LITMIR.BIZ

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he heard the buzzing alert from the ship’s comm station. “What is it now?”

      Kondo, a younger member of the crew, turned from his console, looking upon the group leader with a momentary reverence, a sign of unwavering respect that had been instilled in all of the Wyvern’s military since the day they were old enough to be called grown. “Captain, we lost contact with two of the drone units who were acquiring new conversion subjects.”

      “Confirmed loss of contact?” Orochi asked, striding toward the young officer.

      “Absolutely,” Kondo replied. “Electronics damaged. A third had been struck, but its neural net is still working, though transmission is spotty.”

      Orochi’s chartreuse eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen.

      “The moment we started experiencing malfunctions, we called them back,” Kondo said.

      “Good,” Orochi said, looking at the monitor, distracted from his subordinate’s reassurances. He wasn’t the kind of man to take a sudden change in luck lightly. Someone, after a year of experimentation, had figured out something about their hooded minions.

      “I want you to activate a pod of gators,” Orochi said. “Set them after the group the men had difficulty with.”

      Kondo looked up at his commander. “We’re still not sure if we can keep the alligators under control if we set them into action.”

      “Well, that’s the whole damned point of this journey. If the parasite works well enough for us to remotely control crocodilians, then we can turn around and go home,” Orochi countered.

      The officer nodded.

      Orochi stood back from the console. He was under orders from the Watatsumi high command to utilize the secrets of the Gulf Breeze discoveries to combat the monsters from below the Dragon’s Spine, but he also had a second mission, one that he had managed to expand. Under the guise of influencing more complex mammalian brains, testing the limits of the electronically influenced parasites, he’d grown an army of specimen retrievers.

      Separated from home by thousands of miles, half the surface of the Earth, in fact, Orochi had free reign to alter paradigms, something made easier by recruiting scientists and officers who were true to the cause. The surface of the Earth had been denied to the Watatsumi for too long.

      The parasitic entity would be their key to ruling the surface of this scarred, tumultuous world again.

      THE CAJUN HEARD THE sound of gunfire in the distance, then looked back at the people who had hired him. Agrippine was not someone who relished the idea of venturing into these swamps, thanks to the disappearances of the past few months. But when the New Order’s missionaries arrived, bearing payment and a bounty for the heads of two people in particular, both of them former Magistrates, he wasn’t going to let easy money get away from him.

      The woman who was in charge, a strange figure who was tall, despite the cloak that reached up over the top of her head, shadowing half of her face, seemed as if she knew the sound.

      “Sounds like we’re close,” Agrippine said.

      The woman nodded. She didn’t speak much. Indeed, she had simply laid down a bag of coins and photographs of the two targets and said, “You will get the rest when they are mine.”

      Since then, she’d remained silent. Agrippine didn’t mind, especially since she kept to herself, staying out of the way as the motor launch crawled down the river. She hadn’t come alone, but the rest of the New Order minions with her were both talkative and cooperative when it came to running his ship. In return, Agrippine had been given the money to stock up on weapons so that he could equip them to aid him in the hunt for Kane and Grant.

      She looked over the weapons, examining them as if she was investigating an ancient, outdated artifact, her shadowed face expressionless as her fingers went along the surfaces of the guns.

      “Do they meet with your approval?” Agrippine asked.

      She looked up from the rifle in her hands, then extended it, butt first, so he could take it from her. She stayed quiet.

      This was a matter for employees, not her, Agrippine surmised from her reaction.

      “Mistress, should we move in?” one of the New Order’s expedition asked.

      She lifted her hand, halting any further discussion.

      Whoever this woman was, she had authority enough to silence a man easily one hundred pounds heavier and larger than she was. Her focus was on the distance, lips shut, breathing easily.

      She turned to Agrippine, and for the first time in a week, she spoke.

      “This is where I take my leave,” she said. “Grogan is in charge.”

      Agrippine looked at the big man who had asked to be loosed upon the source of the gunfire. Grogan, aside from being much heavier than the woman, was tall and carved from lean, long muscle. He was formidable, and had been much more talkative than the woman, though he continued to defer to her leadership.

      “Right,” Agrippine said. “And what will you be doing?”

      “That is not your concern,” she replied coldly. She had a satchel with her that she picked up, swinging it over one slender but muscular shoulder. “Your concern is earning the rest of your money. Fail, Grogan kills you. Succeed, Grogan pays you.”

      “What if Grogan dies?” Agrippine asked, casting a sideways glance toward the man.

      “I selected him for this task. He will not fail,” she said. It was if her proclamations were etched into stone. No inflection of doubt haunted any of her words. She nodded to one of the New Order crewmen, who extended a plank toward the shore.

      “Where are you going now?” Agrippine asked.

      “I have a task to attend to elsewhere,” she answered.

      “Where?” Agrippine pressed.

      Green eyes flashed in the shadows of her hood. Her mouth turned down into a frown, then she took a cleansing breath. “If you insist on knowing, then I am off to Africa.”

      Agrippine tilted his head. “What?”

      She strode down the gangplank, moving with grace and balance, her satchel seeming to glow with a brighter intensity.

      “Africa? That’s across an ocean!” Agrippine shouted.

      The woman turned and pointed to Grogan, who rested a large, muscular hand on the Cajun’s shoulder.

      “Do not shout. You may be heard,” Grogan explained.

      “But…how is she getting there?”

      There was a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye, and when Agrippine turned his head to identify the flash, he noticed that the woman was gone.

      “She has her ways,” Grogan answered. “She is beloved of Ullikummis, and her gifts are endless.”

      “What…what the hell?” Agrippine asked.

      “Mistress Haight is on her way,” Grogan said. “We should be on ours.”

      Agrippine turned, wondering just where Brigid Haight really was going and how she’d disappeared so fast. If he’d known of Annunaki technology, and the gemlike threshold she’d carried in her satchel, his understanding might have been more complete, but as it was, there was no way he could even imagine that she possessed the means of opening up holes in space-time and projecting herself through them with but a thought.

      Brigid Haight’s caress activated the alien artifact, itself a weapon that made even the assault rifles that Agrippine had supplied seem like mere sharpened twigs by comparison.

      And then, if Agrippine was aware of such power, such advanced means of matter transmission, he would have wondered why he and his guns were needed in the first place.

      Haight had

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