Hell's Maw (10 page)

Hanging on to the cab one-handed, Kane commanded his Sin Eater back into his right hand—its holster now visible where he had shed his jacket. The Sin Eater struck Kane's palm an instant later, even as a 19 mm slug from the MP9 skittered against the metal rung he was hanging on to, clipping against his skin so that his grip eased for a fraction of a second. Then Kane was falling, dropping backward from his handhold on the rear of the boxy cab, even as his right index finger squeezed down the trigger of the Sin Eater and sent retaliatory fire at his attacker. Kane's bullets struck the stocky man square in the center of his chest, and the man went stumbling back under their impact, screaming blue murder.

But Kane was falling now, plummeting down toward the ground between the two scaffold-like legs.

* * *

D
OMI AND
B
RIGID
stopped to watch as Kane fell. It was a high fall, thirty feet in total, and Kane was falling backward, down between those towering legs.

“Oh, Kane,” Brigid muttered, while a rain of 15 mm bullets peppered the ground all around her.

* * *

K
ANE TWISTED IN
the air as he fell, reaching for the nearest scaffold-like leg as he dropped the first fifteen feet. Above him, the stocky thug who had shot at him had dropped back inside the depending cab, his chest blooming with a red stain where Kane's bullets had ended his life, the unlatched metal door swinging back and forth.

Kane's left hand glanced against one scaffold-like leg but he was falling too fast—grabbing it was like trying to grab a bullet from the air. It was fifteen feet to the ground and he was falling fast now, the ground rushing up to meet him.

Kane shifted his body as best as he could, sending the Sin Eater back to its sheath and holding his arms and legs loosely out before him. He had to judge this just right, let his limbs absorb the impact without breaking anything.
Sounds easy,
Kane told himself sourly as the ground rushed toward him.

And then—
bang!
He struck the ground with more force than he could have prepared for, rolled automatically as his arms took the brunt of the impact, his breath forced out of his chest in a painful “woof!”

Above him, the cruel walking vehicle cycled around its heat blast again. It fired a moment later, sending another wide beam of red-hot heat at the smoldering wag where Brigid and her wounded driver were still crouched, setting fire to the retreating gunner.

* * *

B
RIGID WATCHED AS
the beam blazed toward her, unable to get out of its path. The beam slapped against the side of
the wag that she had used as cover, pushing forward to sear the rear windows of the cab. But as she watched, the iris-like aperture at the front of the boxy walker started billowing thick black smoke where it was overheating, and a moment later the whole thing went up in a fireball, heat ray and cabin bursting into flame. Kane had done it—she only hoped he had managed to save himself.

* * *

A
BOARD THE WALKING MACHINE
, the woman called Umbra saw a sudden rush of flames writhe across the cracked windshield. The walking machine had been her late husband's dream. He had designed it to pick off unarmed transports traveling these forgotten roads, figuring out the nuances of clambering over the uneven ground in the most efficient way possible. He had died before the vehicle had been completed, so Umbra had named it Errol after him. The heat ray could be recharged thirty times before it needed to be restoked, and today was the first day in four years that she had ever come close to reaching that limit. Now Errol Number 2 was about to die on her, this one consumed by fire generated by its own heat ray.

Umbra, a stocky woman in her midforties, whose hair had a tendency toward “disarray” as a style, turned to Errol's driver—her own twenty-four-year-old son, albeit by a different coupling—and told him the bad news. “Time to evacuate, Junior.”

Junior—dyed-red hair, gap-toothed smile, shirt and shorts—looked at his mother with furrowed brow as the flames played across the broken windshield. “You sure you don't wanna go down with the ship, Ma?”

“Going down with ships is for oldie time ship's captains and putzes,” she chastised him as she reached for the metal handle of the side door, which had been swinging to and fro after Carlos had come stumbling back inside under the influence of the man's perfectly placed shot.
As she touched it, the door bit back, intense heat searing her hand and causing her to squeal in pain. The next thing she knew, Umbra was tumbling out the open door, plummeting to the ground thirty feet below, flames rushing up to meet her.

