Apocalypse Unseen

“And the coward,” Kane averred, “who hangs back and lets the others get shot. But I’m not really seeing those patterns, are you?”

“Uh-uh,” Grant confirmed after a few seconds’ observation of the running battle. “You might be onto something.” He brought the scope away from his eye, glancing across at Kane. “I don’t think the tripod cannon’s choosing targets. Its operators are firing wild.”

Kane nodded, considering what Grant had said. It wasn’t unusual for rookies to get behind a big cannon like that and shoot wild, figuring that something with such destructive power would just seek out and obliterate any target. But it was a fool’s game operating it like that—you went through ammo much quicker than you went through targets, and could often be caught with your metaphorical pants down when an armed enemy came close. Which wasn’t to underestimate the sheer destructive power of the cannon itself—CAT Alpha would do well to take it out of action if they wanted to survive the mess they had walked into.

“Think you can take out the cannon?” Kane asked Grant over the Commtact.

Grant smiled. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, edging out from behind the protective pillar.

“I’ll cover you,” Kane promised, stroking the Sin Eater pistol already clutched in his hand, “and keep an eye on the girls here.”

Sharing the Commtact frequency, Brigid glared at Kane with an annoyed “Hey!” before turning her attention back to her work.

* * *

GRANT WOVE OUT INTO the melee, ducking his head and scrambling as bullets zipped through the air less than a dozen feet away. His shadow suit and Kevlar coat would give him some protection, but it didn’t pay to get slack in a battle zone like this.

Grant ran, muscles moving with the fluidity of a jungle cat, hurrying across the sand-covered ground in short, fast bursts, using every hunk of broken stone and every fallen body as cover while he constantly updated his best route to the tripod cannon. The cannon was located on a second-story balustrade, its two young operators feeding a belt of bullets into its side as they swung the nose back and forth on its counterweights. Grant estimated that the cannon spit its 24 mm slugs at a rate of three or four per second, kicking up dirt and striking down the occasional solider too dumb or rattled to get out of its path in time. The army was moving away from the fort, so targets were becoming more spread out.

Grant crouched behind a truncated pillar resting on its side in pieces, searching the second story for a way up. The level was broken haphazardly, great chunks of the walkway missing. Can’t have made it easy to get that beast up there, Grant thought dourly.

A flight of steps caught his attention, winding up behind a masking wall and leading to the upper level of the ancient fort. It was open ground between Grant and the steps, just twenty feet but more than enough to take a bullet and end it all.

Grant glanced around, scouring the combat zone as a group of bloodstained soldiers came rushing past in a flurry of bullets. As Grant watched, one of the soldiers—little more than a kid, skinny and narrow shouldered, wearing camos stained with sweat and dirt—took a bullet to the back from the tripod cannon and went down on his knees, his face slamming into the dirt a moment later. His colleagues shouted something incomprehensible, shooting back at the cannon and all around them in a wild assault before vacating the area.

Suddenly, the cannon stopped firing, and the whole scene was beset with an eerie moment of calm amid the carnage. Grant took that moment to run, ducking low and keeping his head down, closing the twenty-foot gap between his hiding place and the stairwell that led to the second story.

* * *

FROM HIS OWN hiding place, Kane watched Grant make a run for it in the momentary quiet between cannon blasts. Come on, Grant, he mouthed, his eyes scouring the terrain all around his partner for any signs of a hidden ambush.

For a moment it looked as though Grant’s path would remain clear. Then, with no warning, a figure emerged from the shadows of a toppled pillar, holding an AK-47 rifle with a wide bandage wrapped low over his forehead. He had Grant in his sights, Kane could tell. Kane gently let out the breath he was holding, squeezing the trigger of his Sin Eater on the exhale.

* * *

GRANT WAS ALMOST at the stairwell entry when the soldier came bungling out from the shadow of a pillar. The man looked unsteady on his feet, and he was dressed in dirty fatigues with the brutal tool of an AK-47 clutched in his hands. There was something else, too, that Grant registered in the first instant he saw the man—he was wearing a white bandage across the top of his head, and the bandage came down to the level of his nostrils, entirely covering his eyes.

