Hell's Maw

There was not much that Shizuka could say that she had not already told Cáscara, but she sketched out a rough timescale of the events and outlined the state of the room when they had entered and how she and Grant had discovered the bodies.

“You’ve had a traumatic few hours,” Cáscara said sympathetically. “The clinician here wants to keep an eye on you, to make sure you don’t go into shock. Do you think that would be okay?”

“I should speak to Grant,” Shizuka said.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” Cáscara assured her. “He’s fine.”

Shizuka eyed the female Pretor warily. “Can I see him?” she asked.

“Soon, yes,” Cáscara promised.

“When?”

“Soon.”

Cáscara left Shizuka then, and the samurai woman was escorted to a safe room—a cell by another name. The room was comfortable and low-lit with white walls and a vase of flowers and a jug of water on a nightstand beside the single bed. It looked like a private hospital room. Shizuka was too tired to argue, but she remained alert for a long time, pacing the room and wondering about Grant.

In the corridor outside the room, Pretor Corcel met with his partner, Cáscara, to share information as they watched Shizuka pace back and forth through a one-way pane of glass.

“My guy says he’s innocent,” Corcel said in Spanish.

“That’s always the first defense, Juan,” Cáscara said dismissively.

“But there’s more to it than that,” Corcel continued. “He says he’s—get this—an ex-Magistrate, US. He’s retired from service, he’s not shy about explaining that, and he happened to be out here on vacation.”

Pretor Cáscara pushed one slender hand through the long bangs of her fringe. “So he’s one of us. Do you believe him?”

Corcel looked thoughtful. “It’s certainly an unusual tactic if he is lying,” he concluded. “What about the woman, Liana? What does she say?”

Cáscara peered through the one-way glass before replying, watching as Shizuka tidied her hair in the mirror that lay on the obverse side of the glass. “She says she’s the leader of the Tigers of Heaven from New Edo,” she said.

Corcel let out a grim sigh. “Their stories match. Did she give you anything else?”

“The name of a restaurant she and the boyfriend were attending when the crime was committed,” Cáscara stated.

“Yeah, I got that, too.”

“What do you think? Are they for real?”

Corcel shrugged. “The man—Grant—is certainly built. And if his story is true, then he’s been trained to kill. He could be our killer—he’s physically capable.”

“But why come back to the scene?” Cáscara wondered.

“To remove evidence maybe,” Corcel proposed. “Something he left behind. Or…”

Cáscara raised a querulous eyebrow as her partner left the sentence unfinished. “Or…?” she prompted.

“Or maybe they really did just bungle into this mess, in which case we’re no closer than we were before to finding out who’s committing these showpiece murders and how, Liana,” Corcel said grimly. “Except that my suspect claims he saw the killers—or, at least, some people he thinks were at the scene at the time of the ‘performance.’”

Emiliana Cáscara shook her head heavily. “We already have over two hundred dead in less than three weeks, Juan,” she said. “If this goes on—”

“It’s unconscionable,” Corcel agreed. “Let’s check their story first, see if it gels with what the restaurant owner remembers. After that—well, we’ll see.”

Chapter 5 (#ulink_66f73d3b-8ad4-55a4-9dc8-7b9238c7a674)

Crouched among the sacks of corn in the rearmost road wag, Domi watched with a growing sense of disbelief as the weird machine came trundling across the field toward her, and a fanlike aperture irised open on its front surface. An instant later, the aperture began to glow, before unleashing a beam of red-gold energy across the distance between itself and the convoy.

Domi didn’t hesitate. She leaped up, scrambling across the rear bed of the wag even as the energy beam screamed toward her. It struck an instant later, clipping the port flank of the truck with a shriek, accompanied by a wall of burning hotness that seemed to wash across the wag in a wave.

As the wave struck, Domi dropped down behind a pile of grain sacks, sheltering behind them as the wall of heat caromed past overhead, rolling over the roof of the wag and leaving the sacks untouched.

