Grailstone Gambit. James Axler

of broken blood vessels on his forehead appeared to be even more livid. His arms trembled as if he was having difficulty maintaining his balance on the crutches.

      “Interesting,” he said in a faint, tremulous voice. “Far more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m going to keep you alive a while longer, Mr. Grant…at least until your friends come to rescue you, an eventuality of which you seem certain. But it wouldn’t be so if our situations were reversed.”

      A small, bronze-hued curve of metal clinked to the floor at Grant’s feet. He recognized it as the Commtact.

      “You are quite isolated, my large friend,” Esau went on. “You live only at my sufferance and my continuing interest in your memories. Many of them are intriguing to the point of fascination.

      “Shuma, I think he needs some fresh air. Take him to the cage.”

      Chapter 5

      A cold rain pattered down through the leaves that formed a loose canopy over the top of the cage. Grant shivered in the early-morning chill, but he turned his face upward so the raindrops fell into his open, as-dry-as-dust mouth.

      The water soothed the cuts on his lips and cheek lining and eased his thirst somewhat. When the drizzle intensified, his torn T-shirt was quickly soaked through and plastered to his skin.

      “Well, here I am,” he rasped, a little dismayed by how hoarse and weak his voice sounded.

      Grant retained little memory of being half dragged, half carried to the cage by Shuma. His arms and legs refused to function, the muscles feeling as if they were filled with half-frozen mud. He wasn’t sure if the impaired movement was due to his being in a chair or an aftereffect of Esau’s psionic rape.

      He tried to dismiss the concept, but he felt violated. Esau had virtually torn open his mind and ransacked its contents. Although he didn’t know exactly how the little man had accomplished it, he knew with a grim certainty there would be a final reckoning.

      When the sun came up and filtered feebly through the interwoven branches, he moved carefully to the entry gate of the cage. Sliding his hands between the wooden slats, his fingers explored the iron padlock. He briefly considered ripping loose a splinter of wood and using it to pick the lock, but he discarded the idea when he saw a pair of armed men approaching him.

      Grizzled, bearded Roamers, they didn’t warn him not to touch the lock. All they did was glare, and he withdrew his hands.

      Biting back a profanity, Grant sat down and listened to the camp stirring around him, watching dim shapes hustle back and forth between shacks and cook fires. He grew cold in his wet clothes, but he maintained his stoic exposure. As a Magistrate, he had been taught techniques to manage pain and discomfort, but he wasn’t a Mag anymore. He realized with bleak humor that he had experienced more periods of physical suffering in the five years since his exile than during his entire two decades as a hard-contact Magistrate.

      In his first few years as a Mag, as he rose up the ranks, he had undergone periodic training exercises to toughen him and increase his stamina, and that included exposure to extremes of temperature.

      Even now he recalled those exercises with loathing. They were days of pure, unadulterated torture, of walking naked in a desert or clambering among rocky mountains, waiting for the commander to ration out just enough food and water to survive from one dawn to one sunset.

      But Grant learned to live by instinct, reflex and training, to focus solely on putting one foot in front of the other and slogging on. Those of his fellow Mags who didn’t learn didn’t survive.

      Despite the twinges of protest from his knee joints, Grant sat cross-legged and stared at a white spot on the floor of the cage, where the bark had peeled back from the wooden slat. He tried to relax his neck and shoulder muscles, working his way down to his bare, cold toes. He concentrated on regulating his respiration, putting himself into a quasihypnotic state.

      He was trying to achieve the “Mag mind,” a technique that emptied his consciousness of all nonessentials and allowed his instincts to rise to the fore. He had been trained to do it while serving the Magistrate Division of Cobaltville. He used it for handling pain and dealing with exhaustion. Brigid Baptiste had referred to it as a form of yoga, but Grant still thought of the process as Mag mind.

      After memorizing the white spot, he closed his eyes, visualizing it. He struggled to superimpose a mental image that matched the actual spot, but he was unable to do so. His concentration was scattered.

      Grant wasn’t sure if it was due to the pains of the injuries inflicted by the SOBs or whether he was emotionally drained. Rather than seeing the white mark in his mind, he kept seeing Esau’s huge eyes with their red pupils, like a vid tape on continuous replay.

      Despite his situation, worry about his friends consumed him. He felt sure the Cerberus personnel knew he still lived—in fact, they were probably aware of his general state of health, due to his biolink transponder.

      All permanent residents of the Cerberus redoubt had been injected with subcutaneous biolink transponders that transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponders were composed of nonharmful radioactive chemicals that bound themselves to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis. The constant signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, one of the two satellites to which the installation was uplinked.

      The telemetry transmitted from Grant’s subdermal biolink transponders would be directed down to the Cerberus redoubt’s hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetric signals using special human biological encoding.

      Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two them. One was of the Vela reconnaissance class, which carried narrow-band multispectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system. Conceivably, they could fix Grant’s present position in Central Park—not that it would do him any good.

      Kane was far too canny a tactician to try to penetrate the SOB’s camp in broad daylight. As it was, Grant knew he and Domi had somehow been identified and allowed to get as far as they had before being jumped. He assumed Esau’s mental powers were responsible.

      He also assumed Esau planned to use him to lay a trap for Kane, Brigid, Domi and whoever else participated in a rescue attempt. He didn’t know if the little man wanted to capture them or kill them, but he had seemed exceptionally intrigued by what he had seen in Grant’s mind. He guessed the information about the Annunaki overlords was of special interest, since it was connected to the fall of the united baronies.

      Humankind’s interaction with a nonhuman species had begun at the dawn of Earth’s history. That relationship and communication had continued unbroken for thousands of years, cloaked by ritual, religion and mystical traditions.

      According to information gathered by the Cerberus personnel over the past few years, most myths regarding gods and aliens derived from a race known in ancient Sumerian texts as the Annunaki, but also known in legend as the Dragon Kings and the Serpent Lords.

      A species of bipedal reptiles that appeared on Earth at the dawn of humanity’s development, the Annunaki arrived from the extrasolar planet of Nibiru. They reared great cities, built civilizations and spaceports and influenced the evolution of humankind.

      The Annunaki were also consumed by abounding pride and arrogance, and more than a few maintained an insatiable appetite for conquest and control. The faction led by Enlil had developed and imposed complex, oppressive caste and gender systems on early human cultures to solidify that control.

      As far as Enlil was concerned, the nukecaust was a radical form of remodeling and fumigation. The extreme depopulation, as well as the subsequent atmospheric and geological changes, approximated Nibiruan conditions. Earth would