Dark Goddess

The brief rest had done him little good, but his anger added renewed vigor to his muscles. The men and the dogs probably viewed him as little more than a weary fox, fleeing before the hounds, but he felt more like the timber wolf. A wolf was a wise animal that had learned all the tricks of staying alive, spinning out the odds with a gambler’s skill to continually outwit death.

Kane sprinted full-out, achieving a long-legged, ground-eating stride, running on the balls of his feet. He swatted at the mosquitoes that made strafing dives at his eyes. Straight ahead, past a row of gnarled cypress roots, lay a stretch of mudflats that led directly into the ville of Coral Cove. There he would find alleys and doorways in which to hide until he could make his rendezvous.

The soles of his high-laced jump boots sank into the muck, releasing the sulfurous stench of marsh gas. Behind him rose the frenzied yelping of the dogs. Kane lurched into a shadowed area just inside the half-completed log wall surrounding Coral Cove and risked a glance backward.

Three bearded men held a trio of long leather leashes in their right hands, and rifles were slung over their shoulders. At the ends of the leashes strained and slavered six of the biggest mastiffs Kane had ever seen. The black-and-tan dogs yipped and bayed, eyes rolling, tongues lolling, froth dripping from their fang-filled jaws.

Kane wasn’t sure if the men had seen him, but they released the leashes. The mastiffs bounded forward, a line of red maws and yellow teeth pounding right through the mudflats at blinding speed.

Blinking back the sweat from his eyes, Kane whirled and sprinted into the ville, the snarls and yelps of the dogs loud in his ears. Coral Cove’s buildings were old, many of them close together, arranged around a makeshift town square, the centerpiece of which was an old, immense and deep-rooted live oak. He glimpsed a slatternly woman dumping a pail of slops out of an upstairs window of a big frame house. When she caught sight of him running across the square, she retreated quickly, snatching a curtain closed.

The settlement wasn’t very large, but according to the Cerberus database, Coral Cove had been a small fishing village turned vacation resort. Of course, that been a very long time ago, before the skydark.

Kane’s eyes darted back and forth, looking for cover. He didn’t care for the idea of digging in and standing fast, since the dogs could surround him and tear him to pieces. He had not gone armed on the recon mission, taking the precaution that if he were apprehended, he wouldn’t provide more weapons to the enemy’s arsenal.

But Kane was never completely helpless. He dug his hand beneath his shirt to the waterproof utility pouch at his waistband and carefully pulled out a metal-walled sphere about the size of a plover’s egg. The pressure-fused CS powder grenade, usually employed as a diversion in a limited area, would cause extreme discomfort in a small room. To have flung the grenade back at the dog pack would have been useless—there was not enough concentrated spread in the vapor.

Kane sprinted to the trunk of the oak tree and leaped high. He caught hold of a thick, leafy branch and managed to swing up and balance himself precariously upon it. The limb swayed like a hammock under his weight.

Looking across the town square, he saw the first of the mastiffs bounding into view, tongue lolling, savage eyes glinting. The other dogs raced behind it, their smooth dark coats clotted with mud. Their teeth gleamed like ivory daggers.

The dogs milled around uncertainly, sniffing the ground and whining quizzically. Far back across the mudflats there were shouts, the thump of running feet. Kane held the grenade tightly in his left hand as he watched the mastiffs casting about in confusion.

The first dog to have entered the ville growled and slowly advanced on the tree with a twitching muzzle, nose still to the ground.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” Kane breathed. “Nose to the dirt. Don’t look up.”

The limb upon which he crouched suddenly creaked. Kane grabbed a branch overhead as the limb sagged half a foot. Wishing he were fifty pounds lighter, Kane kept absolutely motionless. The dogs would know he was nearby through scent alone, but if their attention wasn’t drawn upward—

The limb suddenly bent and the splintering crack of wood filled Kane’s ears for an instant.

With a startled growl, the mastiff circling below looked up, caught sight of him and barked ferociously. The other dogs clustered around the base of the tree, yipping and yelping. They slammed into one another as they all tried to squeeze around the trunk.

