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Kane opened fire with his Sin-Eater again

“Lakesh, we’ve got trouble. I just hit Durga with an implosion grenade, and all it did was knock the wind out of him.”

The Sin-Eater’s heavy slugs tore into sections of bared flesh, but no blood trickled from the scale-shorn meat. Durga lifted his head, golden eyes filled with fury and disdain for the human who simply would not die.

“Keep fighting, mammal,” Durga growled. “The longer you survive, the more time you give your friends to make peace with their gods.”

“What makes you think you’ll survive killing me?” Kane called back.

Durga laughed, rising to rest on the coiled trunk of his serpentine lower half. He hadn’t recovered fully yet, but scales began to form over the flesh that had been scoured by the implosion grenade. “You amuse me, Kane. I’ll name my first extermination camp after you.”

Serpent’s Tooth
Outlanders^®
James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks to Doug Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.

A Countryman’s son by accident trod upon a Serpent’s tail, which turned and bit him so that he died. The father in a rage got his axe, and pursuing the Serpent, cut off part of its tail. So the Serpent in revenge began stinging several of the Farmer’s cattle and caused him severe loss. Well, the Farmer thought it best to make it up with the Serpent, and brought food and honey to the mouth of its lair, and said to it: “Let’s forget and forgive; perhaps you were right to punish my son, and take vengeance on my cattle, but surely I was right in trying to revenge him; now that we are both satisfied why should not we be friends again?”

“No, no,” said the Serpent; “take away your gifts; you can never forget the death of your son, nor I the loss of my tail.”

INJURIES MAY BE FORGIVEN, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

—Æsop’s Fable

The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 1

A parrot squawked and its multicolored wings blurred as it exploded from its perch in the lowest branches of the tree. The bird’s shriek was close enough to the cry of a woman being murdered that the expedition froze in startled anticipation of violence.

Austin Fargo’s hand dropped to the massive revolver on his hip, his other tightened around the handle of the machete frozen in midstroke at a green branch barring his progress. It took several minutes before the explorers had recovered enough composure to breathe steadily.

Had this been sooner on their journey, Fargo would have relaxed his tightly wound nerves with a laugh, but the hard rubber checkering on his handgun dug into the pads of his fingers and his throat was so tight that he almost choked. Two days earlier, when the expedition set out, Fargo was looking for a gold mine of technology, the materials that the Millennial Consortium would need to wrest control from such adversaries as the rebels of Cerberus redoubt or the Tigers of Heaven. Stockpiles of weapons in the Kashmir region would give the consortium an edge in creating their new empire. Which was why Austin Fargo had twenty trained soldiers and twice that many technicians on hand. The hundred bearers packing their supplies were paralyzed with worry, and only Fargo’s display of stern discipline kept the lot of them from deserting the human train as it crawled through the uncharted forest.

It was one thing to be cut in two by the snarl of a Calico machine pistol, and even the slash of a machete brought a quick demise. The coiled loops of leather that hung on Fargo’s hip, on the other hand, peeled flesh from the body in inch-wide strips, one lash at a time. The Indian deserter whom Fargo had singled out was a giant, six and a half feet with a barrel chest, and long arms and legs as solid as tree limbs. Fargo took his time, peeling the big Indian’s skin off with the crack of tightly woven leather. After an hour and a half, Fargo’s arm started to grow tired. The Indian hung by his wrists, bared ribs and shoulder blades gleaming where the whip had flayed skin and muscle away.

The deserter had been reduced to a gibbering mass, a once powerful man stripped of his strength by the cruelty of Fargo’s whip. Eyeless sockets cried tears that flowed in crimson rivers down his cheeks. The bearer begged for death, for an end to the pain. Finally, well into the third hour of his exhibition, Fargo wound the whip back up, hanging it on the metal hook in his belt. Somewhere in those last few minutes of lashing leather, blood loss or shock had stilled the big man’s heart.

Thoughts of rebellion were crushed. Fargo would make them pay, and the display of violence was foremost in the thoughts of the Indians laden with the expedition’s supplies.

That should have been enough to keep everyone well behaved, but then the ghost sightings began. Humanoid shadows flitted in the darkness just beyond the path that the expedition carved in the forest. The soldiers fired on the ghostly forms, but no blood was spilled by the chattering weapons. Fargo hated to call the stalkers ghosts, but the only other whispered explanation came from the primitives who had borne the supplies on this arduous trek. They called the shadows Nagah, legendary snake creatures that lived beneath the surface of the world, interacting with men only when they chose to. Fargo was well acquainted with the idea of reptilian humans from his adventures in England to interactions with the Annunaki overlords and their scaled Nephilim slaves. The snake men, with their hinged and poisonous fangs, were feared by the natives of postskydark India.

