Apocalypse Unseen Read online

  “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.

  “Dammit, Kane, do you always have to be so blasted impetuous?” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. Then she called over to Mariah, working the catch on her hip holster where she housed her TP-9 semiautomatic.

  “Mariah, you know how to use a gun, right?”

  Falk looked uncertain, her eyes fixed on the pistol in Brigid’s hand. “Um...kind of.”

  Brigid handed the geologist the gun. “Point and shoot,” she summarized. “Anyone gets too close that you don’t like the look of, just blast them. Not Kane, though. He can be annoying sometimes, but he’ll only get more annoying if you put a hole in him.”

  Then Brigid turned her attention back to the interphaser, hoping to be able to trigger a pathway out of this mess. Lakesh had programmed in a half dozen escape vectors if she could just get the wretched thing functioning.

  * * *

  KANE SCRAMBLED, GLANCING up at the mounted cannon and seeing Grant’s shaved head peeking up over the angle of the deck.

  Five ramshackle soldiers were trekking over the ground, finding their way past the wreckage that littered the terrain. Kane dodged past them, spotting a straggler who had opted to stick to the shadows that ran alongside the walls. The young man’s rifle rocked in one hand as he felt his way along the wall with the other.

  “Kane, that you down there?” Grant’s voice came over the Commtact.

  “Gonna try something,” Kane explained without slowing his pace. “Cover me, okay?”

  Kane reached the lone figure in a few loping strides, coming around and behind him to reduce the chances of the guy shooting him. The man was young and dressed in a loose, dirt-smeared top which billowed as the wind caught it. The AK-47 rifle in his hands was scuffed with dirt.

  Sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket, Kane sprinted at the man before dropping low so that he connected with him in a long slide across the loose, dry sand. Kane’s legs caught the soldier’s, tripping him so that he caromed headfirst off the wall that he had been feeling his way along.

  The soldier grunted sharply as he struck the wall.

  Kane was on top of him in a flash, grabbing the barrel of the AK-47 and angling it away from him even as he pressed his weight onto the man’s torso.

  “What are you doing? What’s going on?” the man spat in a foreign tongue, the real-time translation coming to Kane almost instantly. It sounded like French.

  Kane shoved his free hand against the man’s jaw, pressing his hand across his opponent’s mouth. “Keep quiet and I’ll let you live,” he snarled, hoping the man knew enough English to follow his gist.

  The man struggled beneath Kane, trying to bring the rifle into play. It was a poor weapon for such close combat, its 16-inch barrel too long and too unwieldy for close quarters. Kane fixed his grip on it and yanked hard, whipping it out of his opponent’s hand. He slung it to the side behind him, just far enough out of the man’s reach that he couldn’t grab it.

  “Quiet,” Kane warned the man, checking around for possible attackers. No one was approaching—the group of soldiers Kane had spotted was close to the edge of the fort now, where the walls had tumbled away.

  Kane looked back at the man beneath him, watching his eyes. They were hazel and they seemed normal enough, a little wide in panic maybe but otherwise normal. The man struggled, and Kane pressed his hand harder against his mouth in an effort to hold his head still.

  Kane brought his right hand around, clenched it and extended just his index finger. He waved the index finger before the man’s eyes, running it swiftly to the left, then to the right across the man’s field of vision. The eyes did not follow Kane’s finger—not proof positive, but enough to make Kane suspect that Grant’s weren’t the only soldiers who had lost their sight.

  “Can you see?” Kane snapped, using his Commtact’s translation mode to convert the words into stuttering French.

  The man’s eyes remained wide and he refused to answer Kane’s question.

  “You want me to kill you right here?” Kane snarled at the young soldier. “Answer the damn question. Can you see? Are you blind?”

  “I can see,” the man replied in French with an edge to his voice that Kane noticed even if the translation program of the Commtact failed to pick up on it. “I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.”

