Ghostwalk

Swearing beneath his breath, the man juggled the Calico as he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his garment. Kane rose silently and slammed his Sin Eater-weighted forearm against the back of the man’s head.

The sentry’s breath exploded from his lips and he staggered, half-turning to topple off the rim. Kane caught him by one arm and yanked him forward. The Calico clattered on the rock and Brigid snatched it up. The man fell heavily on his face, only a few inches away from Grant.

The Cerberus warriors waited quietly for a handful of seconds, watching and listening for a general alarm to be raised. Men down in the crater shouted to one another, and the sound of the chopper’s vanes increased in volume. The helicopter rose, the rotor blades whipping eddies of dust all over the crater. Swiveling, the aircraft’s nose pointed eastward, banked to port, then arrowed away.

“I wonder who—or what—is aboard the chopper,” Grant muttered. “They seemed to be in a hurry.”

Brigid didn’t answer. Moving swiftly, she removed a set of nylon cuffs from a pants pocket and slipped them over the unconscious man’s hands, snugging his wrists tightly together. Grant fashioned a serviceable gag from a bandanna and knotted the ends at the back of the man’s neck.

Kane gazed down at the activity in the depression, noting the swarthy complexions among the people standing around the gleaming metal plate. “It looks like they’ve got the locals busy.”

Grant rose to a knee, his eyes narrowed. “Busy doing what?”

“I get the feeling they’re packing up and moving out.”

Brigid checked the Calico. “Should we stroll down and ask what they’re up to or wait for the rest of the team? I’d like to avoid a firefight, if at all possible.”

“Yeah, so would I,” Kane replied.

Grant looked up at the sky. “No wonder our satellites couldn’t locate this place…shielded by the rock this way, we could fly over it at a couple of hundred feet and never know the place was here.”

Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two of them.

The Vela-class reconnaissance satellite carried narrow-band multispectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system.

The other satellite to which the Cerberus redoubt was uplinked was a Comsat, which for many months was used primarily to track Cerberus personnel when they were out in the field. Everyone in the installation had been injected with a subcutaneous transponder that transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponder was a nonharmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis.

The telemetric signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, and the Cerberus computer systems recorded every byte of data.

Suddenly the air filled a painfully loud high-pitched whine, like a gigantic band saw. “Down!” Kane exclaimed, falling flat to the lip of rock.

The whining grew louder just as what was left of the sun’s glow vanished below the horizon. But the crater was splashed by a multicolored shimmer. Down below, the laborers pulled aside the metal plate in the ground and then ran toward the gate at the base of the mesa. From a round aperture in the crater floor, a slender metal column rose straight up, pointing like a steel finger toward the sky.

“What the hell—?” Grant began.

The whining noise climbed to an eardrum-piercing crescendo. The top of the metal finger sprouted gleaming armatures, webworks of steel mesh unfolding and stretching outward. They formed shallow, disk-shaped dishes. The column continued to rise until it towered fifty feet above the crater floor.

Kane lifted his head, seeing activity by the gate at the base of the looming mesa. Movement shifted at the corner of his eye and he saw a man wearing the standard dun-drab coverall climb up to the ledge. A Calico was slung over his left shoulder and he stared downward at the crater.

As soon as Kane saw him, the millennialist turned his head and spotted Kane. Their eyes locked for what seemed like a long time. The sentry’s mouth worked as he yelled something, but his voice was completely smothered by the electronic whine from below. He struggled to bring his Calico to bear, but the long sound suppressor made swift movement impossible.

Kane launched himself from the ground as the guard unslung his weapon. He slashed the noise suppressor at Kane’s head, missed and hit his right shoulder. A fireball of pain exploded in Kane’s shoulder socket and then he knocked the man down. They rolled and bumped down the slope, hitting big rocks with bone-jarring impacts.

They thrashed together down to the base of the slope, the man’s breath hissing in his ear. Kane tried to hit him, but his right arm was numb, barely responsive. He grabbed the silencer of the Calico with his left hand, and the sentry twisted over with a steel-spring convulsion of his body. He threw his weight against the subgun, pressing the barrel across Kane’s neck, pinning him against the ground.

