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“A what?” Grant demanded, face drawn in a scowl.
“It’s a form of experimental fusion physics,” she said, speaking quickly, ducking under a low-hanging pipe. “By magnetically compressing electrically conducting filaments, it creates an electromagnetic field that implodes rather than expands. They occur naturally in electrical discharges such as lightning bolts.”
“What the hell is something like that for?” Kane asked.
“Research into the supergravity theory, from what I recall,” Brigid replied, breathing hard. “I think it’s set on a countdown to some sort of energy discharge. I’ll explain when we’re out of here.”
“Looking forward to it,” Grant said dourly.
They quickly retraced their steps, climbing back up the spiral staircase. As they ran toward the gate, Kane couldn’t completely suppress a sigh of relief when he saw it still hung open.
A towering figure suddenly appeared on the other side of the gate, and Kane’s sigh of relief turned into a curse. He snapped up the Calico, finger curling around the trigger.
Kane reflected grimly that they had been lucky so far—but now, typically, their luck had run out.
Chapter 6
Edwards frantically hurled his body to one side, shouting, “It’s me!”
Kane gusted out a profanity-seasoned breath, feeling angry and ashamed. He, Brigid and Grant left the tunnel, slamming open the door. The other members of CAT Alpha stood in the crater, gazing at the spark-shedding and crackling metal transmission tower.
“What’s going here?” Edwards asked. “Where the hell is everybody?”
“How’d you get here?” Grant asked.
“We followed your tracks.”
Kane’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t find a couple of consortium guys tied up?”
Edwards shook his head. “No, sir. Were we supposed to?”
Brigid eyed the dishes on either side of the metal tower apprehensively, noting the greenish aura shimmering around them. “I think we’ve been had. Let’s double-time it out of here.”
“We’re going to leave this place unsecured?” Edwards asked, gesturing with his rifle barrel to the tunnel entrance.
Brigid’s lips compressed. “I don’t think we have much choice. I think the consortium abandoned this place for a reason.”
“Like what?” Kane inquired. “Besides headaches.”
Edwards eyed him in surprise. “All of us have headaches…and I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach.”
“What’s causing this?” Grant asked. “Radiation?”
Glancing up at the indigo sky and the first emerging stars of the evening, Brigid answered bluntly, “I have no idea. But if they don’t want the place, we probably wouldn’t, either.”
Kane opened his mouth to voice a question, but the muffled boom of a subterranean explosion made him jump. He bit back a curse. A second later they heard another explosion, followed by a third. The ground trembled under their feet.
Several sharp cracks burst from the disks mounted atop the metal tower. They sounded like huge sticks breaking simultaneously. From the mouth of the passageway gushed a billow of flame and smoke. Acrid black fumes grabbed everyone by the throat and set them to coughing.
A tremendous explosion cannonaded up from the throat of the tunnel, and a brutal column of concussive force slammed into them like an invisible tsunami, buffeting them backward.
A series of hammering blasts thundered up. The entire crater floor shook and trembled. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and dirt, shaken loose from the mesa, sifted down. A fissure opened up around the mouth of the tunnel with a clash of rending rock and a distant shriek of rupturing metal.
Boulders toppled down from above, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The people moved away, staggering on the convulsing earth. They ran out in the center of the crater to avoid being crushed by rocks falling from the mesa.
The metal tower bent and with a prolonged creak, it sagged downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The crackling, popping pyrotechnic display around the metal mesh disks didn’t ebb.
When the ground tremors ceased, Edwards demanded angrily, “What the fuck is going on?”
Brigid shook her head, fanning the dust-laced air away from her face. “The station was set to self-destruct. God knows why.”
“We can tell you.” The voice, amplified by a loud-hailer, was high-pitched but male.
The crater floor lit up with blinding rods of brightness. The searchlight beams stabbed through the night and intersected with the bodies of Cerberus Away Team Alpha, pinned like butterflies to a board. Squinting, Kane shielded his eyes, bringing up his Calico.
“Don’t move,” the voice said. “It’s very important that you stay as motionless as possible.”
“Fuck them,” Edwards growled, finger crooking around the trigger of his rifle.
“If they meant to kill us,” Grant muttered to him,
“they’d have done it already, not threaten us.”
“I think we’re being warned,” Brigid said, “not threatened. They didn’t tell us to drop our weapons.”
