James Axler - Grailstone Gambit

With a sudden surge of disgust, Kane realized that Shuma was under no one’s control. He made that very clear by parading his captive down the street in full view of his subjects.

Grant lay spread-eagled on the broad hood of the Cadillac, arms and legs held at painful angles by taut lengths of rope. His olive-drab T-shirt was ripped and stained. Kane was unable to tell if the gleam on his brown-skinned body was from perspiration or blood.

Grant was a big man with a heavy musculature. His black hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples. Beneath the fierce, down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, his teeth were bared either in a silent snarl or a rictus of pain.

Kane adjusted the scope and sighted through the lens, carefully pushing a cartridge home into the chamber, gauging the distance at 250 yards. He gave the small figure sitting hunched over in the back seat beside Shuma only a brief visual appraisal, dismissing him as a servant.

His Commact buzzed and Domi’s voice whispered urgently, “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me…” Domi’s voice trailed off.

“What is it?” Kane demanded impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

The Commtact squirted out a burst of static and Kane squinted against the needle of pain boring into his skull. “Domi?”

There was no reply.

“Domi!”

Nothing.

He opened the channel to Brigid. “Baptiste, can you see Domi?”

“No…why?”

“She was cut off.”

“Cut off how?”

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

“Do you think something has happened to her?”

Kane inhaled a slow, thoughtful breath before answering, “I guess we’ll find out.”

“That’s no answer,” came Brigid’s sharp, reproving response. “Until we know what’s happened to her, we should scrub the mission.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Dammit, Kane—”

Edwards’s voice blared through the comm unit. “Sir, I’ve got Shuma dead center. I haven’t heard from Domi.”

Brady announced, “Commander, I just tried checking in with Domi, but she didn’t respond. Do we scrub?”

“Stand by,” Kane said flatly. “Everybody, just stand by.”

Brigid said curtly, breathlessly, “We need to pull back and regroup before—”

“Shut up, Baptiste,” Kane snapped.

The Cadillac lurched as the tires rolled into a rut and Shuma reached out a claw-tipped hand to steady himself. Kane settled the rubber-cushioned stock of the OICW into the hollow of his shoulder and held his breath. The skin between his shoulder blades seemed to tighten and the short hairs at the back of his neck tingled.

He squeezed the trigger.

When the crowd first glimpsed Shuma, a simultaneous roar erupted from every Farer and Roamer throat. All of Manhattan seemed to echo with it.

Standing at the mouth of a litter-choked alley, Domi narrowed her ruby eyes and tugged the hood of her long coat farther over her face, casting it into shadow. She had visited the ruins of Newyork before, but back then it had been strictly a place of the dead. To see it filled with screaming, roaring people unnerved her.

According to the intel briefing, people had been pouring into Newyork across the river for the past two years, coming from the distant Adirondacks and the barren lands south of the Atlantic seaboard. Domi recognized and could easily tell the difference between the Farers and the Roamers, even though they dressed alike.

Farers were essentially nomads, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts and traders. Their territory was the Midwest, so Farer presence in and around Newyork was very unusual.

Roamers, on the other hand, were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

The reports of both groups assembling in such great numbers on Manhattan Island was alarming enough to dispatch the Alpha Away Team from the Cerberus redoubt. They returned in full rout, beaten and bloody and minus of one of their members, a woman named Wright. She had been captured four days before by Shuma’s followers and all contact with her was lost.

Activating her Commtact, Domi whispered, “I’m ready to join the pack.”

“Acknowledged,” Kane responded. “In your rig, they won’t give you a second glance.”

“Hope not.” She took a deep breath. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“Aim good. You be very careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

Domi snorted derisively. “Hell, no. That’s why I mentioned it.”

Sounding irritated, Kane shot back, “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be…and be aware of all our people’s positions.”

“Gotcha.”

Domi cut the connection and stepped away from the mouth of the alley. She didn’t care for crowds on general principle. Her senses had developed in the savage school of the Outlands, and it felt to her that the wind gusting through the ruins carried with it the whiff of blood about to be spilled.

An albino by birth, Domi’s skin was normally as white as milk. She was every inch of five feet tall and barely weighed one hundred pounds. On either side of her thin-bridged nose, eyes glittered grimly like polished rubies. The hood of her long beige coat concealed her short, bone-white hair.

As the laboring of the engine grew in volume, she stepped out of the alley onto the cracked sidewalk and she was immediately jostled and elbowed. Although her temper flared she managed to keep it in check, although she did shove a man who stepped on her toes.

The bellowing crowd surged and swayed as if it were a single-celled organism she had fallen into. The repellant odors of unwashed bodies, as well as the acidic reek of home-brewed liquor, assaulted her sensitive nostrils.

Gritting her teeth, tamping down her disgust, Domi wriggled through the bodies, seeking a closer vantage point to the street. Before she could decide on a course of action, she needed to identify Shuma. She had only seen him once, glimpsed him from afar the previous night in flickering, uncertain firelight. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t matter that Shuma was a murderer or organizing an army of the disenfranchised. As far as she was concerned, the important thing was that Shuma had captured Grant during the dark territory probe. In her mind, Grant’s rescue had become the mission objective, taking priority over all other considerations.

She recalled the briefing within the vanadium-sheathed walls of Cerberus. Baron Shuma was like many other self-styled and self-proclaimed dictators who popped up in the Outlands more often than she and her friends cared to think about.

Rather than ignore them, Cerberus had established a policy to conclusively overthrow their empires before their influences spread beyond small, contained fiefdoms. Most of the time, the little pocket-sized tyrants were content to rule over isolated settlements in the hinterlands. Very often, their own subjects assumed the responsibility of ending their reigns. Once the barons became too overbearing, their subjects either moved away or joined forces to kill them.

But every once in a while, one of the local lords expanded his influence and gained enough resources to become a formidable power. Shuma was one of those, but he was also a showman and a politician. He knew that true, lasting strength derived from developing a political movement more than operating a mere criminal enterprise. He called his group the Survivalist Outland Brigade and invited the homeless, the down-trodden—and the ruthless—to join the SOB, promising them a future of soft beds, food and endless luxuries.