The Kashmir region had for centuries been a contested territory, warred over by the nations of India and Pakistan for strategic purposes and for the vast agricultural benefits it had provided. While Fargo saw evidence of ancient combines, overgrown and now conquered by weeds and new tree growth, he couldn’t imagine this land as farmland. It was too empty, too abandoned. On the other side of the forest, the remnants of Pakistan’s survivors held their ground. Likewise the Indians stayed on their side of the edge of the forest. No one even went to the tree line to harvest logs to create more housing in the snarled shantytown. To leave such resources untouched nagged at Fargo.

A shadowy figure, manlike in size and shape, stepped onto the trail ahead of him. At first, the millennialist thought it was a figment of his overactive imagination. His fingers wrapped around the black rubber grips of his .45-caliber revolver as he realized it was more than just a phantom. Gleaming yellow eyes, partially obscured by a silhouetted hood, flashed as the figure’s nod acknowledged Fargo’s attention.

“Have you not listened to the men you have enslaved?” came a harsh, sibilant challenge.

“I come to you representing the Millennial Consortium. I am here to make contact with the keepers of a trove reported in this area. We are a peaceful group, seeking to negotiate a deal with you,” Fargo answered. His thumb rested on the teardrop-shaped hammer of the big hogleg in its holster, ready for a fast draw. The challenger’s golden-yellow eyes flicked down to his hand.

“You’re well armed for a mission of peace,” the hissing silhouette noted.

“I’d be a fool to come unarmed into a nation filled with tribal feuds and bandits,” Fargo stated. “And in the south, there are violent cultists.”

“They call themselves the Nagas,” the shadowy sentinel added. “They believe themselves to be like unto us.”

The jungle grew silent around them, as quiet as a tomb as birds and insects became too frightened to chirp. The shadowed, amber-eyed stranger was not alone. Odds were that the expedition was surrounded. Fargo glanced back to the Calico-toting millennialist enforcers and nodded.

Safety catches clicked off with the chatter of a sudden metallic rainstorm.

“This can either be peaceful or painful.” Fargo’s words punctuated the chatter of twenty machine pistols going from rest to wakeful readiness. “Your choice, stranger.”

“Please, we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot,” the tall figure said. He stepped into a shaft of sunlight piercing down from the forest canopy. “My name is Durga, prince of the true-blooded Nagah.”

Fargo watched Durga flip back the hood of his long, formless black cloak. Rising from his shoulders like a trapezoidal Central American pyramid, Durga’s head and slender neck were blended into a flat, powerful sheet of muscle that instantly solidified the truth of the legendary cobra men of India. Save for the folds of the cloak that clung to broad, powerful shoulders, Durga was naked to the waist, his chest laden with large segmented plates in a paler hue than the scales that adorned his arms, face and ribs. The belly armor was the color of age-stained bone, while the smaller, finer scales glimmered metallic blue and green, shimmering almost like silk. The cobra man’s yellow eyes remained locked on Fargo, and his thin, scaled lips were turned up at the corners in bemusement.

“Brothers, step out and introduce yourselves. Slowly and politely,” Durga added as an afterthought.

Perhaps as many as thirty similarly cloaked figures strode from the shadows of the trees.

Like their self-proclaimed true-blooded prince, they were lean, slender figures. All were hairless, though not all of them had the perfect sheens of snakelike armor that their leader sported. On the Nagah men who weren’t completely reptilian, bared patches of human flesh seemed like swollen, discolored rashes rather than normal sunburned flesh. Scales twinkled like dew-wet grass amid the untransformed flesh.

Fargo thought back to the semireptilian guardsmen in England, men genetically augmented to be more than human. The Englishmen so transformed looked pathetic in comparison to the powerful, graceful, cobra-hooded Nagah that Fargo looked upon now. The explorer wondered if the treatments of Lord Strongbow were clumsily copied from whatever procedure created the snake men he now encountered.

“Make your weapons friendly, lads,” Fargo called out. “Muzzles down but triggers hot.”

Fargo nodded to Durga. “Just a precaution.”

Durga shrugged. His lean, powerful shoulders flexed, making his segmented chest plates ripple over tight pectoral and abdominal muscles. “Understandable. We are strangers. Indeed, we are obscenely alien to your mammal eyes.”

Fargo shook his head. “Not completely. I have met others who have transformed themselves, but not as well as you have.”

