Death Cry

Chapter 22

Chapter 1

It was snowing in North Dakota, though it wasn’t particularly cold. Wrapped in a light jacket over his shadow suit, Kane hunkered down beneath the snow-laden branches of a fir tree, watching two guards patrol outside the mine entrance. Kane was a tall man, built like a wolf, all muscle piled at the upper half of his body while his arms and legs were long and rangy.

He took shallow breaths, ignoring the fog that formed as he expelled them, trusting the tree cover to hide his breath as well as it hid him. He wasn’t cold. In fact, the jacket was worn more for camouflage and the convenience of extra pockets while on mission. The tight-fitting one-piece shadow suit he wore beneath served as an artificially controlled environment, regulating his body temperature. It also possessed other useful properties, most crucially acting as armor in the event of an attack. Despite this, the suit allowed for remarkable freedom of movement.

Kane turned to look behind him, sensing as much as hearing the approach of his partner. Grant, an ex-Magistrate like Kane, held his massive body low against the fluttering snow as he jogged toward Kane’s hiding place. He was a huge man, all of his bulk muscle without an inch of fat. His skin was like polished ebony, and a drooping gunslinger’s mustache brushed his top lip. Like Kane, Grant wore a white jacket over his shadow suit, camouflaged for the snow-covered landscape, with a white beanie hat pulled low over his head.

They hadn’t expected to need camouflage. When Lakesh had outlined the mission back at the Cerberus redoubt, he had made no mention of other parties being interested in the acquisition. Straight in and out, don’t let the delicate structure collapse on you as you pass through.

The delicate structure in question was a long-buried Air Force base, predating the nukecaust, in a town that had once been called Grand Forks. Close to the old Canadian border, from a time when country borders meant something, rumor had it that the base had been used as a backup data-storage facility. Now all that remained was a pile of rubble that served as firewood for the local roamers. But Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the nominal head of the Cerberus exiles, had recently stumbled upon evidence that suggested some useful data may have been stored at the Grand Forks base, data that might not have survived in other forms. A quick look-see and they’d be out, or so Lakesh had said to Kane’s three-strong survey crew.

Grant’s deep, rumbling voice cut the silence, despite his speaking in a low whisper. “It’s the same all over,” he told Kane. “Guards everywhere. Not many, but plenty enough if they want to make trouble for us.”

Kane continued to watch the pair of guards patrolling the minelike entrance that led into the old underground network of the abandoned Air Force base. “That’s what I suspected,” he answered quietly. “You see any other ways in?”

“Not me,” Grant growled. “Looks like the millennialists have provided the best and only entryway to our buried treasure.”

The millennialists that Grant referred to—or, more properly, members of the Millennial Consortium—were treasure hunters with a solid organizational structure and plenty of backup for their field ops. They dealt in prenukecaust matériel, mostly military ordnance, which they would either sell to the highest bidder or use for their own political ends—quite often both at once. If the millennialists could get someone else to do their dirty work, and pay for the pleasure in the process, so much the better. Kane and Grant had come to blows with the Millennial Consortium a few times, both in America and elsewhere across the globe. Despite claiming noble aims, most who belonged to the Millennial Consortium were opportunistic pirates, bottom-feeders of the worst sort as far as Kane was concerned. Their bold agenda listed a desire to restore civilization to the country, but there was no doubt in Kane’s mind that they’d sell him their own grandmothers.

Three Scorpinauts, the preferred land vehicles of the millennialists, were parked close to the squared-off entrance. The low-slung, boxlike vehicles moved on eight heavily tracked wheels and were sturdily armored. They sported numerous rocket pods and weapons ports, and .50-caliber, swivel-mounted machine guns stuck out from two armatures at the front of the vehicles like a pair of foreclaws. The ten-foot-long snout of a 40 mm cannon protruded from the rear on a huge, swiveling arm, docking in a resting position at the back of the vehicles, resembling a scorpion’s stinger-tipped tail.

Seeing three of them there meant one thing: it was a lightly manned rather than a priority operation.

Kane noticed the misting puff of disturbed snow off to the right, at the edge of his sight, and he turned to see the third member of his crew—Brigid Baptiste—making determined headway through the thick carpet of white as she came to join them. A striking woman, Brigid had hidden her vibrant red-gold hair beneath a white scarf, leaving her pale face clear. Her high forehead pointed to intellect, while her full lips suggested a passionate side to her personality. Wrapped in a white jacket with a sable collar similar to those worn by her colleagues, hair masked and the cold draining the color from her face and lips, Brigid’s bright emerald eyes and thin, ginger eyebrows were a little flash of color in the pale surroundings. She shook her head as she crouched with Kane and Grant beneath the low-hanging branches.

“No good?” Grant asked, his voice low.

“No back door.” Brigid shrugged.

Kane continued to watch the entrance to the underground structure. The roughly built square tunnel was boxed with wooden struts and rusty, paint-flecked metal poles. “Guess we’re going in the front, then,” he told his companions.

