Warlord Of The Pit

Chapter 3

After the first warhead exploded, Brigid Baptiste plunged into the crowded emporium of vice, figuring Captain Saragayn wouldn’t think to look for her among the prostitutes, gambling tables and cockfighting arenas.

Brigid found it difficult to believe that the huge palace of lust and greed was confined within the hulls of a ship. As far as she had been able to learn, the Juabal Hadiah pandered to all tastes, however mundane or perverted. Gambling, drugs, women or even children, she reflected grimly.

Brigid crossed a casino swiftly, trying not to appear intent on leaving. The various gambling stations were decorated with colorful bunting and a band played a variety of musical instruments, blaring forth with a cacophony at a volume she found painful.

From the ceiling hung mirror balls that reflected distorted bird’s-eye views of the blackjack, roulette, paikow and fan-tan tables. The beeps, burps and bells of slot machines added to the clangor.

Barely audible over the noise rose the murmur of a dozen languages, as varied as the clothing styles worn by the men and women clientele—white jackets, saris, Malay sarongs and bajus.

Brigid felt distinctly underdressed in her black whipcord pants with the cuffs tucked into thick-soled combat boots. She wore a gray T-shirt that accentuated her full-breasted, willowy figure. Her bare arms rippled with hard, toned muscle.

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. A mane of red-gold hair fell down her back in a long sunset-colored braid to the base of her spine. Her emerald eyes were narrowed behind the rectangular lenses of her wire-rimmed spectacles as she pushed through the crowd.

Brigid ignored a drink offered to her by a surprisingly buxom Asian woman in a topless outfit and circled a baccarat table. She didn’t think she was pursued by Saragayn’s security staff. She assumed—she hoped—they had other matters to occupy them. She just kept moving through the low-ceilinged gambling hall.

Her distinctly un-Asian features and coloring did not draw the attention of the patrons. Most of them were too engrossed in their own activities at the roulette wheel and blackjack tables to give her more than cursory glances. Still, she kept the TP-9 autopistol pressed against her right thigh as she walked.

Cages filled with colorfully plumed tropical birds hung on the walls and they screeched in agitation. They sensed the violence outside on the decks of the huge ship.

The smell of roasting meat drew her toward a small kitchen. Small, sweating men stripped to the waist labored over smoking grills. Cigarettes dangled from their lower lips, and the stench of marijuana mixed in with the odor of flame-seared fat.

Brigid swiftly moved through the kitchenette, barely avoiding being spattered by sizzling grease. She went through the door on the far side and found herself in a cool, dimly lit corridor. Soft red carpeting muffled her steps, and she paused to catch her breath.

Wincing, she flexed the fingers of her right hand, noting that they all moved despite the pain. She had punched Mr. Book in the face, but her knuckles seemed intact. She hoped the same thing could not be said for his jaw.

Reaching up behind her ear, Brigid activated the Commtact and opened the channel to Kane and Grant. She heard only the hiss and pop of static, and she guessed her partners were forced to retreat out of the reception range of the little comm unit. She tamped down the rise of fear, finding it hard to assemble her thoughts.

Kane had told her more than once there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. She still didn’t know what had happened to Kane and Grant, since the situation developed with startling rapidity, but she had taken advantage of it nevertheless.

Upon arriving in Pandakar early in the afternoon, she, Grant and Kane had spent only a short time learning the lay of the land before entering the island’s only settlement. Definitely taller than most of the people in the noisy, narrow, crowded streets, the Cerberus warriors let themselves be carried along by the press of bodies, the conical straw hats and the shuffling of feet. The people who looked at them directly did so with blank eyes. A hot wind blew between the wooden houses with their thatched roofs and long eaves that looked like the prows of canoes.

Overlooking the harbor was a vast tumble of reed huts and shanties built on docks. A maze of waterways crowded with canoes and sampans confused the eye but not the nose—the smell of fish overhung it like a cloud.

When Brigid asked locals about Captain Saragayn, the ordinarily friendly faces of the villagers became tight and hostile. Still, they were directed to the waterfront and a private pier leading to the immense treasure ship named the Juabal Hadiah.

At first sight, the vessel was impressive. Colored lights flared from the rigging of the huge craft, which was twice as broad in the beam and double the length of any ship docked at harborside. The ship had very high poops and overhanging stems, looking somewhat top-heavy because of the exceptionally tall pole masts and huge sails with batten lines running entirely across the fore- and afterdecks.

The sun cast streaks of copper and gold over the hulls of the motorized sampans, launches and water taxis clustering around the four boarding ramps that extended down from the ship’s port side.

The two Indonesian guards at the security kiosk were suspicious but not overly hostile. They wore grayish-green coveralls with the sleeves hacked off. Web belts cinched their waists and from them hung holstered revolvers.

When Brigid stated their business, speaking the Magindano dialect perfectly, one of the guards grinned at her and then waved meaningfully toward the Juabal Hadiah and the carved figurehead of the well-developed, redheaded woman.

“Ordinarily Captain Saragayn wouldn’t see any stranger on such short notice,” the man said, “but he’d have us lashed if we didn’t let you through.”

