Immortal Twilight (19 page)

But Hugh wouldn’t quit so easily. Even as he slammed into the wall, he was beginning to recover, the results of ancient bioengineering making him far stronger than he appeared.

Grant skipped back as the man sent a low kick at his shins, just barely stepping out of the path of that fearsome blow. He swung the heated pot around, its fourteen-inch circumference whooshing through the air as it came down against Hugh’s flank.

Hugh grunted, shrugging off the powerful blow, but Grant could see he was having some effect. He channeled all of his strength into a swing, bringing the pot around in a wide arc before striking the rogue immortal in the jaw with a resounding clang.

Hugh fell back, slumping against the wall. Grant stood over him, bouncing on his feet with adrenaline, the heavy pot clutched in both hands. “Yeah,” Grant snarled, “that’s for Shizuka.”

But as Grant stood there, someone dropped—almost literally—out of the sky, driving his heels into Grant’s chest as he landed on the surprised ex-magistrate. It was Algernon, the tails of his coat trailing behind him, the rapier-like blade clutched loosely in one hand as he dropped from the airship to fell Grant where he stood.

Folding with the blow, Grant caromed to the ground, the pot-turned-weapon spiraling from his grasp. He had almost forgotten about the airship, and he had been so focused on defeating the dark-haired Dorian that the other’s attack had caught him entirely by surprise. Grant felt his head sing as he slammed skull-first against the doorjamb, his sagging body sprawling on the ground.

“Hitting your opponent from behind, old man?” Algie scoffed. “That’s just not cricket.” He stood there a moment, watching as Grant struggled to cling on to consciousness; struggled—and failed.

* * *

B
ACK
IN
THE
OPEN
street section, Cecily was just pulling herself up from where she had struck the ground. Grant’s bullet had snagged her shoulder, not piercing the skin but still rebounding from the shoulder blade with considerable force. She winced as she rolled the shoulder experimentally, feeling the bee-sting-like echo left by the bullet.

“Hugh?” she asked, peering around.

Hugh was gone, no doubt after her assailant like the gentleman he was. The two new dancers were still performing, though their movements had become erratic, bumbling against a wall. It was clear to Cecily that Antonia was no longer in complete control—what a wretched thing to happen to her up-to-now bravura performance in the little coastal town.

“Antonia?” Cecily called, peering about the crossed meeting of the streets.

Antonia was sunk to her knees, clutching at her head as her eyelids fluttered, her head reeling back and forth like a ship on a stormy sea. Cecily gasped when she saw her, scrambled across the paving stones to her friend’s side.

“Antonia, what has happened to you?” she gasped.

Antonia spoke through painfully gritted teeth. “Inside...my head,” she said. “Fighting...can’t control.”

Cecily peered over her shoulder at the stumbling dancers, turned back to Antonia and settled on a course of action. “Do as Hugh said,” she instructed as she drew something from her little clutch bag, tiny beadlike pearls lining its edges. “Disengage from your performance. You have nothing further to demonstrate to us, not to your friends, not at the risk of your sanity.”

Behind her fluttering eyelids, Antonia could see the strange world that Brigid saw. It had been a human’s world when she had stepped into the woman’s mind, but something had shifted quite without her realizing, and now the whole thing seemed nightmarish and obstinate; even its colors made no earthly sense. She had never seen anything like this before, not in all her years of experimenting inside the minds of the others, not even when she had blown out poor Harold’s mind in a misjudged conjuring performance that had left him in a state beyond repair. Yet this woman had seemed normal enough. How could she slip into this new method of understanding?

* * *

T
EN
FEET
AWAY
,
Brigid felt her shoulder nudge against the wall. But the feeling was distant, as if it was happening to someone else. The Dorian bitch was still inside her head, but her grip was looser now, which was why Brigid could feel her shoulder as it scuffed up against the rough brickwork. A part of her mind was engaged in recalling everything that Ullikummis had shown her, the way he had tried to reconstruct her thinking, reshape it into something alien to her. She couldn’t remember it all, even her eidetic memory had limits—or more likely a part of her had chosen to forget the horror—but she could recall enough, sending it like a missile into her attacker’s probing thoughts. Brigid felt her dominance ascend, felt the Dorian pulling away, removing her psychic tendrils from her mind. Brigid
pushed.