Durga nodded. “Ah, yes. The Englanders. Strongbow had sent scouts to seek a refinement of his crude process. We greeted them as brothers, but sadly, our lost relatives once more were lost. It is no wonder that our appearance does not panic you.”

Fargo glanced back to his millennialist allies. He could hear the hushed whispers of Indians speaking among themselves in Hindi. “No. Not completely.”

Durga’s thin lips pursed in frustration. “Such a shame.”

Fargo read the disappointment in the cobra man’s words. Where the rest of his party displayed confusion, the millennial explorer’s muscles tensed in anticipation of hell unleashed.

Durga took one step forward, but by then, Fargo had sidestepped, barely avoiding the slashing rake of unhinging fangs in the Nagah’s mouth. A spray of fluid issued from Durga’s venom sacks as they squeezed themselves out, disgorging their deadly payloads.

Fargo cracked his whip across Durga’s flat face, a blow that would have lacerated any normal man down to the gleaming, bloody white bone beneath. It was a fast-draw slash that had split faces open from forehead to chin in the past. Instead, one yellow eye was clamped shut and Durga stumbled off balance.

The whip crack preceded the discharge of a half-dozen Calicos, but dozens of other men screamed in agony as venom seared into tear ducts and mucus membranes, burning like acid. Fargo whirled and bolted into the foliage, realizing that the poison-blinded guards and bearers had been neutralized.

The explorer trusted only two things to get him out of harm’s way—his booted feet. They stomped through leaves, breaking saplings and low branches, putting distance between himself and the savage hisses behind him. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the sinewy Nagah lunging at blinded, agonized humans, curved knives and distended jaws slashing into pink and brown flesh alike. Dagger and fang carved through human skin, cutting agonized wails short.

“Him!” Durga bellowed. “Get that miserable ape and drag him before me!”

Fargo noticed one millennialist unaffected by the gushing clouds of vision-destroying venom. His machine pistol hammered loudly, bullets chopping one snake man who staggered but still continued to advance. Mere handgun rounds deflected off the tough chest plate armor of the Nagah, though hits to the finer scales of the arms and thighs betrayed bloody swathes where copper-jacketed lead tore the weaker reptilian armor. Fargo left the fool to stand his ground, charging toward the frontier. The millennial gunman stopped firing, and the guard’s fate was broadcast by a strangled death cry as hinged jaws and folding fangs stretched into a face-piercing lethal bite.

Other guns chattered sporadically, but were quickly overwhelmed by the coordinated assaults of the Nagah’s ambush force.

Behind him, Fargo could hear the snap of branches and rustle of leaves. That could only mean that others were rushing through the thickets after him. As no bullets speared through the foliage, it had to be the knife-and fang-armed Nagah. The cobra-hooded warriors were in hot pursuit of the fleeing archaeologist.

Move, he commanded himself, legs pumping. Vaulting over roots, rocks and ruts with the ease of a man who’d run for his life across six continents, Fargo avoided tripping and stumbling. The Nagah hunters behind him snagged their feet on vines or stepped into open space where they expected solid ground. The snake men’s yellow eyes had been focused on Fargo, not the ground before them. For a moment, the archaeologist was elated that, despite their venom and tough scales, they were as fallible and clumsy as any human. The crack of a rifle, accompanied by the eruption of a tree trunk, informed Fargo that the Nagah were perfectly willing to make use of modern tools to slay their foes.

Fargo changed course and allowed gravity to drag him down a muddy hillside. He rocketed to the bottom of the slope and sprang into a dead run through a copse of trees. Rifles chattered behind him, but Fargo kept up his frantic pace. Soon the single shots changed to fully automatic fire as machine guns were added to the mix.

Fargo plowed on, ricochets pinging and whining all around him. Trunks thumped as they caught the storm of bullets meant for him. He remembered his mental map, visualizing a steep cliff bordering off into a turgid river. It had forced the expedition to change its course by five miles, slowing the trek to a tedious crawl. He remembered that the height of the drop-off was around forty feet.

Boots filled with sloshing mud, wet pant legs clinging to his calves and thighs, Fargo knew his pace would rapidly slow off from constriction and lack of sure footing. One misstep would be the end of Fargo’s explorations of the Kashmir region. While he would consider himself likely to catch an instantly fatal bullet, the ideal outcome was a splash in the river, its powerful current carrying him south and away from the serpentine assassins on his tail.

