Grailstone Gambit

A trifle annoyed, Kane said, “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be…and be aware of all our people’s positions.”

“Gotcha.”

Kane knew Domi intended to blend in with the group of Farers, flowing unnoticed among their number in her patched denims and long, hooded coat that concealed the girl’s white hair and skin, Detonics Combat Master autopistol, grenade-laden harness and her signature knife, with its nine-inch-long, serrated blade.

Kane had been reluctant to put Domi in the midst of the Farers because of her inability to get along with others, but under the circumstances, she was the least conspicuous of the Cerberus rescue team.

He opened another Commtact frequency. “Baptiste?”

“Here,” Brigid Baptiste responded in her characteristically calm tone.

“Status?”

“Hanging out with some Roamer stragglers, half a klick north-northwest of your position. “

Kane turned his head in that direction and squinted. “Sun is in my eyes.”

“In the convoy’s, too,” Brigid replied. “I’m keeping a street between us.”

“Any sign of Grant?”

“None so far.” Someone who didn’t know her would not have detected so much as a hint of concern in her crisp tone, but Kane heard the worry underscoring her voice.

“He’s still alive,” he said reassuringly. “Baron Shuma won’t pass up the chance of show off his prize pig to the citizens.”

“Assuming,” Brigid replied, “nothing has gone wrong in the past few hours.”

“You’re always such an optimist,” Kane said sarcastically.

“About as much as you are…which is to say, not much.”

“Aren’t you the one who always tells me to watch my overconfidence?”

“Only when you need it,” she answered. “Like now.”

Kane smiled crookedly and adjusted the Commtact, opening all the individual channels simultaneously. “Status reports every two minutes now, people.”

“Yes, sir,” Edwards said.

“Yo,” Brady announced.

“Gotcha,” Domi stated.

“Acknowledged,” Brigid said.

Kane took a deep breath. The stock of the OICW rifle felt smooth and warm in his hands. He eyed the sky, noting that in a few minutes the autumn sunset would plunge the narrow concrete valley below into deep gloom. The laser optical scope would help, but he prayed Shuma’s triumphant procession arrived while it was still daylight. If anything went wrong on the op, light levels wouldn’t matter.

A faint, faraway rumble of a distant engine reached his ears. Hitching around, Kane shifted position. A tall man built with a lean, long-limbed economy, most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. The cold stare of a wolf glittered in his blue-gray eyes, the color of dawn light on a sharp steel blade. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his clean-shaved left cheek. The wind ruffled his thick hair, its color a shade between chestnut and black.

He resisted the urge to stand up, not wanting to risk being spotted by any of Baron Shuma’s advance scouts. Shuma was a known killer who operated for hire, using the bombed-out ruins of Newyork City as his base of operations. Manhattan Island no longer held even the ghost of a thriving metropolis, only the hecatomb of a vanished civilization. The fields of devastation stretched to the horizon in all directions. The few structures that still held the general outlines of the buildings they had once been rose at the skyline, then collapsed with ragged abruptness.

All of the skyscrapers and towers had been broken by titanic blows combining shock and fire. Entire city blocks were nothing but acres of scorched and shattered concrete, with rusting rods of reinforcing iron protruding from the ground like withered stalks of some mutated crop.

Why anyone would want to stake out Newyork as an empire was beyond Kane’s understanding, but he knew a number of self-styled and self-proclaimed tyrants had rushed in to fill the power vacuums in the former baronial territories. Shuma was not unique in his dreams of ruling over others. He was, however, a scalie, so by virtue of his pedigree, he stood high on the rung of the unusual ladder.

But even taking overweening ambition into account, Newyork seemed a singularly unappealing place to build an empire of any sort, situated as it was in the longest hellzone in the country.

Manhattan had never been claimed as part of a baronial territory, partly due to its inaccessibility. All the bridges connecting it to the mainland had fallen during the massive quakes in the first few minutes of the nukecaust.

