Hell's Maw. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ this, Kane lamented as he eyed the overcast sky and its sheets of silver-gray ripples. Barely three years earlier, the baronies had been intact, their high walls and firm laws ensuring safety for their occupants and loaning a degree of safety to the provinces beyond. Local Magistrates had patrolled problem areas outside the ville walls, stemming the threat of outlanders and muties who might destabilize the local area or foster an uprising against the ruling baron. All of that had changed when the barons had received something Kane understood as a “genetic download,” a kind of evolutionary trigger that drew their hidden DNA to the fore, revealing the ethereal hybrid barons to be merely chrysalis states for their true forms—the reptilian Annunaki. The Annunaki were an alien race from the distant planet Nibiru, who had once been worshipped on Earth as gods during the Mesopotamian era, over six thousand years ago. Hungry for power, the Annunaki had ultimately squabbled themselves into mutual self-destruction.

      However, the power vacuum left by the disappearance of the barons had resulted in the villes having to find new ways to survive and remain stable. Some had installed new barons, imitating the old system as closely as they could. Others, such as Cobaltville, had covered up their baron’s disappearance, relying instead on Magistrate rule to ensure their populace remained under strict control. Kane had even found a new experimental barony where the population had been reprogrammed to adhere to subliminal commands, losing all independent thought.

      Kane didn’t know how Samariumville was running its show, nor did he much care, just as long as its people were safe. What did matter, however, was that the local territory had become more treacherous as rival gangs vied to carve up the land beyond the ville walls for their own usage. Those gangs included slave traders, gunrunners and other lowlifes who were only too happy to exploit and abuse anyone, human or mutie, who fell into their clutches. And all those crooks and ne’er-do-wells needed feeding, which was how Kane and his partners found themselves guarding this three-wag convoy as it crossed the unpopulated terrain to the west of Boontown, close to what had once been the Louisiana/Mississippi border.

      Kane was here, along with two of his partners from the Cerberus organization, at the behest of a local businesswoman called Ohio Blue. Blue was an independent trader who dealt in everything from purified water supplies to esoteric objets d’art. She was very much under the radar so far as the authorities went, meaning she was unable to turn to the local Magistrates while running missions like this one—mercy missions she called them, although Kane knew the woman well enough to take that with a pinch of salt. Ohio Blue was a rogue, what Kane would call a bottom-feeder, but she was well connected and, along with her wide-reaching organization, had provided support and safety for Cerberus during their direst hour. Kane considered that he owed her for that. So when she spoke to Cerberus about running into some transport problems on this route, he had volunteered to ride shotgun and help make sure she didn’t lose any more men. Cerberus had access to resources that even the well-connected Ohio didn’t, including footage from surveillance satellites and operational air support.

      Kane had dressed in muted colors, a faded gray denim jacket and combat pants, along with his favored Magistrate boots, which had a little protective armor in their construction. Beneath his clothes, Kane wore something even more durable—a skintight shadow suit, made from a superstrong weave that could dull a blade attack and offer some protection from small-arms fire. The miraculous shadow suit had other qualities, too—it was a wholly independent environment, which regulated the wearer’s body temperature, ensuring that they could survive in extremes of heat and cold and could also protect against radiation. In short, the shadow suit provided an almost undetectable layer of protection that was comparable to much more bulky forms of armor, only without compromising maneuverability.

      Kane was not alone. One member of the Cerberus crew had been assigned to each of the three transport wags after a spate of attacks along this, the only route running from farms in the west to a litter of smaller, desperate communities in the south. What Ohio was getting out of the deal, Kane could only speculate, but he knew her well enough to know that the op would not be run from the goodness of her heart. Cold hard cash was in the equation somewhere, and if that didn’t sit well with Kane’s more philanthropic instincts, then he could console himself that the food was going to hungry people who needed it. Traders like Ohio Blue profited out of misery, but they served a need that otherwise went unfulfilled.

      Kane’s partners were located in the two other wags, while Kane took the foremost, wary of a frontal assault. The middle wag contained Brigid Baptiste, an ex-archivist from Cobaltville who, like Kane, had stumbled onto the conspiracy at the top of the ville and been swiftly exiled from its walls. Brigid and Kane had worked together for a long time, ever since that exile into the so-called hell beyond the ville walls. During that time, they had learned that they shared a mystic bond that traversed time and space. That bond named them anam-charas, or soul friends, and it put them closer than siblings or lovers, a deeper bond than mere flesh or chronological time could contain.

      Guarding the rearmost wag was Domi. Domi was another exile from Cobaltville, although she had been born an outlander in the atomic wastes beyond its high walls. Unlike most of the Cerberus staff, which numbered almost forty housed in a refitted military redoubt in Montana, Domi had little in the way of a formal education. As such, she could come across as brash, even animal-like in her desires and the methods that she considered acceptable in achieving those desires. Kane, however, trusted her implicitly. He figured that if she was wild with an uncontrollable streak, then it was better to have her at his side than at somebody else’s.

      The trio of wags trundled on across the stark landscape under the afternoon cloud cover. The wags were similar without matching. They were tired things, old designs patched together and brought back into service, a caking of mud and dirt and poor repaints loaning them the appearance of patchwork quilts as they bumped over the rough road. All three had flatbed rears, though the rearmost included a rail around the bed for added security. A two-man cab sat up front, where driver and shotgun traveled, scanning the long road for danger. Behind the cab of the front and rear vehicles, a makeshift gun turret had been installed, running a .50 gauge machine gun with belt ammo, while the middle wag had two smaller guns installed on tripods on the rear. The vehicles ran on alcofuel—“homebrew engines,” the drivers called them, which gave some insight into where that fuel was coming from.

      Crouched between sacks, Kane kept alert. Back in his Magistrate days he had been fabled for his point-man sense, a seemingly uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened. It was no supernatural ability, however—just the combination of his five senses making intuitive leaps at an almost Zen-like level.

      The road seemed empty, abandoned even, like a lot of the back roads across the territory that had once been called the United States of America. So much had suffered in the nukecaust, and the population had been reduced to one-tenth of what it had been before the war. That left back roads like this abandoned and forgotten, and even now, two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, they remained overgrown and despoiled. There was an irony in that, Kane saw—that it was almost impossible to grow crops on the irradiated land and yet the old roads had become beds for wild grasses.

      They were approaching a rise, the splutter of the wag engine loud as it tackled the incline. Kane thought back to how Ohio Blue had described the previous attacks on her freight convoys. “The wags were crippled and left to rot,” she had said, “and my men had been singed by fire, their flesh burned away. Those who had survived had been incomprehensible, babbling about red and amber lights as though they had been attacked by a predark traffic signal.”

      He was armed, of course, even though that was not obvious from looking at him. Kane wore a Sin Eater, an automatic pistol, in a retractable holster hidden beneath his right sleeve. The Sin Eater’s holster was activated by a specific flinch movement of Kane’s wrist tendons, powering the weapon into his hand. The weapon itself was a compact hand blaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still СКАЧАТЬ