On foot, the Nagah warriors would not be able to keep up and shoot at Fargo at the same time, he suspected. The trees thinned out and the ground began to slope. Fargo’s mud-caked boots turned into wet slicks, his footing dissolving into an arm-windmilling effort at balance as gravity whipped him into a wild slide. The rattle and crack of bullets around him faded as the slope pulled him below the arc of fire laid out by the cobra men. The skid downhill came to a sudden end as Forgo rocketed out into the air over the roiling waters beneath.

There was an odd, queasy moment of weightlessness as Fargo sailed to the waters. The surface of the river shimmered like ribbons of living, writhing glass. The world had gone silent around him, an envelope of calm providing him with a respite from the frantic race for his life. The snake men had stopped firing, it seemed, and in his peripheral vision, the millennialist trespasser knew why. Just before he knifed into the river, he had caught sight of a helicopter hanging over the tree line like a bloated, mechanical bee.

Fargo plunged under the surface of the roiling river, momentum pushing him nearly to the bottom as the water exerted its braking force on him. The current shoved hard, toppling him into a spin that he kicked out of, arms and legs dragging him toward the silty bottom.

With a twist, he looked up through the surface of the river, seeing the warped image of the sky and ledge hanging over him. Fargo knew that he had barely a minute before his lungs forced him to surface, but cold dread of that helicopter stilled his urge to swim upward.

Seconds ticked on as his lungs burned, wanting to return to their normal schedule of inhalation and exhalation. The helicopter’s black shape poked out of the overhang of the ledge. Its fattened fish profile blotted out the sun while rotor wash created a flat dish in the water, creating a lens that the Nagah could see through.

Fargo had no trouble seeing the huge bulk as it hovered, and given the clarity of the river, he was easily visible to the airborne pursuers. A cobra man leaned out of the door and fired his automatic rifle, bullets knifing toward the millennialist. One plucked at his forearm, but Fargo bit his tongue to resist the urge to cry out, expelling needed air from his lungs in the process. The current dragged him along, a cloud of dark blood smearing behind him in a corkscrew.

Had it not been for the refraction of the crystal-clear water, the Nagah sniper would have riddled Fargo’s chest. The explorer kept his cool, playing dead. His lungs burned as the enemy helicopter ascended and joined two more aircraft. Together they whirled in the sky for a moment before they broke north, back past the forbidden frontier that Fargo had dared to penetrate.

In three strong kicks, he broke the surface, sucking in sweet, life-giving oxygen. His arm ached badly. The bullet had glanced off his ulna, one of the strongest bones in the human body. Fortunately, the imprecise hit didn’t have the power to cause more than a hairline fracture. Fargo knew it wasn’t broken because he could still move his fingers, albeit stiffly.

He dragged himself to shore, crawling between two dense bushes to shield himself from discovery in case the humanoid snake warriors saw fit to return.

With his good hand and his teeth, he tore a scarf from around his neck and fashioned a compress and bandage for his gunshot wound, sealing the puckered injury to control further blood loss and stave off infection. He had a strip left over from the bandages, but it wouldn’t support his arm properly. He slipped his belt out of the loops in his pants and cinched the wounded limb to his torso, immobilizing it above the elbow. He wound the last strip of scarf around his forearm and the belt, multiple loops providing sufficient stability to the injured limb.

It would be dark soon, and he needed to get to a warm shelter. A fire was out of the question, not this close to the enemies who had killed more than a hundred trespassers with quick, ruthless efficiency.

No, Fargo needed something just a little better, perhaps the tall, intertwined roots of a tree or a nice cave, provided there were no native, actual serpents present within. The irony of dying from a real cobra bite after escaping a hybrid of man and snake would shame Fargo to no end.

The Millennial Consortium wouldn’t be pleased at the loss of the expedition, especially now that it had been proved that there were operating aircraft in the stockpiles possessed by the Nagah. When the millennialists were disappointed, they tended to shoot the messenger. Already, though, the redoubt raider had a plan to minimize the blame and to appease the consortium.

For the plan to work, Fargo had to get to the Bitterroot Mountains.

The outlanders Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste could succeed where a consortium expeditionary force had failed. If they didn’t, they would still inflict horrendous losses upon the snake men, giving a new millennial strike team sufficient advantage to finish the job. Should Kane and company prevail, then a force meant to crush an army of serpent warriors would be more than enough to deal with the Cerberus interlopers.

It was the kind of win-win scenario that would allow the survivor Fargo a chance to retain his position and support within the consortium.

The journey of a thousand miles, however, needed to start with one step. Leaning on a branch for support, Fargo hauled himself achingly to his feet. With each stride, the explorer put distance between himself and the forbidden frontier. It was a temporary separation, though.

