Apocalypse Unseen

KANE MEANWHILE HAD his own problems. Two ragtag-looking soldiers came hurrying into the partially hidden area where he was hiding out with Mariah and Brigid, their backs to the Cerberus team. The two looked like brothers. Both were young men with dark hair and beards and scuffed uniforms that had seen better days. They each carried an AK-47 automatic rifle smeared with the pale dust of the whipped-up sand.

Kane subvocalized a warning to Brigid where she knelt working on the broken interphaser. Thanks to its remarkable mechanics, the Commtact could pick up such a gesture and amplify it for Brigid’s ear canal, turning Kane’s subvocalized “company” into a whisper.

By the time Brigid looked up, Kane had stepped silently forward, bringing the nose of his Sin Eater up until it was pressed against the side of the head of the closest soldier.

“One wrong move and I blow your brain all over your companion—capisce?”

Whether the foreign soldier did or did not “capisce”—and chances were he hadn’t comprehended a word Kane had just said—he certainly understood what a blaster pressed against his face meant. Kane smiled as the man lowered his own gun, saying something in his own tongue that the Commtact automatically translated as “No, no, not shoot.”

But even as the soldier spoke, his companion spun, alerted by his partner, raising his automatic rifle and squeezing the trigger in a heartbeat.

Kane saw the move coming, that fabled point-man sense of his kicking in like clairvoyance, leaping aside as the trigger clicked and a stream of 9 mm slugs spit in his direction, cutting down the other hapless soldier before the man could even acknowledge what was happening.

Kane dived to one side. This was not the first time his point-man sense had saved his life. He had been renowned for it, all the way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate many years before. It seemed to be an almost uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened, alerting Kane to the threat with just enough time to avoid it. There was nothing uncanny about it, however; it was merely the combination of his standard five senses, honed to an incredible degree, making him utterly aware of his surroundings. A change in wind, the noise of a scuffing boot—a hundred telltale clues gave Kane the advantage in combat, an advantage that could be the difference between life and death.

Kane hit the ground with a whuff of expelled breath, rolling his body even as a stream of 9 mm slugs chased after him across the dirt, always just a handful of inches behind him. As he rolled, Kane brought up the Sin Eater, nudging the trigger and sending his own triple burst of bullets at his attacker.

The first soldier had sunk to his knees as Kane’s bullets struck his companion, a choking noise coming from his throat. His trigger-happy companion dropped in a swirl of unguided limbs, the AK-47 swiveling up into the sky and sending off another half dozen shots before it finally quieted. Then the man lay on his back in the dirt, absolutely still, blood blooming on his chest, the automatic pointed upward like a grave marker.

“Poor sap,” Kane growled as he picked himself up and brushed dirt from his clothes. “Shouldn’t mess with an ex-Mag.”

Across from the dead soldiers, Mariah Falk was cowering beside the pillar, her face pale with exhaustion. “You—you killed them,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged with a solemn nod. But experience nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that something wasn’t right here. The excitable soldier who had shot at him and his partner didn’t seem to have much in the way of aim. Kane had leaped aside and stayed out of the path of his bullets as much by the man’s inability as his own improbable luck. Furthermore, he had shot his own colleague, which could be put down to inexperience or panic, but it still reeked of something closer to stupidity—and Kane didn’t have these two pegged as stupid, just unfortunate enough to find a fully trained hard-contact Magistrate had materialized from a wormhole in space in the spot where they hoped to hide from the battle. No, there was something else to these soldiers and their recklessness, something he wasn’t seeing yet. And, whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_4c19252e-d510-57d5-bf74-b4a029ff0e3f)

Grant raced up the last of the stone steps, the sound of his footsteps masked by the cacophony of the tripod cannon as it continued its deadly opera.

He waited a moment at the topmost step, crouching down and peering warily around the edge of the arched wall where it ended. There was a sort of balcony beyond, wide as a Sandcat wag and made of solid stone. There were cracks in the stone, ancient gouges where rocks had been forced together and held in place by tension. There were two operators working the turret, with a third man visible beside them. The third figure had been hidden before by his low-angled view of the balcony, but now Grant could see him and fingered him for a guard or sentry of some kind because of a stub-nosed pistol resting between his hands. The man was sitting on a box of ammunition and surrounded by almost a dozen more.

