Grailstone Gambit

The pale flesh of his freakishly high forehead showed a blue-and-red network of broken blood vessels spreading up to his hairline. His mouth was a short, lipless gash. His ash-gray hair was thin, almost downy, stirred slightly by the breeze atop his flat skull. A great shelf of bone jutted above his eyes.

They were unusual in shape and color—disproportionately large, completely round with tiny irises and pupils totally surrounded by the whites. They seemed to glow, like two pinpoints of fire.

His eyes swept the crowd disinterestedly, and they rested momentarily on Domi. In that instant she felt a faint touch on the surface of her mind, as if it had been brushed by a cobweb. His eyes moved on, but she instantly realized what the little man was.

She reached up for her Commtact. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me….” She hesitated when the little man’s round eyes flicked back toward her as the Cadillac rolled past. A thick, ropy vein pulsed along his the right temple.

“What is it?” Kane asked impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

Domi caught only the most fragmented impression of an arm whipping toward her from behind. She ducked, but still a hard object struck the side of her head, just under her ear. She staggered and would have fallen into the street if not for the press of bodies all around her.

Senses reeling from the impact of the blow, fighting off unconsciousness, Domi moved on pure animal instinct. She drew her knife and lashed out blindly. A vague figure jerked away from the nine-inch serrated blade.

Blinking through the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming across her vision, Domi saw the flat-faced man in the derby flail at her with a metal truncheon. She sidestepped and slashed again, feeling the point of the knife catch and drag through cloth and flesh.

She heard the profanity-seasoned howl of pain and as her eyes cleared she saw the man stumble backward, clutching at his right arm. Blood seeped between his fingers.

When a hand closed in a painful grip on the back of her neck, Domi leaned forward, her left leg flashing up in a back kick. She felt a solid, satisfying impact against the toe of her combat boot. A heavyset man uttered a muted squeal and doubled over, clutching at his groin.

More people shuffled toward her, arms spread wide to prevent her from bolting into the crowd. Domi backed away, weaving and swaying, reaching under her coat for her autopistol. Then she pivoted on her heel and ran full-out up the boulevard, in the opposite direction from which Shuma and his entourage had come.

Coattails flying, Domi ran as fast as she could, hearing shouts and the sound of pounding feet behind her. She knew she wouldn’t get far, but she didn’t intend to. She reached for her combat harness, her hand closing around a small, metal-walled sphere.

The rifle shot sounded like a distant firecracker going off under a tin can and she smiled grimly. She yanked the M-33 fragmentation grenade free of the harness and its safety lever.

Chapter 3

What you fear the most rarely comes to pass.

That refrain cycled through Brigid Baptiste’s mind on a continuous loop as she stood with her flank against the crumbling brick wall. Her heart pumped and her throat constricted as the screams of the crowd reached her.

Brigid forced herself to calm down, knowing that Domi and Kane were supremely competent in almost any situation. Still, she felt almost relieved something was finally happening. For the past two hours she had been loitering along a narrow side street, separated by the ruins of two buildings from the main activity of the city.

Brigid had visited Manhattan in the twentieth century, during an abortive time-travel mission a few years earlier. What she saw now was scarcely recognizable as the remains of one of the one largest metropolises in the world. Centuries of human history had been reduced to hundreds of square miles of smoldering rubble within a handful of minutes. Some of the towers still stood, shattered and cracked, yet with an indomitable appearance.

A tall woman with a fair complexion, Brigid’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual.

She wore black denim slacks, loose enough in the leg for free movement, the cuffs tucked into thick-soled combat boots. A camouflage jacket covered her torso. Her waist-length mane of red-gold hair was now a short, tightly bound sunset-colored club hanging at her nape. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist, and a Copperhead subgun hung from a harness beneath her coat.

Under two feet long, the Copperhead had a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, the extended magazine holding 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.

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.

