Ghostwalk

“You’re familiar with the mandate of the Consortium, right?”

Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, and try to figure out a way to enslave your fellow human beings.”

Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead.”

“Thanks,” retorted Grant. “I will.”

“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently. “Why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”

Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”

“Whose attention?” Kane asked, a steel edge in his voice.

Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost walkers.”

Ghostwalk

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

Ghostwalk

The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence. What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends. But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 1

Kane did not hear the shot or see anyone with a gun.

The shock of the bullet’s impact high on his right shoulder jerked him around, his feet tangling, his back slamming hard against the adobe wall.

Kane let his body sag to the ground. He could hear only his own strained breath as he swallowed air into his emptied lungs. As quickly as he could, he crawled behind a heap of chipped masonry. Pain streaked up and down his arm like flares of heat lightning, but he didn’t think any bones were broken. Still, he had to clamp his jaws tightly shut against a groan of pain. He fingered the small hole punched through his tricolor desert-camouflage blouse and winced.

His mind swam with anger. Your own fault, dumbass, he snapped at himself. He knew he should have checked out every structure in the ruins of the old village before leaving the shelter of the walls, but concern over a missing team member had made him reckless.

A single dirt lane led to the settlement, which was a cluster of small huts, most of them roofless, surrounding a well. The north wall had collapsed into rubble and dried mud bricks long ago. The place looked like a typical abandoned Outland village so Kane hadn’t strolled through it with any particular caution.

He hitched around, careful not to dislodge any loose stones and give away his position. The lowering sun was a blinding red ball, and if nothing else, Kane appreciated his sunglasses. His eyes swept over the featureless sandy plain. Less than a hundred yards to his right rose a range of low hills with a rolling tongue of sand dunes between them.

High, rust-red mesas towered between the low hills. He resisted taking a drink from his canteen, straining his hearing for any sound of movement. He heard only the singing silence of the desert stirred by the constant hot breeze. Sand and the dry wind sapped all the juices from his body, parching the throat and dehydrating the flesh.

The sun dropped down behind one of the flat-topped outcroppings, and long shadows stretched toward him. Heat waves blurred the far horizon. The peaks of the Jemez Mountain Range were only a wavering mirage many miles to the south.

Kane had been walking point, a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate because of his uncanny ability to detect imminent danger. He called it a sixth sense, but his pointman’s sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing. Most of the time, he could sense danger from far off.

Now he wondered if his senses, his instincts, were failing him. In potential killzones, he normally walked with such care it was almost a form of paranoia. He had grown accustomed to always being watchful and alert, to expecting the unexpected. This time his pointman’s sense had let him down.

Or, he thought sourly, I’m just getting old.

Reaching up behind his right ear, he tapped the Commtact, a flat curve of metal fastened to the mastoid bone by implanted steel pintels. Sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder embedded within the bone. Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal conveyed the radio transmissions directly through the skull casing.

Kane touched the volume control and a hash of static filled his head. Quickly he dialed it back down, grimacing both in frustration and pain. A frequency-dampening field spread out like a vast umbrella over the village, blocking all radio communications. He could think of only a couple of groups with access to that kind of tech.

Brewster Philboyd had volunteered to scout out the zone to prove his suspicions. When Kane declined to grant him permission, Philboyd had gone anyway. He had not returned.

Clenching his teeth, Kane inched toward one of the lengthening shadows. Although his shoulder burned fiercely from the impact of the bullet, he carefully flexed the tendons of his right wrist. With the faint drone of a tiny electric motor, cables slid the Sin Eater from its forearm holster and into the palm of his hand. His fingers tingled with a painful pins-and-needles sensation and they barely stirred.

The Sin Eater, the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, was an automatic handgun, less than fourteen inches in length, with an extended magazine carrying 20 9 mm rounds. When not in use, the butt folded over the top of the weapon, lying perpendicular to the frame, reducing its holstered length to ten inches.

