Grailstone Gambit

Chapter 3

What you fear the most rarely comes to pass.

That refrain cycled through Brigid Baptiste’s mind on a continuous loop as she stood with her flank against the crumbling brick wall. Her heart pumped and her throat constricted as the screams of the crowd reached her.

Brigid forced herself to calm down, knowing that Domi and Kane were supremely competent in almost any situation. Still, she felt almost relieved something was finally happening. For the past two hours she had been loitering along a narrow side street, separated by the ruins of two buildings from the main activity of the city.

Brigid had visited Manhattan in the twentieth century, during an abortive time-travel mission a few years earlier. What she saw now was scarcely recognizable as the remains of one of the one largest metropolises in the world. Centuries of human history had been reduced to hundreds of square miles of smoldering rubble within a handful of minutes. Some of the towers still stood, shattered and cracked, yet with an indomitable appearance.

A tall woman with a fair complexion, Brigid’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual.

She wore black denim slacks, loose enough in the leg for free movement, the cuffs tucked into thick-soled combat boots. A camouflage jacket covered her torso. Her waist-length mane of red-gold hair was now a short, tightly bound sunset-colored club hanging at her nape. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist, and a Copperhead subgun hung from a harness beneath her coat.

Under two feet long, the Copperhead had a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, the extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for one-handed use.

Optical image intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts.

On the other side of the crumbling heaps of masonry and massive chunks of fallen concrete Brigid listened to the chorus of voices chanting Shuma’s name, and she shivered despite the jacket. Carefully she touched the dabs of soot applied to her face to conceal her peaches-and-cream complexion. She knew she would pass a quick visual inspection by a Farer or a Roamer, but she also knew she didn’t smell as rank as they did.

However, her devotion to the masquerade had its limits. As it was, her nostrils recoiled at the potpourri of odors wafting on the wind. To Brigid, whose nose had sampled aromas from all over the world, the place simply stank.

A gangling Roamer youth with a scraggly brown beard made decorative by the addition of little silver beads twisted into the whiskers slid along the brick wall and stood beside her. She ignored him until he reached out and rubbed her right shoulder.

“I been watchin’ you, big sister,” he said in a husky whisper. “You got me swoll up.”

“Fade, little brother,” Brigid retorted in a flint-hard voice, employing the Roamer pattern of speech.

“You be a beaut babe,” he said, rolling his shoulders beneath the tattered, patchwork coat that hung nearly to his ankles.

“Skid off, kid off.”

“And them eyes, they’s like emeralds. You be for me, big sister.”

Brigid stared directly into his face, catching the acidic whiff of home-brewed whiskey that hung around him like a cloud. “I told you to skid off, little brother. I want to see Shuma.”

The Roamer’s lips stretched back over cavity-speckled teeth, and his right hand drifted from her shoulder to breast. “We got the time.”

“Your hand,” Brigid said.

The youth blinked. “What about it?”

“Take it off or I’ll break it off.”

The Roamer’s grin widened. “Tough, you be tough. I likes my big sisters tough. Helps get me more swoll.”

“Dandy,” Brigid replied. “Then this should help, too.”

She jacked her knee up into his groin. The youth grunted, doubling over at the waist, his hands leaving Brigid’s body to clutch convulsively at his crotch. Swiftly, Brigid gripped him by his greasy hair and pulled him hard against the wall, the crown of his head striking the brick with a sound like two concrete blocks colliding.

As he slumped bonelessly to the ground, Brigid stepped casually away from him. No one else in the vicinity noticed the scene. As far as the Roamer definition of violence was concerned, the little struggle barely qualified as a harsh word.

The rumbling of a big engine grew louder and Brigid crossed the side street, peering past broken walls and over the heads of the assembled Farers and Roamers. The long yellow vehicle rolled into sight. The crowd chanted “Shuma! Shuma!” like a religious mantra.

“On his way,” Brigid whispered over the Commtact.

“Acknowledged,” came Kane’s quick response.