Kane wasted no time. He dropped the grenade straight down into the mass of milling dogs. One of the mastiffs snapped at it and the casing burst open, the small explosive charge within it detonating with a low, smacking explosion. A heavy cloud of white CS powder erupted, spraying in all directions, like a miniature blizzard.

Instantly, the baying of the dogs turned to high-pitched whines, whimpers and squeals. Pawing frantically at their eyes, the mastiffs reeled away, staggering, snorting and sneezing. Kane jumped down from the limb, landed on the far side of the tree and ran toward the nearest house, a rambling two-story structure built in the old antebellum style. The windows were boarded up, so he decided the door was mostly likely secured and began to angle away.

A black mass shifted in the shadows cast by a balcony overhang. “Kane!”

The urgent whisper cut through the cacophony of the distressed dogs, and Kane darted into the murk. The black shape was a small figure huddled within a mass of rags and tatters, decorated with gray streamers of Spanish moss. Under green stripes of camouflage paint he saw streaks of milk-white flesh.

“Inside! Be quick!” The figure scurried sideways and a door opened and closed.

Panting, Kane groped over the door, searching for a knob. His fingers touched nothing but damp, slightly warped wood. He pressed a shoulder against it, then the door swung inward and he stumbled into an unlit foyer. A small hand clutched at his right wrist with surprising strength and hauled him forward.

“In here, idiot!”

Kane caught a whiff of mildew and urine. The door closed, and he heard the faint snick of a locking bolt being drawn. Fingering his nose, Kane whispered, “And I thought I was the only stinkard here, Domi.”

“Shut up.”

Kane stiffened at the angry intensity of the girl’s voice, but he fell silent, listening to the yowling of the hounds. He heard men’s voice raised in breathless curses, the cracking of whips and the piteous yelps of the dogs.

“Where’d the son of a bitch go?”

“Guess for your own self, Lucas! Got my own problems with this goddamn hound—”

“Billy-boy ain’t gonna like it if we lose ’im.”

“Shit, tell me something new…but he’s gonna have to live with it.”

Ear pressed against the door panel, Kane listened to more whining, whimpering and cursing as the men got the dogs releashed. They didn’t intend to continue the pursuit. Although the citizenry of Coral Cove put up with a great deal from Billy-boy Porpoise and his gang, they wouldn’t tolerate a midnight door-to-door search. After a few minutes, the sound of the dogs and their masters faded away.

A flashlight suddenly glowed, startling Kane so much that he jumped and cursed.

“Relax,” Domi said softly. “Windows boarded over—nobody can see.”

Kane squinted toward her as she flung back the hood that shrouded her close-cropped, bone-white hair. An albino by birth, Domi was a small white wraith of a girl, every inch of five feet tall. Eyes like red rubies stared up at him through the mask of combat cosmetics she had daubed over her cream-white complexion.

“Had you goin’ there, huh?” Laughter was in her high-planed face, and the faint mockery added piquancy to her features.

“Yeah,” Kane said dryly. “You’re a gifted comedian. What would you have done if the dogs had caught me?”

Domi’s small right hand eased out from beneath the ragged cloak. Nestled within it lay her Detonics Combat Master .45. The stainless-steel autopistol weighed only a pound and a half and was perfectly suited for a girl of her size.

“Shoot ’em,” she replied frankly. “Then kill the men who made them killers.”

Kane nodded. “Figures. Where’s Grant?”

Domi shrugged out of the tattered cloak, letting it drop to the floor. “Upstairs. He was keepin’ an eye on you, too.”

Stepping around the heap of rancid rags, Kane pinched his nostrils shut. “Why does it stink so bad?”

Domi shrugged. “Cover up my own scent, in case the dogs got after me. Old Outland trick.”

Kane regarded her gravely. “You peed on it, didn’t you?”

“Among other things.” Domi turned toward a stairwell, casting the beam of the flashlight ahead of her. She wore a black tank top and tight-fitting denim shorts that only accentuated her compact body, with its pert breasts and flaring hips.

Kane followed her up the stairs, reflecting that after five-plus years of working with her, he shouldn’t be surprised by anything Domi did, even wearing a cloak soaked in her own urine.

