James Axler - Outlanders 16 - Tigers of Heaven

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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as

"unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this

"stripped book."

To Deirdre and Chesley— Kangei su.ru!

First edition February 2001 ISBN 0-373-63829-9

TIGERS OF HEAVEN

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written

permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever

to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or

unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and

Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries. Printed In U.S.A.

But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger.

—William Shakespeare, Henry V

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought

the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in

Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark— reshaped continents and turned civilization

into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands— poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated

life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts dung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military

installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities.

Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the

viltes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was

now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and

chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better

future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition.

A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien

masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary

execution, and

Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to

Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends.

Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold

hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant's dues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique.

But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least

knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no

forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was out— way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist,

Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the

outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end

them.

Chapter 1

Kane sat in the corner of the cell, his teeth chattering. Even crouched on the bunk with the heavy blanket

tucked around him, he felt that he would freeze to death hi a matter of minutes. He knew he wouldn't,

despite the violent shudders that shook his body from toe-tip to nose-tip. The bone-deep,

marrow-freezing cold was by now familiar.

For a long time, he just sat hunched over, his teeth clenched so tightly his jaw muscles ached. He listened

to the slow steady beat of his heart and he imagined he felt the last bit of the drag creeping through his

veins and circulating through his body. Shortly, it would be fully metabolized and the somatic aftereffects

would kick in. Absorbed through the skin, the aphrodisiac gel always gave him a serious chill before

utter exhaustion settled over nun like chains. He doubted his cell was less than sixty degrees Fahrenheit,

but he still shook and trembled as if the temperature were on the low side of zero. He fought against the

growing drowsiness.

Eventually, he would fall asleep, and when he awoke his body temperature would be back to normal

and his hunger ravenous. He would awaken to find a tray of food in the corner, near the cell door. It was

always there after his slumber, but he never saw who put it there. This time, he was determined find out.

The food was always the same—a bowl of warm gruel resembling oatmeal, two small plastic jugs of

milk and water, a sugary substance in a paper envelope, a plastic spoon and a slice of dark bread. The

only way he could measure how long he had been in custody was by how many times he had eaten. He

no longer had any idea of how many days he'd spent locked away in the vast complex beneath the

Nevada desert, in the sprawling installation known two centuries ago as Area 51 and Dreamland.

Kane forced himself to smile as he tugged the blanket up around his ears. If he had dreamed since his

imprisonment, he couldn't remember any of them. In fact, memories of a life preceding his imprisonment

in Dreamland were fading, becoming little more than half-remembered dreams themselves.

Kane knew all about the techniques of disorienta-tion. It was a common enough procedure with the

Magistrates of the Intel section back in Cobaltville. But the purpose behind his confinement had nothing

to do with keeping him confused and dull-witted. He was allowed to leave his small cell at least once

every two days, or at least he thought it was every two days. There was no time in his cell, no daylight,

no dawn or darkness; there was only a routine eternally lit by a single yellow neon strip inset into the

ceiling.

The room that he called home measured hardly twelve paces by ten. Only the small spy-eye vid lens

bolted in an upper corner relieved the monotony of

the smooth, white blocks and mortared seams of each wall.

Kane's existence seemed like perpetual twilight. His reality was blurred, all the sharp edges blunted. For

a while he tried to reckon the passage of time by periods of work and rest, but he lost count and it did

not greatly matter anyway. Still, he clung to his old habit of thought, thinking of the sleep periods as

nights and his work periods as days. Kane left his cell only to work, to be put out to stud. There was no

other word, term or euphemism for it. His life had been spared by Baron Cobalt only so he could father

children, plant his seed in the female hybrids in the installation.

He shivered again, and he forced himself to remember the first time he had awakened in his cell. After

sleeping off the gel-triggered exertions, the first thing he saw was the tray of food on the floor beside the

door. Ravenous, he snatched it up and mindlessly began stuffing himself. Then the memories of what he

had been forced to do and with whom wheeled through his mind in a kaleidoscope of broken,

humiliating pictures. Roaring with rage and shame, he hurled the bowl of porridge at the spy-eye

bracketed in the corner on the opposite wall.