Homemade drums beat a discordant fanfare. Brigid joined the other Roamers thronging toward the parade. Despite herself she felt the tingling warmth of excitement at the prospect of danger spread through her.

For a very long time, she was ashamed of that anticipation, blaming her association with Kane for contaminating her. Now she had accepted the realization that his own desire for thrill-seeking hadn’t infected her, but only forced her to accept an aspect of her personality she had always been aware of but refused to consciously acknowledge.

In her years as a baronial archivist, Brigid Baptiste had prided herself on her intellect and logical turn of mind. She was a scholar first and foremost. Back then, the very suggestion she would have been engaged in such work would have made her laugh. Now she was a veteran warrior, and at some point during her time with Cerberus she realized the moments of danger no longer terrified her but brought a sharper sense of being alive.

Her life in Cobaltville’s Historical Division had not been a full life, but only an artifice, a puppet show she had performed so the string-pullers wouldn’t become displeased and direct their grim attention toward her. Of course, eventually they had. Over the past few years, she had left her tracks in the most distant and alien of climes and breasted very deep, very dangerous waters.

The crowd clogging the alley was too densely packed to move among easily, so rather than force her way through the shouting mob, Brigid chose to run parallel to the parade route. As she picked her way through the rubble, she absently noted the ripple pattern spreading across the asphalt. Weeds sprouted from splits in the surface. She had seen the rippling effect many times, mainly in the Outlands. It was a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by nuclear-bomb shock waves.

When Brigid came to a knitted mass of wreckage that appeared to be several buildings that had toppled atop one another, she paused to study it, looking for a way through it or over it rather than around.

A series of concrete slabs formed something of a crude staircase over the top of the rubble and she began clambering up them, leaping from one to the other until she pulled herself to the summit. Breathing hard, she looked toward the street, just as the yellow Cadillac rolled behind a pile of bricks. She saw the broad dark bulk of Shuma standing in the rear of the vehicle, waving to the shrilling mob. She caught only a glimpse of the big black man spread-eagled across the hood and her heart jumped in her chest.

Quickly she opened the Commtact channel to Kane. “Shuma himself just passed. Big as life and about five times as ugly.”

“Did you see Grant?” he demanded.

“Yes.” Her tone quavered ever so slightly. “It’s going to be close, I’m afraid.”

“It’s what I figured. Stand by.”

Brigid knew Kane was in contact with the other members of the away team, Brady and Edwards, so she did not linger. Swiftly, she bounded down the face of the rubble heap. The footing wasn’t treacherous, but it wasn’t particularly trustworthy, either. Twice, stones turned beneath her feet and she nearly pitched headlong to the ground below.

When she reached the base, she started running, hoping to get ahead of the Cadillac and provide support for Brady, Edwards and Domi, although she knew all three people were experienced. Domi, of course, had lived most of her young life in the wild places, far from the cushioned tyranny of the baronies. She had spent years cautiously treading the ragged edge of death, and her inner fiber had been forged into an iron strength and an implacable stoicism.

Edwards and Brady were, like Kane and Grant, former Magistrates and were now trusted members of the Cerberus away teams. Lakesh had initially opposed the formation of the three Cerberus away teams, made uncomfortable by the concept of the redoubt’s own version the Magistrate Divisions, ironically composed of former Magistrates. However, as the scope of their operations broadened, the personnel situation at the installation also changed.

Kane, Grant, Brigid and Domi couldn’t always undertake the majority of the ops and therefore shoulder the lion’s share of the risks. Over the past year and a half, Kane and Grant had set up Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta. CAT Delta was semipermanently stationed at Redoubt Yankee on Thunder Isle, rotating duty shifts with the New Edo’s Tigers of Heaven, and CAT Beta was charged with the security of the redoubt and surrounding territory.

A number of former Magistrates, weary of fighting for one transitory ruling faction or another that tried to fill the power vacuum in the villes, responded to the outreach efforts of Cerberus.

