Warlord Of The Pit

Wind-driven sheets of rain fell in a torrential downpour. Gusts of wind tore at the distant tree line. Another stroke of lightning split the indigo tapestry of the sky, turning the hulking ships docked at the piers into ghostly apparitions. Their rain-slick hulls glistened as if as they were painted with quicksilver.

Kane crouched beside the gaping rectangular hole that had been a window and a fair-size portion of stone wall before the warhead of an RPG had blown it inward in a hailstorm of rubble.

The rain suddenly increased in volume and tempo, sluicing down the sloping roof and through a hole in it. Kane wiped at the warm fluid seeping down the left side of his face and glanced ruefully at the diluted blood shining on his fingertips. He hadn’t even been aware of the superficial cut, inflicted during the brief but fierce firefight that had raged all along the docks until ten minutes ago.

He wasn’t surprised that the mission had gone sour so quickly, but he raged at the concept that his life and Grant’s might end in such a stinking place for such a foolish cause.

“Shit,” muttered Grant, who knelt on the floor across from him. He glared at the leak in the ceiling, then out through the gaping hole in the wall. “How much longer do you think this storm will last?”

Kane shook his head. “It’s monsoon season in this part of the world. It might last all night or it could stop in five minutes.”

Knee joints popping, Grant heaved himself to his feet and peered out at the rain-buffeted darkness. He could see little of the Pacific island called Pandakar beyond the immediate waterfront area.

Grant loomed six feet four inches tall in his stocking feet. He wore a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt, tricolor camo pants and thick-soled jump boots, which added almost an inch to his impressive height. The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds.

His short-cropped hair was touched with gray at the temples, but it didn’t show in the gunfighter’s mustache that swept out fiercely around both sides of his tightlipped mouth. Behind his lantern jaw and broken nose lay a mind of keen intelligence that possessed a number of technical skills, from field-stripping and reassembling an SAR 80 blindfolded to expertly piloting every kind of flying craft, from helicopters to the Annunaki-built transatmospheric vehicles known as Mantas.

A Colt Government Model .45 pistol hung from his right hip in a paddle holster, and he held a Copperhead in his right hand. The abbreviated subgun was slightly less than two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, and the extended magazines held thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for one-handed use.

An optical image intensifier scope and a laser autotargeter were mounted atop the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperhead to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts.

“I don’t know who is who out there,” Grant murmured, “but I don’t care to be caught in a cross fire again.”

“Me either,” Kane agreed. His blue-gray eyes took in the details of the slithering shadows in the rain while his mind kept the raw worry about Brigid Baptiste from preoccupying him.

Dressed similarly to Grant in a black T-shirt, Kevlar vest and camo pants tucked into high-laced combat boots, Kane was a tall man, lean and rangy. He resembled a wolf in the way he carried most of his muscle mass in his upper body. His thick dark hair, showing just enough chestnut highlights to keep it from being a true black, hung in damp strands. A faint hairline scar stretched like a piece of white thread against the sun-bronzed, clean-shaved skin of his left cheek.

A pair of Bren Ten autopistols were snugged in shoulder holsters, and he cradled a Copperhead subgun identical to Grant’s. A canvas rucksack at his feet held spare ammunition clips and other equipment.

Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder subcutaneously embedded in the bone.

Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, a Commtact would still provide a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

Touching a tiny stud, he opened the channel to Brigid, but only a crackling hash of static filled his head. Scowling, he reached inside the rucksack and brought out a compact set of night-vision binoculars. Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.

Craning his neck, Kane looked toward Captain Saragayn’s treasure ship, the Juabal Hadiah, the Mountain of Wealth. Even at over a mile away, the ship looked monstrous. The vessel was less of a less of a seagoing vehicle than a huge anchored pavilion, sprawling across several acres of harbor water.

The Juabal Hadiah rose to exaggerated heights at stern and bow. The stern was built up in several housed decks, one atop the other. The hull crawled with intricate designs carved everywhere above the waterline, from Asian ideograms to representations of fish and dragons. The prow carried a huge figurehead painted, like the balance of the ship, in gaudy hues of red, yellow and gold. The effigy was of a naked red-haired woman, at least fifteen feet long, with an eighty-eight-inch bust.

Cupping his hands around the lenses of the binoculars to shield them from the rain, Kane tried to find movement on the decks. He saw nothing, whether due to the distance or the rain, he wasn’t sure. However, he could make out the huge flag emblazoned with the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle.

“Pirates,” he muttered.

“What?” Grant asked, raising his voice a trifle to be heard over the drumming of the rain.

