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The assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently…

The assassin, the ghost lady, scared and fascinated Cloud Singer, but the woman kept herself to herself, letting none of the tribe get close. Finally, crouching on his haunches beside the glowing laptop screen, Rock Streaming gazed at the others, waiting for everyone’s reactions. “Well?” he asked.

“A weapon that exists on a higher plane of consciousness is one that can be activated on a higher plane of consciousness, as well.” The assassin spoke from the shadows of the cave, her soft voice carrying eerily through the enclosed space.

“The assassin is right,” Bad Father said in his rumbling-thunder voice. “With this and the Dreamslicer, we could establish the new baronies and carve the world up for the original tribe.”

“But how would we take it?” Rabbit in the Moon asked.

“By force,” Neverwalk chirped, slapping a fist into his open palm.

Outlanders ^® Death Cry
James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

Even when still, your mind is not still; even when hurried, your mind is not hurried. The mind is not dragged by the body, the body is not dragged by the mind. Pay attention to the mind, not the body. Let there be neither insufficiency nor excess in your mind. Even if superficially weakhearted, be inwardly stronghearted, and do not let others see into your mind.

—Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), The Book of Five Rings

The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends. But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 1

It was snowing in North Dakota, though it wasn’t particularly cold. Wrapped in a light jacket over his shadow suit, Kane hunkered down beneath the snow-laden branches of a fir tree, watching two guards patrol outside the mine entrance. Kane was a tall man, built like a wolf, all muscle piled at the upper half of his body while his arms and legs were long and rangy.

He took shallow breaths, ignoring the fog that formed as he expelled them, trusting the tree cover to hide his breath as well as it hid him. He wasn’t cold. In fact, the jacket was worn more for camouflage and the convenience of extra pockets while on mission. The tight-fitting one-piece shadow suit he wore beneath served as an artificially controlled environment, regulating his body temperature. It also possessed other useful properties, most crucially acting as armor in the event of an attack. Despite this, the suit allowed for remarkable freedom of movement.

Kane turned to look behind him, sensing as much as hearing the approach of his partner. Grant, an ex-Magistrate like Kane, held his massive body low against the fluttering snow as he jogged toward Kane’s hiding place. He was a huge man, all of his bulk muscle without an inch of fat. His skin was like polished ebony, and a drooping gunslinger’s mustache brushed his top lip. Like Kane, Grant wore a white jacket over his shadow suit, camouflaged for the snow-covered landscape, with a white beanie hat pulled low over his head.

They hadn’t expected to need camouflage. When Lakesh had outlined the mission back at the Cerberus redoubt, he had made no mention of other parties being interested in the acquisition. Straight in and out, don’t let the delicate structure collapse on you as you pass through.

The delicate structure in question was a long-buried Air Force base, predating the nukecaust, in a town that had once been called Grand Forks. Close to the old Canadian border, from a time when country borders meant something, rumor had it that the base had been used as a backup data-storage facility. Now all that remained was a pile of rubble that served as firewood for the local roamers. But Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the nominal head of the Cerberus exiles, had recently stumbled upon evidence that suggested some useful data may have been stored at the Grand Forks base, data that might not have survived in other forms. A quick look-see and they’d be out, or so Lakesh had said to Kane’s three-strong survey crew.

Grant’s deep, rumbling voice cut the silence, despite his speaking in a low whisper. “It’s the same all over,” he told Kane. “Guards everywhere. Not many, but plenty enough if they want to make trouble for us.”

Kane continued to watch the pair of guards patrolling the minelike entrance that led into the old underground network of the abandoned Air Force base. “That’s what I suspected,” he answered quietly. “You see any other ways in?”

“Not me,” Grant growled. “Looks like the millennialists have provided the best and only entryway to our buried treasure.”

The millennialists that Grant referred to—or, more properly, members of the Millennial Consortium—were treasure hunters with a solid organizational structure and plenty of backup for their field ops. They dealt in prenukecaust matériel, mostly military ordnance, which they would either sell to the highest bidder or use for their own political ends—quite often both at once. If the millennialists could get someone else to do their dirty work, and pay for the pleasure in the process, so much the better. Kane and Grant had come to blows with the Millennial Consortium a few times, both in America and elsewhere across the globe. Despite claiming noble aims, most who belonged to the Millennial Consortium were opportunistic pirates, bottom-feeders of the worst sort as far as Kane was concerned. Their bold agenda listed a desire to restore civilization to the country, but there was no doubt in Kane’s mind that they’d sell him their own grandmothers.

Three Scorpinauts, the preferred land vehicles of the millennialists, were parked close to the squared-off entrance. The low-slung, boxlike vehicles moved on eight heavily tracked wheels and were sturdily armored. They sported numerous rocket pods and weapons ports, and .50-caliber, swivel-mounted machine guns stuck out from two armatures at the front of the vehicles like a pair of foreclaws. The ten-foot-long snout of a 40 mm cannon protruded from the rear on a huge, swiveling arm, docking in a resting position at the back of the vehicles, resembling a scorpion’s stinger-tipped tail.

Seeing three of them there meant one thing: it was a lightly manned rather than a priority operation.