Austin Fargo would return, bringing vengeance to the snakes who had struck at him.

Chapter 2

The return to Cobaltville was meant to be a mission of mercy, but as Kane crouched in the shadows, watching the coldhearts holding Brigid Baptiste and Grant at gunpoint, he was reminded that strength and mercy were two qualities that had to go hand in hand.

“Come on out!” the leader of the bandits snarled. “All we want are the meds, not trouble from you!”

Kane wrenched his fighting knife from the ribs of the raider who’d tried to ambush him. It had taken considerable effort to free the blade from where it was lodged in the breastbone. Still, Kane was not a man to leave a perfectly good weapon behind, especially when he was outnumbered.

He would need information about the coldhearts, which meant that he would have to carefully get in touch with his companions over the built-in Commtact communicator implanted behind his ear and attached to the mastoid bone. “What happened?”

From his vantage point, Kane could see the massive Grant, clad in a tank top and cargo pants, clasping his hands behind his bald mahoghany-colored head as he was surrounded by raiders. Thick, powerful arms glistened like dark bronze in the sun. The big ex-Magistrate’s lips didn’t move, but Kane could see his jaw flexing as he subvocalized, loud enough for only the implanted transceiver to hear. “The fuckers popped out of the woodwork while I was moving crates. With my hands full, they swarmed us.”

“I take the blame,” Brigid’s voice added. Kane’s glance shot to the striking former archivist. Where he had a pang of concern for Grant, his fellow Magistrate for years and the closest thing to a brother that the lone warrior had, the sight of the flame-haired woman held at gunpoint was worth a full wince. “I should have waited until you returned from your errand, Kane.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Kane replied. He scanned the pair from his vantage point. Four bandits now surrounded Grant. It was always a risky proposition to bring medical supplies into the shantytown known as the Tartarus Pits, a sprawl that had grown in the shadow of the tower that housed the subjects of the hybrid barons. The medicine used by the healers at the Cobaltville clinic was almost as valuable as a cache of firearms in the lawless Outlands. Kane, Brigid and Grant were making the delivery, utilizing wheelbarrows to ferry the supplies to the healers who worked in the area.

Colin Phillips, the leader of the ragtag group of physicians and their assistants, had warned Kane and the others about the presence of the band of raiders. They were led by Lombard, a man familiar to Kane. The head bandit was a former Magistrate who operated almost exclusively in the Tartarus slums. The allure of easy money and quick satisfaction had corrupted Lombard, something the other Magistrates had done their best to ignore. Lombard disappeared after killing a fellow Mag, knowing his life was now worthless if he encountered any of the grim group that he’d betrayed.

With the barons now long gone from Cobaltville, most of the Magistrates had also moved on, working as sec men for caravans or small settlements while the more corrupt went into business for themselves. Lombard saw Cobaltville as easy pickings.

Not that the ex-Mag was alone. Lombard had assembled easily a dozen men, according to Kane’s observations, and he wasn’t certain that there weren’t more.

The bandit leader glared toward Grant and Brigid, alert enough to make out the low guttural subvocalizations as they communicated with Kane over their Commtacts. Lombard reached for the flame-haired archivist’s chin, but Brigid jerked it away.

“Communicators?” Lombard asked as he gave her jaw a squeeze.

Brigid grabbed his wrist and pried the grubby, grasping paw away from her face. Around them, Phillips and his fellow healers remained still. They knew the drill, having endured previous raids, but Kane could see the frustration in their faces. The cold-blooded marauders had taken Brigid’s and Grant’s weapons at gunpoint, enticed by the new meat before them.

“So, where is your friend?” Lombard inquired. His thumb glided over the silvery plate of the Commtact implant behind Brigid’s ear.

“It’s a radio, not a radar unit, dimwit,” Brigid retorted. “Besides, do you think that a Magistrate like Kane would give away his position to you?”

The predatory marauders were bold when it came to unarmed victims, but the presence of a Magistrate, especially the legendary Kane, would make the formerly cocky thugs pause. Kane flexed his forearm muscles, the sensitive actuators in his holster flicking his sleek, folding machine pistol into his hand. The full-auto Sin Eater would be necessary in the eventuality of a furious firefight, but Kane held his fire. The Cerberus warriors didn’t want stray bullets to harm any of the healers whose only crime was endangering themselves for the sake of the huddled masses in the remnants of Cobaltville. Besides, Kane had learned long ago that mind games and intimidation could reduce the need for violence or control the reactions of his quarry.

The coldheart grimaced. “Fucking Mags? Kane nonetheless?”