He recollected how he laughed when the thick gruel smeared over the lens. He was still laughing when

the door opened and six men rushed in. They wore crisp, multipocketed gray jumpsuits and

rubber-soled shoes identical to the articles of clothing he had been given. The two guards in the lead

were armed

with long, black batons with thready skeins of electricity crackling between the double-pronged tips. The

Shocksticks were devices used by ville Magistrates for crowd control. A little under three feet in length,

the batons delivered six-thousand-volt localized shocks.

None of the men spoke-as they closed in on him from all sides. Kane bloodied his knuckles and the

nose of one man before the rest of them grappled with him, bearing him down by sheer weight of

numbers. One of the guards reeled away, disabled by a vicious foot to the groin. Kane caved in the front

teeth of another man with the crown of his head a split second before he glimpsed the tip of a

descending Shock-stick. When it touched the side of his neck, all of his muscles convulsed and

spasmed. Streaks of agony lanced through his body, and he went down writhing, curling up in a fetal

position.

There were more blows, both with feet and Shock-sticks, and darkness claimed him. When the light

returned, the mess of oatmeal had been cleaned up and two new guards stood over him. He lay on the

bunk, aching and angry. One of the men deigned to speak to him.

"Wake up, little Nemo," he said, thrusting a new tray of food toward him. He was a young man with

short-cropped blond hair. "Welcome to Dreamland."

Biting back groans of pain, Kane sat up and took the tray. Although his stomach growled and hunger

pangs stabbed through him, he made no motion to touch the food. He asked, "How long?"

"How long what?" the second guard asked. He was a seam-faced, wire-muscled man, his dark hair

gleaming with pomade. "How long you've been unconscious?"

"That'll do for starters."

"About three hours."

"How long have I been here in Dreamland?" Kane inquired.

The young man answered the question. "About three months. Shortly after you blew the mesa."

Kane's lips quirked in a cold smile. "Heard about that, did you?"

Flatly, the man retorted, "I was there, Kane. I guess you don't remember me."

Kane studied the guard's face for a long moment, searching his memory for a match. "Your name is

Maddock?"

The man nodded curtly. "That's right. I was on the hover-tank crew."

Kane arched an eyebrow at him. "I let you go."

"Only so I could deliver a message." Maddock's expression and voice were completely dispassionate. "I

still remember it. "The revolution has officially started.' I delivered it. And now here you are and here I

am."

Kane's smile broadened. "Then you should thank me."

"For what?"

"For getting you reassigned to a detail this soft."

Maddock's face suddenly showed emotion, twist-

ing in a grimace. "I'm not part of that. I don't have the qualifications."

Kane's eyebrows rose. "What kind of qualifications do you need for this kind of work?"

"For one thing—"

"Shut up, dipshit," the other man snapped. "He doesn't need to hear your life story."

The man stepped forward, putting the tip of a Shockstick close to Kane's head. "Our orders are to

make sure you eat. So eat."

Kane shrugged, lifted the lid of the tray, picked up his spoon and dug into the oatmeal. He said nothing

else to Maddock, remembering the night when he, Grant, Brigid Baptiste and Domi inadvertently

destroyed the medical facility beneath the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. The barons depended on the

facility, and though its destruction had been the accidental by-product of shooting down an aircraft,

Kane wasn't about to tell the guards that.

At the end of the twentieth century, the Aurora aircraft had been the pinnacle of avionic achievement.

Before the nukecaust, the Aurora enjoyed the status of the most closely guarded of military secrets.

Supremely maneuverable, it was capable of astonishingly swift ascent and descent, could take off

vertically and hover absolutely motionless.

was a true marauder of the skies, and as such, the baronial hierarchy relied upon it to locate sources of

raw genetic material in the Outlands, kill the do-

nors, harvest their organs and tissues, and deliver them to the mesa to be processed.