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past five years, Brigid Baptiste, Domi, Kane and Grant had tramped through jungles and ruined cities, over mountains and across deserts. They had found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Due in part to her eidetic memory, Brigid spoke a dozen languages and could get along in a score of dialects, but knowing the native tongues of many different cultures and lands was only a small part of her work. Aside from her command of languages, Brigid had made history and geopolitics abiding interests in a world that was changing rapidly.

She and all the personnel of Cerberus, more than half a world away atop a mountain peak in Montana, had devoted themselves to changing the nuke-blasted planet into something better. At least that was her earnest hope. To turn hope into reality meant respecting the often alien behavior patterns influenced by a vast number of ancient religions, legends, myths and taboos.

Brigid ran through a scattering of machine parts, her Copperhead bumping in an irritating rhythm against her left hip. Most of the rusted hunks of metal were so corroded as to be unidentifiable. Brigid continued along the front a row of roofless brownstones. As she crossed an overgrown strip of gravel alley between a pair of buildings, she heard the roar of the crowd as Shuma’s vehicle hove into view.

Vaulting over a web of rusty iron pipes, Brigid sprinted to a low brick wall and knelt down behind it, catching her breath. Urgency vibrated along all the sensitive nerve endings of her body. Kane’s voice suddenly entered her head.

“Baptiste, can you see Domi?”

From a jacket pocket Brigid withdrew a small monocular and pressed it against her right eye. She swept the crowd swarming on both sides of the street, but she saw no one standing out to attract her attention.

“No…why?”

“She was cut off.”

“Cut off how?”

“How the hell do I know?” Kane snapped impatiently. “That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Do you think something has happened to her?” Brigid demanded, still peering through the lens of the monocular.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Brigid focused on the dark bulk of Shuma’s figure. “That’s no answer. Until we know what’s happened to her, we should scrub the mission.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Dammit, Kane—”

“Stand by,” Kane broke in tersely. “Everybody, just stand by.”

Brigid’s gaze was drawn to the strange figure hunched down beside Shuma. He looked shrunken, almost dwarfish. A chill finger of dread stroked the base of her spine as she studied his features. His eyes were his most disquieting characteristic. They were wide, unblinking and not completely human. Tiny red pinpricks blazed brightly within the pupils. The eyes fixed on her, and she felt a sudden pressure in her temples.

Heart trip-hammering in her breast, feeling out of breath, Brigid jerked the monocular down and said into the Commtact, “We need to pull back and regroup before—”

“Shut up, Baptiste,” Kane snapped.

Her face filmed with cold sweat, Brigid did not reply. The gunshot was sharp and sudden. Even at such a distance, she saw the spark flaring from the Cadillac’s polished grillwork. A plume of steam jetted from the radiator, obscuring Grant from sight.

Pushing herself up from behind the wall, she reached for her TP-9. A sudden explosion behind the Cadillac sent a cloud of black smoke billowing into the air. The sound boomed back and forth, and Brigid felt the concussion like the slap of a languid hand across her face.

She recognized the characteristic crump of an M-33 fragmentation grenade, and she had no doubt at all who had thrown it.

Chapter 4

When Grant awoke that dawn, he tasted blood in his mouth. The blood had dried on his lips and he licked them, his tongue exploring the lacerations on the tender lining of his cheeks. He came out of unconsciousness like an exhausted swimmer pulling himself ashore, and he became aware of a consuming pain in his head and a burning thirst. He remained motionless, listening to the sound of voices speaking in low tones below him. The abraded flesh around his left eye felt swollen and raw.

Grant lay in a wooden cage, a bit under five feet tall at its apex, six feet in diameter. The slats were lashed together by rawhide thongs and many turns of a heavy-gauge wire. The entry gate was sealed by a length of rust-flecked chain and an old-fashioned iron padlock.

All things considered, the cage hanging from the cross-brace framework ten feet above the ground wasn’t the worst place he had ever been imprisoned, but it was a long way from the most comfortable.

The events that had led up to his imprisonment were only a set of disjointed images, fragmented memories of ugly dreams.

