Jade Sky (4 page)

Blossom appeared next to him and signed in the flickering darkness.
No radio contact. Ready?

Take them
, he signed.

The silhouette ahead became two, then fell to the ground. Blossom whispered in his ear. "Hallway clear. Two more guards on the other balconies." He blinked, and they disappeared from sight. A second later Blossom stood next to him. "Neutralized." Matt noted that the helmet didn't transfer the signal.

Over the chanting, Conor's bare murmur wouldn't have been caught by unaugmented ears. "Brilliant. Let's do this."

Matt looked back. Conor tapped his helmet, then signed,
No communication.
He drew his katana in one fluid motion—why an Irish guy used any sword, much less a Japanese sword, Matt would never understand. Next to Conor, Garrett appeared out of the darkness of the doorway. The huge man frowned, then gave a thumbs up as he made eye contact. Blossom disappeared through the arch in front of them, then reappeared.

She stood in the archway for a moment, a stocky black silhouette limned with green, before approaching. "I think radio's not working."

Matt nodded. "Satlink is out."

"You come up," she replied. "See what I see." They followed her forward into a white marble amphitheater.

Twin staircases circled the room, descending twenty feet. Eight marble columns held up the stone ceiling, the white stone veined with pink and gold. At the base of each squatted a huge obsidian brazier filled with glowing red coals. Hooded acolytes sprinkled powder onto them; they flared green with each pass. The almost-transparent bowls caught the light and darkened it, accentuating the shadows more than bringing light.

They're burning Jade,
Matt thought. He turned his eyes to the rest of the room.

Perhaps sixty people crowded around a central dais, every one hooded and chanting, their eyes a faint, luminescent green. Two massive forms, at least eight feet tall, stood on either side of an altar, muscled arms crossed over bulging chests. On the white stone slab a figure writhed, twice as tall as a man and hidden in shadow, its tortured gyrations in time with the persistent chant. The whispers gibbered in pleasure and an image formed in Matt's mind, not quite seen.

In the midst of the crowd a naked teen knelt at the altar, his body defiled by primitive tattoos still wet with blood. A dripping, crimson symbol pulsed on his forehead, a circle cut with a line, each half-filled with a snake-like, sinuous squiggle. He called out to The Servant in every tongue and none, and begged for a taste of Her glory. He sighed in pleasure as his skin sloughed to the floor, blood writhing from his skeleton into the cracks between the marble blocks. With a cry of delight, he collapsed in a puddle of wet, red pain.

Matt shook off the vision, or hallucination, or whatever, and glanced at his team. Blossom furrowed her brow, a look of ultimate confusion. Conor grinned, the green-tinged fire sparkling in his eyes. He turned back to the masses just as eleven people stepped forward from the first row.

They slipped out of their robes, revealing filthy, naked bodies, men and women, old and young, with shaved heads and crowns of thorns. They knelt. The chanting reached a crescendo, and the air around the altar shimmered. A breeze became a whirlwind, and the supplicants faded to a dusty white, then crumbled to black soot in the growing wind. Their remains darkened and writhed as the wind picked them up and swirled them above the dais.

On the altar, the ashy shadows gyrated. They took form; a massive man with wings of feathered silver, alabaster skin, a chiseled human face with the curled horns of a ram. Matt's soul burned in crushing awe, and he took an involuntary step forward. He closed his eyes to the terrible beauty and struggled not to open them.

A burning need for his own slavery pulsed in his mind, entwined with the whispers, and urged him to join the maelstrom at the altar. Instead, Matt choked up the AA-12. He struggled to pull the trigger, but his finger wouldn't obey. He stepped forward. Someone grabbed him from behind. He stumbled, backpedaling, and the whispers shrieked as he fell out of the mine. Blinded by the dawn, he scrambled on hands and knees away from the black doorway, his mind silent.

An inhuman shriek split the sky, and the ram-horned creature stepped into the light. As it stalked toward him, twisting shadows clung to it, defying the sun. Its eyes burned with the green flame of the braziers, and Matt suffocated in them, all thoughts of resistance melting into the jade light.
I am yours,
he thought, while his soul raged against its imprisonment. The creature grabbed him by the throat and lifted him from the ground, and against his will he joined the whispers as they begged it for death.