The mission that brought Kane and his companions to the New Mexican desert was to eliminate the

barons' method of harvesting fresh material—merchandise, as they referred to it. Grant shot down the

Aurora with a rocket launcher while it hovered above its underground hangar. The impact of the crash

breached the magnetic-field container of the two-tiered fusion generator—or at least that was Brigid

Baptiste's theory. Whatever happened, Kane couldn't argue with the cataclysmic aftermath, akin to

unleashing the energy of the sun inside a cellar. Although much of the kinetic force and heat were

channeled upward and out through the hangar doors, a scorching, smashing wave of destruction swept

through the installation. As he learned later, if not for the series of vanadium blast-shield bulkheads, the

entire mesa could have come tumbling down.

Kane blinked, biting back a yawn, trying to focus not only on the memory of the night at the mesa but

also on his reintroduction to Maddock. He wondered if the young man felt any gratitude toward him.

Apparently, his partner Gifford wondered the same thing, so after that brief meeting, he never saw

Maddock again. Only Gifford came thereafter, using a magnetic card to open the cell door and make

sure he always ate the oatmeal served to him three times a day. Three times a day a smirking Gifford

inspected the toilet and tiny sink to make sure he hadn't dumped the food.

It took Kane several servings of the bland food to figure out why his diet never varied. The porridge was

high in protein and probably laced with both a stimulant and blood-building enzyme. The stimulant was

more than likely of the catecholamine family, drugs the Magistrate Divisions used to counteract shock

and exhaustion. He dredged his memory for the details of how it worked on the renal blood supply,

increasing cardiac output without increasing the need for oxygen consumption.

Combined with the food loaded with protein to speed sperm production, the stimulant provided him with

hours of high energy. Since he was forced to achieve erection and ejaculation six times a day every two

days, his energy and sperm count had to be pre-ternaturally high, even higher than was normal for him.

Kane knew he was supposed to be special, for a variety of reasons—or at least that was the story he

had been told by Mohandas Lakesh Singh who had founded the group of exiles at Cerberus redoubt.

The qualities that made him unique sprang from the Totality Concept's Overproject Excalibur. One of its

subdivisions, Scenario Joshua, had its roots in the twentieth century's Genome Project, which mapped

human genomes to specific chromosomal functions and locations. The end result had been in vitro

genetic samples of the best of the best. In the vernacular of the time, it was referred to as purity control.

Everyone who enjoyed full ville citizenship was the descendant of the Genome Project. Sometimes, a

par-

ticular gene carrying a desirable trait \yas spliced into an unrelated egg, or an undesirable gene removed.

Despite many failures, when there was a success, it was replicated over and over, occasionally with

variations. Even the baronial oligarchy was bred from this system.

Some forty years before, when Lakesh had determined to build a resistance movement against the

baronies, he rifled Scenario Joshua's genetic records for the most deskable traits to breed into potential

warriors in his cause.

According to Lakesh, Kane's family line possessed the qualities of high intelligence, superior adaptive

traits, resistance to disease and exceptionally potent sperm.

Kane wasn't a superhuman, but he was superior. Baron Cobalt knew that. He had access to the same

records as Lakesh, and he took full advantage of them. There was more to the process than insuring

Kane's superior traits. With the destruction of the Ar-chuleta Mesa medical facilities, the barons no

longer had access to the ectogenesis techniques of fetal development outside the womb. The

conventional means of procreation was the only option for keeping the hybrid race alive.

Lakesh speculated that since Area 51's history was intertwined with rumors of alien involvement, Baron

Cobalt was using its medical facilities as a substitute for those destroyed in New Mexico. Of course, he

couldn't be sure if the aliens referred to by the pre-dark conspiracy theorists were the Archons. If so, the

medical facilities in Area 51 would be of great use to the hybrid barons since it would already be

designed for their metabolisms. Lakesh suspected Baron Cobalt could have reactivated them, turned

them into a processing and treatment center without having to rebuild from scratch, and transferred the

medical personnel from the Dulce facility.

Baron Cobalt's occupation of Area 51 was still a matter of wonder to Kane. As far as he remembered

from old Magistrate Intel reports, most of Nevada was considered Outlands. It wasn't a part of official

baronial territory, certainly not Baron Cobalt's. The nearest ville was that of Snakefish in California.