Kane tried to break free by arching his back and bucking upward, but the sentry was heavy and surprisingly powerful. His teeth bared in a grin of triumph as he put more pressure on the metal across Kane’s throat.

Kane glimpsed a shifting movement and even over the screeching whine from the crater, he heard a solid thump of metal colliding with bone. The millennialist cried out, went limp and fell half on top of him. Brigid stood over the man, feet spread, her appropriated subgun reversed in her hands. She had used to the blunt stock to club the man into unconsciousness.

Breathing hard, Kane elbowed aside the unconscious man. He staggered to his feet, rubbing his throat. “Thanks, Baptiste.”

From a pocket he produced his own set of nylon cuffs and bound the man’s wrists. While he worked, Brigid asked, “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”

“Because you said you didn’t want to start a firefight.” He picked up the millennialist’s Calico.

“Now we have a matched set.”

As they began climbing up the crater wall again, the mechanical whine ended. When they reached the top of the slope and rejoined Grant, they saw that the slender metal tower was slowly rotating, the disks made of mesh angling downward.

Grant glanced over his shoulder at them. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Kane said hoarsely. “Thanks for all your help.”

Grant shrugged. “I knew you could take him—with Brigid’s help.”

They eyed the metal tower. Although the electronic whine had faded, miniature skeins of lightning played along the rims of the dishes.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Kane asked.

Brigid shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“My market for speculation is open.”

“I’d sell it if I had it. At first glance, I’d say it looks like a microwave pulse transmitter. But my gut tells me it’s something else entirely.”

Grant hoisted himself to a knee. “Let’s go take a closer look, since nobody is around.”

“There could be a good reason nobody is around,” Kane commented.

Brigid tried the Commtact frequencies again but heard only static. “There’s no calling for help if he get ourselves trapped.”

Grant snorted. “Since when do we call for help?”

Kane assumed the question was rhetorical. He rose and walked along the ridge until he found the path that the sentries had climbed. The Cerberus warriors descended into the crater, alert for other guards but they saw no one.

They strode across the crater, giving the steel column a wide berth. They heard a deep bass hum emanating from within the tower, a low throbbing that set up shivery vibrations within their eardrums.

The Cerberus warriors walked toward the metal gate and saw it hanging ajar, dim light spilling out from between the flat slats. The square-cut passageway beyond the door stretched away into gloom. Keeping close to the right-hand wall, they followed the curve of the tunnel until it ended at a circular well pit, with metal steps spiraling down.

“Why does it always have to be underground?” Brigid murmured with mock weariness.

Kane responded with a crooked half smile and took the first step, careful that the risers did not creak or squeak beneath his weight. The staircase corkscrewed down only a couple of yards before ending at a low-ceilinged foyer. Stenciled on the wall in red were the letters: Property OF DARPA, IEEE Approved. Must Have A-10 Clearance ID To Proceed.

Brigid’s eyes darted back and forth as she read the words. “Definitely a predark scientific testing facility.”

“What kind?” Grant asked, familiar with but annoyed by the fixation on acronyms.

She pointed to each letter, enunciating the words clearly, “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers gave this place its seal of approval, if that means anything.”

“It doesn’t,” Kane muttered, but he didn’t question her.

Although Brigid Baptiste was a trained historian, having spent over half of her thirty years as an archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division, there was far more to her storehouse of knowledge than simple training.

Almost everyone who worked in the ville divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid’s secret was more arcane than the commission of petty crimes or manipulating the baronial system of government for personal aggrandizement.

Her secret was her photographic, or eidetic, memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and detailed visual memories. When she was growing up, she feared she was a psi-mutie, but she later learned that the ability was relatively common among children and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare among adults, but Brigid was one of the exceptions.

