Serpent's Tooth

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.

Chapter 3

At the sight of the stranger in the forest, Domi slipped her satchel full of scrounged books from her shoulder, hiding it in a corner between the raised roots of an ancient tree. The small but cord-muscled albino woman didn’t want to lose her latest haul from the library in the event of a chase, or if the stranger had allies who would capture her. Armed with only her dagger and a pistol crossbow for catching game while in the wild, the youngest, most feral member of the Cerberus redoubt focused her ruby-red eyes intently on the newcomer, sizing him up.

The security of Cerberus had been breached many times in the scant years that Domi had called the redoubt her home. As commander of Cerberus Away Team Beta, however, she’d proved to be more than merely a wayward refugee in the ancient facility. She’d battled reptilian invaders with spacecraft and gods armed with technology that could have been mistaken for mythical weaponry, all in the name of protecting her lover, Lakesh, and the ever growing population of the predark bastion of technology, knowledge and security.

The man wending his way toward the Bitterroot Mountain stronghold had, no doubt, picked this arduous route to avoid Sky Dog and the Lakota Indians who were staunch allies of Cerberus. Domi had crossed this particular terrain with the nimbleness of a mountain goat, spring-steel leg muscles bounding her along the rocky, uneven path with preternatural ease. She noticed that the man was no stranger to hard journeying, but exhaustion weighed on his powerful limbs. Domi regretted leaving behind the Commtact implant at the redoubt as she observed the lone traveler. She had gotten into the habit of isolating herself on these solitary expeditions to achieve a measure of solace, as Lakesh described it. Such trips were meant to escape the confines of the base, abandoning both people and modern technology. The act of shedding the Commtact was the ultimate statement of that mental journey. The machine-woven fibers in her tank top and shorts and the polymer materials of her crossbow were the only evidence of her connection to the Cerberus redoubt and the technology it represented.

Domi’s thumb snicked off the safety on her crossbow. The bolt was now ready to be released with only the touch of her finger on the trigger. The broad-headed tip was an aggressive assembly of four vaned blades designed to inflict enormous trauma as it pierced the organs of animals as large and as fierce as bears. Domi avoided contact with the carnivores who hunted in this region, leaving them a wide berth. However, a shaft capable of killing a bear would be more than sufficient to take any human invader. She wondered at the stranger’s affiliation and his motives for approaching the redoubt. From his focus and his direction, there was no way that he could miss the base. Nothing else was nearby for hundreds of miles.

The man was armed with a large revolver stuffed into a leather scabbard that rode on his thigh. A coiled bullwhip hung from a hook on his opposite hip. His machete sheath was empty, for now, as he was using it to hack through thick briars that halted his path. Hardly the arsenal of an invader, even with the two-foot blade in his grasp. Cerberus guards would easily overpower him in the event of a hostile confrontation, but Domi’s curiosity had been piqued, and she strove to get in closer.