* * *

S
PRAWLED ON THE GROUND
, Kane watched as the towering death machine stumbled unsteadily, its boxy cab consumed with fire. Suddenly, a figure came dropping through the flames, on fire and falling like a dead weight. The figure struck the ground a moment later, a line of black smoke following it like the tail of a comet, scream echoing across the field.

“Damn,” Kane spat, pushing himself up on aching limbs. He had been responsible for the inferno, but he couldn't just let its crew member die like that—not without at least trying to help. But even as he reached the screaming human torch that had once been Umbra, he knew already that he was too late.

* * *

A
FTER THAT IT
was just a mop-up operation.

The walker's driver had survived, but he was badly burned and had been shaken up to the point that he could hardly string a sentence together. The walker itself was nothing more than a burned-out shell.

Domi, Brigid and Kane had all survived, although they each sported a few scrapes and bruises from the adventure, and Kane's left shoulder complained a little when he tried to raise his arm above his head, causing him to wince.

The other members of the road crew didn't fare as well. The gunner who had worked with Brigid had been caught by the heat ray and was now nothing more than hanging, ash-black flesh on charred bones, and Kane's gunner had died instantly when his vehicle had split apart. The others had some cuts, but they had mostly survived intact.

Two-thirds of the cargo that the wags had been carrying had survived, although the wags were shot, meaning that Ohio Blue would need to source more transportation before the mercy op could be completed. “Grain keeps, my sweet prince,” she told Kane when he spoke to her via radio comm. “At least we know the next journey through this pass will be less fraught. More important, when might I see you to thank you in person? My gratitude is overflowing, you know.”

Kane passed on that offer. Blue had always been flirtatious with him, and her affection for him, whether or not it was reciprocated, gave Kane—and Cerberus—a useful contact in the darker underworld that existed outside the villes. For now he would keep Ohio at a safe distance, without actively discouraging her. “No point breaking a pretty woman's heart,” he told Brigid as they gathered themselves up for the trip back home.

Brigid gave a bark of sarcastic laughter in response. “You couldn't break a woman's heart if you tried,” she told him.

Kane had the good sense to look wounded rather than to argue. He could not face another fight today, not even a verbal one.

Ohio would be sending another vehicle shortly to salvage what she could and pick up her surviving team. While they waited, the trio of Cerberus warriors looked across the fields where the altercation had played out. Smoke billowed from the carcass of the walker vehicle, and trailed here and there from the wrecked wags and tracts of soil that had been caught up in the battle.

“Guess it's time to go home,” Domi said as they retrieved their belongings, which included an operational interphaser, from the wrecked wags.

“Guess so,” Kane agreed while Brigid calculated where the closest parallax point was through which they
could teleport themselves home. “Baptiste, what's the news?”

Brigid peered up from her calculations and flashed him a tired smile. “It's a ten-mile walk to the nearest parallax point,” she said. “And when I say ten, I'm trying to make it sound closer than it really is.”

Kane sighed with resignation. “So,” he said cheerily as the group began the long trek to their jump point, “does anyone want to guess how much more fun Grant's having than us on his vacation?”

The Pretors obtained a register of who had been at the hotel at the time of the incident, but the records were inexact. There was a register for who had booked in, of course, but no definitive record of how many people had come to the dance. City fire regulations required only that a cap be placed on the number of people in a room, not that each was logged in or out.

Thus, it was assumed—
wrongly
—that the people found hanging at the scene had been the only ones who had died. However, there had been in fact three more deaths: a young couple honeymooning in the city, and an older woman who had returned here for the first time in a decade and had happened upon the “dance sinister” by chance when she had been searching for the hotel's restaurant.

All three had died, but their bodies were shuttled elsewhere, to let blood. Blood was needed. The why would come later.