Lombard glared at the massive Grant, a towering figure in his own right. The olive-green tank top left little doubt about the awesome power contained in his muscular arms and shoulders. It had been years since Lombard had last seen Grant. To assist with his disguise as just another guy the size of a collossal statue, Grant was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and had traded his forearm-holstered Sin Eater for a belt-holstered Heckler & Koch MP-5 K. In a nearby wheelbarrow Grant had hidden both a Sin Eater and a compact Copperhead assault rifle, ready to be reached through a precut opening.

“Then who the fuck are you?” Lombard asked.

“I’m just a delivery boy,” Grant said. “Does she look like she hauls around crates full of this shit?”

Lombard glanced over to the slender but fit young woman. Brigid didn’t look like a delicate flower thanks to years of adventuring across the globe. Though it was obvious that she was in very good shape, Kane knew that there was a mentality among his fellow Magistrates to dismiss women as incapable because of their softer bodies. At first even he had trouble adapting to Brigid’s competence and capability as a fellow adventurer.

Kane also quietly admitted to himself the stomach-churning anger at Lombard’s sneering familiarity with Brigid Baptiste. Though she could take care of herself, having proved her inner strength across several years and every continent on the planet, Kane still possessed an instinctual protectiveness for the archivist.

Brigid shrunk from the renegade Magistrate, and Lombard chuckled.

“Still, it’s only one Mag bastard,” Lombard said aloud, as if to calm his companions.

“Well, I guess if they measure those guys by you…” Grant said, shrugging.

“Ruben, if this overmuscled cock head talks again, shoot him with his own gun,” Lombard snapped.

Grant looked down at the bandit Lombard had spoken to. Ruben, a young, tattooed punk wearing a leather vest, was a foot shorter than Grant. He gripped the machine pistol with whitened knuckles.

“Don’t shoot yourself with that thing, kid,” the big Cerberus warrior whispered to him.

Even without being close enough to see Grant’s face, Kane could tell that his partner was smiling. The mind games against the coldhearts were now in full effect.

Ruben glared at Grant. “I’m not simple, you damned big freak.”

“You could have fooled me,” Grant replied. “You keep pointing that muzzle at your friends, too, and your finger’s locked on that trigger. If it weren’t for the fact that you haven’t deactivated the safety on the gun, you’d have shot your partners twenty times over.”

Kane could see Ruben’s nearly comical double take as he glanced down at the machine pistol. The Cerberus rebel fought to restrain a snort of amused derision at the reaction. His partner’s mockery had struck another blow against the raider’s confidence.

Kane dragged the corpse of his ambusher into a ditch and submerged the body beneath two feet of shantytown sewage. He had relieved the dead man of his walkie-talkie, as well as the twin single-action revolvers that he’d worn. The radio would give Kane even more intelligence against the bandits. The handguns were typical of what the robbers had, a blend of pump shotguns, bolt-action rifles and old revolvers, which explained Ruben’s confusion over Grant’s more complicated HK. In the two centuries since skydark, technology was no longer uniformly equal, and maintenance-intensive devices such as automatic weapons were nowhere near as common as manually cycled firearms and tough old solid-state circuitry, which could be reconstructed from simple wire. The bandit radio was one such cobbled piece of technology, presumably a simple circuit board, some magnets and wire wrapped in a hard little case. Kane figured that if he ran out of ammunition, he could use the boxy walkie-talkie to smash open an enemy gunman’s skull and not even cause harm to the electronics within.

Kane thumbed back the hammer on one revolver, then cut loose with a terrified death cry. The revolver boomed, a cordite cloud filling the alley.

“Banyon! Banyon! Report!” the coldheart’s voice cut over the walkie-talkie and the Commtact in stereo. “Second team! On Banyon’s position now!”

Grant chuckled. “Good luck catching Kane.”

Lombard whirled toward Ruben. “I thought that I told you to shoot that loudmouth!”

“I can’t get the gun working,” Ruben complained.

“You really think that shooting me is going to affect a hard bastard like him?” Grant asked.

“You’re annoying me, shithead,” Lombard grunted. “I’ve heard of Kane, and he’s nothing special.”

“No. He’s only the most dangerous man ever to patrol the Tartarus Pits,” Brigid countered. “Who else would I hire to protect us?”

Lombard grimaced. “Listen, bitch, Kane might have been hot shit in the old days, but I know all of his—”

“Lombard!” a bandit interrupted, shouting into his radio to the left of Kane’s hiding place. “We found a puddle of blood.”

“Banyon’s body?” Lombard asked.