“What th—?” Grant asked even as the stranger turned his AK-47 on him.

Before he could fire, however, the bandaged soldier dropped to the ground, the distinctive recoil of a Sin Eater being discharged echoing amid the chaos of battle, a bloom of ghastly red materializing on the man’s fatigues where they covered his chest.

Kane!

Grant kept running. He would thank his partner later; right now he needed to get himself behind that wall and up those stairs to knock out the cannon that had already recommenced its incessant song of destruction from above him.

An instant later Grant was past the stone arch of the doorway and scrambling, blaster in hand, up the steep steps that led to the fort’s second level.

The archway was made from sand-colored stone, as were the steps. As Grant stepped into the shadows, he felt the heat of the burning sun on his face drop away, a relief of sudden coolness from the shade. In that instant, however, he was momentarily blind, his vision flickering in extremes of green as it tried to adjust after the brilliance of the direct sunlight. He took a moment, just a moment, to blink back his sun blindness, taking a pace forward onto the first stone step. The staircase curved around, winding up on itself as it ascended to the second story.

Two more steps and his vision was still restricted by the aftereffects of the sun...and Grant was in the sights of an attacker. He felt the movement of the breeze as the man stepped forward, lunging downward with the long blade of the knife he held, driving it toward Grant’s face.

Grant reared back, sweeping his left arm up to knock the blade aside by instinct alone. He still couldn’t see, not fully, his eyes rendering the figure attacking him from the shadows as a kind of dark blur of limbs and torso.

The man—and it was a man—spit something in a tongue Grant didn’t recognize. His Commtact tried to translate, came up with a phrase that was doubtless a curse, but sounded somehow ludicrous to his ears.

“Goat of a mother!”

But with the insult came something else—a gunshot, loud in the confines of the stone stairwell, the blast accompanied by the acrid smell of cordite. Something raced past Grant in that instant, and he heard the wall behind him give up a chunk of rock with a sound like walking on gravel.

Grant did not hesitate. Even through the retreating green mire of his eyesight, he brought his Sin Eater to bear, blasting his opponent in the left kneecap, hobbling the guy in an instant.

Grant’s attacker cried out in sudden shock and pain, stumbling forward, losing his balance on the steps above Grant. His blaster—a handheld pistol of unknown manufacture—spit again, sending a 9 mm slug at Grant in a roar of explosive propellant. The bullet struck Grant in the same instant, slamming high on his left biceps before reeling away with the impact. Grant grunted, stumbling against the wall to his right. It had been a glancing blow, clipping him below the shoulder with a lot of force but no penetration—his double layer of Kevlar and shadow suit had ensured that. But it still stung like something out of a blacksmith’s forge.

Grant raised his pistol and blasted again, sending a second shot into his opponent—now visible as the green wash across his vision retreated to a handful of spots when he blinked. The man was unshaved with an unruly mop of dark, curly hair held in place with a olive-green cap. His uniform—if you could call it that—was too tight across the chest and too large in the pants, and it looked as if it had been sewn together from scraps, albeit in a way that made for effective camouflage.

Grant stepped aside as his attacker sunk down the steps, blood seeping from his open mouth. Dead.

* * *

KANE MEANWHILE HAD his own problems. Two ragtag-looking soldiers came hurrying into the partially hidden area where he was hiding out with Mariah and Brigid, their backs to the Cerberus team. The two looked like brothers. Both were young men with dark hair and beards and scuffed uniforms that had seen better days. They each carried an AK-47 automatic rifle smeared with the pale dust of the whipped-up sand.

Kane subvocalized a warning to Brigid where she knelt working on the broken interphaser. Thanks to its remarkable mechanics, the Commtact could pick up such a gesture and amplify it for Brigid’s ear canal, turning Kane’s subvocalized “company” into a whisper.

By the time Brigid looked up, Kane had stepped silently forward, bringing the nose of his Sin Eater up until it was pressed against the side of the head of the closest soldier.

“One wrong move and I blow your brain all over your companion—capisce?”