Due to her memory, everything she read or saw or even heard was impressed indelibly in her memory. Since her exile, Brigid had taken full advantage of the redoubt’s vast database, and as an intellectual omnivore she grazed in all fields. Coupled with her memory, her profound knowledge of an extensive and eclectic number of topics made her something of an ambulatory encyclopedia. This trait often irritated Kane, but just as often it had tipped the scales between life and death, so he couldn’t in good conscience become too annoyed with her.

Kane started walking, cradling the appropriated Calico in his arms. “Let’s see what we’ve got here. Let’s explore a little.”

“What do you expect to find?” Grant demanded.

Kane shrugged. “How do I know? That’s why I suggested we explore.”

“Just about every time we explore one of these places, we end up having to run out of it as fast we can,” Grant muttered.

At a cross corridor, they passed a small cafeteria-type dining room, equipped with two upright refrigerators and a large coffeemaker, but no one was seated at the long tables. On the opposite side of the passageway lay an office suite, furnished with a dozen desks, computer stations and file cabinets.

“Where is everybody?” Grant asked. “We saw them come in here, and the place can only be so big.”

“Maybe there’s a back way out,” Brigid suggested.

The corridor turned to the left like an L. They passed a sign on the wall at the angle that read Los Alamos Shuttle. An arrow pointed ahead, in the direction they walked.

Kane glanced around uneasily. “Maybe that’s the back door they took.”

“Could be,” Brigid conceded. “But why?”

The hallway terminated in a door emblazoned with the warning No Unauthorized Admittance.

“That means us.” Grant tried the knob and to his surprise, it turned easily.

Carefully, he pushed the door open and entered a narrow passage illuminated by naked light bulbs in ceiling fixtures. The three people navigated through a labyrinth of pipes, fuse boxes and cooling systems, all the machinery that kept the installation alive and self-sufficient.

Grant, Kane and Brigid became aware of a low hum ahead of them. It was almost like the bass register of a piano, which continued to vibrate long after a key had been struck. Their neck muscles tensed and their diaphragms contracted at the same time they became aware of a dull pain in their temples.

The passageway opened directly into a large circular room, the curving walls lined by consoles. The control surfaces flashed and glowed with various icons and indicator lights. A stainless-steel shaft mounted in a drum-shaped socket rose from the floor and continued through the domed roof.

“Here’s where the tower is raised,” Kane commented. “Whatever the hell it really is.”

Three crystalline hoops surrounded the drum socket at the base of the shaft. The hoops turned slowly and emitted the deep drone. The sound seemed to tighten around their craniums, squeezing and compressing as if their heads were trapped in tightening vises.

Wincing, Kane said, “Let’s get out of here. My head is really hurting.”

“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “Like my skull is being pinched against my brain or something.”

“Just a second,” Brigid replied absently as she inspected the control boards.

She noted the similarity of symbols and letters glowing on various monitor screens. The circle-and-ovoid combination representing the Greek letter theta was repeated over and over. The center screen showed a column of numbers, the digits clocking backward.

Suddenly, realization washed over her like a flood of icy water. She whirled toward her friends. “We definitely should get out of here before the pinching sensation gets any worse.”

She moved swiftly toward the door. Grant and Kane fell into step behind her.

“What’s the problem, Baptiste?” Kane asked.

“I think what we’ve got here is a theta-pinch transmitter,” she said over a shoulder.

“A what?” Grant demanded, face drawn in a scowl.

“It’s a form of experimental fusion physics,” she said, speaking quickly, ducking under a low-hanging pipe. “By magnetically compressing electrically conducting filaments, it creates an electromagnetic field that implodes rather than expands. They occur naturally in electrical discharges such as lightning bolts.”

“What the hell is something like that for?” Kane asked.

“Research into the supergravity theory, from what I recall,” Brigid replied, breathing hard. “I think it’s set on a countdown to some sort of energy discharge. I’ll explain when we’re out of here.”

“Looking forward to it,” Grant said dourly.

They quickly retraced their steps, climbing back up the spiral staircase. As they ran toward the gate, Kane couldn’t completely suppress a sigh of relief when he saw it still hung open.