If the autopistol was needed, a flexing of wrist tendons activated sensitive actuator cables within the holsters and snapped the weapon smoothly into his waiting hands, the butt unfolding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eater did not have a trigger guard or a safety switch, the autopistol fired immediately when his index finger touched the firing stud.

The wrist actuators ignored all movements except the one that indicated the gun should be unholstered. It was a completely automatic, almost unconscious movement practiced by Kane.

Kane heard a faint crunch, as of a foot coming down on loose stone. Carefully he leaned over, peering around the base of the rock heap. The figure of a man stepped through a wide crack in the adobe wall. Because he was backlit by the shimmering corona of the setting sun, Kane couldn’t pick out specific details beyond the very long-barreled pistol in the man’s right fist. The man moved quickly and purposefully, walking heel-to-toe with expert ease, keeping the wall to his right.

Inhaling a deep breath through his nostrils, Kane pushed the Sin Eater back into the holster, hearing the lock solenoid catch with a pair of soft clicks. He noted the foot-long sound suppressor that was screwed into the bore of the man’s autopistol. The silencer had successfully reduced the noise of the gunshot, but had also reduced the bullet’s velocity sufficiently so it had only knocked Kane down rather than penetrating the Spectra fabric of his shadow suit.

A sound suppressor seemed a very strange attachment for a man on foot out in the wastelands of New Mexico, but Kane had no time to wonder about it.

With his left hand, he drew the fourteen-inch-long combat knife from the sheath at his waist. He gripped the Nylex handle tightly while he grimly tried to coax more feeling into his right arm. He waited, barely breathing, listening for sounds of the gunman’s progress.

Built with a lean, long-limbed economy, most of Kane’s muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. A wolf’s cold stare glittered in his blue-gray eyes. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his left cheek. His thick dark hair glistened with sweat at the roots.

He listened to the stealthy tramp of feet, realizing that the way the man soft-footed through the loose gravel and sand indicated he wasn’t sure of his shot. Kane felt pressure moving along his nerves and he rose to a crouch, favoring his injured shoulder.

A shadow crept slowly across the ground toward him, then it halted. Kane figured the gunman was eyeing the pile of rock, studying the tracks in the sand, guessing that his quarry more than likely hid behind it.

The man advanced silently in a smooth, fast rush. In his eagerness to get past the heap of stone, he grazed the wall with a knee and was thrown slightly off balance. He stumbled, reaching out to steady himself.

Kane slashed out with the knife, the razored edge penetrating the leather of a jump boot and slicing the tendon at the man’s left heel. He uttered a strangulated screech and staggered forward, leg buckling.

The man’s shoulder slammed against the wall, and a webwork of cracks spread out across the sun-baked clay. Kane caught an impression of a smooth, round face contorted in agony and surprise. The hollow bore of the sound suppressor swung toward him. Although he gave the handgun only the most fleeting of glances, he identified it as a Calico M-950 rimfire.

Kane dodged to one side, hearing a faint thump, then the sharp whine of a ricochet somewhere behind him. With his right hand, he knocked the pistol aside, then whipped the blade of the combat knife forward, stopping the razor edge a hairbreadth from the man’s throat.

For a long second, the two men stared into each other’s eyes. A round button on the man’s dun-colored coverall glinted with dim sun sparks. The inscribed image showed a stylized representation of a featureless man holding a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, in his left hand and a sword in his right, both crossed over his chest. No words were imprinted on it, but none were necessary.

“The Millennial Consortium,” Kane said softly.

“I should’ve known.”

The man’s lips writhed back over his teeth in a sneer. In the same low tone he said, “The Cerberus crew. We did know.”

Chapter 2

The millennialist struggled, trying to align the bore of the noise suppressor with Kane’s head.

Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater slapped into his palm, the barrel smacking the side of the man’s head as it popped from the holster. He cried out in pain and fear, squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation of a bullet plowing a path through hair, flesh, bone and brain.

