Dragon City

“My guess is it’s the rock,” Mariah confirmed as she watched the scan unfold, “but it’s difficult to get a proper idea of what’s in there.”

The final person within the room spoke up then, his voice deep as faraway thunder. Grant was another Cerberus field operative, and he took particular interest in this case not least because he was also an ex-Magistrate like Edwards. Grant was a huge figure, with dark skin like polished ebony and a body that was all muscle, with not an ounce of fat. Unlike the others, Grant wore a shadow suit, a gossamer-thin armored weave that offered protection from radiation, environmental contamination and extreme climates. He had augmented this with a few simple adornments, dark pants and a pale shirt, which he wore unbuttoned like a jacket. The grimness of his bearing could not be mistaken; his interest in this case was personal. “I remember Edwards having some trouble with his Commtact a while back,” Grant said, referring to the subdermal radio system implanted in the mastoid bone of the user. “Seemed he could hear transmissions but his own reports weren’t coming through.”

Lakesh nodded wistfully as he remembered. “That’s correct, my friend,” he said. “Edwards had been out in Hope at the time, providing medical help to the refugee populace. We’d had trouble contacting him while he was out there, but other events had seemed to overshadow that problem.”

The “other events” in question had included a visit by an alien called Balam, as well as Edwards himself getting knocked unconscious during a religious rally celebrating the coming of Ullikummis.

DeFore spoke up then, her voice sounding rather loud in the confined area. “We need to operate,” she announced. “Whatever this thing in Edwards’s head is, we need to see what it’s doing and how. That could provide a valuable insight into how Ullikummis is spreading his influence.”

Dr. Kazuko nodded in assent. “Loath as I am to open a man up like this, it seems the only option left open to us,” he agreed. “And if, as you say, it’s some kind of stone that’s in there, then not doing anything will be far more dangerous than operating. This man’s brain is calcifying as the growth spreads. Left unchecked, he could lose his power of speech, his rational will—he would be left as a vegetable.”

Lakesh’s brow furrowed as he considered what the two doctors were proposing. “Do we have the facilities here to operate?” he asked Kazuko.

The Tigers of Heaven doctor nodded. “I can call for everything we require,” he said. “We could likely operate as soon as tomorrow, if you’re agreeable, Dr. Singh.”

With weary reluctance, Lakesh slowly nodded. “Whatever it all means, it’s time we got to the root of the problem.”

* * *

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF two Tigers of Heaven guards, Grant escorted Edwards back on a gurney to a windowless room that was located just belowground level in the vast complex of Shizuka’s winter palace. Edwards was strapped down, hand and foot, to the gurney. However, despite being sedated, he still had some fight in him, and he glared at Grant as the larger man escorted him to his cell.

“I don’t like doing this much, either,” Grant assured Edwards as he saw the rage burning in the man’s eyes.

Under Grant’s instruction, the Tigers of Heaven prepared to move Edwards from the gurney to the single futonlike mattress that lay against one wall. The guards untied the straps that held Edwards’s feet down, but his ankles remained bound to one another so that he had no hope of escape. Then they moved up to his wrists, untying the tight straps and freeing his hands, a guard standing on either side of the gurney.

Grant watched warily from the end of the cot, his face emotionless as Edwards was untied from the gurney. Like everything in the winter palace, the room was pleasantly decorated, the peach wallpaper featuring a flock of white doves soaring over its sunset colors. Despite the austerity of the single mattress, featuring as it did four horizontal straps that could buckle the occupant in place, it still looked typically artistic, the dark swirl of pattern there mixed with gold thread that caught the soft side lighting of the room. A low occasional table had been placed against one wall, a vase of dried flowers in its center to add color to the room. This hidden room had likely been used as servants’ quarters once upon a time, and in other circumstances it could seem quite delightful, Grant was sure. As was, however, it had been pressed into service as a jail cell, its lack of windows ideal to prevent any chance of escape. Edwards was sedated and kept restrained, but even so, he was an ex-Magistrate, one of the class of highly trained enforcers in the towering villes that dotted the country. Any enemy underestimated him at their own folly.