In the company of Brigid Baptiste, Grant and Domi, Kane had visited the shockscape of ruins over five years earlier, when they found it inhabited mainly by the peculiar mutie strain known as scalies.

The engine rumble grew louder and Kane peered over the edge of the building. Lights bobbed along the dark ribbon of the road, already cast into shadow by the structures rising on either side. Faint cheers and shouted laughter were audible through the mechanical roar.

“On his way,” Brigid’s voice whispered.

“Acknowledged,” Kane replied as he checked the direction of the wind with a moistened forefinger.

He eyed the sky, noting that in less than fifteen minutes, sunset would give way to dusk, then full night. A shot would be exceptionally risky, depending on where Grant was positioned in the promenade.

Brigid’s voice came again. “Shuma himself just passed. Big as life and about five times as ugly.”

“Did you see Grant?”

“Yes.” Her tone quavered slightly. “It’s going to be close, I’m afraid.”

“It’s what I figured. Stand by. Edwards?”

“Yes, sir,” the man calmly responded. “Target coming into sight.”

“Brady?” Kane inquired.

“Got them in my crosshairs, Commander,” Brady stated.

“Acknowledged. Wait for my signal.”

A single shaft of sunlight slipped over the top of the building and cast a shifting yellow halo on the road below. A thunder of drums, a rhythmic engine throb and sharp voices echoed between the walls of the concrete canyon. Kane crept closer to the cornice edge and peered through the rifle’s scope.

Straight down the potholed street came the procession, and on either side milled the Farers and Roamers, lean people wearing rags, but their faces were those of predatory animals. They yelled and shouted and waved at the vehicle chugging slowly over the potholed blacktop. In a previous incarnation, some two centuries earlier, the long automobile had been a bright yellow Cadillac convertible. Garlands of artificial flowers festooned the bodywork, from the gleaming grillwork to the sharp tail fins. Four men marched beside the vehicle, hammering on drums made of old metal containers.

Although he had never seen him before, Kane had no problem identifying Baron Shuma. An enormous man stripped to the waist stood upright in the rear seat, his arms folded over his thick chest. His hairless head was small in proportion to his massive torso. He resembled a toad more than a lizard. His blunt-featured face was coated in overlapping scales of a dark gray-green. His nose was a blob, a lighter shade of gray. His pendulous lips drew back over yellowed teeth in a savage grin. His black-rimmed eyes glittered brightly even in the dim light.

Kane recalled that Lakesh had speculated the scalies were the descendants of humans modified for war. Most likely the first generation were little more than expendable fighting machines, with their brains modified to ensure that they remained under the control of those guiding their actions.

With a sudden surge of disgust, Kane realized that Shuma was under no one’s control. He made that very clear by parading his captive down the street in full view of his subjects.

Grant lay spread-eagled on the broad hood of the Cadillac, arms and legs held at painful angles by taut lengths of rope. His olive-drab T-shirt was ripped and stained. Kane was unable to tell if the gleam on his brown-skinned body was from perspiration or blood.

Grant was a big man with a heavy musculature. His black hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples. Beneath the fierce, down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, his teeth were bared either in a silent snarl or a rictus of pain.

Kane adjusted the scope and sighted through the lens, carefully pushing a cartridge home into the chamber, gauging the distance at 250 yards. He gave the small figure sitting hunched over in the back seat beside Shuma only a brief visual appraisal, dismissing him as a servant.

His Commact buzzed and Domi’s voice whispered urgently, “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me…” Domi’s voice trailed off.

“What is it?” Kane demanded impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

The Commtact squirted out a burst of static and Kane squinted against the needle of pain boring into his skull. “Domi?”

There was no reply.

“Domi!”

Nothing.

He opened the channel to Brigid. “Baptiste, can you see Domi?”

“No…why?”

“She was cut off.”

“Cut off how?”

“How the hell do I know? That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Do you think something has happened to her?”

Kane inhaled a slow, thoughtful breath before answering, “I guess we’ll find out.”