Kane couldn't even hazard a guess as to how much of the Area 51 installation was still intact. The few

scraps of intel that Lakesh had found in the Cerberus database were nearly two hundred years old, and

had to be assembled like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

Baron Cobalt might be able to provide some of the missing pieces if he felt generous, but generosity was

not part of his personality. For that matter, Kane hadn't seen the baron since the day of his capture and

his inauguration into stud service. He hadn't seen Domi or heard anything about her, and he wasn't

inclined to ask questions. If she had escaped apprehension and was still free and undetected in the

enormous installation, he didn't want one of his questions to spur a search for her. If the albino girl had

somehow managed to escape, then so much the better.

For reasons he couldn't name, he knew Domi

wasn't dead. Even if Gifford told him she was, he wouldn't believe it until he viewed her corpse. His

certainty she still lived derived less from faith in her survival skills than his own instincts. But, he reminded

himself darkly, if his instincts were everything he purported them to be, he wouldn't be penned up and

treated as a prize bull.

Very little interest had been evinced toward him, other than his capacity to plant his seed in the females.

For that matter, Kane had no idea how long he would be allowed to live. He assumed it would be until

the first pregnancy was carried to full term, but he didn't know how many months comprised a hybrid's

gestation period. Nor did he know if a hybrid female could even conceive a child by a human male. All

he knew was what Baron Cobalt had told him upon his capture, accusing him of perpetrating an act of

genocide. Rather than kill him outright, the baron had promised, "I won't let you die." The vow became a

mantra, not of mercy but of condemnation and punishment.

However, Kane did know the male hybrids were incapable of engaging in conventional acts of

procreation, at least physically. As he had seen, their organs of reproduction were so undeveloped as to

be vestigial. Before his capture, he had actually shied from wondering if the females were similarly

under-equipped, but as he discovered many times since arriving at the complex, they were not.

Sleep suddenly washed over Kane in waves. He swallowed a yawn, the effort making his ears pop.

His eyes began to water. He realized he was no longer cold. In fact, he was warm, comfortably,

wonderfully warm. Snuggled in the blanket, he tried to remain upright, but it took all of his strength to

keep his eyes open. Dimly, he became aware of his body falling over to one side. He was deep asleep

before his head touched the pillow.

Chapter 2

A small sound, so faint and indistinct as to be subliminal, gently pierced the black cloak of slumber

swathing Kane's mind. With an effort that seemed to take hours and concentration so single-minded it

was an obsession, he managed to crack open one eyelid.

He saw a square panel in the wall where it joined with the floor closing almost silently. He spied his tray

of food next to the door, and he smothered a laugh of triumph. He remained motionless on the bunk. It

wouldn't do for him to act as if the sound of the panel opening and closing had roused him. For the

benefit of the spy-eye monitor, he maintained steady deep breathing, as if he were still fast asleep.

He lay unmoving for what seemed like an hour, then slowly he stirred, rolling over, shifting position and

finally sitting up. He knuckled his eyes and yawned. He shuffled across the cell and bent over to pick up

the tray. As he did so, he glanced surreptitiously at the wall. Now that he knew what to look for, he just

barely discerned a square outline barely thicker than human hair.

Kane sat on the edge of the bunk and obediently ate the inevitable oatmeal. He had gone to great

lengths to seem docile, but always he waited for an opportunity, for an edge, for an opening.

He wasn't used to waiting. He had been a poor student of the waiting game, but he'd forced himself to

learn it. He also forced himself to accept the fact no rescue would be forthcoming. Minutes after his and

Domi's arrival in Area 51's mat-trans gateway, the unit had been shut down and the jump lines cut.

Grant, Brigid, Lakesh and anyone else back at the Cerberus redoubt in Montana interested in then- fates

would have to travel cross-country to find out what had happened.

Kane seriously doubted he and Domi could be traced by the signals transmitted by their biolink

transponders. Everyone in the Cerberus redoubt had been injected with a subcutaneous transponder that

transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brainwave patterns. Based on organic

nanotechnology, the transponder was a nonharmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an

individual's glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis. The signal was relayed to the redoubt by the

Comsat, one of the two satellites to which the installation was uplinked.