But as the Tigers of Heaven guard unstrapped Edwards’s bound right wrist, the ex-Mag moved, lashing out with his fist and knocking the warrior backward. Already unstrapped, Edwards’s left hand snatched at the other guard’s arm, yanking him with such force that the man flipped over the gurney and crashed headfirst to the floor.

“Dammit,” Grant cursed as he came at Edwards from the foot of the gurney.

Although they were still bound together, Edwards kicked out with both feet, striking Grant high in the chest.

Grant staggered backward, his breath bursting out of his mouth with a great “whomph.” He had righted himself in an instant, and he turned once more to Edwards, his hands forming into fists.

Behind the gurney, Grant saw the twin Tigers of Heaven recovering. Both men were well trained in the arts of ninjitsu, and while Edwards’s attack had come as a surprise it had not been enough to render either man inoperative. They circled the gurney, warily approaching Edwards from above and behind his head.

“Kill you!” Edwards spit, mouth foaming, his hate-filled eyes fixed on Grant.

“Not this time, bucko,” Grant assured him as he grabbed Edwards’s kicking legs, fixing them a moment later in a two-handed grip.

“Kill you!” Edwards snarled again as he writhed in place, batting at the Tigers of Heaven as they tried to restrain him.

“Let’s get more sedation,” Grant instructed as he held on to those kicking legs. “Quickly now, I’ve got him.”

One of the warriors reached into the cloth bag he wore at his hip on a crosswise strap, producing a hypodermic syringe. In a half minute he had prepped it with sedative, flicking it to pop any bubbles that remained in the clear mixture. Grant continued to hold Edwards’s legs as the man kicked back and forth, his body tossing on the gurney like a struggling fish on a hook. The remaining guard tried to hold Edwards’s hands above his head and found himself almost knocked aside by several attempts by the ex-Mag.

Then the other guard approached Edwards with the hypo, and Edwards watched it with angry eyes.

“Just be a moment,” the Tigers of Heaven warrior promised, his voice calm despite how fraught the situation was.

“Fuck you,” Edwards growled, pulling both arms across his body and tossing the other guard across his chest as he hung on there. The guard tumbled over the gurney and slammed into his companion, head smashing against head with the brutal thump of bone on bone.

Grant watched as the two guards slumped to the floor, both of them dazed by the impact as the syringe rolled out of reach. Faster than thought, Edwards folded his body at the waist, aiming his forehead at Grant’s. Grant reared back, releasing his grip on Edwards’s legs.

“Utopia is upon you,” Edwards hissed, the madness burning behind his eyes as he flipped himself on the gurney.

“Yeah,” Grant snarled, taking a step toward the rocking gurney, his fist drawn back. “Well, let’s not get too excited about it just yet.”

With those words, Grant snapped out a solid punch at Edwards’s jaw. Grant’s fist connected with a crack, and Edwards shook on the gurney as he struggled to defend himself.

“Hate to do it, man,” Grant explained as he pulled his fist back for a second blow. But as he did so, Edwards’s own struggles proved the man’s downfall. The rocking gurney suddenly upended, and Edwards was thrown to the hard floor in a tumble of limbs. With his ankles still tied, the ex-Mag lay struggling there as the gurney crashed down beside him.

Grant watched as the gurney slammed against Edwards’s side, and the already sedated man slapped against the floor.

“You still got any fight left in you?” Grant asked as he stood over Edwards’s fallen form.

“Kill…” Edwards muttered, blood on his lips.

“Yeah,” Grant said as he picked up the hypodermic syringe, “that’s what I thought.”

A moment later Grant had pressed the needle into Edwards’s vein as the man struggled woozily from the blow he’d taken. Thirty seconds later, Edwards lay restrained on the futon, happily snoring as he drifted off to sleep.

Grant checked on the two guards who had accompanied him to house Edwards. Apart from a little wounded pride, they both seemed pretty much okay. “You need to watch this guy,” Grant reminded them both. “Used to be a Magistrate—he’s trained to turn impossible odds against you.”

The Tigers of Heaven genuflected appreciatively as Grant left the cell.

