser burst burned the tarmac where she had been, but her stuttered speed caught her pursuers out and they overestimated where she would be.
The roadway bumped along beneath her squealing tires as Brigid jostled along the street, speeding toward the off-ramp. The city map just wouldn’t come back to her.
“Come on,” she muttered to herself. “Remember where you are.”
* * *
K
ANE
TOOK
ANOTHER
ALLEYWAY
parallel to the building, stepping over a pool of something unguessable. The pool was colored a putrid green and had a film of grease over it.
As he turned the corner, he came face-to-face with a tall man dressed head to toe in rags with a bandanna pulled low and a neckerchief pulled high, leaving just his dark eyes on show. Kane tried to step aside but the man stopped him.
“Private party,” the figure in rags said in a growl, and Kane saw that a blaster had materialized in his hand from somewhere beneath his ragged robes. “Turn back,
muchacho.
”
Kane took a step back and turned as if to leave. Then, in a blur of motion, his right fist swung around and he socked the man in the face, striking his nose in a hard thump. “No can do,
‘muchacho.’
”
The surprised guardsman stumbled backward, crunching against the wall as his broken nose caved in, blood streaming down his face behind the neckerchief.
Kane didn’t let up. Already he was stepping close to the man, sweeping his left arm in a rapid arc that knocked the man’s pistol out of his hand. The blaster sailed through the air before coming to an abrupt halt against the far wall.
“By dose,” the gunman was muttering. “You broke by dose.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed as he delivered another brutal punch into the man’s face. The man’s neck snapped back with the blow and he slumped to the ground, his head lolling back against the wall.
There wasn’t a lot of time, Kane knew. He checked the guardsman, lifting his eyelids to make certain he was unconscious. He was.
Then Kane grabbed the man by his legs and dragged him into the nearest doorway, leaving him hidden there in the shadows as best he could. It was all about speed now. Smart guy back there was out for the count, giving Kane maybe five or ten minutes to get in, check what he was looking for and get out.
Kane wound his way down the narrow alleyway until he reached the door he was after. The building backed onto the one he had observed with the corrugated steel walls, but this one was a single story. The door was similar to the big steel-and-concrete one he’d seen at the front of the building, six thick inches of protection for whatever was inside and no handle showing on the exterior.
With a swift glance behind him to make sure he was still alone, Kane reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled loose a tiny charge no bigger than a ball bearing. The charge had an adhesive strip on the back, and Kane pulled off the backing and slapped it in place against the door, about where he figured the lock to be.