Kane noticed the misting puff of disturbed snow off to the right, at the edge of his sight, and he turned to see the third member of his crew—Brigid Baptiste—making determined headway through the thick carpet of white as she came to join them. A striking woman, Brigid had hidden her vibrant red-gold hair beneath a white scarf, leaving her pale face clear. Her high forehead pointed to intellect, while her full lips suggested a passionate side to her personality. Wrapped in a white jacket with a sable collar similar to those worn by her colleagues, hair masked and the cold draining the color from her face and lips, Brigid’s bright emerald eyes and thin, ginger eyebrows were a little flash of color in the pale surroundings. She shook her head as she crouched with Kane and Grant beneath the low-hanging branches.

“No good?” Grant asked, his voice low.

“No back door.” Brigid shrugged.

Kane continued to watch the entrance to the underground structure. The roughly built square tunnel was boxed with wooden struts and rusty, paint-flecked metal poles. “Guess we’re going in the front, then,” he told his companions.

“No way, Kane,” Grant spit. “I’ll always back your play, but look at them. Walking in there would be suicide, plain and simple.”

Brigid nodded her agreement. “The entrance is too well guarded, Kane. We can’t just sneak past them. And there are too many to just start blasting people, even if that was a reasonable option.” She narrowed her eyes in frustration. “Face it, the scavengers have won this round. Maybe we’ll be able to buy the tech from them sometime later on.”

The trace of a thin smile crossed Kane’s lips as he turned to look at his partners. “O, ye of little faith,” he chided. “You’re always telling us how we need to use our guns less and diplomacy more, Baptiste.”

“I don’t see what…” Brigid began, but Kane was already unclipping something from the built-in belt of his jacket.

Kane stepped out of the tree cover and walked down the slight slope toward the mine entrance, holding aloft the small gunmetal canister with his thumb pushed tightly against its circular top.

“Everybody relax,” Kane shouted to the confused guards as they raised their rifles toward him. “This here is what’s known as a dead man’s switch. You all know what that means, right?”

The two guards nodded and tentatively lowered their blasters, still clutching them in readiness. Their outfits were patched together, not uniforms as such but uniform in their raggedness. Both had heavy fur hats pulled low to their brows, and their hands were wrapped in dirty gloves or bundled in rags.

“Now, me and my friends here have some business inside,” Kane continued. “We don’t plan to be long and we don’t intend to take much, but if we don’t get our way, then you, me and this whole underground shaft thing you have going on is about to meet the glorious maker and sing hallelujah.”

Brigid looked annoyed as she followed Grant out from beneath the tree. “This is what he calls diplomacy?” she whispered from the side of her mouth as she moved alongside Grant.

One corner of Grant’s wide mouth lifted in the barest hint of amusement. “If I’m not mistaken, he’s threatening them with a flask of water,” he whispered back.

As he spoke, Grant tensed the tendons in his right wrist and his Sin Eater sidearm was thrust into his hand from beneath his right sleeve.

The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them when they had fled from Cobaltville. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand. If the index finger was crooked at the time, the handblaster would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard.

As Mags, Grant and Kane were schooled in the use of numerous different weapons, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements.

Just now, Kane’s own Sin Eater was still sheathed in its wrist holster beneath the white sleeve of his coat. He paced forward, holding the flask aloft and keeping the attention of the two guards as they wondered whether to leave their posts. “I want you all to step away from the entrance there,” Kane advised them, his voice steady.

Grant leveled his Sin Eater meaningfully at the guards, holding it for a second first on the one to the left, then tracking swiftly across and pointing it at the other guard before returning to the first once more. “Guns in the snow, gentlemen,” he warned.

“Maniacs,” Brigid muttered as she stepped over to Kane’s other side and revealed her own pistol—a black TP-9 handgun.

“How many are inside?” Kane asked, addressing the left-hand guard as he placed his rifle flat in the snow.

“Um…” The guard’s eyes lost focus for a moment as he began a quick count in his head.

“Come on, son,” Grant urged, “quickly now.”

“Eight,” the other guard piped up, the unsteady voice of a young man muffled by the scarf he wore over his nose and mouth.

“You got a way to speak to them?” Kane asked. The hand holding the gunmetal canister was stretched out steadily before him, a little above head height.

“Shoutin’,” the young man replied. “Just shoutin’.”

“No radios? No comm devices?” Kane queried.

“Only in the tanks,” the young man explained, looking across to the parked Scorpinauts, “to communicate with home. Nothing for here.”

This rang true to Kane and his team. The Millennial Consortium was not renowned for its lavish treatment of staff. Its operations were executed at minimal expense to generate maximum profits.

Kane strode toward the open, box-shaped entrance. Low-ceilinged, the tunnel dipped into a shallow slope, burrowing under the wrecked firewood and open foundations that had once formed buildings above. Kane could see a few paces into the tunnel, after which its contents were lost in darkness.

“Me and my buddies here are going to go in,” Kane explained to the guards as he tried to penetrate the darkness with his gaze. “You’re going to wait here, and you’re not going to do anything stupid. If you are under any illusions about how a dead man’s switch works, and you decide to be a chancer with your popguns, let me assure you that we will all be having the remainder of this discussion in the afterlife. Am I clear?”