Grant remembered how he and Domi sauntered into the camp of the Survivalist Outland Brigade without being challenged by sentries, mainly because none was posted. They hadn’t seen any pickets, nor did there appear to be a clear-cut perimeter of the camp. The place was a sprawling mess of people and slapdash structures.

Tar-paper shacks, lean-tos, huts and tents stood jumbled in Central Park, spread out like a spilled garbage can. Four huge fires sputtered redly in the drizzle. In front of some of the dwellings stood poles of stripped saplings with skulls mounted on top, not all of them animal.

The people they saw in the camp ranged from youths with wispy beards to sharp-eyed, hard-bitten warriors. The clothing styles were varied and eclectic—colorful wool serapes, wide-brimmed cowboy hats with snake-skin bands and scruffy fur caps.

Grant easily differentiated between the Roamers and the Farers—the Roamers were festooned with weaponry, bandoliers crisscrossed over their chests, with foot-long bowie knives and big, showy handguns at their hips.

The Farers dressed a bit more sedately, and their weapons of choice were utilitarian longblasters, bolt-action rifles and a few autocarbines.

But neither Roamer nor Farer gave Grant or Domi so much as a second glance, which, he realized in retrospect, should have aroused his suspicions. Despite being dressed in standard Farer wear—patched denim jeans and leather hip jacket over a khaki shirt—he still stood four inches over six feet and much of his coffee-brown face was cast into sinister shadow by the broad brim of an old felt fedora. Walking side by side with a petite albino girl barely five feet tall should have drawn some curious glances, even from the most jaundiced member of the SOB.

He had almost no memory of being buffeted on all sides by a surging mass of bodies that overwhelmed him with such swift efficiency he had no chance to draw his weapon. As he was borne to the ground under the weight of many men, he heard Domi blurt in wordless anger. He shouted for her to run, then a flurry of blows fell on him and hands ripped the big revolver from his shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

A soft, lisping voice said, “Move aside, let me see him. Move aside, let him up so I can see him.”

When the crushing weight obligingly left Grant’s body, he lunged upward—then he felt as if an immense fist slammed into the back of his head. The impact drove all light and consciousness from his eyes. For a long time, he saw nothing but black and heard only silence.

He regained his senses in piecemeal fashion when a cup of icy water dashed into his face roused him. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Agony tore his skull apart. He tasted the salt of his own blood in his mouth.

Then the pain ebbed, fading to a steady throb. Grant squinted around, trying to focus through a series of what seemed to be gauzy veils draped over his face. Finally, he realized he was surrounded by planes of pale gray smoke. He made a motion to touch his head, but he couldn’t move his arms. He sat tied to a heavy, wooden, straight-backed chair, arms and legs bound tightly by strips of rawhide. Glancing down at himself, he saw he wore only his T-shirt and jeans. Everything else, including his boots and socks, had been stripped from him.

The acrid fumes of the smoke seized his throat and dragged a cough from him. Lying on a far table were several long-stemmed clay pipes, the bowls discolored and smoldering. The place reeked of marijuana and overcooked meat, of stale and sweaty bodies.

The fact that he could even smell the stink of the room told him just how powerful the stench was. His nose had been broken three times in the past and always poorly reset. Unless an odor was extraordinarily fragrant or fearsomely repulsive, he couldn’t smell it; he was incapable of detecting subtle aromas unless they were literally right under his nose.

Grant coughed again, then cleared his throat.

“You may speak if you wish.”

The voice was a low, ghostly whisper, touched with a faint lisp. He remembered hearing the voice before, and he turned his head toward a shadowy figure looming on his right.

He felt a quiver of revulsion at the sight of Shuma and his enormous scaled belly bulging over his sweat pants. He glanced up into his face, expecting to see it twisted in a triumphant smirk. Instead, Shuma’s expression was vacant, his eyes hooded and distant as if they were focused on another scene entirely. His flaccid lips hung open, slick with saliva.

The voice spoke again and Shuma’s lips did not move. “Do you find your host revolting, Mr. Grant?”