The Cerberus computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and bounced it down

to the redoubt's hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning niters combed through the telemetry using

special human biological encoding. The digital data stream was then routed through a locational program

to precisely isolate an individual's present position.

As far as Kane knew, his present position could be

under half a mile «f vanadium-shielded rock through which the telemetric signal couldn't penetrate. The

Cerberus personnel knew to where he and Domi had jumped, but he was certain they had no idea if the

two were alive, dead or otherwise. So Kane resigned himself to do what was expected of him, at least

for the foreseeable future.

Only Kane's sense of humor, his appreciation of the ridiculous vagaries of life, kept him sane. When he

reflected on his many celibate months after his escape from Cobaltville, the irony of now having more

female flesh than he cared to deal with sometimes made him laugh. Of course, the amusement value had

begun to pall as of late. He couldn't help but wonder about Baptiste's reaction when—not if, he

reminded himself fiercely—he told her of Baron Cobalt's concept of penance.

When he finished his meal, he returned the tray to its place on the floor and went back to his bunk. As

soon as he lay down, he heard the click as a magnetic card was swiped through the electronic lock. The

door swung inward.

"Kane!" Gifford barked.

Kane sat up as the man stepped into the doorway, Shockstick in one hand, a set of chrome-plated

swivel cuffs in the other. Gifford never entered the cell alone, but always waited just a single step out into

the corridor.

"I haven't been asleep two days," Kane said.

Gifford chuckled snidery and made an exaggerated show of checking his wrist chron. "More like sixteen

hours. Poor fella, I guess those bitches wore you out Get ready to be worn down to a nub. You're

pulling a double shift, you lucky bastard you."

Kane stiffened in surprise. The routine had never varied before. "On whose orders?"

The guard scowled. "It doesn't matter to me and it sure as shit doesn't matter to you. The deal is simple

enough, ain't it?"

Kane didn't answer, but he silently agreed with Gifford. If he performed, he lived. If he didn't, he died.

The mantra Baron Cobalt crooned into his ear upon his capture still echoed hi his mind: "I won't let you

die."

"Up," Gifford snapped.

Levering himself to his feet, Kane stood hi front of his bunk, wrists together. He was unshaved, and his

thick dark hair lay against the base of his neck in unwashed strands. No fear showed in his gray-blue

eyes or hi the set of his long, lean-muscled body, but a spasm of vertigo caused him to totter briefly. The

dizziness was a side effect of the drug-laced food.

The guard shifted his weight from one booted foot to the other and grasped the molded plastic grip of

the Shockstick tightly. In a suspicious tone, he demanded, "Are you all right?"

Kane smiled thinly, showing the edges of his teeth. "I didn't think it mattered."

Gifford's eyes narrowed, and he gestured with the baton. "It might to some. It doesn't to me. Now

move, slagger."

Kane moved, trying to step jauntily despite the

weakness in his legs. As cold as he had felt a few hours ago, his hopes of escape or rescue were even

frostier.

As he entered the corridor, the guard pointed at his chest with the Shockstick. "Stop. Hands."

In an almost involuntarily motion, Kane extended both hands, wrists pressing against each other. The

guard slapped the shackles in place and locked them with a loud, final click. Kane didn't resist. He had

learned already that any attempt to do so earned a touch of the Shockstick and unendurable agony.

He preceded Gifford down the featureless corridor for a hundred paces, his rubber-soled shoes

occasionally squeaking on the floor tiles. He had seen very little of the legendary Area 51 complex, and

what he had seen of it was no more dramatic than hallways and offices.

The corridor ended at a T junction. Beyond it an arched tunnel stretched in either direction as far as the

eye could see. A small, burnished-metal shifter engine and passenger car rested in perfect balance atop a

narrow-gauge monorail track. It disappeared into the darkness to the left and to the right.

Gifford undipped a small trans-comm unit from his belt and spoke into it. "This is Gifford in section

47-12a. I've got the donor at station three."

Kane had heard himself referred to as such many times, so he no longer took offense at being objectified.

The voice filtering from the comm sounded bored. "Code."

Gifford tried to subvocalize so Kane couldn't hear, but days—or weeks—ago he had read the man's

lips. He said lowly, "Jimmy six January."