Trapped in the dazzling exposure of the light, Kane figured the Millennial Consortium really didn’t care one way or the other if they were disarmed. They had other matters occupying them.
Beyond the blinding circle of the handheld spotlight, he could barely make out man-shaped shadows arrayed on the ridgeline. He asked, “Who are we talking to?”
“Shh!” came the reply. “Call me Mr. Blue, call me late for dinner, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you don’t move until we tell you to.”
“Why?” Brigid asked.
“Shh!”
“Don’t shush me,” Brigid snapped irritably. “Are you responsible for blowing up the installation?”
“Shh! Don’t make any noise. Be as quiet as you can and don’t move. Stay in the light if you value your lives!”
Mystified, but feeling sweat form on his hairline, Kane cut his gaze over to Brigid. “Is he crazy or what?” he whispered.
She shook her head slightly. “For the time being, we probably should do as he says—until we can get a better idea of what’s going on here.”
“Nothing is going on around here,” growled Higson, a CAT team member. “Except we’re being set up to be slaughtered.”
Kane considered Higson’s words for a thoughtful second, then the sparks dancing along the rims of the disks suddenly faded away. He found the phenomenon worrisome, not comforting.
At the same time, the glare of the spotlight dimmed. He sensed it hadn’t been done to spare their vision. Faintly, he heard a murmuring from the people on the ridgeline. Mr. Blue’s voice whispered frantically, “Shut up! Be quiet!”
Kane blinked, trying to clear his vision of the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming over his eyes. His flesh suddenly prickled with a pins-and-needle sensation, almost as if a multitude of ants crawled over his skin. He felt rather than heard a feathery fluttering against his eardrums. His stomach surged with nausea.
Edwards shuddered and muttered, “Something is going on here.”
The spotlight dimmed even more, becoming little more than a faint yellow halo.
“It’s like the power is being drained,” Brigid said wonderingly. “Localized ionization of the atmosphere, too.”
Higson shifted his feet nervously and said in a guttural whisper, “What the fuck is that?”
Kane followed the man’s gaze toward the smoke-occluded opening in the base of the mesa. Movement shifted within the roiling vapors, and a green-hued light flickered in the haze. A faint, cold breeze touched his face, ruffling his hair, and he heard a distant hiss. The green light whirled, bathing the entire crater in an emerald glow. Then, slowly, the light contorted into the outline of a human figure.
Kane gazed, transfixed, his mind a whirl of bewilderment. He felt his throat constrict, and his heart began pounding in a sudden terror. The green figure twisted, stretching outward, growing broader. It split into another shape of identical size and dimension.
“Too late!” Mr. Blue bleated from the ridgeline. His voice thickened with horror and he screamed,
“Run!”
Cerberus Away Team Alpha retreated from the ghostly, nebulous bodies, backing away toward the crater wall. The figures resembled cadavers glistening with a coating of green phosphorous. Their facial features were always in flux, sliding and re-forming, like smoke. Two more appeared, gliding over the ground toward them. Fingers like wisps of emerald smoke reached out at the end of skeletal arms, convulsing with grasping and clutching movements. The wraiths spread out in a horseshoe formation, clouds of fluorescent particles swarming around them.
Kane raised the appropriated Calico to his shoulder, sighted down its length and shouted, “Fire!”
He squeezed off a long rattling burst. Bright brass arced out of the smoking ejector port, tinkling down at his feet. Grant, Brigid and the other members of CAT Alpha triggered simultaneous full-auto fusillades.
The barrage ripped through the wraiths, punching holes, ripping them to shreds. The figures instantly re-formed, resolving into a dozen wavering, green ghostly shapes. Tiny pieces of green light floated over their heads, like a swarm of radioactive fireflies. The keening whines of ricochets reverberated and echoed all over the crater. The hailstorm of bullets struck bell-like chimes from the metal tower. The slugs bounced off with high-pitched whines.
Kane released his pressure on the Calico’s trigger and shouted, “Cease fire! Fall back!”
CAT Alpha sprinted up the slope to the ridge surrounding the crater, causing miniature avalanches under their feet. Kane, Higson and Grant remained at the base of the crater wall, eyes and gun barrels fixed on the cluster of green ghosts less than ten yards away.
Higson snatched a round V-60 minigrenade from his combat webbing, and ran at an oblique angle away from the rest of the team. He shouted, “Keep going!”
“Get your ass back here!” Grant bellowed.