Whether the foreign soldier did or did not “capisce”—and chances were he hadn’t comprehended a word Kane had just said—he certainly understood what a blaster pressed against his face meant. Kane smiled as the man lowered his own gun, saying something in his own tongue that the Commtact automatically translated as “No, no, not shoot.”

But even as the soldier spoke, his companion spun, alerted by his partner, raising his automatic rifle and squeezing the trigger in a heartbeat.

Kane saw the move coming, that fabled point-man sense of his kicking in like clairvoyance, leaping aside as the trigger clicked and a stream of 9 mm slugs spit in his direction, cutting down the other hapless soldier before the man could even acknowledge what was happening.

Kane dived to one side. This was not the first time his point-man sense had saved his life. He had been renowned for it, all the way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate many years before. It seemed to be an almost uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened, alerting Kane to the threat with just enough time to avoid it. There was nothing uncanny about it, however; it was merely the combination of his standard five senses, honed to an incredible degree, making him utterly aware of his surroundings. A change in wind, the noise of a scuffing boot—a hundred telltale clues gave Kane the advantage in combat, an advantage that could be the difference between life and death.

Kane hit the ground with a whuff of expelled breath, rolling his body even as a stream of 9 mm slugs chased after him across the dirt, always just a handful of inches behind him. As he rolled, Kane brought up the Sin Eater, nudging the trigger and sending his own triple burst of bullets at his attacker.

The first soldier had sunk to his knees as Kane’s bullets struck his companion, a choking noise coming from his throat. His trigger-happy companion dropped in a swirl of unguided limbs, the AK-47 swiveling up into the sky and sending off another half dozen shots before it finally quieted. Then the man lay on his back in the dirt, absolutely still, blood blooming on his chest, the automatic pointed upward like a grave marker.

“Poor sap,” Kane growled as he picked himself up and brushed dirt from his clothes. “Shouldn’t mess with an ex-Mag.”

Across from the dead soldiers, Mariah Falk was cowering beside the pillar, her face pale with exhaustion. “You—you killed them,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged with a solemn nod. But experience nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that something wasn’t right here. The excitable soldier who had shot at him and his partner didn’t seem to have much in the way of aim. Kane had leaped aside and stayed out of the path of his bullets as much by the man’s inability as his own improbable luck. Furthermore, he had shot his own colleague, which could be put down to inexperience or panic, but it still reeked of something closer to stupidity—and Kane didn’t have these two pegged as stupid, just unfortunate enough to find a fully trained hard-contact Magistrate had materialized from a wormhole in space in the spot where they hoped to hide from the battle. No, there was something else to these soldiers and their recklessness, something he wasn’t seeing yet. And, whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

Chapter 6

Grant raced up the last of the stone steps, the sound of his footsteps masked by the cacophony of the tripod cannon as it continued its deadly opera.

He waited a moment at the topmost step, crouching down and peering warily around the edge of the arched wall where it ended. There was a sort of balcony beyond, wide as a Sandcat wag and made of solid stone. There were cracks in the stone, ancient gouges where rocks had been forced together and held in place by tension. There were two operators working the turret, with a third man visible beside them. The third figure had been hidden before by his low-angled view of the balcony, but now Grant could see him and fingered him for a guard or sentry of some kind because of a stub-nosed pistol resting between his hands. The man was sitting on a box of ammunition and surrounded by almost a dozen more.

“Where do these psychos get all their ammo from?” Grant muttered to himself with a disbelieving shake of his head.

Grant brought his Sin Eater around the arch, edging it silently along the wall until the sentry was in his sights.

Pop!

The sentry keeled over as the bullet drilled through his hand, slumping forward where he sat as his right hand was reduced to a bloody smear.

Even as the man slumped forward, Grant stepped out from his hiding place, shooting again. His next bullet ripped through the arm of one of the two gunners, striking the man with such force that he went careening from his position and danced himself straight over the edge of the parapet.

The second gunner said something that Grant’s Commtact translated as “Who’s there?”

“Hands in the air where I can see them!” Grant snarled in a voice like rumbling thunder, raising the Sin Eater so that the man could see he was in the center of its sights.