Kane didn’t depress the trigger stud or even increase the pressure of the knife blade. Calmly he said, “You’re leaking a lot of blood, pal. If you want to keep enough of it in you to stay alive, I’m your only option.”

The millennialist’s lips twisted in pain and frustration. His skin was pinked by the sun, and his wispy blond hair was cut very short. He resembled most of the other consortium grunts Kane had met over the past few years. He looked to be in his early thirties.

“All right,” he said hoarsely. “All right.”

He opened his hand and the Calico dropped to the ground.

Picking up the man’s pistol, Kane took the knife away from the man’s throat. “What’s your name?”

“What difference does it make?”

Kane shrugged. “None. I just thought it was the polite thing to ask of a man I’ve probably crippled.”

Wincing, the man reached for the scarlet-seeping slash at the back of his boot. “Call me Mr. Gray.”

Kane smiled slightly, recalling the pair of color-coded millennialists he had met in Europe. “You can call me—”

“Kane,” Mr. Gray broke in harshly. “I’ve seen pix of you. Your file is black tagged.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you’re a high-priority target. Big bonus pay for any of us who nails you.”

He glanced sourly at the Calico in Kane’s hand. “Guess I got too eager. But I could swear I got you.”

“You did, just not as good as I got you.” Kane eyed the man’s injured foot. He popped the magazine out of the Calico and tossed the weapon over his shoulder. It clattered loudly against rock. “Let me see what I can do about getting that boot off.”

Gray looked longingly toward the Calico. “They’ve been making us pay for every gun we lose.”

“Yeah, the consortium has a reputation for squeezing every penny until it screams.” Kane applied the edge of the knife to Gray’s bootlaces, and after a quick sawing motion they parted easily.

“We’re thrifty,” Mr. Gray said defensively.

“There’s a difference.”

Kane didn’t reply as he carefully tugged off the man’s boot. Blood acted as lubricant. Although the pain must have been excruciating, Gray didn’t cry out, although he sank his teeth into his lower lip.

The Millennial Consortium was, on the surface, a group of organized traders who dedicated their lives to recovering predark artifacts from the ruins of cities. In the Outlands, such scavenging was actually the oldest profession.

After the world burned in atomic flame, enough debris settled into the lower atmosphere to very nearly create another ice age. The remnants of humankind had waited in underground shelters until the Earth became a little warmer before they ventured forth again. Most of them became scavengers mainly because they had no choice.

Looting the abandoned ruins of predark cities was less a vocation than it was an Outland tradition. Entire generations of families had made careers of ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe. The locations of those hidden, man-made caverns filled with hardware, fuel and weapons had become legend to the descendants of the nukecaust survivors.

Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally a hitherto untouched one would be located. As the Stockpiles became fewer, so did the independent salvaging and trading organizations. Various trader groups had combined resources for the past several years, forming consortiums and absorbing the independent operators.

The consortiums employed and fed people in the Outlands and gave them a sense of security that had once been the sole province of the barons. There were some critics who compared the trader consortiums to the barons and talked of them with just as much ill will.

Since first hearing of the Millennial Consortium a few years earlier, the Cerberus warriors had learned firsthand that the organization was deeply involved in activities beyond seeking out stockpiles, salvaging and trading. The Millennial Consortium’s ultimate goal was to rebuild America along the tenets of a technocracy, with a board of scientists and scholars governing the country and directing the resources to where they saw the greatest need.

Although the consortium’s goals seemed utopian, the organization’s overall policy was pragmatic beyond the limit of cold-bloodedness. Their influence was widespread, but they were completely ruthless when it came to the furtherance of their agenda, which was essentially the totalitarianism of a techno-tyranny.

Nor were their movements restricted to the continental United States. Not too long before, Cerberus had thwarted a consortium operation in Slovakia.

Kane examined the knife wound. His blade hadn’t completely severed Gray’s Achilles tendon. Even so, Kane doubted the man would ever be able to walk without a limp again.