Higson paid no attention to the command. Swiftly he unpinned the grenade and hurled it overhead into the center of the glowing green wraiths, then he flung himself flat, covering up, face buried the cradle of his arms. The V-60 exploded in a ballooning ball of flame. The concussion slapped Kane and Grant backward a few paces. Dust sifted down and they impatiently waved it a way.
Although they didn’t see the ghostly figures, they saw the little swarm of orbs surrounding Higson. Howling, he leaped to his feet and flailed at them with the frame of his rifle, without making solid impact.
The cloud settled over the man’s head and shoulders, spreading over his face. When he opened his mouth to scream, two of the orbs darted past his lips and his shriek turned into a gargling croak. Dropping his rifle, he ran in a blind panic across the crater, hands clapped over his eyes.
“Baptiste, get everybody back to the parallax point!” Kane snapped.
He didn’t wait to find out if she obeyed his order or had even heard it. He and Grant kicked themselves into sprints as they chased after the frantically fleeing Higson.
The man stumbled over an irregularity in the ground and fell heavily. He writhed, crying out, limbs thrashing in wild spasms.
By the time Grant and Kane reached him, the swarm of green orbs had lifted from the man’s body and circled high overhead. Higson lay sprawled on his back, saliva bubbling over swollen lips, his respiration shallow. A puff of gray-green vapor rose from his mouth.
Kane recoiled at the sight of his face—the blotched flesh leaking and suppurated as if suddenly exposed to a horrific blast of heat. Tiny blisters formed on his cheeks and burst with pops. The whites of his eyes showed only bloodshot streaks.
“He’s still alive?” Grant rasped.
Stooping over the body, Kane pressed two fingers against the base of Higson’s neck, timing the pulse. It beat fast and erratic. “Not for long.”
When Kane removed his fingers, a layer of Higson’s flesh peeled off. “It’s like he’s rotting from the inside out,” he said quietly.
Grant shook his head. “Not so much rotting as disintegrating.”
Even as he spoke, the left side of Higson’s face went slack, sagging from the bone. With the moist sound like a wet rag dragged over a rock, the flesh completely fell away, revealing red-filmed cheekbone. The man shuddered violently for a moment, then died.
As Grant and Kane watched in stunned, shocked silence, Higson’s body beneath his clothes collapsed in on itself, the flesh and bones dissolving into a foul-smelling green smoke. The cloud was shot through with tiny crackling flashes, like miniature versions of the pyrotechnics they had seen dancing on the tower’s disks.
Kane backed away, feeling bile rise up his throat. “Let’s get out of here.”
“And leave Higson?”
“There’s not much to take with us,” Kane retorted flatly.
He eyed the witch-fire glow of the green orbs still hovering overhead. He said quietly, “We need go before we end up like Higson.”
Grant’s teeth bared in a silent snarl. “We don’t know what was going on here!”
Kane nodded and backed away, keeping his gaze on the ghostly swarm. “Exactly. That’s why we need to get the hell out of here as fast as we can.”
Chapter 7
Grant and Kane scrambled down the rocky crater wall. The moon slowly rose ahead of them, casting a silver luminescence over the sand. The silence all around was ominous. They heard only the scuffling of their running feet as they sprinted in the direction of the village. As Edwards claimed, the bound and gagged millennialists were nowhere to be seen.
Kane resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder, looking for the swarm of green bees. He glimpsed them only once, whirling in the distance like jade-hued dust motes.
“I hate to say it,” Grant half gasped, half growled, “but we’ve been skunked by the consortium again. I don’t know what they were trying to pull, but they managed to do it.”
“You don’t really think they had anything to do with any of this, do you?” Kane panted.
The two men slowed their pace, noting the mess of footprints over a comber of sand. They stopped in order to catch their breath. Grant stared back toward Phantom Mesa. His face was beaded with sweat.
A thick plume of smoke coiled into the desert sky. Flames still erupted from some entrances to the complex, but the glowing orbs weren’t visible.
“I think they decided we’re not worth chasing after,” Grant commented. “Maybe the consortium called them off.”
“The Millennial Consortium isn’t behind those things,” Kane said flatly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“They wouldn’t have warned us about attracting their attention.”
Grant knuckled his chin thoughtfully. “Even so, I don’t think they were worried about our safety.”
Kane nodded in agreement. “Neither do I. But I have the distinct impression the millennialists bit off way more than they could chew.”