A towering figure suddenly appeared on the other side of the gate, and Kane’s sigh of relief turned into a curse. He snapped up the Calico, finger curling around the trigger.

Kane reflected grimly that they had been lucky so far—but now, typically, their luck had run out.

Chapter 6

Edwards frantically hurled his body to one side, shouting, “It’s me!”

Kane gusted out a profanity-seasoned breath, feeling angry and ashamed. He, Brigid and Grant left the tunnel, slamming open the door. The other members of CAT Alpha stood in the crater, gazing at the spark-shedding and crackling metal transmission tower.

“What’s going here?” Edwards asked. “Where the hell is everybody?”

“How’d you get here?” Grant asked.

“We followed your tracks.”

Kane’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t find a couple of consortium guys tied up?”

Edwards shook his head. “No, sir. Were we supposed to?”

Brigid eyed the dishes on either side of the metal tower apprehensively, noting the greenish aura shimmering around them. “I think we’ve been had. Let’s double-time it out of here.”

“We’re going to leave this place unsecured?” Edwards asked, gesturing with his rifle barrel to the tunnel entrance.

Brigid’s lips compressed. “I don’t think we have much choice. I think the consortium abandoned this place for a reason.”

“Like what?” Kane inquired. “Besides headaches.”

Edwards eyed him in surprise. “All of us have headaches…and I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach.”

“What’s causing this?” Grant asked. “Radiation?”

Glancing up at the indigo sky and the first emerging stars of the evening, Brigid answered bluntly, “I have no idea. But if they don’t want the place, we probably wouldn’t, either.”

Kane opened his mouth to voice a question, but the muffled boom of a subterranean explosion made him jump. He bit back a curse. A second later they heard another explosion, followed by a third. The ground trembled under their feet.

Several sharp cracks burst from the disks mounted atop the metal tower. They sounded like huge sticks breaking simultaneously. From the mouth of the passageway gushed a billow of flame and smoke. Acrid black fumes grabbed everyone by the throat and set them to coughing.

A tremendous explosion cannonaded up from the throat of the tunnel, and a brutal column of concussive force slammed into them like an invisible tsunami, buffeting them backward.

A series of hammering blasts thundered up. The entire crater floor shook and trembled. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and dirt, shaken loose from the mesa, sifted down. A fissure opened up around the mouth of the tunnel with a clash of rending rock and a distant shriek of rupturing metal.

Boulders toppled down from above, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The people moved away, staggering on the convulsing earth. They ran out in the center of the crater to avoid being crushed by rocks falling from the mesa.

The metal tower bent and with a prolonged creak, it sagged downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The crackling, popping pyrotechnic display around the metal mesh disks didn’t ebb.

When the ground tremors ceased, Edwards demanded angrily, “What the fuck is going on?”

Brigid shook her head, fanning the dust-laced air away from her face. “The station was set to self-destruct. God knows why.”

“We can tell you.” The voice, amplified by a loud-hailer, was high-pitched but male.

The crater floor lit up with blinding rods of brightness. The searchlight beams stabbed through the night and intersected with the bodies of Cerberus Away Team Alpha, pinned like butterflies to a board. Squinting, Kane shielded his eyes, bringing up his Calico.

“Don’t move,” the voice said. “It’s very important that you stay as motionless as possible.”

“Fuck them,” Edwards growled, finger crooking around the trigger of his rifle.

“If they meant to kill us,” Grant muttered to him,

“they’d have done it already, not threaten us.”

“I think we’re being warned,” Brigid said, “not threatened. They didn’t tell us to drop our weapons.”

Trapped in the dazzling exposure of the light, Kane figured the Millennial Consortium really didn’t care one way or the other if they were disarmed. They had other matters occupying them.

Beyond the blinding circle of the handheld spotlight, he could barely make out man-shaped shadows arrayed on the ridgeline. He asked, “Who are we talking to?”

“Shh!” came the reply. “Call me Mr. Blue, call me late for dinner, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you don’t move until we tell you to.”