The stairs opened onto a small room that led out onto a balcony. Grant stood there, peering through a screen of oleander leaves. The buttsock of the heavy Barrett sniper rifle was settled firmly in the hollow of his right shoulder. He pushed it forward on its built-in bipod as he leaned down to squint through the twenty-power top-mounted telescopic sight.

Without turning toward Kane, he said in his lionlike rumble of a voice, “I thought you were going to be in and out of here like the wind.”

A big man standing several inches over six feet, Grant had exceptionally broad shoulders and a heavy musculature, but with a middle starting to go a little soft. Beads of perspiration sparkled against his coffee-brown skin like stars in the night sky. Gray dusted his short-cropped hair at the temples, but it didn’t show in the sweeping black mustache that curved fiercely out from either side of his grim, tight-lipped mouth. Like Kane, he wore camo pants and T-shirt.

In response to Grant’s sarcastic question, Kane replied, “That was the plan. I guess they smelled my wind.”

Carefully, he moved to the balcony’s rail and looked down into the ville. He could still detect the chemical tang of the CS powder.

Grant stepped away from the Barrett and tapped the scope. “They caught more than that. Take a peek.”

Obligingly, Kane stooped and peered through the eyepiece. He glimpsed a tall figure standing just outside the log wall, trying to hide himself in the shadows. The rifle he cradled in his arms looked like a lever-action 30.06.

“They left one behind,” he commented. “A spotter.”

Grant nodded. “They want to see which house you come out of. And to find out if anybody in town is helping you, so they can be made an example of.”

Kane shrugged. “I don’t think they got a good look at me. And since you two didn’t arrive until after dark, they most likely don’t know you’re here.”

“Porpoise is probably sure it was you creepin’ around his place,” Domi stated matter-of-factly.

Kane cast her a quizzical glance. “Why do you say that?”

The girl shrugged. “He only saw you and Brigid together—stands to reason he’d figure you’d be the one to try and sneak in and steal her back from him.”

Chapter 2

The morning sky melted, pouring down heat. Kane stood on the shoreline, listening to the noise of the surf and gazing through the smoky spume rising from the breakers.

Although sunglasses masked his eyes, he squinted against the glare glimmering on the blue surface of the gulf. There was nothing to be seen except the blaze of white sand, sparse stalks of beach grass and the long line of combers lapping at the shoreline. He perspired heavily, as if the rising sun were a sponge sucking liquid from every pore of his body and soaking through his black T-shirt. Although he felt the sting of sunburn on his arms and face, the heat failed to thaw a hard knot of ice inside him.

Acceding to the demands of Billy-boy Porpoise, he was completely unarmed, not even carrying a jackknife. The only concession to his standard complement of equipment was the Commtact, a flat curve of metal fastened to his right mastoid bone and hidden beneath a lock of hair.

Despite heat that turned the beach into an oven, Kane stood motionless, hands loose at his sides. He knew he was being watched, and he figured Billy-boy would wait until he had virtually sweated out all of his strength before sending someone to fetch him.

But Kane had learned stamina in a hard school, a killing school. He retained vividly grim memories of former colleagues whose stamina failed them at the last critical second. Stamina in this case consisted of standing steadfast, husbanding all of his resources until they were needed.

A burst of static filled his head and Grant’s voice said, “Testing, one, two, testing.”

Resisting the urge to turn and look in the direction of Coral Cove, Kane reached up behind his ear and made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm was attached to implanted steel pintels; its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder embedded in the bone.

Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, as long as he wore a Commtact, he would still have a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

“Receiving you,” Kane subvocalized in a faint whisper. “Do you read me?”

“Reading you. Status?”

“Lots of sea and sand. I think I spotted a crab a few minutes ago.”

The Commtact accurately conveyed Grant’s grunt of disgust. “The bastard believes in making people wait for him.”

“I guess Billy-boy thinks it increases the anticipation.”

“No sign of the spotter he left behind?”

“No. He probably hung around until just before daybreak and then moved on.”

