Grailstone Gambit. James Axler

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.

      The brigade consisted mainly of a loose confederation of bandits, but enough poor outlanders had sworn allegiance to Shuma to swell the ranks of the SOB significantly.

      Outlanders were born into a raw, wild world, accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive, in the postnuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great-grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semibarbarism.

      In the Outlands, people were divided into small, regional units. Communications were stifled, rivalries bred, education impeded. The people who lived outside the direct influence of the villes were reviled and hated. No one worried about an outlander, or even cared. They were the outcasts of the new feudalism, the cheap, expendable labor forces, even the cannon fodder when circumstances warranted. Generations of Americans were born into serfdom, slavery in everything but name. Whatever their parents or grandparents had been before skydark, they were now only commodities and they cursed the suicidal foolishness of their forebears who had brought on the nightmare.

      Recently, the numbers of the SOB had grown large enough to be noticed by other groups, like renegade Magistrates who had turned to the mercenary trade or the Millennial Consortium. Neither possibility was comforting, so Domi, Grant, Kane and Brigid traveled to Newyork through the mat-trans gateway network. They set out to scout the area and ascertain if the reports about Shuma’s Survivalist Outland Brigade had any foundation.

      Posing as Farers, the team hadn’t experienced much difficulty in blending in at first, and the easy acceptance made them careless, although Domi was alert from the start. As an Outlands child born and bred, Domi had learned how to hunt and had been taught the way of the hunted.

      Still, the ambush had caught her almost completely unaware. She and Grant had scouted out the area around Shuma’s headquarters, in the tangled fastness of Central Park. Domi suspected that something they had done or not done had given them away, but whatever the case, she and Grant had been set upon by shadowy figures wielding ropes and clubs.

      Although her first impulse was to remain and fight by the big man’s side, she realized they were severely outnumbered and couldn’t hope to shoot, slug or slash their way clear. When Grant ordered her to run, she had done so—reluctantly and shamefully, but she had obeyed him, melting into the gloom and the overgrowth.

      Domi had never considered herself a soldier, as someone dedicated to fighting for a cause, but over the past few years she had accepted the need to prevent an unstable world from being overrun by human and inhuman tyrants alike.

      Now, as she squirmed between the shouting people toward the curb, Domi closed her right hand over the checkered walnut grip of her Detonics Combat Master, holstered at the small of her back.

      Kane’s voice suddenly whispered in her head, “Status reports every two minutes now, people.”

      “Gotcha,” Domi stated.

      She inched her way to the edge of the sidewalk, pushing in front of a short, flat-faced man wearing a ragged mackinaw and beat-up bottle-green derby. Judging by his clothes, he was a Farer. Roamers tended to prefer clothes made of animal hide, which reflected their more barbaric mind-sets.

      “Watch it, you li’l bitch,” he growled in a voice slurred by liquor.

      Domi ignored him. Her belly slipped sideways as she sighted the yellow Cadillac and the big man spread-eagled across the hood like a hunting trophy. Word had traveled fast through Shuma’s followers that he had captured Grant, one of the renegade baron blasters.

      The term “baron blaster” was old, deriving from the rebels who had staged a violent resistance against the institution of the unification program a century before. Domi knew that neither Kane nor Grant enjoyed having the appellation applied to them. Their ville upbringing still lurked close to the surface, and they had been taught that the so-called baron blasters were worse than outlaws, but were instead terrorists incarnate.

      Regardless, the reputations of the core Cerberus warriors had grown too awesome, too great over the past five years for even the most isolated outlander to be ignorant of their accomplishments, even if it was an open question of just how many of the stories were based in truth and how many were overblown fable.

      With a conscious effort, Domi tore her gaze away from Grant, at once relieved that he did not appear to be seriously hurt but enraged that he was injured at all. Beneath the overhang of her hood, she watched Shuma intently, only vaguely aware that there was something not right about him beyond his obvious physical deformity.

      She had seen and even killed scalies before, but her belly still roiled with nausea and her hand automatically went to the hilt of her long knife, fingering the pommel. For six months she had been enslaved by Guana Teague, the Pit Boss of Cobaltville, and she had never forgotten the greenish tint of his skin and its odd, faintly scaled pattern. A number of people had suspected that Guana had a scalie in the family—hence his nickname. The loathing for her former master still ran deep within Domi, even years after slitting his throat with the very knife sheathed at her hip.

      Shuma’s reptilian appearance didn’t trigger a mental alarm, since he looked pretty much like the other scalies she had seen. Her eyes focused on the figure slouched in the seat beside him. He was a very small man, probably no more than four feet five. However, a massive, almost rectangular head rose from between a pair of down-sloping shoulders.

      The pale flesh of his freakishly high forehead showed a blue-and-red network of broken blood vessels spreading up to his hairline. His mouth was a short, lipless gash. His ash-gray hair was thin, almost downy, stirred slightly by the breeze atop his flat skull. A great shelf of bone jutted above his eyes.

      They were unusual in shape and color—disproportionately large, completely round with tiny irises and pupils totally surrounded by the whites. They seemed to glow, like two pinpoints of fire.

      His eyes swept the crowd disinterestedly, and they rested momentarily on Domi. In that instant she felt a faint touch on the surface of her mind, as if it had been brushed by a cobweb. His eyes moved on, but she instantly realized what the little man was.

      She reached up for her Commtact. “Kane?”

      “Here.”