Not responding to the question, Grant rumbled in his lionlike voice, “Who the hell are you?”

Shadows shifted behind Shuma’s bulk, and Grant caught a whistling, asthmatic wheeze. “I am the voice, the mind, the spirit behind the Survivalist Outland Brigade.”

Grant hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the floor. “Bullshit.”

The voice tittered, sounding somewhat like an out-of-breath owl. “Why are you so sure?”

Straining against the rawhide bindings, Grant tried to peer around Shuma. “Let me see you.”

“All in good time, Mr. Grant…all in good time.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, your spy—Wright was her name?—was most forthcoming about everyone and everything.”

Grant did not allow his sudden apprehension to show on his face or be heard in his voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

There was another breathy giggle. “Oh? What a pity…because I definitely know what she was talking about.”

The note of certainty, of complete confidence in the speaker’s voice sent a tingle of fear up Grant’s spine. He gusted out a weary sigh. “All right. But she wasn’t a spy.”

“She was here on an intelligence-gathering mission, correct?”

“More or less. We wanted to find out more about Shuma and this SOB of his.”

“Of his?” A mocking lilt touched the voice, but Grant detected an edge of anger there, as well.

“Who else?” He eyed Shuma surreptitiously, looking for a glimmer of intelligence in his eyes. They were covered by a dull sheen, the lids drooping.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

“Nothing,” came the dismissive response. “That is, nothing that’s isn’t wrong with any other addict of jolt and various other opiates.”

Grant knew that jolt was a combination of various hallucinogens and narcotics, like heroin. To sample it once was to virtually ensure addiction.

He hesitated, started to ask a question, then closed his mouth, shaking his head.

“You were about to ask how a jolt-brain could command his own bowels, much less an army.”

Grant nodded. “Something like that, yes.”

“I command Shuma and he commands the SOB.”

“Which brings me back to my first question—who the hell are you?”

“My name would mean nothing to you…but if you must call me something, you may call me Esau.”

Grant inhaled a deep breath, held it, then released it slowly. “What are you?”

“I believe you have already guessed.”

When Grant declined to respond, he heard a shuffle of movement and a small figure stepped out from behind Shuma. At first Grant thought it was a crippled child, leaning as it did on a pair of crutches. But when the figure lurched closer he knew with a rise of nausea he was vastly mistaken.

Esau stood a little more than four feet tall, his emaciated body lost in a baggy flannel shirt and pants several sizes too large for him. An old extension cord cinched the waistband tight. The frayed cuffs of the trousers dragged on the floor, but Grant couldn’t see any sign of feet.

Esau’s face was dominated by a thick shelf of bone bulging above his huge eyes. The forehead rose like a marble wall, angling upward to join with the flat crown of his skull. A mat of thin gray hair covered it.

Grant struggled to keep his expression neutral, to disguise the fear swelling within him.

Esau’s small mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “I revolt you more than Shuma, do I not?”

Grant didn’t respond for a few seconds, visually examining the blue-and-red mapwork of broken blood vessels spreading over Esau’s forehead. “Not exactly. I’ve come across your type a time or two.”

Esau’s smile widened in mock ingenuousness. “And what type is that, Mr. Grant?”

“Doomies,” he retorted matter-of-factly. “You’re a doomseer. I didn’t think there were many of you left.”

In the Outlands, people with enhanced psionic abilities were called doomseers or doomies, their mutant precognitive abilities feared and hated.

Most of the mutant strains spawned after the nuclear holocaust were extinct, either dying because of their twisted biologies, or hunted and exterminated during the early years of the unification program. Doomseers weren’t necessarily mutants, but norms with true telepathic abilities were rare in current times.

Extrasensory and precognitive perceptions were the most typical abilities possessed by mutants who appeared otherwise normal.

Esau uttered a scoffing, contemptuous laugh. “Hardly a doomseer. I can’t foretell the future any more accurately than you can.”

“Then what do you call yourself?”

Casting a sideways glance up at Shuma, Esau answered confidently, “A mastermind. I call myself a mastermind.”