“Why?” Brigid asked.

“Shh!”

“Don’t shush me,” Brigid snapped irritably. “Are you responsible for blowing up the installation?”

“Shh! Don’t make any noise. Be as quiet as you can and don’t move. Stay in the light if you value your lives!”

Mystified, but feeling sweat form on his hairline, Kane cut his gaze over to Brigid. “Is he crazy or what?” he whispered.

She shook her head slightly. “For the time being, we probably should do as he says—until we can get a better idea of what’s going on here.”

“Nothing is going on around here,” growled Higson, a CAT team member. “Except we’re being set up to be slaughtered.”

Kane considered Higson’s words for a thoughtful second, then the sparks dancing along the rims of the disks suddenly faded away. He found the phenomenon worrisome, not comforting.

At the same time, the glare of the spotlight dimmed. He sensed it hadn’t been done to spare their vision. Faintly, he heard a murmuring from the people on the ridgeline. Mr. Blue’s voice whispered frantically, “Shut up! Be quiet!”

Kane blinked, trying to clear his vision of the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming over his eyes. His flesh suddenly prickled with a pins-and-needle sensation, almost as if a multitude of ants crawled over his skin. He felt rather than heard a feathery fluttering against his eardrums. His stomach surged with nausea.

Edwards shuddered and muttered, “Something is going on here.”

The spotlight dimmed even more, becoming little more than a faint yellow halo.

“It’s like the power is being drained,” Brigid said wonderingly. “Localized ionization of the atmosphere, too.”

Higson shifted his feet nervously and said in a guttural whisper, “What the fuck is that?”

Kane followed the man’s gaze toward the smoke-occluded opening in the base of the mesa. Movement shifted within the roiling vapors, and a green-hued light flickered in the haze. A faint, cold breeze touched his face, ruffling his hair, and he heard a distant hiss. The green light whirled, bathing the entire crater in an emerald glow. Then, slowly, the light contorted into the outline of a human figure.

Kane gazed, transfixed, his mind a whirl of bewilderment. He felt his throat constrict, and his heart began pounding in a sudden terror. The green figure twisted, stretching outward, growing broader. It split into another shape of identical size and dimension.

“Too late!” Mr. Blue bleated from the ridgeline. His voice thickened with horror and he screamed,

“Run!”

Cerberus Away Team Alpha retreated from the ghostly, nebulous bodies, backing away toward the crater wall. The figures resembled cadavers glistening with a coating of green phosphorous. Their facial features were always in flux, sliding and re-forming, like smoke. Two more appeared, gliding over the ground toward them. Fingers like wisps of emerald smoke reached out at the end of skeletal arms, convulsing with grasping and clutching movements. The wraiths spread out in a horseshoe formation, clouds of fluorescent particles swarming around them.

Kane raised the appropriated Calico to his shoulder, sighted down its length and shouted, “Fire!”

He squeezed off a long rattling burst. Bright brass arced out of the smoking ejector port, tinkling down at his feet. Grant, Brigid and the other members of CAT Alpha triggered simultaneous full-auto fusillades.

The barrage ripped through the wraiths, punching holes, ripping them to shreds. The figures instantly re-formed, resolving into a dozen wavering, green ghostly shapes. Tiny pieces of green light floated over their heads, like a swarm of radioactive fireflies. The keening whines of ricochets reverberated and echoed all over the crater. The hailstorm of bullets struck bell-like chimes from the metal tower. The slugs bounced off with high-pitched whines.

Kane released his pressure on the Calico’s trigger and shouted, “Cease fire! Fall back!”

CAT Alpha sprinted up the slope to the ridge surrounding the crater, causing miniature avalanches under their feet. Kane, Higson and Grant remained at the base of the crater wall, eyes and gun barrels fixed on the cluster of green ghosts less than ten yards away.

Higson snatched a round V-60 minigrenade from his combat webbing, and ran at an oblique angle away from the rest of the team. He shouted, “Keep going!”