* * *

A
NTONIA
SHRIEKED
AGAIN
,
her fingers snatching through her hair, ripping a whole clump out without conscious thought.

“It’s all right,” Cecily cooed, using her delicate hand fan to cool her friend. “You’re safe.”

Antonia looked at her with eyes full of fear. “That woman...she’s inhuman.”

Cecily glared at the redhead where she had slumped against the wall of an unmarked gambling house, her beau crashed against her in a tangle of limbs. “Well, what did you expect? She dresses frightfully and her hairbrush evidently leaves much to be desired.”

Swiftly, Cecily helped Antonia depart the scene of carnage.

Chapter 20

Brigid Baptiste awoke with a headache. No, she didn’t awaken; she was already awake—but she hadn’t been herself in a while. So in a way it was like waking up in the sense that her mind was reengaging with her body. She had been momentarily overwhelmed by the other woman’s presence as it infiltrated her brain. She couldn’t say how long “momentarily” had actually been—the experience of losing one’s mind, even temporarily, plays havoc on one’s sense of time. Only the brainwashing technique, slipping mental gears and putting another way of thinking into motion, had enabled her to fend off the other.

She was back now; mind, body and spirit all in the same place. And as for the headache—well, that was all hers, too.

When she opened her eyes—reengaging her optic nerves after the psychic assault—she saw that Kane was two inches away, both of them sprawled on the street like discarded toys. Brigid realized then that, in a sense, that was a pretty fair assessment. Considering themselves superior to mortals, the Dorians perceived every other man and woman as a toy, a plaything to be posed and manipulated for their own entertainment, to be discarded the moment boredom set in. Brigid saw that now, had realized it the very moment she had used her mind trick to push back against the psychic invader. It had given her an insight she hadn’t had before, and now she realized just what it was the Dorians sought—and it surprised her to learn that it wasn’t to be all-powerful conquerors, to wage war as they had been designed. Rather, the Dorians sought entertainment, a lull in the boredom of their protracted existence. They toyed with living humans the way a cruel child might toy with insects, crushing them, pulling their wings off, subjecting them to the sun’s rays through the medium of a magnifying glass. The Dorians were seeking nothing less than freedom from the tyranny of their endless lives. And as she lay in the street amid the mass of assaulted and wounded people, Brigid wondered—is immortality always to be so cursed?

Beside her, Kane shuffled, eyes closed, a thin stream of blood worming from his nose down across his upper lip, trickling farther as gravity drew it inexorably toward the ground.

“Kane?” Brigid urged, her voice little more than a whisper. “Kane, are you awake?”

Inarticulately, Kane grumbled something, his head rolling a little. His eyes were still shut.

Brigid reached over to him—an action that seemed to demand all her effort, weak as she felt just now—and slapped her palm against his broad chest. “Kane—wake up,” she called. “We need to...to keep moving.”

It was hard to think still, even after she had forcibly ejected the Dorian woman from her mind. Everything, every movement, every thought, felt as if she was breaking the crust of a scar, bits of herself snapping away in painful rips.

Something crossed over the street at that moment, something huge and dark as it passed across the sun, a grand cigar shape above Brigid’s face. She squinted against the sun, watched as the shadow glided off to the east with a sound like a cat purring, the faint strains of Elgar accompanying it. It was the airship, its bulging shape and odd fingerlike projections gliding through the sky like the ominous shadow of death.

Kane muttered something as the great airship slunk away on the wind, his voice sounding like a deflating tire. “What hit me?” he managed, the words slurring into one.

“Mind probe,” Brigid told him, still lying flat on her back and watching the sky. “Telepath tried to puppet us. Kind of succeeded for a while.”

Kane cursed, the expletive coming out of his dry throat like an explosive round, doubled via their linked Commtacts.

* * *

G
RANT
FELT
AS
IF
he’d had an altercation with a steamroller. And a particularly ill-tempered steamroller, at that.

As he sucked in a lungful of air, Grant coughed and the coughing made him hurt right across his rib cage. His chest ached where Algernon had struck him from the air, making it painful to properly draw breath.

There was someone standing over him, Grant realized as he became aware of his surroundings once more. For a moment, Grant felt the fight-or-flight urge hammering at his brain until the figure leaned down and spoke to him.

“You okay?” the woman asked. She was maybe twenty-five, malnourished with a dirty apron and her long, straw-colored hair tied ineffectively back from her face in a ponytail that had maybe begun her waitress shift as a bun.