"Roger," responded the voice from the comm. "Powering up."

The engine suddenly emitted a soft electric hum. At a gesture from the Shockstick, Kane climbed into

the passenger car. The monorail system appeared to be the only way to move around the many and

widely separated sections of the installation. Except for a cargo train he had seen in the warehouse area

on the day he arrived, the cars carried only two people. Without the proper code words, power

wouldn't be fed to the rail.

Sitting beside him, Gifford said into the comm, "Green. Go."

The hum rose in pitch and with a slight lurch, the train slid almost silently along the rail. It swiftly built up

speed. Overhead light fixtures flicked by so rapidly that they combined with the intervals of darkness

between them to acquire a strobing pattern. Neither man spoke as the train sped down the shaft.

The rail curved lazily to the right, plunging almost noiselessly into a side chute. Lights shone intermittently

on the smooth walls, small drops of illumination that did little to alleviate the deep shadows. The trains

slowed, then hissed to a halt beside a broad platform.

Gifford climbed out first, then gestured for Kane to step onto the platform and walk down the corridor

ahead of him. Kane did so and after a few yards stopped automatically in front of an open cubicle.

"Hands."

Kane extended his arms and Gifford deftly unlocked the shackles. The first few times Kane performed

the drill, the urge to deliver a teisho blow to the man's nose and spear his brain with fractured shards of

nasal bones had been almost overwhelming.

"Strip."

Kane unzipped his jumpsuit, kicked out of his shoes and stepped naked into the cubicle. A door slid

shut behind him. Kane stood in the small dark room hardly larger man a closet—or a coffin. A red

ceiling light winked on, and hard sprays of liquid hit him from every direction. Grime, caked sweat and

even dead skin cells slid off his body. The jet sprays reeked of disinfectant. The decontamination booth

was a prelude to copulation. The hybrids didn't want him spreading any nasty diseases among their

numbers. It was certainly a valid fear. Despite their enormous intellects, the hybrids were susceptible to

an entire range of congenital immune-deficiency diseases, so he was periodically subjected to a cleansing

process that sterilized even his thoughts.

Kane moved about in the spray, working it even into his hair like a shampoo. The streams ended,

replaced by warm air gusting down from a ceiling vent. His very clean, sterilized body was dried within a

minute. A light bulb flashed green on the wall and a drawer slid out. From it Kane removed a small

battery-powered shaver, which he ran over his face, re-

moving the stubble. The skin of the hybrids was thin and sensitive, and the females were particularly

susceptible to beard burn.

A panel on the opposite side of the cubicle slid aside, and Kane stepped into the Spartanly furnished

chamber where he would spend the next eight to ten hours. Despite the muted lighting, he saw the bed

and the small table holding a carafe of water and a pair of folded towels. He went to the side of the bed

and stood, waiting for his first partner of the shift to come through the door.

At first the females selected for the process donned wigs and wore cosmetics in order to appear more

human to the trapped sperm donors. Kane had overheard snatches of conversation about how a number

of men pressed into stud service were so terrified of the hybrid females they had difficulty achieving

erection, the aphrodisiac gel notwithstanding. They had to be strapped down, and for the first couple of

sessions, so had Kane. He was never sure if the restraints were designed to keep him from attacking his

partners or simply controlling him so he wouldn't injure the fragile females in a blind rutting fever when

the gel took effect.

Lately, the restraints hadn't been employed, either. He wasn't sure if the reason was an acknowledgment

of his ability to control himself during the sessions or his apparent lack of fear of the hybrids. He knew

that not all of the human men regarded the females with terror. Right before his capture, Kane killed a

guard

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Ifyoupurchasedthisbookwithoutacoveryoushouldbeawarethatthisbookisstolenproperty.Itwasreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher,andneithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedanypaymentforthis"strippedbook."ToDeirdreandChesley—Kangeisu.ru!FirsteditionFebruary2001ISBN0-373-63829-9TIGERSOFHEAVENSpecia...

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James Axler - Outlanders 16 - Tigers of Heaven.pdf

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James Axler - Outlanders 16 - Tigers of Heaven

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