  Chapter 7

  “Blind men fighting a war,” Kane scoffed. “What part of that even makes sense?”

  The battle had moved on. Now Kane, still standing over the soldier he had disarmed some minutes earlier, had been joined by Brigid—still tinkering with the interphaser as she tried to piece its internal mechanism back together—Mariah and Grant. Grant had brought the remaining gunner with him, held in his strong grip in such a way that he was forced to walk pigeon-toed as he was partly shoved and partly dragged across the stone-strewn battlefield.

  “It doesn’t,” Grant confirmed, screwing up his face.

  “Maybe it does,” Brigid said from where she sat in the shade with the ruined interphaser spread before her. “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask about their blindness, but concern ourselves instead with what they do see, or think they’re seeing.”

  The others looked at her, bemused. Brigid had always been “the smart one” of the CAT Alpha field team, and sometimes her leaps of logic took a little bit of explaining before everyone caught up on the same page.

  “You said that fish-face here said something about seeing the face of god,” Brigid reminded Kane as she worked a screw back in place on the interphaser with her thumbnail. It slipped. The chassis was cracked above and below its resting place where a bullet had struck.

  “Yeah,” Kane acknowledged, “but I figure that’s—y’know—metaphorical. Religious zealot hokum.”

  Grant nodded. “We’ve see a lot of religious zealots in our time.”

  “And a lot of hokum,” Brigid accepted. “But what if what he said was meant literally? That he’s really seeing the face of god. Or, at least, something he thinks is a god.” She looked up at Kane and the others for approval. “You follow?”

  Mariah Falk nodded. “But which god?” she asked. Though a geologist rather than a field agent, even she had met her share of beings who considered themselves gods during her time with Cerberus. One such being, the monstrous Ullikummis, had compelled her to commit fiery suicide, and she had only been stopped when one of her colleagues had shot her in the knee, preventing her from throwing herself into a crematorium oven.

  Brigid smiled grimly. “That, Mariah, is a very insightful question.”

  “Insights can wait till we’re somewhere secure,” Kane reminded everyone, his eyes fixed on the distant battle still under way just past the borders of the ruined fort. “Baptiste, have you got anywhere with getting the interphaser running?”

  “I’ve made progress,” Brigid told him, “but it’s not responding to my commands yet. I need—”

  “Sure,” Kane said with a wave of his hand, cutting her off. “Then let’s keep moving forward, locate the quake source we came here to check, and try to stay out of trouble.”

  Grant laughed at that. “Staying out of trouble? You get bumped on the head or something, buddy?”

  “I said try,” Kane clarified as he removed the ammo clip from his captive’s AK-47 and secreted it in a pocket, along with the other ammunition he had found on the man. “No one’s expecting the impossible.”

  * * *

  “HE SAID THAT he saw the face of god before everything,” Kane recalled as the four Cerberus warriors trekked away from the tu
mbledown fort, away from the ongoing skirmish between the mysterious factions of blind men.

  They were following the path laid out by the crack in the earth, tracking along it as it widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed, searching for the source. Right now, the gap was still five feet across, and it was deep enough that you could not see down to its floor.

  “He told me it lit every step he took,” Kane continued, “showing him the path of salvation. Like I say, normal religious fanaticism.”

  “But if he meant it literally,” Brigid reasoned, “then here is a man who is seeing an entirely different view of reality. The way he described it, as lighting his path, it might be like neon arrows showing him where to move and what to do. I’m speculating, of course, but we’ve both seen different views on reality, Kane. You know that.”

  He did. Kane had been drawn into a war with the Annunaki, which had seen him tap into their holistic view of the universe. He had fought in the bordering dimensions of string theory, which his brain had interpreted in the wildest ways, trying to provide input he could comprehend. It had barely worked; only Kane’s innate practicality had kept him grounded during—and after—the experience.