Only, the man couldn’t see it, Grant realized. He was blind.

* * *

“HOW’S THAT INTERPHASER coming along, Baptiste?” Kane asked, nervously pacing back and forth as he watched the battlefield. Grant had disappeared from view up the stairwell and the general hubbub that they had walked into seemed to have moved on, for it was now playing out fifty yards away from the ruined barracks itself.

“I can’t work miracles, Kane,” Brigid told him, irritated. “Just let me work.”

“I don’t like being somewhere without a way out,” Kane growled.

“That explains your inability to hold down a relationship, then,” Brigid snapped back at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brigid glared at Kane for a few seconds, an unspoken challenge flickering between them. They were anam-charas, these two, soul friends whose relationship reached back through the folds of time, beyond their current bodies. Kane would always be watching over Brigid and she over him, the two souls entwined in a dance that stretched beyond the lines of eternity.

Mariah saw the look Brigid shot Kane from her hiding place, wondered what was going on between the two of them.

“What?” Kane asked Brigid. “You getting broody all of a sudden?”

“No,” Brigid told him. “Just wondering why we keep fighting these abominable wars for humanity when our whole lives are geared to nothing but the fight. I’ve lost everyone I cared about—Daryl, others. And look at us—we’re meant to be anam-charas, soul friends, but sole friends is about the sum of that. I just wonder how we can keep fighting for humanity when we’re so out of touch with what humanity really is.”

Kane began to respond when Grant’s voice came over the Commtact frequency, interrupting the discussion. “You wanna know why the cannon team are firing blind?” he asked. “Because they are blind!”

Automatically, Kane looked across to where the cannon was located, realizing that its seemingly incessant sputter had finally halted. “Say again?”

* * *

GRANT WAS STANDING beside the tripod cannon, holding its operator’s arm behind his back with such force that the man was bent over until he almost kissed the deck.

“I said they’re blind,” Grant elaborated. “Both operators, I think, plus their guards.”

Grant’s captive squirmed in his arms, spitting saliva on the floor as he issued a cruel curse on Grant and his family. The man’s eyes were unfocused, darting wildly in their sockets.

“The Commtact’s not doing a great job with their language,” Grant continued. “Whatever it is they’re speaking seems to be a combination of Bantu, French, slang and some local patois it can’t decipher. But from what I can tell, they’re either blind or only partially sighted.”

“And they’re operating big guns,” Kane responded, with a clear edge to his voice.

“Maybe by luck,” Grant said.

* * *

BRIGID SPOKE UP without taking her eyes from the repair work she was doing on the interphaser. “Shoot off enough bullets and you’re bound to get a few lucky shots, right?”

Kane shook his head, not disagreeing but just trying to piece everything together. The two soldiers he had dealt with had seemed—well, not real aware of their surroundings, that was for sure. Could they be blind, too?

Kane scanned the area beyond the little enclave, counting the trickle of soldiers still bumbling about amid the fortress ruin. At first glance they seemed normal enough, the usual fretful stalking of people on the edge of stress. But look again, and Kane thought he detected more of an aimlessness to their progress, as though they perhaps couldn’t see where it was they were headed, were just drawn to the noise of battle.

Kane scampered forward, reached for one of the two soldiers he had dealt swift justice to mere moments earlier. They looked normal, and even their eyes looked normal. How do you know a man’s blind?

“Baptiste, protect the civilian,” Kane instructed, referring to Mariah.

Before Brigid could so much as look up, Kane was off, hurrying into the wreck of the fortress, head down and blaster in his hand.

“Dammit, Kane, do you always have to be so blasted impetuous?” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. Then she called over to Mariah, working the catch on her hip holster where she housed her TP-9 semiautomatic.

“Mariah, you know how to use a gun, right?”

Falk looked uncertain, her eyes fixed on the pistol in Brigid’s hand. “Um...kind of.”

Brigid handed the geologist the gun. “Point and shoot,” she summarized. “Anyone gets too close that you don’t like the look of, just blast them. Not Kane, though. He can be annoying sometimes, but he’ll only get more annoying if you put a hole in him.”

