LITMIR.BIZ

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but I didn’t get assigned to Manitius by being sloppy and second-rate,” Falk answered.

      “Point taken,” Brigid said. “My apologies.”

      “None necessary,” Falk replied. “I just wanted you to know who you were working with.”

      “How deep is that pit supposed to be?” Edwards asked.

      “From ceiling to floor, we’re looking at thirty feet,” Falk explained. “The overall floor space looks to be the size of four football fields blocked together, with pillars that could easily be five feet in diameter.”

      “Football fields?” Edwards asked. “Say it in postapocalyptic terms for those of us without a frame of reference.”

      “Two hundred yards long, and we’re looking at about fifty yards wide,” Falk translated. She snorted with amusement.

      “What’s so funny?” Edwards asked.

      “First time I knew more about football than someone who is so stereotypically a jock,” Falk said. “Football was a game full of men who wished they were as big as you or Grant.”

      Edwards smirked at the obvious compliment. “You know, instead of fucking around with knives and shovels, why don’t we blow a hole in the side of this thing?”

      “We want to see what’s inside, not collapse the whole damn place,” Brigid explained.

      “The roof’s thick, easily two yards,” Falk said. “And the support pillars are thick and intact according to the sonar.”

      Brigid frowned as she thought about it.

      “I’m not talking about a nuclear blast,” Edwards said. “A controlled, focused explosion. Back when the Magistrates had to get into a place without bringing down the whole shantytown, we used loops of detonation cord that cut through walls without a blast wave that would level huts around our target.”

      “Kane generally just throws grenades,” Brigid mused.

      “He also was a pilot on a Deathbird gunship,” Edwards told her. “Firepower is its own solution for those guys.”

      “I guess the old saying is correct,” Brigid said.

      “There’s no problem that can’t be solved with the application of high explosives?” Edwards asked.

      Brigid nodded. “And not to judge a book by its cover.”

      Edwards shrugged his huge shoulders. “Don’t attribute it too much to brains. Just a good memory and some damned impatience.”

      “Do you have that kind of explosive power?” Brigid asked.

      Edwards scooped up his war bag. “I can roll my quarter kilogram blocks of plastique into det cord.”

      “Why do you have them separated into quarter kilogram blocks?” Brigid asked.

      Edwards smiled. “Sela told me about her time with Special Forces who made these things called ‘eight balls.’ A wad of C-4 with a detonator made a big stunning sound without throwing shrapnel all over the place. You could deafen a room full of bad guys with one of these, maybe even knock them cold, but they’re still useful enough for ripping shit apart when packed properly.”

      “Then set it up and let’s see what this place really is,” Brigid said.

      The explorers worked together to open the ancient underground temple, hoping to learn when and where their friend Grant lost his coat in this foreboding tomb.

      BRONDA STRODE along the perimeter that the Millennial Consortium had placed around the Thunder Isle facility. The barrel of his 9 mm Calico submachine gun rested on his left forearm, and his finger lay on the frame above the weapon’s trigger in an effort to keep the weapon safe but ready to go. One twitch of his finger, and he could start spitting out bullets from the Calico’s 100-round helical magazine, sawing an opponent in half.

      He reached the end of his patrol circuit and saw Lonmar. Where Bronda had been a grim, brutal raider who had attacked caravans that crossed the Outlands, Lonmar was a tall, powerful giant who was once been a Magistrate from Beausoleilville, a violent enforcer who obeyed the whims of the bitch-goddess who had evolved into the merciless Annunaki overlord Lilitu. These were the raw-muscled head breakers who the millennialists had known were the backbone of their effort to set up a technocracy over the shattered Earth. Both men were given power and the freedom to utilize it in service to that scientific cabal.

      That Lonmar and Bronda got to engage in their heartless excess of cruelty was icing atop a cake whose ingredients were pay, logistical support and the backing of an army of like-minded brutes.

      The guards and scientists who were manning the Operation Chronos time trawl facility had given a modicum of a fight—they had even brought down a couple of millennial mercenaries—but it hadn’t been enough to slake the two sentries’ blood thirst. There was a little hope, though. A radio message had gotten out to New Edo.

      The Tigers of Heaven had received that call.

      Bronda took a deep breath, and nodded to Lonmar. “Any sign of those primates?”

      “The samurai are going to be sneaky,” Lonmar answered. “I heard from Snakefishville about a raid their Mags went on. They had their asses handed to them.”

      Bronda’s crooked scar of a mouth turned up at one end. The other side had been immobilized by scar tissue and nerve paralysis when he’d been slashed across the face on one of his first caravan raids. “Scared?”

      Lonmar’s bushy eyebrows wrinkled, inching together like hairy caterpillars over his black, soulless eyes. “Snakefishville is full of pussies. If I’d been there, I’d have broken off their own damn swords up their asses.”

      Bronda chuckled. “Keep your eyes open.”

      “You, too,” Lonmar replied.

      Bronda turned and went back along his section of perimeter. With the consortium, the former raider had found the closest thing he could call kinship and family. Maybe it had been a design by one of the technocrats, some form of social engineering that turned the mercenary thugs under their sway into a more cohesive fighting unit. Bronda liked people like Lonmar and the rest of the hired guns working with him. It might have been a form of manipulation, but Bronda didn’t mind. The group he fought alongside worked. Let the Tigers of Heaven come get them. When the Calico drained empty, the Outlands pirate would draw the wicked foot-and-a-half-long sword and show the primitive Japanese how to really carve up flesh.

      There was the smack of fist on flesh from behind, and Bronda whirled. Lonmar staggered backward, recoiling from a punch hurled by a tall monster of a man dressed in a long black coat. Lonmar had been a physical giant, but the titan in the leather duster threw a follow-up punch that felled the ex-Magistrate like a rotted tree. Bronda didn’t think that anyone could have laid out the man, but the stranger whirled to look at the raider.

      Seeing the skin of dark mahogany, the drooping gunfighter’s mustache and the swelling musculature shifting under the coat, Bronda had a moment of recognition.

      It was Grant, one of the three who had escaped from Cobaltville, turning their backs upon the barons of the monolithic city-states. A jolt of panic passed and Bronda swung up his Calico to rip the bald, black giant in half.

      The machine pistol stuttered out a short burst, and Bronda knew that he’d hit Grant, but the outlander ignored the impacts of his bullets. If Bronda hadn’t been distracted by a goose-feather shaft jutting from his rib cage, he’d have had the time to realize that Grant’s coat had been armored. Bronda looked at the end of the arrow that had transected his torso, then into the woods. The arrow had flown scant moments before Bronda had opened fire, his ability to recover from surprise only a moment quicker than the archer’s estimate.

      For a brief moment, he saw a beautiful woman in samurai armor nock another arrow onto her bowstring, her hands moving swiftly. It had felt like minutes to the dying, shocked

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