Chapter 2

For Grant, Edwards’s condition was something personal. He made his way through the Cerberus operations center, a temporary arrangement consisting of four laptop computers attached to a powerful server hub that hummed in one corner of the room. The room itself was originally a simple communal area, a sparsely decorated living room with several low tables and a wide mat covering the floor. The mat had been rolled back to allow for the wiring to trail across the room. Donald Bry, the ginger-haired assistant to Lakesh, was busily linking two of the laptop units together. He lay on his back with a screwdriver in one hand and a pen between his teeth, his mop of copper-colored curls in its usual disarray.

Beside him, Brewster Philboyd, another of the trusted Cerberus team, was running a diagnostics check on the expanding computer system. A tall man with a high forehead, dark hair and black-framed spectacles perched on his nose, Brewster was a trained astrophysicist who could generally turn his hand to most technical problems.

“How’s it going?” Grant asked as Philboyd caught his eye.

Philboyd held up his hands in mock despair. “It’s getting there,” he said begrudgingly. “Satellite feeds are scanning properly, but we’re still amassing the data.”

For years now Cerberus had relied on the data from two satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the equator, the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. The feeds from the two satellites provided empirical data from across the globe and also allowed for real-time communication via the Commtact units that many of the field operatives had had embedded beneath their skin. The task of monitoring these satellite feeds had been interrupted with the recent attack on Cerberus, and it was only now that Lakesh had begun to reassemble his team and initiate the arduous task of checking the information that had been stored in their absence.

Grant continued across the room, walking through the open doorway at its far end and making his way along a wooden-walled corridor that led the way through the building. He passed several doors, each one leading to private bed quarters that had been procured by Cerberus personnel for the duration of their tenancy. Grant arrowed toward one of these, pushing it gently open with a soft touch despite his imposing size.

Within, the drapes of the bedroom were closed, creating a cozy, dark atmosphere. A beautiful dark-haired woman sat in a chair beside the lone bed, her head lolling backward, a mangy-looking dog lying at her feet. As Grant walked in, the dog raised its head, ears pinned back to its head, and let loose a wary growl.

“It’s okay, boy,” Grant said, leaning down for a moment and offering the dog his empty hand to sniff. “Just me.”

The dog was some kind of mongrel, a scraggly-looking beast with more than a hint of coyote. It had the palest eyes that Grant had ever seen in a dog, orbs a white so pure they seemed faintly blue.

The woman in the chair had awoken, too, and she watched Grant through narrowed eyes. Her name was Rosalia, a stunningly attractive woman in her mid-twenties, with long dark hair that fell halfway down her back, olive skin and long, supple limbs. Rosalia wore a long skirt that trailed to her ankles, its flowering pattern scuffed with dirt, her dark top askew on her shoulders where she had slept in the chair. Working both sides of the law, Rosalia had recently found herself siding with the Cerberus team as they escaped the imprisonment of Life Camp Zero.

Grant took no notice of her. His dark eyes were fixed on the still figure lying alone in the bed. Kane had come to be Grant’s brother-in-arms over the years. An ex-Magistrate like Grant, Kane was a few years younger than the other man, and he looked terrible. His dark hair was ruffled, sticking to his forehead in sweaty clumps, and he had the dark shadow of a beard around his jaw now. And there was something else, too—a spiny protrusion growing on his face, circling and encrusting his left eye like bone before arcing over the cheek and pulling the corner of his mouth up into a sneer. Grant looked at Kane as he slept, eyes running across that hideous protrusion and feeling the frustration rising in his gut. Whatever it was, the growth had affected Kane’s vision, not simply blinding him but inexplicably triggering some kind of hallucinatory episodes. As such, it had left Kane grounded while Dr. Kazuko and the other medical staff investigated the nature of the intrusion to his flesh.

When he looked down, Grant saw that he had clenched his own hands into fists. He eased his hands open again, willing the tension from his body. “How is he?” he asked, not bothering to look at the woman he was addressing.

“He’s been asleep mostly,” Rosalia said, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the room’s sleeping occupant. “Probably a relief.”

“I guess,” Grant agreed.