Domi was a strange-looking woman, an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, red eyes the color of blood. She was petite and slender of frame with small, pert breasts and bird-thin limbs that she habitually kept on show, wearing only the bare minimum of clothing. For this mission, however, she wore a dark hoodie, its hood up to hide her face, and shorts, her pale legs darkened with a smearing of dirt for camouflage. She had kept her feet bare, preferring to feel the land beneath her than fuss with shoes or boots. Strapped to her ankle was a six-inch combat blade with a serrated edge. It was the same blade with which she had killed her slave master, Guana Teague, back in Cobaltville years before, and she carried it with her like a comfort blanket. Domi had another weapon, too, a Detonics Combat Master with a silver finish, which she wore holstered at her hip in a brown leather sheath.

The wag swerved under the force of the heat blast, one metal side liquefying in a moment until it resembled the remains of a wax candle, the cooling surface creating new patterns in a matter of moments. Behind her, Domi could hear the two men in the cab shout in shock as the heat ray rose the temperature within by a dozen degrees in those instants. One man cursed loudly as the surface he was touching became suddenly too hot to handle.

The wag bumped off the road for a half-dozen seconds, two wheels running along the uneven ground of the field to the right before the driver righted it.

As the wave of heat passed, Domi’s Commtact blurted to life—Kane and Brigid both asking for a status update and whether she was okay.

“I’m fine,” Domi growled between gritted teeth. Already she was unholstering her Detonics revolver, flipping off the safety as she watched the weird box on legs come striding across the abandoned landscape toward the convoy.

The towering box was moving closer, its long legs perfectly suited to traveling across the uneven ground of the surrounding fields, taking ten-foot strides toward Domi and the wag. As it closed in, Domi saw the secondary attachments running up both sides of the mysterious vehicle—twin railguns located on either side of the boxy cabin, belt-fed and situated in the gap between legs and box. The railguns were mounted on swivel balls, giving them a limited range of fire. But it was enough to cover everything in front of the weird, scaffold-like machine.

Domi took aim from behind the cover of the grain sacks, closing one eye and focusing on the aperture as it cycled again. The aperture looked flat when it was closed, interlocking metal shutters in a weblike pattern sealing off the hole. There was a flickering of brightness deep within where something was burning, Domi saw.

That was as much as Domi had time to process before the boxy construction fired again, sending another screaming blast of intense heat toward the wag like a man chucking a spear. Domi narrowed her eyes against the brightness and squeezed the trigger on her blaster, sending a 9 mm titanium-clad bullet toward the box-on-legs as the red-gold beam struck. The bullet was caught in the red wave and it disintegrated, melting down to liquid in less than a second.

* * *

TWO WAGS AHEAD, Kane eyed the weird machine as it charged across the rough terrain toward the convoy. It had already blasted the rear wag, and Kane watched as the wag slewed off the road before returning to the track. He could see that it was losing ground—their attacker’s plan was rudimentary, but that was how the classics worked.

Kane engaged his Commtact. “They’re picking us off from behind,” he shouted, “trying to split us up.”

Brigid acknowledged Kane’s observation with a “hmf” that seemed to say “well, obviously.”

Kane shouted to his driver, “Take us back and circle before we lose the back man.”

The driver—a blond-haired man of twenty with the puppy fat and bright white teeth of a teen—popped his head out of the cab and looked back. “I’ll slow but I’m not stopping, Kane,” he shouted over the roar of the straining engine. “We’ve lost too many people on this stretch of road already.”

“Good enough,” Kane spit, his eyes fixed on the mechanical colossus on the horizon.

As the driver spoke, his partner was clambering out of a roof hatch to operate the machine gun that was mounted just behind the cab. The man was slender with gangly limbs and a prominent Adam’s apple, his shoulder-length hair decorated with twisted ribbons. Wedging himself behind the cab, the man swung the heavy gun around until it pointed to the rear. Then he squeezed the trigger. “I can’t make the distance,” he said with evident irritation as he watched the shots fall short.

Kane glanced at him, then back down the road. “Get behind it,” he instructed to the driver, indicating with a circling motion of his hand. “Get behind it!”

With a shifting of grinding gears, the wag pulled up a slope to the side of the road and the driver began scanning for a clear route on which to comply with Kane’s instructions. “You better not be getting us killed, Kane,” the driver shouted as he fought with the steering wheel. “Ohio won’t never forgive you if you do that.”

“I’ll do my best to avoid it,” Kane shouted back as he watched the mechanical marvel stride closer to Domi’s wag. It was still charging, blasting another red beam of light ahead of it. Between that and his wag was the other wag—the one that Brigid Baptiste was guarding.