Outlanders 15 - Doom Dynasty Read online

  Shizuka, Jozure and Odo swiftly stepped over to him. Wryly, she said, "Your technique may be straightforward to the point of crudity, but I can't ar­gue with the effect."

  The tip of Jozure's blade lightly touched the narrow strip of flesh visible between the Mag's high-collared undersheathing and his helmet, probing for the carotid artery.

  Grant snapped fiercely, "No!" and launched a kick at the katana. Jozure snatched it away with lightning speed, causing Grant to stagger. The Tiger of Heaven instantly assumed an offensive posture, sword posi­tioned for a double-handed stroke.

  Struggling to compose himself, Grant said sternly, "No killing of the guards unless absolutely neces­sary."

  He felt the pressure of Shizuka's penetrating eyes upon him. She asked, "Is this a man you know?"

  Grant shook his head. "He's only following orders, like Kane and I did when we were officers like him. He probably didn't want to take part in the massacre of the settlement, but he had no choice."

  Directing violence against members of his former brotherhood still caused Grant pangs of guilt. He re­tained vividly unpleasant memories of the firefight with Cobaltville Mags when he, Kane, Domi and Brigid made their escape. They were not memories he relished.

  Grant said nothing more, though he sometimes questioned himself about his reluctance to kill Mag­istrates when they would have no such qualms if the situation was reversed. The Magistrate Division, for all of its many faults, had been the only true home he had ever known. It was where he had grown to manhood, where his personality and identity had been formed. No matter how far away from the Division he might run, both in distance and experience, he could never completely outdistance its oaths and its disciplines. In the remote recesses of his mind, the division was his home, not Cerberus.

  Bending over the unconscious man, Grant swiftly disarmed him, appropriated his Copperhead, searched through the pouches on his web belt, found the nylon cuffs that were part of standard Mag equipment and bound the man's wrists behind him.

  He fashioned a gag with the man's web belt and made sure he couldn't comcall for help by removing his helmet. The Magistrate looked frighteningly young, almost like a child. And there was something vaguely familiar about his soft features. Grant dragged him deep into a brush-clogged thicket by the ankles, acutely aware of how foolish his humanitarian efforts appeared to the samurai.

  Shizuka's posture telegraphed impatience. "Let us waste no more time."

  Although he wanted to, Grant did not object to her autocratic tone. As he began walking again, static hissed into his ear and Kane's voice filtered through the helmet's comm-link. "We're set."

  Grant whispered into the transceiver, "We're not. Stand by for my signal."

  With a note of impatience in his tone, Kane re­sponded, "Standing by."

  It didn't seem likely they would come across any more sentries before they reached the entrance to the courtyard. Pollard had obviously stationed two on the north side and two on the south. He only hoped Ki-yomasa would dispatch the ones on that side effi­ciently and silently.

  Almost as soon as the thought registered, the quiet of the night was torn apart by a scream of terror and the staccato roar of blasterfire.

  Chapter 11

  With infinite caution, Kane crept sideways, crouched, listened, but heard nothing. He stalked along the cor­ridor, aware of the faint sounds of Brigid's and Domi's footfalls six feet behind him.

  He kept close to die right-hand wall, and the two women walked down the center so they would have a clear field of fire. The plaster on the walls was cracked where it wasn't broken altogether, and large pieces of it were scattered on die terra-cotta-tiled floor. Despite the lack of humidity, the air tasted dank and stale, as if they were creeping through a mauso­leum.

  Most of the rooms on either side of the hall showed as black as pitch, but several were dimly lit by the ghostly moonlight, peeping in through rents in the roof. They were far from bare, but their contents had not withstood the merciless double team of time and the elements. They were littered with haphazard heaps of unidentifiable junk. He hoped Brigid the historian didn't feel cheated.

  They reached a T junction in the hallway and paused. On the right, a flight of rickety and sagging stairs angled up into darkness. Kane heard the mutter of voices somewhere ahead of them, so he moved on, senses alert, finger lightly touching the trigger stud of his Sin Eater. They reached a point where their path was blocked by a jumbled barricade of fallen timbers and support beams, so they had to work their way over and around and through them. It was a tight squeeze, even for Domi.