“I’m all right,” Grant said, plucking the earplugs from his ears as he pulled himself up to a sort of crouch using the wall. His words sounded loud to his ears, and they came out with hard edges that made his vocal cords burn. “Did you...see where he went?”

“The men you were fighting?” the waitress asked, taking a step back from Grant as he stood, keeping her distance. “They left. The blond-haired one helped the other one. They went down there and then—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. Grant was ahead of her, putting the story together with his eyes. Both the Dorians were gone, and their airship no longer cast a shadow over the alleyway. When he looked up, he could see a peach sky where evening took hold. “You have water you can spare?”

The waitress nodded. “We’re by the sea,” she told Grant as he pulled his aching body erect. “Water’s just about the only thing we do have to spare.”

* * *

“W
E
’
RE
FACING
PEOPLE
who can think so hard that they can infiltrate a person’s mind,” Brigid stressed as she sat with her colleagues in the Cerberus ops center a few hours later. Her head was still reeling from the psychic attack, and she sipped at a cool glass of water and tried to work her way through everything that had happened in the past few hours.

It transpired that she, Kane and Grant had been left semiconscious by the battle in Hope, giving the Dorians ample time to make their exit. The immortals had been wounded—Grant was sure of it—but they hadn’t realized quite how hurt the Cerberus personnel had been. “Otherwise they would have finished us,” Kane surmised. As it was, they had made a run for it in their airship transport, leaving the Cerberus field team struggling to recover amid the groaning bodies strewed through the streets.

And that was another point of contention. While the Dorian-class soldiers had departed in their airship, theoretically in full view of Cerberus satellite monitoring, the airship had somehow slipped away from the fishing ville unseen, disappearing as if it were never there at all.

Now it was four hours later and Brigid, Kane and Grant had returned to Cerberus feeling disappointed, frustrated and just a tad sorry for themselves. They had joined Lakesh and the team as soon as their Manta craft had docked in the mountainside redoubt, and all three still showed the ravages of their brief skirmish.

“They were designed to be smart,” Donald Bry reminded everyone, sounding uncertain.

“Smart, yes,” Kane spouted, waving an angry finger in Bry’s face, “but no one warned us they’d be able to get inside our heads. That was not something I signed up for.”

Lakesh placed his hand on Kane’s arm to restrain him, speaking in a calm voice. “No one signed up for any of this,” he said. “These Dorians are loose, and it is apparent that our knowledge base for them remains a work in progress. Reba has produced some interesting information while you’ve been away and I’ve asked her to join us as soon as she can to present her findings to all three of you.”

“Lot of good that will do,” Grant growled as he rubbed at his aching shoulders. “We had them right in our sights and the desk jockeys here apparently lost track of their airship. I mean, it’s an airship. How hard is that to track?”

“It wasn’t just an airship,” Brigid said before any of the operations team could defend themselves. “I got a close-up peek from the rooftop before that...woman went for a joyride inside my skull. The balloon was decorated with various spines and projections. I suspect they’re used to somehow baffle tracking devices, creating a magnetic echo when they line up with any large metallic object in the vicinity.”

Perched on the edge of his desk with a mug of now-lukewarm tea in his hand, Lakesh rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “What you’re suggesting is that these spines lock on to the nearest object and create some kind of a feedback loop that feeds false data to our tracking system. Ingenious.”

“Like I said,” Bry pointed out, “they were designed to be smart.”

“But smart people can get caught out,” Kane reminded everyone. “They don’t know how we’re tracking them—didn’t even know we were until we arrived. They got lucky, but we can work around that—right?”

Lakesh nodded. “Definitely.”

Poised at the computer terminal that they had all gathered around, Brewster Philboyd tapped a few commands into the keyboard as he spoke. “We had the airship firmly in our crosshairs when you reached the location,” he said, bringing up the satellite footage of the moment when the Mantas had landed. “It had been traveling languidly in a northeasterly direction. Estimates put it at around two miles per hour—that’s slower than walking speed.

“But everything seemed to go south when it hit this point—” again Philboyd tapped his keyboard to bring up footage of the fishing port “—where we suddenly see a ghost report over here.” Sure enough, a second airship seemed to have joined the first, lining up almost parallel and about a quarter mile away from the original.

“Couldn’t you just keep tracking the first?” Kane asked.