“Pirates of the goddamn South China Sea,” Kane said loudly. “Who would have figured?”

A gust of wind blew streamers of water into his face. Swallowing a curse, Kane rose and went to stand beside the big man.

“We should’ve figured,” Grant commented sourly. “Who better?”

Kane assumed the query was rhetorical and so didn’t respond. In the world he and Grant shared, the impossible happened often enough to seem commonplace. They had encountered pirates before, like those who prowled the waters off the Western Isles and controlled the island of Autarkic. That term was a catchall to describe a region in the Pacific Ocean of old and new landmasses.

Back during the nuclear holocaust, bombs known as earthshakers had been triggered, seeded months before by submarines along the fault and fracture lines of the Pacific Ocean. ICBM missiles had pounded the Cascades and the region from western Canada down to California. The concentrated destructive force had ripped that part of the Earth to pieces.

The tectonic shifts and undersea quakes triggered by the atomic megacull raised new volcanic islands. Because the soil was scraped up from the seabed, most the islands became fertile very quickly, except for those in the Blight Belt—islands that were still dangerously irradiated. Pandakar wasn’t one of those.

Arriving on a small island in the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia and finding Pandakar to be a stronghold of twenty-third-century pirates was one thing, but landing barely two hours before a bloody insurrection staged by a rival faction was something neither Grant nor Kane could have anticipated. They had been running and hiding along the sprawling waterfront for the past thirty minutes.

Pandakar’s population was a surprisingly mixed lot of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos and quite a few Chinese. Unsurprisingly, the little island stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. Mud-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Still, Brigid, Kane and Grant had been entranced by the people of all colors with monkeys and parrots for sale. There were vendors of magical charms for the healing of wounds and curing of scurvy. There were sellers of maps who offered charts of submerged predark cities and their treasures.

But at night, the waterfront looked quite different, particularly during a rainstorm, than it had during the daytime. When the Cerberus warriors arrived on Pandakar, they had only caught a glimpse of its stilt-legged huts, plank walkways and piers crammed with sampans and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats. In the rainy darkness, the flickering glow of yellow lanterns cast an unearthly aurora over its byways.

A flash of lightning showed only the faint outlines of two figures creeping between a pair of thick wooden pilings draped with fishnets. With the long streamers of rain falling onto them, they resembled life-size mannequins attached to puppet strings.

“Looking for us?” Kane whispered.

“I don’t think it matters much,” Grant replied lowly. “Both sides will probably shoot us on sight.”

Kane sighed heavily. “Why does this shit always happen when we’re making diplomatic overtures?”

Grant uttered a derisive snort. “You’re asking me?”

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the Overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past several years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Grant and Kane had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Another crash of thunder exploded overhead, blasting a shock wave ahead of it, concussing with great force against the roof of the structure. A split roof timber shifted with a creak, and wood splinters mixed with dirty water pattered down.

Grant eyed it apprehensively. “We’re going to have to get out of here pretty soon, no matter what.”

A staccato drumroll wove its way around and through the roar of the storm. Kane and Grant knew the noise wasn’t thunder. They ducked, falling almost prone on either side of the cavity in the wall, and peered into the night.

Illuminated by a lightning stroke arcing overhead, they saw a man lying on the ground near one of the pilings, rain slamming into him. Dark liquid ribbons inched away from his body.

A figure slid away from the shadows, and a stab of orange flame spit from between a stack of wooden crates. Shot after shot cracked in the darkness as the subgun sprayed the gloom with bullets. The muzzle flashes strobed.

A crooked spear of lightning spread a curtain of blue-white radiance across the sky. The figures moved swiftly, bent over in crouches. Kane’s eyes flitted back and forth, trying to fix the men’s position in his mind. Then Grant sucked in his breath and whispered, “They’re behind us.”

Kane wheeled, unholstering a pistol and leveling it at the doorway in the rear of the hut. The plank door hung askew on crooked hinges. Grant threw himself against the wall, putting his Copperhead against his right shoulder. In almost the same shaved fraction of a second, the door crashed open and three men staggered into the hut.

Chapter 2

They were small, fierce Malaysians, all of them adorned in little more than rags. They carried a variety of pistols and carbines. The tallest man, who stood five foot eight, stared at Grant and Kane in astonishment.

A purple silk scarf enwrapped the Malaysian’s forehead, and gold earrings glittered in the lobes of both ears. His face and hands were covered by a network of old scar tracings. A scraggly mustache twisted down around the sides of his mouth, which was open in surprise.

For a long moment no one moved or spoke. Then the man in the purple scarf demanded in passably good English, “Where the fuck did you two come from?”