“Where do these psychos get all their ammo from?” Grant muttered to himself with a disbelieving shake of his head.

Grant brought his Sin Eater around the arch, edging it silently along the wall until the sentry was in his sights.

Pop!

The sentry keeled over as the bullet drilled through his hand, slumping forward where he sat as his right hand was reduced to a bloody smear.

Even as the man slumped forward, Grant stepped out from his hiding place, shooting again. His next bullet ripped through the arm of one of the two gunners, striking the man with such force that he went careening from his position and danced himself straight over the edge of the parapet.

The second gunner said something that Grant’s Commtact translated as “Who’s there?”

“Hands in the air where I can see them!” Grant snarled in a voice like rumbling thunder, raising the Sin Eater so that the man could see he was in the center of its sights.

Only, the man couldn’t see it, Grant realized. He was blind.

* * *

“HOW’S THAT INTERPHASER coming along, Baptiste?” Kane asked, nervously pacing back and forth as he watched the battlefield. Grant had disappeared from view up the stairwell and the general hubbub that they had walked into seemed to have moved on, for it was now playing out fifty yards away from the ruined barracks itself.

“I can’t work miracles, Kane,” Brigid told him, irritated. “Just let me work.”

“I don’t like being somewhere without a way out,” Kane growled.

“That explains your inability to hold down a relationship, then,” Brigid snapped back at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brigid glared at Kane for a few seconds, an unspoken challenge flickering between them. They were anam-charas, these two, soul friends whose relationship reached back through the folds of time, beyond their current bodies. Kane would always be watching over Brigid and she over him, the two souls entwined in a dance that stretched beyond the lines of eternity.

Mariah saw the look Brigid shot Kane from her hiding place, wondered what was going on between the two of them.

“What?” Kane asked Brigid. “You getting broody all of a sudden?”

“No,” Brigid told him. “Just wondering why we keep fighting these abominable wars for humanity when our whole lives are geared to nothing but the fight. I’ve lost everyone I cared about—Daryl, others. And look at us—we’re meant to be anam-charas, soul friends, but sole friends is about the sum of that. I just wonder how we can keep fighting for humanity when we’re so out of touch with what humanity really is.”

Kane began to respond when Grant’s voice came over the Commtact frequency, interrupting the discussion. “You wanna know why the cannon team are firing blind?” he asked. “Because they are blind!”

Automatically, Kane looked across to where the cannon was located, realizing that its seemingly incessant sputter had finally halted. “Say again?”

* * *

GRANT WAS STANDING beside the tripod cannon, holding its operator’s arm behind his back with such force that the man was bent over until he almost kissed the deck.

“I said they’re blind,” Grant elaborated. “Both operators, I think, plus their guards.”

Grant’s captive squirmed in his arms, spitting saliva on the floor as he issued a cruel curse on Grant and his family. The man’s eyes were unfocused, darting wildly in their sockets.

“The Commtact’s not doing a great job with their language,” Grant continued. “Whatever it is they’re speaking seems to be a combination of Bantu, French, slang and some local patois it can’t decipher. But from what I can tell, they’re either blind or only partially sighted.”

“And they’re operating big guns,” Kane responded, with a clear edge to his voice.

“Maybe by luck,” Grant said.

* * *

BRIGID SPOKE UP without taking her eyes from the repair work she was doing on the interphaser. “Shoot off enough bullets and you’re bound to get a few lucky shots, right?”

Kane shook his head, not disagreeing but just trying to piece everything together. The two soldiers he had dealt with had seemed—well, not real aware of their surroundings, that was for sure. Could they be blind, too?

Kane scanned the area beyond the little enclave, counting the trickle of soldiers still bumbling about amid the fortress ruin. At first glance they seemed normal enough, the usual fretful stalking of people on the edge of stress. But look again, and Kane thought he detected more of an aimlessness to their progress, as though they perhaps couldn’t see where it was they were headed, were just drawn to the noise of battle.

Kane scampered forward, reached for one of the two soldiers he had dealt swift justice to mere moments earlier. They looked normal, and even their eyes looked normal. How do you know a man’s blind?

“Baptiste, protect the civilian,” Kane instructed, referring to Mariah.

Before Brigid could so much as look up, Kane was off, hurrying into the wreck of the fortress, head down and blaster in his hand.