“What about you?” Rosalia asked softly, standing and edging toward Grant. “Any word on Edwards?”

“They’re still trying to figure out what the condition is,” Grant told her, “but they figure it’s stone inside his head. So it’s a safe bet they’re related. Which means the cure to one might just hold the cure to the other.”

Rosalia’s lips pulled back from clenched teeth. “Damn this Ullikummis,” she cursed. “What did Kane ever do to—?”

“Got in his way,” Grant interrupted. “We all did. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for a half-dozen years. Had to take a casualty sometime.”

Grant didn’t tell her the other thing he was thinking. The third member of their cozy partnership—a trained archivist called Brigid Baptiste—had disappeared without trace, only to reappear in time to shoot Kane in the chest as he lay already wounded. That had occurred out in a cavern near the newly rebuilt settlement of Snakefishville, a cavern Kane, Grant and Rosalia had investigated as it housed an Annunaki artifact called the Chalice of Rebirth. While Brigid meant little to a newcomer like Rosalia, the woman had been a crucial member of the Cerberus team since its inception, and she shared a special bond with Kane himself—the two were anam-charas, so-called soul friends linked through eternity.

Rosalia made her way toward the door, encouraging her pale-eyed companion along beside her. “The dog needs some exercise,” she told Grant, knowing the man would want to be left alone with his best friend.

Grant looked at her and nodded sorrowfully.

“You’ll be okay here, right?” Rosalia asked. “I can stay, get one of the big tough samurai men to take care of this nuisance.”

“I’ll be fine,” Grant told her, “but thanks.” As Rosalia pushed through the door, Grant spoke once more, almost to himself. “You know, it’s the strangest feeling—finding out we’re not as immortal as we thought.”

Rosalia silently closed the door and left the ex-Magistrates alone.

Chapter 3

The silent drums were beating and Farrell looked wasted. He was a young man but he was looking old, his sunken skin drawn and pale where he had rapidly lost weight over the past few weeks. His gold hoop earring hung low on his ear, his goatee beard looked a little more ragged than normal and his usually shaved head was growing out in mismatched tufts of ginger and brown. But when Sela Sinclair looked at him across the dilapidated room they found themselves hiding in, the thing she most felt was not sorrow or worry or even desperation—it was hunger. Seeing a man that drawn, that sallow cheeked, made her stomach growl. She wanted so much to feed him, to just see him eat.

That was stress, Sinclair told herself as she looked at him. That was what it had done to him. Was doing to him.

Farrell had been a technician at the Cerberus redoubt, one of those perennial staff members who could turn his hand to any background task to keep things running smoothly. His favorite post had been running the mat-trans and he could often be found checking the diagnostics on the computer terminal linked to the man-made teleportation unit.

When Cerberus had come under attack, Farrell had been among the staff who had been caught with their pants down. Quite how Ullikummis’s forces had penetrated the redoubt remained a mystery to Farrell—hadn’t they had a security perimeter to stop this very type of attack? Somehow, whatever it was that they faced in this Ullikummis creature, it was a threat that could change the rules. And, like the rest of the complement of personnel at Cerberus, Farrell had been overpowered and imprisoned by those invading forces, incarcerated in Life Camp Zero to be indoctrinated into the ways of this new would-be master of the world, this new world order.

Farrell had played only a minor role in the subsequent breakout. Having spent days locked in a single cavernlike room with no amenities and only the most basic foodstuffs, he had been utterly bewildered when the door had pulled back and a beautiful woman and her scruffy mongrel dog had stood framed in the volcanic light, granting his release. Everything since then had been a blur. Kane and the woman—Rosalia was her name, Farrell learned later—had overpowered the troops of Ullikummis but they knew their freedom would be short-lived should reinforcements arrive. It seemed that the cult of Ullikummis was growing into a religious movement that was sweeping the country at an alarming rate, and the Cerberus people were considered a very trivial but very dangerous threat to that movement. Thus the decision had been taken to evacuate the redoubt-cum-prison, to split up the targets and keep the fifty or so Cerberus personnel safe. Farrell had been partnered with Sela Sinclair. Sinclair was a lean-muscled black woman, ex-U.S. Air Force, and had been cryogenically frozen back in the twentieth century to be revived two hundred years later. Thanks to her military background, Sinclair had acted as security detail for Cerberus, and was frequently involved in field missions. If nothing else, Farrell should be safe with her.

