LITMIR.BIZ

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on us?”

      “Everything we’ve seen of Durga is part of a long-term plan,” Brigid offered. “He’s not one to go for a quick partial victory.”

      “Except when he took a dip in the Cobra baths back in Garuda,” Kane subvocalized. Grant caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. He was looking toward the forest to the right of the truck, so what noises he made would be lost in the wind and the other three wouldn’t see his throat and jaw move. “And he’s learned his lesson from that disaster.”

      “Instant gratification and physical power weren’t enough to protect him, nor give him the victory he sought,” Brigid concurred.

      “So, Thurpa, if he is a ticking time bomb, might not go off for years?” Grant asked.

      “I don’t think that he’s a bomb,” Kane’s voice popped in, disembodied. “He’s too valuable to Durga.”

      “Kane has a point,” Brigid returned. “From Thurpa’s account, we learned that when Neekra attacked Durga, sensory input seemed to be deferred between Durga’s body and Thurpa’s. When Thurpa sought the regenerative capabilities of Nehushtan, he could sense Durga also drawing strength and healing.”

      “So, Thurpa is Durga’s means of immortality?” Grant mused. “Like an overflow valve. Things get too hot for Prince Asshole, it vents through our friend.”

      “On a psychic scale, yes,” Brigid concurred. “The two of them have a psychic link through which they share the load.”

      Grant frowned, his gunslinger’s mustache accentuating and exaggerating the downward bow of his lips. “So if we ever have to take down Durga, we could hurt Thurpa.”

      “Why have a bomb when you have a perennial human shield?” Brigid inquired rhetorically.

      Kane’s grumble, to Grant’s ears, was indicative of a stewing, deepening anger stemming from impotence. “Not that your riddle needs answering, but he gets psychic shielding from Neekra, and he gets something that will stop us from putting a bullet into his head.”

      Brigid nodded. “Correct.”

      Grant watched the mirror image of Kane glance toward Thurpa in the back of the truck. He saw profound pain in his friend’s features, that impotence toward helping the young Nagah, whose only sins had been those of his father.

      “What’s to say that Hannah’s children aren’t going to end up the same way?” Kane asked finally, looking away from Thurpa. “Durga implanted his DNA into her, giving her twins, the first and last children she’ll ever have.”

      “Durga’s a bastard, but those kids will be raised right,” Grant said. “Manticor will be a good father to them.”

      “Will fatherhood be enough when they’re in psychic contact with a sociopath like Durga?” Kane asked. “They’ll grow up with what the rest of the world would think are schizophrenic delusions.”

      “But we’ll get this information to Hannah,” Brigid said.

      Kane’s grunt showed his frustration. “And what will that provide?”

      “It will warn her of what’s coming,” Brigid told him.

      Grant kept his eyes on the road. Even as he drove, he was trying to figure out what could mitigate any telepathic influence on Hannah’s twins or on Thurpa.

      “What about the control interface that Gamal used?” Grant asked. “It was a thought transmitter.”

      Brigid turned to him. “Use it as a signal blocker? But that was a lot of machinery. Unless it would be an area denial device. It sends out a scramble signal...but then, no one could use any natural psychic ability in Garuda.”

      “It’d have to be a blanket, wouldn’t it?” Grant asked.

      “We could try something akin to a torus defense, but...” Brigid mused. “Brain waves would have openings in areas away from the ring itself, either transmitting over the top or under the earth.”

      “The only way we have to protect Hannah’s children is to end Durga,” Kane murmured. “And if we kill Durga, what kind of harm would we cause Thurpa?”

      Brigid sighed. “He said he’d be willing to sacrifice himself.”

      Grant’s mood darkened even further, but he refused to let go of any hope. “Let’s see that it doesn’t come to that.”

      Frustrated and feeling helpless in the face of Thurpa’s personal danger, Grant’s stomach twisted. He needed to vent his impotence on something.

      The hiss-boom of a darting rocket drew his attention from the side. Their pickup truck had passed into a sandy, barren clearing between trees, and a line of enemy trucks were parked up on a hill. It had to be the militia, the Panthers of Mashona—or what was left of them.

      And there would be no mistaking Kane, a white man, or Thurpa, a human cobra, in the bed of their truck.

      “Here comes shit!” Grant bellowed, tromping the gas to keep ahead of subsequent rounds of enemy fire.

       Chapter 2

      As soon as the wobbly spear, riding its tail of smoke and fire, hissed past the bed of the pickup truck and smashed into the ground, Thurpa grabbed his folded rifle and looked along the cottony trail back to its point of origin. He grimaced at the sight of three trucks, similar to the one that Grant and the others had procured back at Victoria Falls, except these had been mounted with machine guns and were filled with gunmen.

      What do you think you are, idiot? A swordsman? Thurpa winced at his own self-reproach and snapped the stock open on the rifle.

      Kane clapped him on the shoulder, shook his head.

      “We’re moving too fast. You’ll waste ammunition!” he shouted over the roar of engines and crunching dirt kicked up by the pickup’s tires.

      Thurpa glanced back and heard the crackle of enemy weapons, but there was no sign of near impact. He was trained well enough to keep his finger far from the trigger, making certain he didn’t inadvertently send a bullet out of his rifle. Considering the amount of jostling and physics at work in the bed of the pickup, he realized the wisdom of Kane’s admonition. One bad bounce or rut in the ground, and a shot intended for one of the enemy militia could go into an ally.

      They needed to rely on Grant’s driving skills to make it out of this alive.

      “When we slow down, then we shoot,” Kane added.

      Thurpa looked to Nathan and Lyta. He tried not to spend too long looking at the young Zambian woman, though she was pretty. Again, he was thrown back to when he discovered that he was a clone of the Nagah prince Durga. He’d learned from Kane, Grant and Brigid that his “father” had played upon racial purity differences among the Nagah to assemble for himself a die-hard crew, an army who would give him the strength behind his uprising.

      Of course, that race-baiting, those who had been “born cobra” or had been false Nagah having been converted by the Cobra baths, was simply a means of pecking and splintering the society of the underground city of Garuda. The underground city was home to humans, “natives” and pilgrims who undertook the change in a nanotech machine bath, and as in any society with a great deal of immigrant influx, there had been the disenfranchised who felt as if they were owed something, either by their “birthright” or simply because they had toiled hard to cross dangerous borders and frontiers. As such, Durga had a means of destabilizing an otherwise rock-solid representative republic monarchy.

      Blaming “the other” was one of the oldest means of gaining personal power, even with a government in which the will of the people was able to overrule and defy royal decree. Hatred was at once a means of consolidating groups and eroding the fabric of a society. Thurpa heard about the rifts within Nagah society still existing as open wounds since Durga’s expulsion from

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