Brigid maintained a stony expression, even when the guard’s eyes flicked from her bosom to the gigantic one of the figurehead. The other man took a small trans-comm unit from a pocket and spoke into it softly for a few seconds. Then he folded it up and said roughly to Brigid, “The captain will see you.”

Kane and Grant were directed to wait. Since they weren’t disarmed, they didn’t lodge serious objections, despite hearing the rumble of thunder that heralded a tropical storm front. Both men had learned long ago that when on the home turf of a potential ally, the easiest way to turn him or her into an adversary was to resist local protocol.

One guard escorted Brigid down the long private pier toward the treasure ship looming above them. Exterior galleries ran along each of the decks, with peaked eaves and elaborately carved roof-trees. When they reached a ramp, the guard gestured for Brigid to precede him. Quickly, she climbed it and when she reached the top, she found her way blocked by a door made of bamboo struts.

She noted that the bars were actually steel rods painted to look like bamboo. A young Malaysian woman in a formfitting sheath dress of cobalt blue stared at her expressionlessly. One long bare leg showed through the slit in the skirt. Beyond the door, Brigid saw a wide corridor lit by ceiling bulbs of pale yellow.

A trans-comm unit in the girl’s hand buzzed. She quickly lifted it to her ear, spoke one word that Brigid didn’t catch and stepped back. Brigid didn’t see her touch anything, but the steel-barred door slid aside on a noiseless track.

She stepped over the track and saw a very tall man, dark-skinned and wearing a silk scarf of bright yellow around his head standing in the alcove. The man did not speak, but the black eyes he turned toward Brigid betrayed a contempt of death—either his own or hers. He stepped toward her, moving with a controlled tension as he strained against an invisible leash around his neck.

He held out a very broad hand, and wordlessly Brigid placed her TP-9 autopistol and Copperhead subgun into it. With a jerk of his head, the man escorted her down the corridor. They walked about a dozen yards when they passed a tall blond woman hurrying past. Brigid received only a brief impression of urgency and blue eyes before the man led her into a poorly lit chamber. Her gaze was instantly drawn to the throne-like chair placed atop a dais. Two oval plaques rose from the back, both of them inscribed with Chinese ideograms.

The air smelled of sandalwood incense, and little wind chimes tinkled at the far edge of audibility. Brigid felt a sense of being in a dream or a fairy tale. The man seated in the throne looked as if he had designed his clothes by copying the illustrations found in a children’s book about ancient caliphates.

His gold-embroidered tunic was made of shimmering black satin, and a crest of peach-colored feathers sprayed from the jeweled forepart of his bright red turban. She half expected to see pointy-toed slippers on his feet, but he wore sandals, exposing toenails painted a bright red. Brigid guessed he was Captain Saragayn.

Everything looked exaggerated about the man—the sharp, curved nose, thin slit of a mouth, black almond-shaped eyes and his smooth, amber-hued skin gave him the appearance of a raptorial bird. His face was clean-shaved except for a long, thin mustache. An electric aura seemed to charge the air around the throne.

“On your knees!” the tall man barked in Magindano.

Brigid affected not to have understood.

“On your knees, outlander bitch!” the man shouted. He reached for the back of her neck.

Without otherwise moving, Brigid’s right hand lashed up, caught the man by the thumb and secured a wrist lock. Twisting sharply, she took a swift step back and kicked the man behind his left knee. He dropped her guns to the floor.

His leg buckled and he went down awkwardly, catching himself by his right hand. Gritting her teeth, Brigid locked the man’s wrist under her left arm and heaved up on it, hoping to dislocate it at the shoulder. He cried out in pain.

Captain Saragayn lifted his right hand, the fingers sparkling with jeweled rings. “Our guest apparently does not understand either our language or our etiquette.”

In Magindano, Brigid said, “I understand the one and have no tolerance for the other.”

Saragayn smiled blandly. “You can let Daramurti up now, I think. Forgive his overzealous attitude. He feels he has more to prove to me now than ever before.”

Saragayn spoke in cultured English, a very affected form as if he had learned the language from watching old vids of upper-crust Bostonians.

Brigid obligingly released the man’s arm and stepped back. Grimacing, Daramurti pushed himself to his knees and then to his feet. He worked his shoulder up and down and took a menacing step toward Brigid.

Saragayn spoke a single sharp word and the man picked up Brigid’s fallen weapons and took them to him, then retreated to the doorway. Captain Saragayn briefly inspected the guns but said nothing. Watching him, Brigid knew she should have felt fear, or at the very least, apprehension, but instead she felt the tingling warmth of excitement as the prospect of danger spread through her.

For a very long time, she was ashamed of that anticipation, blaming her association with Kane and Grant for contaminating her. Now she had accepted the realization that their 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 the years long past during her life 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 fulfilling, but merely 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 man on the throne showed the edges of his teeth in a vulpine grin. “I am Captain Saragayn, if you haven’t guessed.”

“I had. I am—”

“Brigid Baptiste,” the man broke in. “A chief field operative for the group known as Cerberus, based in Montana, in the former United States of America.”