“Nothing,” came the reply.

Sandwiched between two makeshift huts, Kane observed the search party that had stumbled upon the crimson slick that was the last evidence of Banyon’s existence. Six marauders milled around, their eyes wide and fearful. Counting the five hanging around Lombard, watching Brigid, Grant and the doctors, that made a full dozen coldhearts, with a few more most likely still hanging back on perimeter security.

Sure enough, Kane’s observation skills proved correct as a radio message crackled over his captured unit. “We found another wheelbarrow full of supplies. No sign of any Mags, though.”

“Son of a bitch!” Lombard cursed. “Leave the meds for now. Find that fucking Mag before he turns everything to shit!”

“Where’d your bravado go?” Kane taunted softly into his radio, loud enough to transmit but not enough to betray his roost to the hunting bandits. From his vantage point, Kane could see the blood drain from Lombard’s face.

“Show yourself, Kane! Or we start killing your people! And we’ll make it slow!” Lombard snapped.

Kane decided to up the ante. “Go ahead. I already have the first half of my pay. I’m sure I could find a good buyer for the dread bandit Lombard’s severed head, too.”

Lombard dropped his radio as if it were a venomous snake, dancing back in fright. Nothing like striking a cruel, casual predator with the knowledge that he was nowhere near the top of the food chain. Where Lombard had set himself as a brutal ruler of the Tartarus Pits, the bandit now lived with the knowledge that an even bigger bastard was poised to snatch him and carve him apart for blood money.

“Pick up your damned comm, coward,” Kane growled.

The rumble of Kane’s threat attracted the attention of one of the brighter members of the marauders’ hunting party. The shotgun-toting thug stalked cautiously along the alley between rows of huts, looking for a clear view of Lombard. Kane heard the man’s approach. If it hadn’t been for Kane’s well-honed senses, the thief would have been stealthy. Instead, every footfall and kicked bit of debris locked Kane on to the approaching gunman like drumbeats.

Lombard tentatively reached for the radio. “Okay.”

Kane reversed the revolver in his grasp and whipped the handle violently into the bridge of the curious bandit’s nose. Steel and wood crushed bone, pounding splinters of skull into the marauder’s brain for a sudden, decisive kill. Swiftly Kane snatched the still-standing corpse and hauled it between the two huts, jamming it down into the clutter on the walkway floor. He keyed the radio to Lombard. “You want the medicine, then you don’t need to bully those sheep. Walk away and I won’t have to waste any ammunition killing you fused-out pricks.”

Lombard glanced at Grant, who let his powerful shoulders sag in a display of false helplessness. Brigid also put on the airs of cornered, helpless prey. It was a good act, and if Kane hadn’t witnessed their efficacy against countless enemies, he would have been convinced. The two companions were figuring out the angles necessary to take down the bandits with maximum efficiency and the least harm to the Cobaltville healers.

“Where’s Russ?” a searching bandit asked. “Fireblasted punk…Russ!”

Lombard turned his attention toward the source of the shout. In that quick glance, the marauder leader glimpsed the silhouette of the wolf-lean Kane. “There! There he is!”

The five raiders around Lombard spun in unison, ignoring their “harmless” hostages as they raised their guns to burn down Kane. The warrior in the shadows lunged out of his hiding spot, twin revolvers cocked in unison.

“That’s right, idiots,” Kane whispered to himself. “Follow the bouncing bogeyman.”

GRANT EXPLODED INTO ACTION first, his long, brawny right arm circling Ruben’s throat. With a hard yank, the bandit’s feet were dragged into the air, whipping across the head of a second coldheart with stunning force. Ruben gurgled in surprise, watching his partner drop to the ground after the wrenching impact of booted feet on his skull. Grant’s left hand clawed the MP-5 K loose from stunned fingers, thumb stabbing the safety down to full-auto. As a third gunman fired his bolt-action rifle at the spot where Kane’s silhouette had been only moments earlier, Grant pumped a half-dozen bullets between the killer’s shoulder blades.

Brigid was only a half heartbeat slower than Grant. She pulled a box cutter from a nearby table and thumbed the razor edge out of its blunt-sheath nose. It was a quick, practiced movement. She whipped it in a savage backhand across the cheek and forehead of a fourth hostage-taker. The sharp blade carved skin and muscle down to the bone, the angled point raking through his eye socket. Milky fluid gushed from the gunman’s ruined orb, and he shrieked in horror, dropping his weapons to free his hands for the task of holding his face together. She scooped up the half-blinded man’s pistol in a lightning-fast movement.