Lakesh had made swift contact with a black-market trader called Ohio Blue, an old friend of the Cerberus operation whose underworld contacts gave her ideal access to hiding places for the Cerberus team. Thus, Farrell and Sela Sinclair had engaged in a mat-trans jump that sent them to what had once been the southernmost edge of Arkansas, way out near the border of Louisiana, where Blue’s operation was centered. Ohio Blue was a glamorous figure. Farrell guessed she was in her late thirties, with a cascade of long blond hair that reached halfway down her back and was swept in peek-a-boo style to mask her left eye entirely. Like her name, Ohio always wore blue; the first time she and her security crew had greeted Farrell and Sinclair at the entrance to the old military redoubt, she had been dressed in a floor-length sapphire gown that glistened with sequins and had a hip-high split that left her right leg bare when she walked.

Farrell and Sinclair had traveled with six other Cerberus staff, including Brewster Philboyd and a weeping Reba DeFore. All of them were split into pairs at the destination redoubt, where Ohio’s people led them to various safehouses dotted across the area.

Ohio’s people had escorted Farrell and Sinclair to a dead town that had once been a suburb of Bradley. It looked as if a bomb had hit it, which was very likely what had happened. The asphalt of the streets was churned up into broken chunks, weeds and plants and whole great trees emerging through the wreckage that had sat, unrepaired, for two hundred years. Once upon a time, this had probably been a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb of hell. One half of the street was just gone; it was simply not there, only the occasional markings where houses or apartment blocks had once stood, old pipes overflowing with swarming plant life and buzzing insects.

The other side of the street still looked somewhat like a street. There were houses there, eight or nine of them, but it was hard to be sure given the state of the last two, which looked more like something that had washed ashore from the ocean depths even out here, two hundred miles away from the nearest shore. The other houses stood on ruined foundations. Three of them had sunk into the ground, crumbling so that they sat like the steepled fingers of a pair of hands, propped against one another for support. A conifer grew out of one and into the roof of another, its cone shape striving up through the eaves of the second house and into the sky where birds flocked all around it, cawing and chirruping. The other houses were dirty, weather-beaten and overgrown with moss and mold, but they at least looked durable. If nothing else, the street seemed about right for the state that Farrell found himself in—a blue funk.

The suburb of Bradley was surrounded on all sides by swamp and jungle and forest, much of it impassable even in these days of so-called civilization after the Program of Unification had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction. There were pathways through those jungles, hidden routes that Ohio Blue and her men knew, ways to reach all of these forgotten little corners of middle America that had been largely ignored since the nukecaust.

Sinclair and Farrell had holed up in one of the broken buildings, choosing the place with the strongest walls and traipsing back and forth to furnish it as best they could from the bombed-out remains of the other houses in the street. Ohio’s people visited every three or four days, bringing with them parcels of food, some of it fresh but much of it tinned or dried goods, cured meats that would keep despite the lack of refrigeration or power in the ruined shack. The place itself smelled like the cloying atmosphere of a hothouse, as if they were living in an arboretum. Mold grew a dark greenish-brown up the walls, and some kind of fungus had taken over the bathroom, pretty violet spores popping and bursting from the walls, ceiling and floor the first time Sinclair had pushed open the door. After that, they had left the room shut, and converted what had once been a downstairs home office into a latrine.

In the forty-two days that they had been here, Farrell and Sinclair had barely spoken. They were both in shock, and both were quite unable to comprehend what was going on around them. Days had passed where not more than two words would be grunted between them. Farrell took to staring through the gap in the boarded window at the front of the house, watching the churned-up street as if waiting for a parade to arrive, some kind of parade that only the Devil himself could bring. Ex-military, Sela Sinclair lost herself in a punishing fitness regime, exercising obsessively, well into the night. At least, she thought, if we do get attacked I’ll stand a chance.