Conor appeared behind it, sword flashing in the rising sun. He sheared off one wing with a single sweep of his katana, and as the ghostly metallic feathers disappeared in a shower of sparks he turned and embedded the blade into the creature's back. It leapt and spun, tearing the sword from his grasp as it threw Matt to the side. It crushed Conor into the rock wall with a massive fist, sword still wedged next to its spine. Conor coughed up blood as a pair of knives appeared in his hands, and he cartwheeled over the thing's shoulders as it reared back for another strike.

He jammed the blades into the sides of its head. One skittered off of solid bone, and the other lopped off the top of an ear as it embedded in the skull. As he flipped over top of the beast, he let go of the knives and grabbed his katana two-handed, using his momentum to tear it free in a shower of steaming blood.

Dazed, Matt fell to a sitting position. His head swam. Part of him worried; he recovered from concussions faster than this. A darker part worried that he hadn't suffered a concussion. A memory of a thought tickled his mind.
I am yours.
He scowled and shook the nonsensical phrase away. The mine entrance faded from the black of nothingness to just dark. Light flashed in that darkness. Loud light.

Blossom backed out of the tunnel next to Garrett, both targeting tight bursts through the opening. The bonks that had flanked the altar charged out, roaring. Blossom dove, firing her assault rifle up into one's groin as she rolled through its legs. The other wrapped Garrett in a tackle and landed on top of him.

Conor spun his whole body in two fluid motions, and deep red lines appeared across the winged creature's calves. It leapt into the air, whole-again wings spread to block out the blood-red sky. In an instant it disappeared, washed out by the rising sun. Matt's identity struggled back into his consciousness.

Conor shrieked at the sky. "GIVE ME BACK MY KNIFE, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

"Matt," Jeff said in Matt's ear. "Are you okay?"

Matt's automatic assessment kicked in with the help of an implanted medical chip. BP 110/60, pulse 58, regenerates not triggered, no major trauma. "Yeah." The feeling of submission had faded to a dull, yearning ache. "I'm fine."

He picked up his combat shotgun and realized he had no clear targets.

Garrett lifted a bonk by the knee and thrust it sideways, then shot it in the groin while it stumbled. Blossom and Conor flashed around the second, their movements traceable only by the lines of blood that appeared on its thick, gnarled hide. The thing raised a knee, and Conor flew sideways in a spray of blood, his face a ruined mass of pulped meat. Undeterred, Blossom jammed a carbon-fiber knife into its back and wrenched the blade sidewise. She snarled as the bonk’s legs collapsed, dodged a clumsy grapple attempt, and pulled the knife out, to bury it halfway into its temple.

It grabbed her wrist with one hand and squeezed, crushing bone, then shook her like a rag doll. She screamed and tried in vain to twist out of the monstrous grip as it smashed her onto Conor. Matt bolted forward and leapt, slamming his shoulder into the pommel of the knife. It punched through thickened skull and into the bonk's brain. It let go of Blossom. She stumbled to the side and collapsed. The bonk fell on its face.

It twitched. Matt placed the combat shotgun against the back of its head and fired. The microgrenade blew its skull to pieces in a splatter of brains and blood. He looked up just in time to see Conor sever the other bonk's spine, grab its hair as it dropped to its knees, saw back and forth across its neck with his katana, and tear the head from the body. Steaming red gore fountained from the massive neck as Conor stepped back and flicked blood from his blade in a single, efficient motion.

"Fucking brilliant," he said, beaming through a broken jaw, his face a massive, bloody bruise. He helped Blossom up. He carried the head to Matt, dropped it at his feet, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Done is done is fun, am I right?"

"Status?" Jeff asked in his ear.

As Matt formulated a reply, people stumbled out of the mine, jaws slack, eyes vacant. Dozens of them. "Uh . . . ." They stank of body odor and piss and Jade, and shuffled their feet through the dirt. "I . . . ."

Blossom saved him from having to reply. Her brow scrunched in worry, she spoke into her helmet. "One augmented subject escaped. Multiple injuries, nothing serious."

Garrett and Akash stumbled up to him. Akash, his face a worried mask, held Garrett up with an arm around his waist. Dark blood stained the giant marine's abdomen, a stark contrast to his pallid face. Behind them, more slack-jawed civilians emerged.

"What the hell just happened?" Matt asked.