On the other side of the crumbling heaps of masonry and massive chunks of fallen concrete Brigid listened to the chorus of voices chanting Shuma’s name, and she shivered despite the jacket. Carefully she touched the dabs of soot applied to her face to conceal her peaches-and-cream complexion. She knew she would pass a quick visual inspection by a Farer or a Roamer, but she also knew she didn’t smell as rank as they did.

However, her devotion to the masquerade had its limits. As it was, her nostrils recoiled at the potpourri of odors wafting on the wind. To Brigid, whose nose had sampled aromas from all over the world, the place simply stank.

A gangling Roamer youth with a scraggly brown beard made decorative by the addition of little silver beads twisted into the whiskers slid along the brick wall and stood beside her. She ignored him until he reached out and rubbed her right shoulder.

“I been watchin’ you, big sister,” he said in a husky whisper. “You got me swoll up.”

“Fade, little brother,” Brigid retorted in a flint-hard voice, employing the Roamer pattern of speech.

“You be a beaut babe,” he said, rolling his shoulders beneath the tattered, patchwork coat that hung nearly to his ankles.

“Skid off, kid off.”

“And them eyes, they’s like emeralds. You be for me, big sister.”

Brigid stared directly into his face, catching the acidic whiff of home-brewed whiskey that hung around him like a cloud. “I told you to skid off, little brother. I want to see Shuma.”

The Roamer’s lips stretched back over cavity-speckled teeth, and his right hand drifted from her shoulder to breast. “We got the time.”

“Your hand,” Brigid said.

The youth blinked. “What about it?”

“Take it off or I’ll break it off.”

The Roamer’s grin widened. “Tough, you be tough. I likes my big sisters tough. Helps get me more swoll.”

“Dandy,” Brigid replied. “Then this should help, too.”

She jacked her knee up into his groin. The youth grunted, doubling over at the waist, his hands leaving Brigid’s body to clutch convulsively at his crotch. Swiftly, Brigid gripped him by his greasy hair and pulled him hard against the wall, the crown of his head striking the brick with a sound like two concrete blocks colliding.

As he slumped bonelessly to the ground, Brigid stepped casually away from him. No one else in the vicinity noticed the scene. As far as the Roamer definition of violence was concerned, the little struggle barely qualified as a harsh word.

The rumbling of a big engine grew louder and Brigid crossed the side street, peering past broken walls and over the heads of the assembled Farers and Roamers. The long yellow vehicle rolled into sight. The crowd chanted “Shuma! Shuma!” like a religious mantra.

“On his way,” Brigid whispered over the Commtact.

“Acknowledged,” came Kane’s quick response.

Homemade drums beat a discordant fanfare. Brigid joined the other Roamers thronging toward the parade. Despite herself she felt the tingling warmth of excitement at the prospect of danger spread through her.

For a very long time, she was ashamed of that anticipation, blaming her association with Kane for contaminating her. Now she had accepted the realization that his own desire for thrill-seeking hadn’t infected her, but only forced her to accept an aspect of her personality she had always been aware of but refused to consciously acknowledge.

In her years as a baronial archivist, Brigid Baptiste had prided herself on her intellect and logical turn of mind. She was a scholar first and foremost. Back then, the very suggestion she would have been engaged in such work would have made her laugh. Now she was a veteran warrior, and at some point during her time with Cerberus she realized the moments of danger no longer terrified her but brought a sharper sense of being alive.

Her life in Cobaltville’s Historical Division had not been a full life, but only an artifice, a puppet show she had performed so the string-pullers wouldn’t become displeased and direct their grim attention toward her. Of course, eventually they had. Over the past few years, she had left her tracks in the most distant and alien of climes and breasted very deep, very dangerous waters.

The crowd clogging the alley was too densely packed to move among easily, so rather than force her way through the shouting mob, Brigid chose to run parallel to the parade route. As she picked her way through the rubble, she absently noted the ripple pattern spreading across the asphalt. Weeds sprouted from splits in the surface. She had seen the rippling effect many times, mainly in the Outlands. It was a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by nuclear-bomb shock waves.