Lombard and the remaining bandit were torn between the options of shooting Grant, Kane or Brigid. Grant rendered the dilemma moot with a withering hail of machine-pistol fire that stitched Lombard’s shotgunner from sternum to forehead. Lombard took a fourth option and charged down an alley. Brigid hammered off a single round at the rogue Mag, but the bullet was just a second too slow to catch the fleeing coward.

KANE STEPPED INTO THE VIEW of his pursuers, both revolvers held at eye level, their triggers snapping down twin hammers in unison. One shot missed Kane’s initial target, the buffoon who’d cried out for the clever but dead Russ. It was no matter, as Kane’s other revolver shot punched through the loudmouth’s face. The slug gouged out his brain, and the back of his skull erupted in gore. The brutal death of their comrade stunned the remaining four gunmen. That bought Kane the time to cock and fire the revolvers in his hands twice more. One of the marauders folded over in agony, a bullet burning in his bowels. A second gunman whirled with a shattered shoulder joint, collapsing as he clutched his ruined limb.

Kane sidestepped, taking cover behind the corner of a hut, but the remaining two bandits were in no mood to fight back. They were fleeing for their lives. Just to make certain, Kane put two more quick bullets into the dirt at their heels. The rebuffed predators only picked up speed, not even weaving to avoid being shot in the back. Terror, not tactics, ruled the minds of the pair. Any thoughts of returning fire had been abandoned with the elimination of their friends.

The man with the bullet in his belly lay in an ever growing pool of bright arterial blood. It had been only a few seconds since the initial hit, meaning that Kane had severed the bandit’s aorta. Unable to be staunched by tourniquet or direct pressure compress, the marauder was doomed the moment the bullet tore through the central trunk of blood flow in his body. The other raider, his shoulder reduced to stringy, bloody pulp, fumbled with his rifle, flipping it across the alley toward Kane.

“I give up! Don’t shoot!” the wounded man cried out. “I’m unarmed.”

“You think I’m blind?” Kane growled, stalking closer to the surrendering bandit. “Pull the pistol from your belt.”

The raider looked down at the handle poking from under the folds of his shirt. His left hand slapped at the gun, clumsily dislodging it while avoiding any semblance of grasping it firmly. The predatory instincts that had made the wounded robber into a thief had been quenched with his crippling injury. Kane stooped and helped the wounded gunman in his surrender.

“How large was Lombard’s gang?” Kane inquired.

“There were twenty of us,” the crippled prisoner answered.

Kane nodded, doing the math. “Baptiste, Grant, we’ve got about ten more raiders out there,” he subvocalized over the Commtact.

“We’ve got two prisoners here that confirm those numbers,” Grant responded.

“No medics were harmed, except for the initial rough-housing by the bandits,” Brigid added. Over the Commtact, Kane could hear Brigid check the action of her 9 mm pistol. “Do you think Lombard will regroup and try to finish the job?”

“Lombard lost half of his crew trying to get these meds,” Kane answered. “I don’t know. Black market medicine is worth a hell of a lot, but money won’t bring you back from the dead.”

Kane escorted his prisoner to the intersection, seeing Brigid tend to Phillips. The medic had a cut on his forehead, and blood stained his white coat pink from the seeping wound. On closer examination, though, Kane was relieved to see that Phillips’s eyes were focused.

“No concussion, just a mess,” Brigid confirmed.

“Good luck for me at least,” Phillips grunted.

“Us, too,” Kane answered. “I wouldn’t want to lose any allies here in Cobaltville. You’re worth more than any five gunslingers we could recruit.”

“Especially for rebuilding Cobaltville,” Brigid added.

Phillips winced. “I appreciate the sentiment, guys. Just wish these bastards hadn’t cracked my head open.”

Phillips slowly got up and started dealing with the bleeding laceration of the man Brigid had carved with the box cutter. Kane had packed the shoulder of his prisoner with a kerchief and tied it down with a belt, so he wouldn’t need immediate attention. Ruben was rubbing his throat, looking weak and sickly after being swung around as a human weapon.

An orderly looked at Phillips, then shook his head. “These guys attacked us. They hurt you.”

“And they’re not a threat anymore,” Phillips snarled. “Damn it, even Kane, a Magistrate, tended to his prisoner’s injury. Maybe you feel like you can pick and choose when to apply mercy, but that’s not the oath I took.”

Kane looked at the angered medic. “Besides, I don’t think the danger’s over yet.”

In the distance, the rumble of diesel engines sounded.

Lombard had gotten back to his war wags, and from the sounds of things, they were returning to deal with Kane and his allies.