Brigid smiled with a confidence she did not feel. “Very good. How did you know that?”

“Would you care to guess again?”

Brigid presented the image of pondering the question before replying calmly, “The emissary of the Millennial Consortium either described me or showed you a picture.”

Saragayn clapped his hands together in delight. “Excellent. Mr. Book said you were very smart…and very dangerous.” A frown suddenly replaced the smile on his lips. “I’ve already witnessed the dangerous part.”

“What else did Mr. Book tell you?”

Captain Saragayn shrugged. “Many things. Mostly about the bit of bad blood between your two houses. Very interesting.”

“No doubt,” Brigid responded flatly. “Was Mr. Book alone?”

“Yes,” a male’s voice said from behind her. “Due to a personnel shortage, thanks in large part to Cerberus.”

Brigid turned quickly, just as a slender man stepped around the guard in the doorway and entered the throne room. He wore a one-piece zippered coverall of a neutral dun color. A small button glinted dully on the collar of his garment, and she didn’t need to see the image inscribed on it to know she faced an agent of the Millennial Consortium.

“My name is Mr. Book,” the man stated coldly. “It’s about time we met.”

Chapter 4

Brigid’s first impulse was to shoot back with a witticism or an insult. But when she looked into Book’s eyes, she saw the glint of cruelty in their pale depths, glimmering like the fires of a furnace that had only been banked, not extinguished.

Although of medium height, Book was so excessively lean he appeared taller. His hair was cropped so short it resembled a gray skullcap of bristles. His rawboned, leathery face was deeply seamed, as if it had been cooked by the sun and leached by acid rain until only bone, muscle and sinew were left.

His posture and attitude reminded her of Magistrates she had encountered, and she realized that Book was quite possibly a former Mag, one who had been recruited by the Millennial Consortium. Her mouth went dry as she experienced a rare moment of fear. She opted to remain silent.

Book regarded her broodily. “Brigid Baptiste. And where you are, so are Kane and Grant. The question is why.”

Brigid frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You people from Cerberus are enigmas, Baptiste. Oh, I know your names and your histories—renegades from Cobaltville, baron blasters and all that overblown bullshit told about you in the Outlands.”

Brigid forced a taunting smile to her face, but she didn’t reply. Over the past five-plus years, the Cerberus warriors had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.

Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the Overlords, all of them wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. Brigid privately feared that everything she and her friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict, the Armageddon yet to come.

Seeing the smile, Book challenged, “I amuse you?”

“To a point. If our reps are overblown bullshit, why has the consortium black-tagged our files?”

Saragayn stirred in his chair. “What means this ‘black-tagged’?”

Staring levelly at Book, Brigid declared, “It means that my friends and I from Cerberus are high-priority targets for the millennialists. There is a big bonus paid to any of their agents who manage to kill us.”

Saragayn angled at eyebrow at Book. “Is this so?”

The man nodded and then glared at Brigid. “Why are you here in Pandakar?”

Brigid smiled defiantly. “Take a guess, Mr. Book.”

“The cheap heroics of you Cerberus people nauseate me,” Book said harshly. “But let’s be frank with each other. The consortium’s enterprises in America are imperiled by the continual interference of Cerberus. You’ve destroyed our satraps, killed our personnel and disrupted our operations. You’ve forced us to move farther and farther from the American shores, yet you keep coming after us. Why?”

Brigid cast a glance at Saragayn. “That’s an example of the bad blood you mentioned.”

Saragayn nodded. “I gathered as much. I’m interested in your perspective.”

Brigid made a dismissive gesture. “Is there any point in that? You’ve already made up your mind.”

Saragayn chuckled. “You severely over- or underestimate me. I am responsible for nearly a thousand people, most of them related to me. Pandakar is surrounded by tides of change, and I do not want my island to be swept away. Therefore, I don’t make decisions rashly or choose sides until I’ve gauged every advantage and disadvantage.”

Brigid nodded as if she agreed, although she surreptitiously looked around for another way out of the room. Daramurti still blocked the doorway. “Do you know what the Millennial Consortium really is, Captain?”

“I only know what Mr. Book told me—a union of organized salvagers and traders.” Saragayn cocked his head at her in an exaggerated pose of puzzlement. “Is that not the truth?”

“To a point,” Brigid admitted, pinching the air between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. “A very small and very blunt point.”

The Millennial Consortium was, on the surface, a group of very well-organized traders who dedicated their lives to recovering predark artifacts from the ruins of cities. In the Outlands, such scavenging was actually the oldest profession.

After the world burned in atomic flame, enough debris settled into the lower atmosphere and very nearly created another ice age. The remnants of humankind had waited in underground shelters until the Earth became a little warmer before they ventured forth again. Most of them became scavengers mainly because they had no choice.

Looting the abandoned ruins of predark cities was less a vocation than it was an Outland tradition. Entire generations of families had made careers of ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe. The locations of those hidden, man-made caverns scattered across the country, filled with hardware, fuel and weapons, had become legend to the descendants of the nukecaust survivors.