“That’s no answer,” came Brigid’s sharp, reproving response. “Until we know what’s happened to her, we should scrub the mission.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Dammit, Kane—”

Edwards’s voice blared through the comm unit. “Sir, I’ve got Shuma dead center. I haven’t heard from Domi.”

Brady announced, “Commander, I just tried checking in with Domi, but she didn’t respond. Do we scrub?”

“Stand by,” Kane said flatly. “Everybody, just stand by.”

Brigid said curtly, breathlessly, “We need to pull back and regroup before—”

“Shut up, Baptiste,” Kane snapped.

The Cadillac lurched as the tires rolled into a rut and Shuma reached out a claw-tipped hand to steady himself. Kane settled the rubber-cushioned stock of the OICW into the hollow of his shoulder and held his breath. The skin between his shoulder blades seemed to tighten and the short hairs at the back of his neck tingled.

He squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 2

When the crowd first glimpsed Shuma, a simultaneous roar erupted from every Farer and Roamer throat. All of Manhattan seemed to echo with it.

Standing at the mouth of a litter-choked alley, Domi narrowed her ruby eyes and tugged the hood of her long coat farther over her face, casting it into shadow. She had visited the ruins of Newyork before, but back then it had been strictly a place of the dead. To see it filled with screaming, roaring people unnerved her.

According to the intel briefing, people had been pouring into Newyork across the river for the past two years, coming from the distant Adirondacks and the barren lands south of the Atlantic seaboard. Domi recognized and could easily tell the difference between the Farers and the Roamers, even though they dressed alike.

Farers were essentially 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 Newyork was very unusual.

Roamers, on the other hand, were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

The reports of both groups assembling in such great numbers on Manhattan Island was alarming enough to dispatch the Alpha Away Team from the Cerberus redoubt. They returned in full rout, beaten and bloody and minus of one of their members, a woman named Wright. She had been captured four days before by Shuma’s followers and all contact with her was lost.

Activating her Commtact, Domi whispered, “I’m ready to join the pack.”

“Acknowledged,” Kane responded. “In your rig, they won’t give you a second glance.”

“Hope not.” She took a deep breath. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“Aim good. You be very careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

Domi snorted derisively. “Hell, no. That’s why I mentioned it.”

Sounding irritated, Kane shot back, “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be…and be aware of all our people’s positions.”

“Gotcha.”

Domi cut the connection and stepped away from the mouth of the alley. She didn’t care for crowds on general principle. Her senses had developed in the savage school of the Outlands, and it felt to her that the wind gusting through the ruins carried with it the whiff of blood about to be spilled.

An albino by birth, Domi’s skin was normally as white as milk. She was every inch of five feet tall and barely weighed one hundred pounds. On either side of her thin-bridged nose, eyes glittered grimly like polished rubies. The hood of her long beige coat concealed her short, bone-white hair.

As the laboring of the engine grew in volume, she stepped out of the alley onto the cracked sidewalk and she was immediately jostled and elbowed. Although her temper flared she managed to keep it in check, although she did shove a man who stepped on her toes.

The bellowing crowd surged and swayed as if it were a single-celled organism she had fallen into. The repellant odors of unwashed bodies, as well as the acidic reek of home-brewed liquor, assaulted her sensitive nostrils.

Gritting her teeth, tamping down her disgust, Domi wriggled through the bodies, seeking a closer vantage point to the street. Before she could decide on a course of action, she needed to identify Shuma. She had only seen him once, glimpsed him from afar the previous night in flickering, uncertain firelight. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t matter that Shuma was a murderer or organizing an army of the disenfranchised. As far as she was concerned, the important thing was that Shuma had captured Grant during the dark territory probe. In her mind, Grant’s rescue had become the mission objective, taking priority over all other considerations.

She recalled the briefing within the vanadium-sheathed walls of Cerberus. Baron Shuma was like many other self-styled and self-proclaimed dictators who popped up in the Outlands more often than she and her friends cared to think about.