“No way, Kane,” Grant spit. “I’ll always back your play, but look at them. Walking in there would be suicide, plain and simple.”

Brigid nodded her agreement. “The entrance is too well guarded, Kane. We can’t just sneak past them. And there are too many to just start blasting people, even if that was a reasonable option.” She narrowed her eyes in frustration. “Face it, the scavengers have won this round. Maybe we’ll be able to buy the tech from them sometime later on.”

The trace of a thin smile crossed Kane’s lips as he turned to look at his partners. “O, ye of little faith,” he chided. “You’re always telling us how we need to use our guns less and diplomacy more, Baptiste.”

“I don’t see what…” Brigid began, but Kane was already unclipping something from the built-in belt of his jacket.

Kane stepped out of the tree cover and walked down the slight slope toward the mine entrance, holding aloft the small gunmetal canister with his thumb pushed tightly against its circular top.

“Everybody relax,” Kane shouted to the confused guards as they raised their rifles toward him. “This here is what’s known as a dead man’s switch. You all know what that means, right?”

The two guards nodded and tentatively lowered their blasters, still clutching them in readiness. Their outfits were patched together, not uniforms as such but uniform in their raggedness. Both had heavy fur hats pulled low to their brows, and their hands were wrapped in dirty gloves or bundled in rags.

“Now, me and my friends here have some business inside,” Kane continued. “We don’t plan to be long and we don’t intend to take much, but if we don’t get our way, then you, me and this whole underground shaft thing you have going on is about to meet the glorious maker and sing hallelujah.”

Brigid looked annoyed as she followed Grant out from beneath the tree. “This is what he calls diplomacy?” she whispered from the side of her mouth as she moved alongside Grant.

One corner of Grant’s wide mouth lifted in the barest hint of amusement. “If I’m not mistaken, he’s threatening them with a flask of water,” he whispered back.

As he spoke, Grant tensed the tendons in his right wrist and his Sin Eater sidearm was thrust into his hand from beneath his right sleeve.

The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them when they had fled from Cobaltville. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand. If the index finger was crooked at the time, the handblaster would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard.

As Mags, Grant and Kane were schooled in the use of numerous different weapons, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements.

Just now, Kane’s own Sin Eater was still sheathed in its wrist holster beneath the white sleeve of his coat. He paced forward, holding the flask aloft and keeping the attention of the two guards as they wondered whether to leave their posts. “I want you all to step away from the entrance there,” Kane advised them, his voice steady.

Grant leveled his Sin Eater meaningfully at the guards, holding it for a second first on the one to the left, then tracking swiftly across and pointing it at the other guard before returning to the first once more. “Guns in the snow, gentlemen,” he warned.

“Maniacs,” Brigid muttered as she stepped over to Kane’s other side and revealed her own pistol—a black TP-9 handgun.

“How many are inside?” Kane asked, addressing the left-hand guard as he placed his rifle flat in the snow.

“Um…” The guard’s eyes lost focus for a moment as he began a quick count in his head.

“Come on, son,” Grant urged, “quickly now.”

“Eight,” the other guard piped up, the unsteady voice of a young man muffled by the scarf he wore over his nose and mouth.

“You got a way to speak to them?” Kane asked. The hand holding the gunmetal canister was stretched out steadily before him, a little above head height.

“Shoutin’,” the young man replied. “Just shoutin’.”

“No radios? No comm devices?” Kane queried.

“Only in the tanks,” the young man explained, looking across to the parked Scorpinauts, “to communicate with home. Nothing for here.”

This rang true to Kane and his team. The Millennial Consortium was not renowned for its lavish treatment of staff. Its operations were executed at minimal expense to generate maximum profits.

Kane strode toward the open, box-shaped entrance. Low-ceilinged, the tunnel dipped into a shallow slope, burrowing under the wrecked firewood and open foundations that had once formed buildings above. Kane could see a few paces into the tunnel, after which its contents were lost in darkness.

“Me and my buddies here are going to go in,” Kane explained to the guards as he tried to penetrate the darkness with his gaze. “You’re going to wait here, and you’re not going to do anything stupid. If you are under any illusions about how a dead man’s switch works, and you decide to be a chancer with your popguns, let me assure you that we will all be having the remainder of this discussion in the afterlife. Am I clear?”

The guards both nodded, their eyes wide in fear, but Kane didn’t bother turning to them. He was busy scanning the gloom of the tunnel and listening for any hint of approaching reinforcements.

“Now,” Kane continued as he led the way into the tunnel, “if nobody does anything stupid, nobody will get hurt and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

Grant held back as Brigid followed Kane into the dark tunnel, covering the two guards with his Sin Eater.

“Sit tight, boys,” Grant told them. “We won’t be here long.” With that, Grant ducked his head and jogged the few steps it took for him to catch up to his colleagues.

Brigid looked from Grant to Kane, a sour look on her face. “This is insane, you realize,” she whispered.

Still holding the flask aloft, Kane glanced at her. “We’re in and nobody’s been hurt so far,” he replied in a low voice. “Score one for diplomacy, I think.”