Infestation Cubed

This was a matter for employees, not her, Agrippine surmised from her reaction.

“Mistress, should we move in?” one of the New Order’s expedition asked.

She lifted her hand, halting any further discussion.

Whoever this woman was, she had authority enough to silence a man easily one hundred pounds heavier and larger than she was. Her focus was on the distance, lips shut, breathing easily.

She turned to Agrippine, and for the first time in a week, she spoke.

“This is where I take my leave,” she said. “Grogan is in charge.”

Agrippine looked at the big man who had asked to be loosed upon the source of the gunfire. Grogan, aside from being much heavier than the woman, was tall and carved from lean, long muscle. He was formidable, and had been much more talkative than the woman, though he continued to defer to her leadership.

“Right,” Agrippine said. “And what will you be doing?”

“That is not your concern,” she replied coldly. She had a satchel with her that she picked up, swinging it over one slender but muscular shoulder. “Your concern is earning the rest of your money. Fail, Grogan kills you. Succeed, Grogan pays you.”

“What if Grogan dies?” Agrippine asked, casting a sideways glance toward the man.

“I selected him for this task. He will not fail,” she said. It was if her proclamations were etched into stone. No inflection of doubt haunted any of her words. She nodded to one of the New Order crewmen, who extended a plank toward the shore.

“Where are you going now?” Agrippine asked.

“I have a task to attend to elsewhere,” she answered.

“Where?” Agrippine pressed.

Green eyes flashed in the shadows of her hood. Her mouth turned down into a frown, then she took a cleansing breath. “If you insist on knowing, then I am off to Africa.”

Agrippine tilted his head. “What?”

She strode down the gangplank, moving with grace and balance, her satchel seeming to glow with a brighter intensity.

“Africa? That’s across an ocean!” Agrippine shouted.

The woman turned and pointed to Grogan, who rested a large, muscular hand on the Cajun’s shoulder.

“Do not shout. You may be heard,” Grogan explained.

“But…how is she getting there?”

There was a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye, and when Agrippine turned his head to identify the flash, he noticed that the woman was gone.

“She has her ways,” Grogan answered. “She is beloved of Ullikummis, and her gifts are endless.”

“What…what the hell?” Agrippine asked.

“Mistress Haight is on her way,” Grogan said. “We should be on ours.”

Agrippine turned, wondering just where Brigid Haight really was going and how she’d disappeared so fast. If he’d known of Annunaki technology, and the gemlike threshold she’d carried in her satchel, his understanding might have been more complete, but as it was, there was no way he could even imagine that she possessed the means of opening up holes in space-time and projecting herself through them with but a thought.

Brigid Haight’s caress activated the alien artifact, itself a weapon that made even the assault rifles that Agrippine had supplied seem like mere sharpened twigs by comparison.

And then, if Agrippine was aware of such power, such advanced means of matter transmission, he would have wondered why he and his guns were needed in the first place.

Haight had her reasoning and purpose.

It was for neither he nor Grogan to know.

THE REFUGEE CAMP WAS quiet, which unnerved Grant slightly. Even in the depths of the Tartarus Pits, the slums that nestled in the shadow of the barony of Cobaltville, there was usually the chatter of laughter, pipings of music, a constant drone of conversation amid the squalor and everyday struggle for life.

Grant towered over the people who had populated the camp. Young and poorly fed, dark eyes tracking his every step, children stopped their chores to watch him closely.

Grant was something that people didn’t see every day. Well over six feet tall, with a powerful body crammed into a suit made of skintight space-age polymers, he was an impressive sight. His skin was dark, being an African American, but his tone was even deeper than the sunburned flesh of the people who lived in the wiregrass region. The people here were a mix of ethnicities, ranging from Caucasian to American Indian, and all of them had been sun-roasted to a similar bronzed hue several shades lighter than Grant’s.

It was the size, the easy power that he carried in his stride, that attracted the most attention. His own attention was drawn to the fact that he saw very few men.

Demothi had said that the raiders had been persistent in attacking this particular camp, stealing away with the few men who had managed to escape the initial harvests by the Hooded Ones. Seeing the makeup of the population of the camp was still a surprise to Grant.

Close to three hundred people were present. The raiders didn’t seem to be interested in women, which was unusual. In his dealings with pirates and bandits, Grant had never known them to pass up the chance to take females into captivity. If they couldn’t be used for easy sexual gratification, they were often easy to cow into servitude, made to do the chores that the cold-bloods felt were beneath their interests.

Suwanee had been quiet as they walked along, her face drooped in sullen shadow. She’d only looked up to navigate particularly soft and spongy terrain, struggling to keep her balance like the rest of them. Grant had attributed that to her distrust of the newcomers among them—himself, Kane and Rosalia—but with the gender imbalance in the camp, he was starting to understand the anger seething just below her surface.

The people here were quiet, focusing on menial tasks out of the need to distract themselves from the losses in their families. Grant could figure why Kane had been astute enough to restrain himself from opening fire on the Hooded Ones. Between the disgusting growths and the electronics attached to their heads, the men they had battled were more drones and victims than actual villains. Something was spreading an infestation among the men, creating an army that would be under long-distance control. The electronics had to be operated by cybernetic impulse, the growths some form of parasite that had either hallucinogenic or will-numbing excretion.

Grant rubbed his brow. “You’ve been hanging around Brigid too much.”

Kane paused, looking over his shoulder at his friend. “Thinking about what’s happening to this camp?”

“It’s like she’s still here with us,” Grant answered. “I can almost hear her talking about mind-control secretions.”

“You’d almost think we were capable of learning, eh?” Kane asked.

“We’d be damned fools if we didn’t. Other than that, this is pretty grim shit,” Grant said. “I don’t see a man who isn’t as healthy as Demothi around, unless we’re looking at 12 or under.”

“That’s what I made out, too,” Kane said. “About 300 here, we can see about another 150 men, given the adult women present?”

“One hundred and fifty men,” Grant murmured. “That’s a lot of people wearing those funky blobs.”

“An army,” Kane added. “Minus two, and they died because we damaged them.”

“I know that I was looking for a real knockout past those heavy hoods,” Grant said. “What about you?”

“I was tired of the guy I was fighting getting back up,” Kane said. “I wasn’t aiming to kill him, though.”

“The one Rosie shot, he took a chest full of bullets,” Grant added. “I don’t think he’ll last too long. He’ll bleed out but he didn’t die.”

Kane frowned. “Not right away, which means if they come at us in force, we’re going to need a lot of luck or head shots to put them down.”