Rather than ignore them, Cerberus had established a policy to conclusively overthrow their empires before their influences spread beyond small, contained fiefdoms. Most of the time, the little pocket-sized tyrants were content to rule over isolated settlements in the hinterlands. Very often, their own subjects assumed the responsibility of ending their reigns. Once the barons became too overbearing, their subjects either moved away or joined forces to kill them.

But every once in a while, one of the local lords expanded his influence and gained enough resources to become a formidable power. Shuma was one of those, but he was also a showman and a politician. He knew that true, lasting strength derived from developing a political movement more than operating a mere criminal enterprise. He called his group the Survivalist Outland Brigade and invited the homeless, the down-trodden—and the ruthless—to join the SOB, promising them a future of soft beds, food and endless luxuries.

The brigade consisted mainly of a loose confederation of bandits, but enough poor outlanders had sworn allegiance to Shuma to swell the ranks of the SOB significantly.

Outlanders were born into a raw, wild world, accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive, in the postnuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great-grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semibarbarism.

In the Outlands, people were divided into small, regional units. Communications were stifled, rivalries bred, education impeded. The people who lived outside the direct influence of the villes were reviled and hated. No one worried about an outlander, or even cared. They were the outcasts of the new feudalism, the cheap, expendable labor forces, even the cannon fodder when circumstances warranted. Generations of Americans were born into serfdom, slavery in everything but name. Whatever their parents or grandparents had been before skydark, they were now only commodities and they cursed the suicidal foolishness of their forebears who had brought on the nightmare.

Recently, the numbers of the SOB had grown large enough to be noticed by other groups, like renegade Magistrates who had turned to the mercenary trade or the Millennial Consortium. Neither possibility was comforting, so Domi, Grant, Kane and Brigid traveled to Newyork through the mat-trans gateway network. They set out to scout the area and ascertain if the reports about Shuma’s Survivalist Outland Brigade had any foundation.

Posing as Farers, the team hadn’t experienced much difficulty in blending in at first, and the easy acceptance made them careless, although Domi was alert from the start. As an Outlands child born and bred, Domi had learned how to hunt and had been taught the way of the hunted.

Still, the ambush had caught her almost completely unaware. She and Grant had scouted out the area around Shuma’s headquarters, in the tangled fastness of Central Park. Domi suspected that something they had done or not done had given them away, but whatever the case, she and Grant had been set upon by shadowy figures wielding ropes and clubs.

Although her first impulse was to remain and fight by the big man’s side, she realized they were severely outnumbered and couldn’t hope to shoot, slug or slash their way clear. When Grant ordered her to run, she had done so—reluctantly and shamefully, but she had obeyed him, melting into the gloom and the overgrowth.

Domi had never considered herself a soldier, as someone dedicated to fighting for a cause, but over the past few years she had accepted the need to prevent an unstable world from being overrun by human and inhuman tyrants alike.

Now, as she squirmed between the shouting people toward the curb, Domi closed her right hand over the checkered walnut grip of her Detonics Combat Master, holstered at the small of her back.

Kane’s voice suddenly whispered in her head, “Status reports every two minutes now, people.”

“Gotcha,” Domi stated.

She inched her way to the edge of the sidewalk, pushing in front of a short, flat-faced man wearing a ragged mackinaw and beat-up bottle-green derby. Judging by his clothes, he was a Farer. Roamers tended to prefer clothes made of animal hide, which reflected their more barbaric mind-sets.

“Watch it, you li’l bitch,” he growled in a voice slurred by liquor.

Domi ignored him. Her belly slipped sideways as she sighted the yellow Cadillac and the big man spread-eagled across the hood like a hunting trophy. Word had traveled fast through Shuma’s followers that he had captured Grant, one of the renegade baron blasters.

The term “baron blaster” was old, deriving from the rebels who had staged a violent resistance against the institution of the unification program a century before. Domi knew that neither Kane nor Grant enjoyed having the appellation applied to them. Their ville upbringing still lurked close to the surface, and they had been taught that the so-called baron blasters were worse than outlaws, but were instead terrorists incarnate.