Grant didn’t respond for a long tick of time. Then he asked dourly, “How did such a simple op go so goddamn complicated?”

Kane almost lifted a shoulder in a shrug but stopped himself. “Happens sometimes,” he retorted with a nonchalance he did not feel. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I do,” Grant said. “I also know Brigid hasn’t answered any of our thousand and one hails, so we may want to—”

“Her Commtact is probably malfunctioning,” Kane broke in harshly. “She was knocked into the pool when Billy-boy’s crew put the arm on us. That’s all there is to it.”

“Right,” Grant drawled, his tone studiedly neutral. “So let’s cut to the chase here. Billy-boy wants to parley with you for Brigid’s return. Why?”

“Why what?”

“He’s already got her, so why does he want to bargain with you for her? What does he need you for? It’s the Cerberus armory he wants, not her…unless he thinks having two bargaining chips is better than one.”

“That possibility occurred to me,” Kane admitted. “He was pretty disappointed when we came to him yesterday bearing no gifts, particularly of the lethal kind.”

“I got that. But I don’t think you can trust this son of a bitch to do a simple exchange, Brigid for blasters. You may have to—”

“I hope you’re not trying to prepare me for the possibility that she’s already dead,” Kane interrupted.

“Now that you’ve brought it up,” Grant said, “what if she is? This guy reps out as a stone-cold murderer, not a businessman.”

“If she is,” Kane intoned flatly, “then all the more reason for me to be in Billy-boy’s company. If she has so much as bruise on a leg, he is most definitely a dead man.”

“And what about you?” Grant argued. “You’re waltzing in there unarmed and even if you manage to get close enough to kill the bastard, there’s no way we can extract you before you’re killed, too.”

Before Kane could formulate a response, he heard the grinding of an engine.

He turned toward the south and saw a red Jeep emerge from a copse of royal palm trees. The chassis was painted a bright cherry red with the illustration of a shocking pink porpoise emblazoned on the hood. The vehicle rolled smoothly on oversize beach tires across the expanse of searing sand where it met with the surf line.

The driver was a tall man who looked half Viking and half pirate. His long white blond hair was tied back in a foxtail, a sharp contrast to the deep bronzed tan of his naked torso. A black eye patch embroidered with the outline of a pink dolphin covered his right eye. Sunlight winked from the three-inch gold ring piercing the lobe of his left ear.

The man’s single eye glinted with cobalt brightness, and his hands on the steering wheel were very big and powerful. As the Jeep drew closer to Kane, he flashed a taunting grin. His teeth gleamed startlingly white in his bronzed face.

A young woman sat beside him, her eyes the deep amber of a Siamese cat’s, slanted, cold and dangerous. They looked at Kane with contempt. Her hair was a thick glossy black, cascading in loose waves over her bare shoulders. Little-girl bangs hung in feathery arcs, inky against the white of her forehead. Her eyelids and sullen mouth were heavily rouged, and the bright red blossom of a flower made a splash of color in her raven’s-wing hair.

The woman’s full breasts strained against the tight confines of her slate-gray bikini top. The cloth was almost the same color as the S&W Airweight .38-caliber revolver she aimed at him around the frame of the windshield. Kane had been introduced to the man and girl the previous day. Their names were Shaster and Orchid.

“Here’s my ride,” Kane murmured.

“Acknowledged,” Grant replied. “Standing by.”

Shaster braked the Jeep a few yards away and sat with the engine idling. He stared at Kane and Kane stared back.

After a few seconds, the tanned man challenged, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you trying to see how long it will take to pass out from heatstroke? Don’t you have a breakfast sit-down scheduled with B.B.?”

“You tell me,” Kane retorted.

“You do,” Orchid snapped petulantly, gesturing with the short barrel of the revolver. “Get your ass over here.”

Kane’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Don’t you want to frisk me, sweetheart?”

Shaster glanced toward the girl. “Don’t you, Orchid?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Maybe later. Right now it’s too goddamn hot. Besides, you were told to come unarmed, just like yesterday, right?”

The half smile disappeared from Kane’s mouth. “Right.”