  Turning a corner, Kane saw the double doorway leading directly into the courtyard. Crouching, he mo­tioned for Domi and Brigid to take up positions on either side of it. He kept his eyes fixed on Pollard, watching his every move, and opened the comm-link channel to Grant. "We're set."

  Grant's whispery voice responded, "We're not. Stand by for my signal."

  Impatiently, Kane replied, "Standing by."

  With hand motions, Kane told Brigid and Domi to throw their Alsatex grens when he gave the word. He would follow with the canister of CS gas. The three devices weren't lethal, but they would cause the pris­oners some discomfort. However, it was a far safer solution than employing the high-ex grens in his war bag. As it was, with the people below ground level in the pool, they weren't likely to be caught in a cross fire.

  Kane waited for Grant's communication, barely able to stop himself from fidgeting. Like all hard-contact Magistrates, Kane hated forestalling preemp­tive action. The moments directly preceding action were the hardest to endure. They always felt like a long chain of interlocking eternities. But since he had spent years as a hard-contact Mag, he also knew that real violence often came without warning.

  As he reflected on that concept, he heard a scream, interwoven with the crackle of a Copperhead on full-auto.

  The burst was short, barely two seconds in dura­tion, but it galvanized the Mags in the courtyard like electric shocks. Shouting, they scrambled to their feet, snatching weapons and helmets. Pollard lumbered swiftly toward the entranceway, roaring an unintelli­gible command.

  "Shit!" Kane hissed. When the two women turned questioning faces toward him, he gestured and snapped, "Do it!"

  Domi and Brigid unpinned their grens and tossed them into the compound. They bounced unnoticed over the flagstones and detonated almost simulta­neously, with painfully loud thunderclaps and ear­drum-compressing concussions. A pair of stars seemed to go nova, and intolerable white glares blazed, bleaching all of the shadows out of the court­yard. The building shuddered, and little flakes of plas­ter sifted down. Even over the echoes of the twin explosions, Kane heard the prisoners crying out in fear.

  The Magistrates nearest the epicenters of the ex­plosions were stunned and deafened, and those with­out their helmets were blinded, their optic nerves overwhelmed. They clapped hands over their eyes and screamed out curses. While oilier Mags reeled in shock, trying to bring their blasters to bear, Kane pinched the gas gren's pin and hurled the gren with a looping overarm. It passed through the doorway, trailing a little stream of acrid vapor. When it struck the flagstones, it erupted with a loud pop and spewed a billowing plume of white smoke. Almost immedi­ately the courtyard was engulfed by clouds of roiling vapor.

  Yells and shouted commands became incompre­hensible as the gas seared eyes, lungs and nostrils. The Mags coughed and gagged, groping for whiffs of fresh air. Two of them opened up with their Copper­heads at the doorway of the building. Kane could barely see flame wreathing the stuttering muzzles through the blinding smoke, but the bullets turned the wall behind him into a sieve. Chips of wood and plas­ter flew past his head, deflected from his eyes by his visor. Slugs plowed up the floor in the center of the corridor, beating a drumroll on the terra-cotta tiles.

  Dark shapes shifted through the planes of gas, fan­ning out to approach their position inside the door­way. The chemical vapors wafted into the building, and Kane he
ard Brigid cough, then choke as she tried to suppress it.

  "You two stay where you are," he directed the women. "Don't move!"

  Kane stepped out into the center of the corridor, framing himself in the opening. He allowed himself to be seen. Just to make sure, he squeezed off a tri-burst from his Copperhead at the nearest black figure. As he did so, he realized the man wasn't wearing his helmet and his weeping eyes were but slits in his face. Kane also recognized him, but it was too late to alter his aim.

  Three 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds struck Frank­lin in the face and neck. His features dissolved in a wet blur, blood spraying out of his throat like a foun­tain. As he jerked backward, something struck Kane high on the left side of his chest, just below his col­larbone. He heard an explosive report and saw a spurt of flame from vapor.

  Staggering from the impact, air kicked from his lungs, Kane flailed backward into the gloom of the corridor, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the floor. Though his armor had absorbed and distributed most of the high-caliber bullet's kinetic energy, he was numbed, his heart quivering from hydrostatic shock. If the round had struck his molded pectoral directly, he knew his heart would have stopped beating.