From a pouch pocket of his pants, Kane took out a long bandanna and folded it, then expertly knotted it around the man’s wound to staunch the flow of blood.

Conversationally he said, “Once I hook back up with my team, I’ll have access to a medical kit and get you some proper bandages and even a painkiller.”

Gray responded only with a muffled groan.

In the same studiedly casual tone of voice, Kane continued, “You don’t seem surprised to hear about my team…. or even what I’m doing out here.”

Gray’s sweat-pebbled face tightened. “We expected you.”

“And why is that?”

The millennialist sighed and said almost regretfully, “We found your spy.”

Kane laid a hand on Gray’s injured ankle. In a level voice he asked, “What spy?”

“He said his name was Philboyd, that he was a scientist and that we should back off.”

Kane tightened his fingers around Gray’s ankle. “Where is he?”

“He’s not dead,” Gray replied quickly. “I swear to you. We didn’t kill him.”

“I asked where he was.”

Gray winced. “I can show you.”

“I’m sure you can.” Kane released the man’s ankle and stood up. “And you’ll show us a lot more besides.”

He gazed beyond Gray. “You hear any of that?”

Mr. Gray’s face registered momentary confusion, then he turned to see Cerberus Away Team Alpha stepping through a break in the wall.

THE SIX PEOPLE WERE ATTIRED in tricolor desert-camouflage BDUs and thick-soled, tan jump boots. All of them carried abbreviated Copperhead subguns attached to combat webbing over their field jackets. Under two feet long, with a 35 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing one-handed use.

Optical image intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts. Four members of Team Alpha also carried XM-29 assault rifles.

Grant strode up to Gray and stared down at him, his eyes shadowed by heavy, overhanging brows. He towered six feet five inches tall in his thick-soled jump boots, and his shoulders spread out on either side of a thickly tendoned neck like massive planks, straining at the seams of his field jacket.

Although he looked too huge and thick-hewn to have many abilities beyond brute strength, Grant was an exceptionally intelligent and talented man. Behind the fierce, deep-set eyes, the down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, granite jaw and broken nose lay a mind rich with tactics, strategies and painful experience. Like Kane, he had lived a great deal of his life surrounded by violence. He had been shot, stabbed, battered, beaten, burned, buried and once very nearly suffocated on the surface of the Moon.

Kane nodded to Gray. “Gray, this is Grant. Grant, this is Gray.”

“I know who he is,” Gray snapped. “The consortium is very thorough when it comes to identifying its enemies.”

Grant regarded him with no particular emotion on his face. In his lionlike growl he intoned, “All of you millennialists look like you were mass-produced. Same build, same haircuts.”

“And you usually say the same things when we meet any millennialists,” said a well-modulated female voice, purring with an undercurrent of humor.

“I almost forgot.” Grant nodded to Gray and said almost apologetically, “I hate you guys.”

Brigid Baptiste stepped between Grant and Kane, gazing down at Gray with bright emerald eyes. She was a tall woman with a fair complexion. Her mane of red-gold hair fell down her back in a long sunset-colored braid to the base of her spine. Like the other members of CAT Alpha, she wore desert camouflage. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist.

Kneeling down beside Gray, she lifted the lid of a square medical kit. “I think we can dress your injury a bit more properly.”

Gray gave her a beseeching look of gratitude. “Something for the pain, too, please. I’m really hurting.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Brigid replied sympathetically. She busied herself with the contents of the kit, then paused. “Of course, you’ll have to give me something in return.”

The expression of gratitude on Gray’s face turned to resentment. “Like what?”

“What do you think, dipshit?” Edward barked. The ex-Mag from Samariumville marched forward and prodded Gray roughly in the ribs with a boot.

“Information.”

Edwards, whose head was shaved, wasn’t as tall as Grant, but he was almost as broad, with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. He usually served as the commander of CAT Alpha in the absence of Kane and Grant.