Regardless, the reputations of the core Cerberus warriors had grown too awesome, too great over the past five years for even the most isolated outlander to be ignorant of their accomplishments, even if it was an open question of just how many of the stories were based in truth and how many were overblown fable.

With a conscious effort, Domi tore her gaze away from Grant, at once relieved that he did not appear to be seriously hurt but enraged that he was injured at all. Beneath the overhang of her hood, she watched Shuma intently, only vaguely aware that there was something not right about him beyond his obvious physical deformity.

She had seen and even killed scalies before, but her belly still roiled with nausea and her hand automatically went to the hilt of her long knife, fingering the pommel. For six months she had been enslaved by Guana Teague, the Pit Boss of Cobaltville, and she had never forgotten the greenish tint of his skin and its odd, faintly scaled pattern. A number of people had suspected that Guana had a scalie in the family—hence his nickname. The loathing for her former master still ran deep within Domi, even years after slitting his throat with the very knife sheathed at her hip.

Shuma’s reptilian appearance didn’t trigger a mental alarm, since he looked pretty much like the other scalies she had seen. Her eyes focused on the figure slouched in the seat beside him. He was a very small man, probably no more than four feet five. However, a massive, almost rectangular head rose from between a pair of down-sloping shoulders.

The pale flesh of his freakishly high forehead showed a blue-and-red network of broken blood vessels spreading up to his hairline. His mouth was a short, lipless gash. His ash-gray hair was thin, almost downy, stirred slightly by the breeze atop his flat skull. A great shelf of bone jutted above his eyes.

They were unusual in shape and color—disproportionately large, completely round with tiny irises and pupils totally surrounded by the whites. They seemed to glow, like two pinpoints of fire.

His eyes swept the crowd disinterestedly, and they rested momentarily on Domi. In that instant she felt a faint touch on the surface of her mind, as if it had been brushed by a cobweb. His eyes moved on, but she instantly realized what the little man was.

She reached up for her Commtact. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me….” She hesitated when the little man’s round eyes flicked back toward her as the Cadillac rolled past. A thick, ropy vein pulsed along his the right temple.

“What is it?” Kane asked impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

Domi caught only the most fragmented impression of an arm whipping toward her from behind. She ducked, but still a hard object struck the side of her head, just under her ear. She staggered and would have fallen into the street if not for the press of bodies all around her.

Senses reeling from the impact of the blow, fighting off unconsciousness, Domi moved on pure animal instinct. She drew her knife and lashed out blindly. A vague figure jerked away from the nine-inch serrated blade.

Blinking through the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming across her vision, Domi saw the flat-faced man in the derby flail at her with a metal truncheon. She sidestepped and slashed again, feeling the point of the knife catch and drag through cloth and flesh.

She heard the profanity-seasoned howl of pain and as her eyes cleared she saw the man stumble backward, clutching at his right arm. Blood seeped between his fingers.

When a hand closed in a painful grip on the back of her neck, Domi leaned forward, her left leg flashing up in a back kick. She felt a solid, satisfying impact against the toe of her combat boot. A heavyset man uttered a muted squeal and doubled over, clutching at his groin.

More people shuffled toward her, arms spread wide to prevent her from bolting into the crowd. Domi backed away, weaving and swaying, reaching under her coat for her autopistol. Then she pivoted on her heel and ran full-out up the boulevard, in the opposite direction from which Shuma and his entourage had come.

Coattails flying, Domi ran as fast as she could, hearing shouts and the sound of pounding feet behind her. She knew she wouldn’t get far, but she didn’t intend to. She reached for her combat harness, her hand closing around a small, metal-walled sphere.

The rifle shot sounded like a distant firecracker going off under a tin can and she smiled grimly. She yanked the M-33 fragmentation grenade free of the harness and its safety lever.