  Grant's voice suddenly snarled into his ear. "What the fuck's going on?"

  Kane had only enough oxygen to either run or an­swer. He could not do both. He glimpsed four Mags bulling through the door, gripping their Sin Eaters and Copperheads. They did not see either of the women crouched in the dark corners on either side of them. Painfully dragging air into his laboring lungs, Kane turned and ran.

  As the double explosions sent tremors rolling through the night air, Grant broke into a sprint, dash­ing around the corner of the wall and making for the entranceway into the courtyard. He opened the comm-link to Kane. "What the fuck's going?" He snarled out the words. There was no reply.

  A Mag pushed his way through the arch, raised his Sin Eater, then checked the motion. He started to call out to Grant, but when he spotted the Tigers of Heaven running up behind him, the man tried to bring his blaster to bear again, but Grant beat him to it.

  The Sin Eater and Copperhead in Grant's hands spit flame and thunder, unleashing round after round. The Mag stumbled, voicing a garbled babble of screams and profanity. The hailstorm of bullets didn't breach the armor, but the kinetic shock was sufficient to numb him and slam all the air out of his lungs. He reeled back into the courtyard.

  A Magistrate came around the south corner of the wall, but he wasn't running. He stumbled dazedly, hands over his midsection. Falling to his knees, he put out his hands to catch himself. When he did so, blue-sheened intestines fell from a slash in his armor, spilling in a wet and pulsing mass to the ground.

  Kiyomasa, Ibichi and Kuroda came around the cor­ner a breath later. Kiyomasa's sword gleamed with blood. Its razor edge had sheared through the Mag from groin to chest.

  On his knees, the Mag tried to scrape up his intes­tines and push them back into his belly through the gash in his armor. He raised his face to Grant and tried to speak.

  The katana in Kiyomasa's hands flashed. The Mag­istrate's head fell from his shoulders, the mouth open and lips moving as if it had one last thing it wanted to say. Then the body slumped forward.

  Kiyomasa barked, "This pig managed to get off a few shots before I could attend to him." He sounded embarrassed, not angry. "I apologize."

  Grant said nothing, ignoring the quiver of nausea in his stomach. When Kiyomasa made a motion to enter the courtyard, Grant put out a restraining hand. "Wait until the gas dissipates. You'll have plenty to do out here."

  Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, a quar­tet of Magistrates staggered out of the entranceway, their mouths opening and closing as they desperately dragged in lungfuls of fresh air. When they saw the Tigers of Heaven and Grant, they simply froze, not knowing what to do.

  The samurai knew. They went into whirling at­tacks, their katanas surgically dismembering the Mags. One man's gun hand was taken off at the wrist, and in the half second he stared in disbelief at the blood-squirting stump, the edge of the sword sliced through the neck of his companion, separating it from his head. The severed neck spouted a scarlet-foaming fountain from the opened arteries.

  The Mag with the amputated hand opened his mouth to drag enough air into his lungs to start screaming, but a sword blade lifted, fell and lifted in between eyeblinks. The edge clove his helmet and the skull beneath it nearly in two. Both men dropped to the ground at the same time.

  The other two Magistrates screamed in soul-deep terror and broke through the samurai, racing like pan­icked deer for the river. The Tigers pursued them only a little way, bounding like their feline namesakes, their katanas licking out. Blood rushed from piercing wounds in their backs and the two men screamed hid­eously, turning to fight Grant did not engage them. Neither Magistrate managed to squeeze off a single shot when four Tigers of Heaven closed in around them.

  It was not a fight—it was a slaughter. Within sec­onds the Magistrates floated facedown in the water, blood spreading away from their bodies. Then the weight of their armor pulled them beneath the surface and out of sight. Jaw muscles bunched, Grant turned away, back toward the walled-in compound.

  "You don't approve of our fighting style?" Shi-zuka inquired softly.

  "That wasn't a fight," he said, his tone frosty with disgust "It was butchery."

  "The honorable act would have been for them to bow their heads and accept the killing punishment they earned."