  Brigid, too, had touched on different ways to view this fragile thing we call reality. She had been mindwiped by the Annunaki prince Ullikummis, and had her thinking rewired into the Annunaki way of seeing the world for a short period of time. She had become a different person then, just to process the new perspective she had been given on the world, and had taken the name of Brigid Haight. That new comprehension had allowed her to shift time itself, stepping outside of its confines long enough to undo the birth of a goddess. It had been traumatic, and Brigid loathed thinking back to those days, had done all she could to mentally distance herself from that dark other her.

  “Men fighting wars in a reality that only they can see,” Kane mused. “That’s...not an easy thing to process.”

  “I agree,” Brigid said. “Reality is a lot more fragile than most of us realize.” As she spoke, her mind went back to another occasion, when CAT Alpha had stumbled upon an ancient device designed to bring about a new genesis. Kane had died during that mission, truly died, but Brigid had stepped inside the machine and reworked things, forcing reality to reknit. In doing so, she had brought Kane back from the dead, though she had never told him.

  Mariah was walking beside Grant a few paces behind Brigid and Kane, struggling a little to keep up the pace that they were setting. They were soldiers while she was primarily a desk worker—gunfights and traipsing across battlefields were significantly outside Mariah’s comfort zone.

  “There’s a lot of trekking around in what you guys do, huh?” she said, doing her best to ignore the feeling of damp sweat in her hair.

  “Seems that way sometimes,” Grant agreed. Despite his recent exertion in curtailing the tripod cannon’s assault while wearing a long duster made of Kevlar, he seemed to be barely breaking a sweat. The shadow suit he wore beneath his clothes was regulating his body temperature, keeping him cool in spite of the fierce sunshine.

  “So, what’s the formula you guys use in determining whether to use the interphaser or the Mantas to travel somewhere?” Mariah asked.

  Grant looked at her and smiled. “No formula,” he said. “If there’s a parallax point or an old mat-trans unit, then we use that, unless we figure we might need to switch locations and stay on the move—in which case, we bring the Mantas out of the hangar.” The Mantas he referred to were superfast aircraft of alien design, ones which he, Kane and a few other members of Cerberus were adept in piloting.

  Ahead of them, the bleak landscape stretched on and on, parched dirt dotted with stones like the debris from a mine, just a few leafless bushes here and there, rooted to the ground like the skeletal nests of birds. The terrain rose gradually, the crack in the ground widening and narrowing uncertainly but never closing to less than a four-foot gap.

  The Cerberus team followed the line drawn by the crack in the earth, making their way up the gentle slope. The slope was made up of loose stones of all sizes and shapes, and as they went farther they found it became harder to keep one’s balance on the loose ground. Mariah especially needed help to keep moving forward, and Grant put an arm behind her back to prevent her from slipping. Brigid had put away the interphaser by this point, replacing it in its padded carry case, which could be strapped to her back. The unit still wasn’t operational; the bullet had evidently sheared through something important.

  As they climbed higher, some of the loose rocks were dropping into the jagged rent that they were following. Once one started to fall, the rocks cascaded like a waterfall. For a frightening moment, Mariah slipped and fell toward the brink where those rocks had disappeared. Grant grabbed her in an instant, held her tightly by the arm as she dropped to one knee and continued to slide toward the rent in the earth.

  “Hang on,” Grant told her with all the authority of the Magistrate he had once been.

  “I’m—” Mariah began, breathlessly. “Can’t...” Her kneeling leg slipped out from under her as a landslide of stones began to disappear into the four-foot-wide opening of the chasm.

  Grant tensed his muscles, spreading his legs wider to anchor himself in place. Kane and Brigid hurried back to join him, themselves slipping dangerously on the relentless stream of rocks that were now cascading into the pit.

  Grant began to slip, his feet sliding along with the loose stones as Mariah’s weight threatened to drag them both into the chasm. Mariah herself was thrashing about, trying to keep from sliding into the darkness, her feet so close to the edge.