The guards both nodded, their eyes wide in fear, but Kane didn’t bother turning to them. He was busy scanning the gloom of the tunnel and listening for any hint of approaching reinforcements.

“Now,” Kane continued as he led the way into the tunnel, “if nobody does anything stupid, nobody will get hurt and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

Grant held back as Brigid followed Kane into the dark tunnel, covering the two guards with his Sin Eater.

“Sit tight, boys,” Grant told them. “We won’t be here long.” With that, Grant ducked his head and jogged the few steps it took for him to catch up to his colleagues.

Brigid looked from Grant to Kane, a sour look on her face. “This is insane, you realize,” she whispered.

Still holding the flask aloft, Kane glanced at her. “We’re in and nobody’s been hurt so far,” he replied in a low voice. “Score one for diplomacy, I think.”

Grant sniggered for a moment at that, before Brigid pierced him with her emerald glare.

“The pair of you seem to have mistaken diplomacy for insanity,” she snarled.

Grant held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, despite the automatic pistol in his right hand. “Whoa there,” he muttered. “This is strictly Kane’s insanity. I just follow the leader.”

Brigid’s green eyes were narrowed slits and she bit back a curse at the huge, dark-skinned man before turning to address Kane once more. “So you plan to bluff your way inside, and then what?”

Even in the semidarkness, a mischievous twinkle seemed to play in Kane’s eyes, just for a second. “I’ll insist they all leave or I’ll set off the bomb.”

“What bomb?” Brigid snapped. “You’re holding a flask.”

“They don’t need to know that,” Kane said.

Grant agreed. “I’d say it’s preferable if they don’t know it,” he muttered.

“Scared by the loco bomber,” Kane continued, “they all wait outside a safe distance and we get the place to ourselves. You find what you need, then we head back to Lakesh and Cerberus.”

Brigid reached a hand up and fidgeted with the white scarf that covered her hair as she let loose a frustrated sigh. “Brilliant. And what, pray tell, is your plan for getting out again? You know, with maybe fifteen armed and now very much antagonized millennialists waiting for us at the end of a bottleneck.”

Kane’s smile was bright in the darkness. “This used to be a military base, right, Baptiste? We’ll use their mat-trans. Simple. And yet, genius.”

The mat-trans chamber was found in many of the prenukecaust military bases, and offered a quick way to move from one to the other by the almost instantaneous transfer of particles. Having been originally constructed as a military installation, the Cerberus redoubt, the headquarters of Kane’s field team, had a mat-trans chamber. However, they had traveled to Grand Forks via two Manta flyers, which acted as both transatmospheric and subspace aircraft. It would be a simple matter, Kane reasoned, to collect the hidden Mantas once the heat had died down.

The Cerberus exiles had a variety of ways to transport people, the Manta aircraft and the mat-trans network were just two. In the past few years they had come to rely increasingly on another form of teleportation called the interphaser, which exploited naturally occurring centers of energy both around the world and on the Moon and other planets. The interphaser was ideal for traveling between known locations but, like the mat-trans, could be dangerous when gating into the unknown. There were other limitations on the interphaser, as well, but for the right mission it was ideal.

Keeping pace with Kane, Brigid eyed him for a few moments before she spoke. “Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”

“Not unless he drinks the bomb by mistake.” Grant grinned.

Kane led the way along the ill-lit tunnel, assuming the role of point man. Taking point was an unconscious habit for Kane, dating back to his days as a Magistrate. He exhibited an uncanny knack for sniffing out danger, a sixth sense in some respect, though it was really an incredible combination of the natural five he possessed, honed to an acute sharpness. Walking point, his eyes darting right and left, his hearing seeking changes in sound at an almost infinitesimal level, Kane felt electric, tuned in to his surroundings at a near Zenlike level. Walking point in the danger zone, Kane felt alive.

They met another pair of guards as they worked their way down the incline into the underground base, and each time they played the same bluff, with Kane insisting that anyone who disagreed with his proposal would end up picking his entrails off the tunnel walls.

By the time they reached the concrete exterior of the base itself, even Brigid was feeling quietly confident.

At the end of the shaft, a huge circular hole had been bored through the thick concrete wall of the old military base, taller than Grant and wide enough for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.

“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.

The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.

“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.

“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”

As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Kane announced as he entered the computer room, his hand holding the gunmetal flask prominently out before him.

Inside it was gloomy, with smoke damage on the walls. Three guards spun to face the intruders, reaching for their sidearms. Two other men were in the room, and they looked up from their work at the stripped-down computer banks.

“I’d like to introduce you to my friend,” Kane said, “the dead man’s switch. Some of you look like scientific types so I’ll put this in terms you’re all familiar with—get out of here or I will blow us all up. Any questions?”

One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”

The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.

Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.

“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”

One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”

Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”

Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.

The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”

Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”

Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.

Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”

“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.

Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”

“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”

“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”

She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.

Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”

Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”

Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”

Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.

“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.

“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.

“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.

Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”

Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”

Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”

O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.

Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.

Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.

If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.

Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.