Garrett grunted and pushed himself off Akash's shoulder. He spat toward the severed head. "I got in that thing's way, and it likes to hug. I'll be fine"—he stumbled and dropped to one knee—"in a few minutes." For whatever reason, Garrett healed slower and not quite as well as the rest of the team, despite the same regenerates.

Jeff's order came through the ear-bud. "Secure the civilians."

Blossom and Conor corralled the perps, pulling off their filthy, hooded capes and herding the naked group into a rough human conglomerate. They complied with dazed expressions and offered not the slightest resistance. Matt frowned. Even before a full bonk-out, Jade could induce violent schizophrenia in severe addicts and a cocaine-like manic happiness in the casual user. This looked more like too much heroin.

A middle-aged man wandered away from the group, toward the desert. Conor put a hand on his chest. "Sir, you need to stop." The group dropped to their knees, vacant eyes forward, mouths open. As one they groaned.

Garrett clucked his tongue. "Recommend neutraliz—"

"Belay that," Matt interrupted. "Civilians are cooperating and docile."

"Proceed, Sergeant Rowley," Jeff said.

Garrett gave him a flat, unblinking stare, then turned away to light up a landing site with phosphorous flares. Even in the broadening daylight, the UV signature would pop on the pilots' heads-up displays.

Akash raised an eyebrow at Matt. "Kill them all? When did that become okay?"

Conor clapped him on the shoulder. "Guy's a bit shook up is all, and their little zombie act freaked him out a bit." He followed Akash's look to Matt. "Well?"

Matt gave the order, and his team zip-tied the wrists and ankles of every man and woman. They didn't have enough for the children, but that didn't matter. Not one person protested, resisted, or spoke. As Conor and Blossom led the shuffling civilians toward the LZ, Matt and Garrett approached the mine entrance.

Worm holes pitted the crumbling, bone-dry wood of the entranceway. Beyond, a narrow tunnel of rough-hewn rock reached no more than ten feet before ending in a cave-in of boulders and rubble. Dusty footprints littered the rock floor, leading right up to it.

"Sorry about the mess," Garrett said. "That thing wouldn't take 'die' for an answer."

Matt reached down and picked up a scarf's length of leather from in front of the cave-in. As his eyes passed over the tattooed glyphs and sigils, his augmented mind connected them to those on the boy kneeling in front of the altar. The whispers tittered in bloodthirsty glee. He dropped the leather strip and took a sharp step back, wiping his fingers on his shirt.

"Yeah," Garrett said. "That sucks."

Matt couldn't shake his confusion. "What the hell happened here? I mean, to us?"

Garrett shrugged, grabbed a wooden beam, and heaved it out of the way. "Don't know, but I want to find out."

Rotors thrummed in the distance. By the time the team made it through the rubble, every civilian had been evacuated by government helicopter. Matt stepped deeper into the cave, careful to avoid the leather strip—
skin
—he'd dropped. He ran his hands along the walls, and the white he first mistook for marble came off on his fingertips, revealing wood and gray stone beneath. He smelled it and wiped the chalk on his pants.

Once inside, he turned on his flashlight and looked around. A kitchen table served as the dais, with chipped white paint showing cheap wood underneath, and instead of obsidian braziers, cast-iron frying pans held piles of Jade over wood coals. A pile of black, cold ash smeared across the floor in front of the table, and in it were chunks of burnt bone. He put a hand over them. Cold.

He looked at Garrett sidelong. "Is it just me—"

"Nope," Garrett said. "I saw it, too. This place was a lot fancier a few minutes ago."

"Hours," Matt muttered. "It's past dawn. We were in here for hours."

They didn't say anything. Nothing they could say would make sense. They stepped back outside and waited for the forensics team. As the civilians did their work, they set up an ambush for the winged bonk, just in case it came back.

They waited three days and filed an action report that nobody would believe. Jeff sure didn't, though he said he'd sign off on their account of events anyway. The winged shadow didn't return.

*   *   *

Matt carried the overfilled tumbler of whiskey to their booth, careful not to spill any. Conor took it with a nod, downed the alcohol in three massive gulps, upended the glass on the table, and belched. Akash rolled his eyes. Garrett chuckled. Second-generation regenerates had to drink fast to get a buzz, and even so, it wouldn't last more than a couple minutes.