  “Stop struggling,” Kane advised as he scrambled across the moving river of stones, struggling to get purchase. “Baptiste, hold on to me!”

  “Hold on to you?” Brigid asked, confused.

  “Yeah, I’m going to try to grab Mariah,” Kane said, reaching forward.

  Brigid swiveled behind Kane, placing her arms around his midriff and locking her hands together.

  Kane reached his hand out for Mariah, speaking through gritted teeth as he grabbed her flailing left arm. “Grant, you okay back there, bud?”

  Grant was on his backside, still holding on to Mariah’s right arm as he struggled to stay in place. His grip had slipped down her sweat-slicked forearm, however, and it was now cinched painfully around her wrist. Mariah felt as though her hand was being wrenched off.

  “Grant?” Kane pressed.

  “Just grab her, Kane,” Grant told him. “Don’t worry about me.”

  With Brigid providing counterbalance, Kane leaned in and reached his other arm around Mariah’s shoulders, still clinging to her left arm with his right hand. He pulled her to him in what seemed almost a consoling hug, drawing her face toward his left shoulder and chest. Mariah flailed, still fighting the stream of loose shale that threatened to throw her into the pit, and then she had an arm around Kane. Grant let go, anchoring himself in place as the stream of rocks beneath him rushed onward like an avalanche, accompanied by a susurration of noise as they disappeared into the chasm. In a moment he had stopped moving, though the rocks continued to drop.

  “No one move,” Kane instructed. “Everyone just stay still, let the rocks settle.”

  Brigid clutched Kane around his waist while Mariah clung on to him like a drowning woman clinging to debris from a shipwreck.

  “You’re okay,” Kane told her, gently. “You’re not going to fall.”

  Around them, the rocks settled finally as the last few fell into the darkness. The ground, such as it was, felt stable again.

  Brigid let go of Kane and he let go of Mariah, while Grant pushed himself cautiously back to a standing position beside them.

  “Now, let’s just proceed with caution, okay?” Kane said. “No sudden moves.”

  Following his own advice, Kane took wary steps up the slope, te
sting the ground with his toe before he proceeded, guiding the group in a path that took them a little farther away from the dangerous chasm they were tracking.

  The slope continued to rise, taking the group forty or fifty feet above the tallest part of the distant fort where they had materialized. Throughout the climb, they saw no one else, though the sounds of gunfire continued to echo from the distance where two armies—one made up of blind men—fought their lunatic war.

  The Cerberus group reached the summit of the gentle slope unexpectedly. Unexpected, that is, because they had not foreseen that there would be an almost sheer drop on the other side. From above, it looked like a sinkhole, a perfectly circular maw in the earth, its sides so steep that they were almost vertical. A few scaffolds were dotted here and there with ladders leading down into the hole itself. There were figures wandering among the scaffolding, and they could see two simple, boxy buildings at different levels where the people here might take shelter. The nearest ladder down was sixty feet away, a quarter turn around the circular hole.

  “What the hell?” Grant muttered, gazing over the edge.

  Kane looked at his partners, his eyebrows raised. “Watch that first step, huh?” he said.

  “It’s a mine,” Mariah stated, looking at the formations all around them. They now saw that the slope of rock that they had climbed was waste that had been removed from the ground to create the mine shaft. The shaft itself was a perfectly vertical drop into the ground.

  “Not natural, then?” Kane checked.

  “No, not natural.”

  Brigid turned to Mariah, quizzical. “Could this be the cause of the quake?”

  Mariah shrugged. “Possibly,” she admitted. “I guess it depends on what they’re using to bore into the earth.”

  Kane eyed the figures on the scaffold, trying to detect a pattern that might indicate whether they were sentries. “Guess we’re going to have to take a look-see at what’s inside,” Kane told the others, reloading his Sin Eater.

  “I think I miss my workstation,” Mariah muttered as she followed the Cerberus field team around the lip of the mine.