“Good enough for me,” Shaster said. “Climb aboard, muchacho, so we can get back to the pool and the piña coladas.”

Swallowing a sigh, Kane crossed the stretch of scalding-hot sand, feeling the heat even through the soles of his boots. Orchid slid into the backseat, affording him a glimpse of her well-molded backside and the pink porpoise tattooed at the center of her back.

“Billy-boy really believes in this brand-recognition thing,” Kane commented as he climbed in on the passenger side. “Even on his hired help.”

He felt the cold tip of the pistol press against the back of his neck. “Shut the fuck up, sec man,” Orchid said, voice sibilant with spite.

Kane felt his shoulders stiffening at the epithet, then he forced himself to relax. “Sec man” was an obsolete term dating back to preunification days when self-styled barons formed their own private armies to safeguard their territories. It was still applied to Magistrates in hinterlands beyond the villes, so Kane figured Orchid was either a former Roamer or a Farer. Roamers were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

Farers, on the other hand, were nomads, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts and traders. Their territory was the Midwest, so Farer presence in and around Florida was a little unusual. Regardless, Magistrates were feared and despised all over the Outlands by Roamer and Farer alike.

Shaster turned the Jeep and drove up the beach, the coarse sand flying from beneath the knobby tire treads in a double cresting of rooster tails. After a quarter of a mile, he turned off onto a bumpy asphalt road that led directly to a glass-walled toll booth. Within it sat a man wearing swim trunks and a gold chain about his neck, but little else.

He saluted Shaster with the barrel of a shotgun as the Jeep rolled past. The vehicle followed a narrow lane stretching over a moat filled with brackish water and flowering hyacinths. The canal Kane had been forced to swim less than eight hours before fed the moat.

The lane curved into a community of pale pink stucco houses with red-tiled roofs. Palm trees sprouted from the small lawns. The houses faced a beach that sloped gently toward the waters of the gulf. White-winged gulls wheeled over the shoreline. A number of boats floated on the brilliant blue sea, and although most of them looked like fishing vessels, Kane knew a number of them were disguised fast-attack craft. The bows of several boats bore the outline of leaping pink porpoises.

The beachfront marina was one great open market, just like the intel had indicated. Shops and stalls were brightly painted, the vendors selling the wares looted from other coastal communities by Billy-boy’s fleet. People from all over the region mingled with the tanned locals who came to trade, exchanging valuable items like drugs for guns or artifacts dredged up from the Gulf coast’s plentiful supply of submerged ruins.

Shaster steered the Jeep through an open gate in a five-foot-high whitewashed wall. Bracketing both sides of the gate, painted in pink on the surface on the wall, was a pair of sporting dolphins. A deeply bronzed blond man, stripped to the waist and cradling a lever-action 30.06 rifle in his arms, pursed his lips at Kane, blowing him a kiss as the vehicle drove into the compound.

Shaster cast Kane a sly grin. “Lucas is checking you out.”

“I noticed,” Kane grunted.

“He didn’t get the chance to formally meet you last night.”

“That’s a shame,” Kane replied blandly.

Brigid Baptiste had described the Porpoise compound as the model of an exclusive beachfront estate—it had been built as such more than two centuries earlier, when land development was the chief economic force on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Kane had been less interested in the history of Billy-boy Porpoise’s little seaside fiefdom than the man who had put it together over the past few years. The only reason he and Brigid had traveled from Montana to Florida was to learn what kind of man he was and if he could be recruited into joining their struggle, as other former and potential adversaries had done.

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past five years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Kane and Grant had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they had found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Due in part to her eidetic memory, Brigid spoke a dozen languages and could get along in a score of dialects, but knowing the native tongues of many different cultures and lands was only a small part of her work. Aside from her command of languages, Brigid had made history and geopolitics abiding interests in a world that was changing rapidly.

She and all the personnel of Cerberus, over half a world away atop a mountain peak in Montana, had devoted themselves to changing the nuke-scarred planet into something better. At least that was her earnest hope. To turn hope into reality meant respecting the often alien behavior patterns of a vast number of ancient religions, legends, myths and taboos.