Brewster tapped out more commands, bringing a time-lapse version of the footage from the next half hour of monitoring. “Easier said than done. A second ghost appeared three minutes after that,” he said, “and all three seemed to converge here—roughly five minutes after your arrival.”

“That’s just before we reached them,” Brigid said, eyeing the satellite image. “But that isn’t where the craft was at that stage. It’s about a half mile off target, give or take.”

Kane shook his head. “It’s the old shell game,” he muttered. When he realized that the others were looking at him quizzically, he briefly explained. “Three cups and one ball. Ball goes under one cup, then they’re mixed up. The punter has to guess which cup the ball’s under, usually without realizing they’re being had courtesy of a little sleight of hand. Known as
Find the Lady
when you play it with cards.”

“Clever,” Lakesh admitted, the frustration clear in his face.

“So,” Grant growled, flicking his hand at the screen, “assuming we can find our rogue supersoldiers again, how do you propose we take them down?”

“Airship should be easy enough,” Kane mused. “If we can hit them hard while they’re still in the sky, the ship’ll come down and the rest is mop-up duty. Right?”

Lakesh looked uncertain. “If you do that over a populated area, we could be looking at massive collateral damage,” he advised.

“Keep out of the villes,” Grant said. “Gotcha.”

But Lakesh was shaking his head. “It’s not that easy,” he remarked. “If whatever’s keeping it afloat is flammable, then there could be much more significant effects. You could start a forest fire, for instance, and Cerberus is simply not equipped to deal with repercussions on that scale.”

“Could we tow it?” Brigid asked thoughtfully.

Lakesh considered this for a moment before he spoke. “Getting close enough to snag it with a hook of some kind would likely prove difficult,” he said. “Assuming that that could be achieved, then we’d need to factor in the airship’s power in relation to a Manta’s pulling power. Without proper data, that’s impossible to calculate....”

“From what I saw, it moved slow,” Kane said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lakesh warned. “What we’ve seen so far is simply what these Dorians have allowed us to see. Remember the shell game. They’re wily and they don’t answer to anyone. It would be folly to assume anything about that airship at this stage.”

“Then what?” Grant asked angrily. “Sit and wait? While Shizuka’s keeping a bed warm in the sick bay?”

“No, my friend,” Lakesh said gently, “that wouldn’t do. These people are dangerous—there’s certainly no question of that now, not after what you all witnessed in Hope. We need to provide a way to halt the airship that creates the least possible damage to anything nearby. Holing it might be one option.”

Kane looked thoughtful for a few seconds, his eyes fixed on the false image of the airship that remained on Philboyd’s screen. “So, how do we do that with the Mantas?” he asked, turning to Lakesh. “Seriously? Poke it in the backside till it pops?”

“I’d propose a somewhat more graceful solution,” Lakesh said, “but in essence, yes.”

Kane nodded. “Okay, we’re going to need one big zit popper, then.”

“And some fancy flying,” Grant chimed in.

* * *

S
ITTING
ON
A
STONE
BENCH
amid Cecily’s garden of human statuary, Antonia was rubbing at her head. It still hurt there, where the redhead had sent a mental shunt at her. The feeling of alienness disturbed her, its echo like an aftertaste she could not seem to get rid of.

“Does it still hurt?” Cecily asked as she came to join her friend at the bench. She was chewing on a long-stemmed rose she had plucked from one of the flower borders that lined the decorative and practical garden, tasting the petals with a look of vexation marring her brow. She could not decide if she liked the taste or not.

“Has the world moved on so,” asked Antonia, “that all humanity has been lost? The woman’s mind was wrong—it’s plain to see that now.”

Cecily chewed thoughtfully on a rose petal the deep red of blood. “Perhaps she lost her mind?” she suggested.

“How frightfully careless that would be,” Antonia pointed out, still rubbing at her temple with the heel of her hand.

Just then, Hugh and Algernon came to join the ladies where they sat together on the bench. Algie had a smear of oil on his cheek from when he had been tinkering with the airship’s motion camouflage projector, and he wielded an adjustable wrench, tossing it from hand to hand as though it weighed nothing. As he reached the bench, the blond Dorian turned and launched the wrench in an arc. It spun through the air before embedding itself fully three inches into the chest of a nude woman where she appeared to prance amid the fairy children. The nude tottered on static legs before caving to the grass with the wrench sticking up from her ribs like a lever.