Then Brigid turned her attention back to the interphaser, hoping to be able to trigger a pathway out of this mess. Lakesh had programmed in a half dozen escape vectors if she could just get the wretched thing functioning.

* * *

KANE SCRAMBLED, GLANCING up at the mounted cannon and seeing Grant’s shaved head peeking up over the angle of the deck.

Five ramshackle soldiers were trekking over the ground, finding their way past the wreckage that littered the terrain. Kane dodged past them, spotting a straggler who had opted to stick to the shadows that ran alongside the walls. The young man’s rifle rocked in one hand as he felt his way along the wall with the other.

“Kane, that you down there?” Grant’s voice came over the Commtact.

“Gonna try something,” Kane explained without slowing his pace. “Cover me, okay?”

Kane reached the lone figure in a few loping strides, coming around and behind him to reduce the chances of the guy shooting him. The man was young and dressed in a loose, dirt-smeared top which billowed as the wind caught it. The AK-47 rifle in his hands was scuffed with dirt.

Sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket, Kane sprinted at the man before dropping low so that he connected with him in a long slide across the loose, dry sand. Kane’s legs caught the soldier’s, tripping him so that he caromed headfirst off the wall that he had been feeling his way along.

The soldier grunted sharply as he struck the wall.

Kane was on top of him in a flash, grabbing the barrel of the AK-47 and angling it away from him even as he pressed his weight onto the man’s torso.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” the man spat in a foreign tongue, the real-time translation coming to Kane almost instantly. It sounded like French.

Kane shoved his free hand against the man’s jaw, pressing his hand across his opponent’s mouth. “Keep quiet and I’ll let you live,” he snarled, hoping the man knew enough English to follow his gist.

The man struggled beneath Kane, trying to bring the rifle into play. It was a poor weapon for such close combat, its 16-inch barrel too long and too unwieldy for close quarters. Kane fixed his grip on it and yanked hard, whipping it out of his opponent’s hand. He slung it to the side behind him, just far enough out of the man’s reach that he couldn’t grab it.

“Quiet,” Kane warned the man, checking around for possible attackers. No one was approaching—the group of soldiers Kane had spotted was close to the edge of the fort now, where the walls had tumbled away.

Kane looked back at the man beneath him, watching his eyes. They were hazel and they seemed normal enough, a little wide in panic maybe but otherwise normal. The man struggled, and Kane pressed his hand harder against his mouth in an effort to hold his head still.

Kane brought his right hand around, clenched it and extended just his index finger. He waved the index finger before the man’s eyes, running it swiftly to the left, then to the right across the man’s field of vision. The eyes did not follow Kane’s finger—not proof positive, but enough to make Kane suspect that Grant’s weren’t the only soldiers who had lost their sight.

“Can you see?” Kane snapped, using his Commtact’s translation mode to convert the words into stuttering French.

The man’s eyes remained wide and he refused to answer Kane’s question.

“You want me to kill you right here?” Kane snarled at the young soldier. “Answer the damn question. Can you see? Are you blind?”

“I can see,” the man replied in French with an edge to his voice that Kane noticed even if the translation program of the Commtact failed to pick up on it. “I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.”

Chapter 7

“Blind men fighting a war,” Kane scoffed. “What part of that even makes sense?”

The battle had moved on. Now Kane, still standing over the soldier he had disarmed some minutes earlier, had been joined by Brigid—still tinkering with the interphaser as she tried to piece its internal mechanism back together—Mariah and Grant. Grant had brought the remaining gunner with him, held in his strong grip in such a way that he was forced to walk pigeon-toed as he was partly shoved and partly dragged across the stone-strewn battlefield.

“It doesn’t,” Grant confirmed, screwing up his face.

“Maybe it does,” Brigid said from where she sat in the shade with the ruined interphaser spread before her. “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask about their blindness, but concern ourselves instead with what they do see, or think they’re seeing.”

The others looked at her, bemused. Brigid had always been “the smart one” of the CAT Alpha field team, and sometimes her leaps of logic took a little bit of explaining before everyone caught up on the same page.