Grant had been left alone in the Pretor interview room where he was provided with water and allowed an escorted rest break before the lights were dimmed. The room was warm but not uncomfortably so, so Grant removed his jacket while he was uncuffed to use the restroom, and he hitched it over his shoulders for the rest of the night while he waited for Corcel to come back to him. He had no doubt that his story would check out, so he put that to the back of his mind and thought instead about the hanging bodies and the strange people he had seen in the alleyway behind the hotel.

It was impossible to guess at what he and Shizuka had stumbled upon. He had none of the facts, and reading between the lines he suspected that there was a lot that the local Magistrates—or Pretors—were not telling him right now. One thing seemed clear—they had seen this kind of activity before, presumably recently, and had eyewitnesses to at least one of the possible perpetrators, a man whose description matched Grant's to some degree. That could be one of the men he had seen, the bare-chested brutes who had thrown the lethal razor discs.

By three in the morning, Grant was pretty certain that he was not being observed. He was still sitting at the table, his head resting on his outstretched arm, eyes closed as if in sleep. He was alone in the room, but he could see there were cameras watching the interview room at all times.
He made an educated guess that those cameras were recording and monitoring the cell twenty-four hours a day and that someone was watching that feed—along with a number of others. But three in the morning was that time when even the most diligent of Mags gets bored and their attention starts to wander. Grant figured he could take a chance and maybe get a message out to Cerberus. Sitting there, Grant engaged his hidden Commtact and subvocalized a question.

“Cerberus, this is Grant,” he hissed. “Have run into some trouble. Please respond.”

There was a momentary pause before a Cerberus operator called Farrell answered. “Receiving you loud and clear,” Farrell said. “What's the trouble?”

Grant gave a brief outline of what had occurred, of how he and Shizuka had walked into what appeared to be a mass murder scene and how he had subsequently been arrested for the crime.

“You need backup sent?” Farrell asked over the Commtact link, his words vibrating through Grant's skull casing.

“Not at this stage,” Grant decided. “Is Kane there?” Kane had been Grant's partner in the Magistrates for years, before the two of them had become field agents for the Cerberus organization. They were a solid partnership, along with the third member of their trio—Brigid Baptiste—and were often considered inseparable by their fellow operatives.

“Kane is on-site,” Farrell confirmed. “Just got back and probably sleeping off his last mission. You want me to hail him?”

“No, I can do that,” Grant said thoughtfully. “Just speak to him when he's awake and tell him to stay ready. We may need him on this side of the pond.”

“Roger that,” Farrell confirmed. “Anything else?”

“Get Brigid and Lakesh and replay them the
description I gave to you of the strangers I chased,” Grant said. “Let me know if anything there rings a bell.”

“Will do,” Farrell agreed before signing off.

In the aftermath of the conversation, Grant tried his best to relax his mind and get some much-needed sleep.

* * *

M
ORNING CAME, AND
with it the news that Cáscara had tracked down the restaurant owner as he opened up his café for the day. Emiliana Cáscara showed him her Pretor badge and explained whom she was looking for information about. The ruddy-cheeked owner nodded.

“Si, Si,”
he said as he poured her a black coffee from the machine. “Two Americans, didn't drink any wine. Typical Americans—ate fast, somewhere to rush off to.”

Cáscara nodded thoughtfully as she stirred cream into her coffee. “Can you confirm what time they were here, and when they left?” she asked.

The café owner pondered this for a moment, then snapped his fingers in recollection. “They were here less than two hours and they arrived late,” he explained. “Their table was booked for eight and the pretty lady was very apologetic about their lateness, but I assured her it did not matter to me and to enjoy themselves. They would have left a little before ten. This door,” he added, pointing to the main doors of the café.

“Ten,” Cáscara said thoughtfully. “That puts them… Yes, that works.”

The café owner looked at her and smiled. “You want to stay for breakfast, Pretor?”

“Want to—yes,” Cáscara told him as she stood up. “Going to—no.”