  Grant refused to acknowledge the woman's obser­vation. Taking and holding a deep breath, he pushed through the archway and into the courtyard, plunging into the planes of gas. He tried to stay beneath the drifting clouds of chemical vapor, but he inhaled some of it and for a second he gagged himself blind.

  Grant's breath burned in his throat, his eyes still tearing from the tainted air, but it would have been far worse without his visor. A black-armored figure came to a stop in front of him. He started to speak, then spotted Shizuka at his side. He whipped his Cop­perhead to his shoulder.

  Grant lifted the Sin Eater first, firing a triburst, aim­ing for the red-tinted visor. The subsonic rounds cored through the faceplate and pushed the man's brains ahead of them in a thick wad. The Mag stumbled, rocking on his heels and hit the ground, already a dead man.

  Sounding slightly surprised but gratified nonethe­less, Shizuka said breathlessly, "Ah so domo arigato. Thank you. I didn't expect you to do that."

  "I said no unnecessary killing," he replied gruffly. "He didn't give anybody a choice."

  Grant moved deeper into the courtyard, squinting against the burn of CS gas hanging in the air. Foot­steps pounded on the flagstones behind him. He started to whirl, and metal flashed at the periphery of his vision.

  A Magistrate staggered back from Shizuka, who had her sword angled over her left shoulder. The ar­mored man made a peculiar croaking sound, then blood bubbled up in a precise line across his torso. The cut was from the juncture of the neck just above the seventh vertebra, then through the collarbone, an­gling to die sternum, slicing through the cartilage and spinal column. The Mag slid wetly in two pieces to the ground.

  Grant stared in amazement and revulsion. Before he could say anything, he saw more Mags racing across the courtyard. He also glimpsed Pollard wav­ing his Copperhead and bellowing commands in the booming, aggressive voice he had learned to despise. Grant brought up both of his blasters. Whipsawing autofire raked the onrushing Magistrates in continu­ous steel-jacketed stream. A Mag was hit broadside and bowled off his feet.

  Return fire ripped the air around Grant, tearing through it in a frenzy, like a ground-level gale. Hold­ing down the trigger of his Copperhead, he swung the flame-belching barrel from left to right. Hot brass spewed from the ejector. He found himself subcon­sciously aiming for the red badges emblazoned on the left pectorals of the body armor.

  Wild rounds smashed into the wall behind him, fill­ing the air with fragments of stucco and br
ick. Flag­stones shattered, the ricochets whining and buzzing in all directions.

  The firing pins of both blasters clicked dry almost in the same second. With swift sure hands, Grant tog­gled the Copperhead's magazine release, men rammed a fresh one home. He shot the bolt, stripping and chambering the first round.

  The thinning clouds of chemical vapor suddenly lit up with a hot, hell-hued white flash, like heat light­ning contained within die walls of the building. Chunks of debris blew out of the ground-floor win­dows, and as they pattered down around him, Grant instinctively lifted an arm to shield himself.

  In that instant, Pollard stitched Grant across the midriff with a zipper of slugs. They bruised him, pounded him dazed and gasping to the ground.

  Before Grant's body had fully settled, the air shiv­ered with a scream of rage from Domi, followed a shaved fraction of an instant later by the ear-knocking report of her handblaster.

  Chapter 12

  The gren detonated only moments after the Mags raced into the building after Kane. The concussive wave crashed down the corridor, and the fog-shrouded courtyard was lit up with a bright white flare. Brigid felt the shock and the heat on the back of her head. Instinctively, she crouched in an even tighter ball, hunching her head between her shoulders. Plaster and bits of wood fell from the ceiling, pelting her and filling her hair.

  An instant later, she felt the fanning of cool air on the right side of her face as Domi screamed in outrage and fired her Combat Master. The boom of the report painfully compressed her eardrum, which was still throbbing because of the detonation of the gren. She turned to Domi and shouted angrily, "Be more care­ful!"

  Domi said nothing, her eyes fixed on the supine Grant He climbed to his feet as they watched, but their view of him was blocked by running, shouting, shooting figures. If nothing else, Domi's reaction to Grant's dilemma proved to Brigid that her anger to­ward him was superficial in nature, and didn't pollute her deep wellspring of devotion.