Axler, James - Outlander 15 - Doom Dynasty

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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty

Doom Dynasty

James Axler

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."

First edition November 2000 ISBN 0-373-63828-0

DOOM DYNASTY

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

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.

Only thin smoke without flame

From the cairns of stone and grass,

Yet this doom will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

—Justin Geoffrey

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 clung 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 consoli-dated their power and reclaimed technology for the

vitles. 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 tews 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

expedi-tion. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about

alien mas-ters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary

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execution, and grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgive-ness 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 mysteri-ous and alien power and deny loyally 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 clues 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 Cobaltvilie.

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,

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

With their past turned into a lie, their future threat-ened, 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

Toward the middle of an overcast autumn afternoon, with the sun finally breaking free from the black

mass of thunderheads, the settlement of Port Morninglight was overwhelmed.

Upright sharpened logs were meant to serve as a protective palisade for the small collection of reed and

thatch-roofed huts, but the barrier looked better suited for keeping livestock in than enemies out The area

around the stockade fence was open except for clus-ters of scraggly sage and mesquite that offered little

cover. The squad of Magistrates couldn't approach without being seen, so they didn't expend any time or

effort trying.

Before the attack commenced, Pollard didn't de-mand surrender, nor did the citizens ask for terms. They

simply began shooting from parapets built on the palisade walls, first with bows and arrows, then with

home-forged flintlocks. The twenty Magistrates under Pollard's command quickly realized it was eas-ier

to keep out of range of the crude .75-caliber mini-balls than it was the four-foot-long arrows. The

rifle-men weren't very accurate, but the archers were. If not for their body armor, the Mags would have

been pincushioned a dozen times over.

Only a single mortar launcher was needed to breach Port Morninglight's fortifications. The stripped-down

PRB 424, taken from the Cobaltville armory, was as-sembled in a matter of minutes. Launched from only

a hundred yards beyond the village's stockade fence, each 60 mm, high-ex round pulverized the logs and

threw up great clouds of dust and grit. The echoes of the cannonade rolled across the barren sand dunes

like prolonged thunderclaps. Four shells reduced a thirty-foot span of the wall to a heap of splinters and

broken timbers.

Pollard dutifully led his men through the breach, clambering over the smoldering wreckage of the fence.

Streamers of acrid black smoke veiled the in-terior of the settlement. Arrows and muskets were fired from

behind the crude huts. Only a handful of armed defenders remained and once they loosed then-last shots,

they died under the autoblasters wielded by the Magistrates.

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The Mag force suffered only one casualty, a triple-careless stupe named Mitchell who allowed a child to

stab him in the throat with a filleting knife. The blade punched through his neck and into his brain stem,

and he died without a murmur of surprise or protest.

Defying the vengeful snarls of the men who wit-nessed Mitchell's swift death, Pollard ordered the child to

be bound, not chilled. He commanded two of his Mags to strip Mitchell of his armor and Kevlar

undersheathing. Concealing physical evidence of the incursion was the mission's secondary priority.

After that, Pollard put his men to work rounding up the survivors. It didn't take long. He stood in the

humid air, redolent with the coppery tang of blood and brine, watching as scarlet runnels cut crusted

channels through the ground. A thousand flies crawled and feasted on them. He could hear the boom of

the surf over the rise at the rear of the settlement. He had never seen either the Lantic or Cific oceans, but

he kept his curiosity in check. He had never been in California, either, until dawn the day before, but he

wasn't too interested in looking around.

So far he had seen very little of Baron Snakefish's territory that seemed worth coveting. The terrain

around the little seaside ville of Port Morninglight was slashed through with dry streambeds and narrow

ravines. Clumps of sagebrush surrounded the area like tufts of hair atop a balding man's pate. In the

distance, humping up from the horizon, the gray peaks of the Sierra Nevada range shouldered the sky.

Although not an educated man by even the most charitable definition of the term, Pollard knew that when

the nukes flew and the mushroom clouds scorched their way into the heavens, the San Andreas Fault had

given one great final heave and thousands of square miles of California coastline dropped into the sea. For

the past two centuries, the Cific had lapped less than thirty miles from the foothills of the Sierras.

A woman ran out of a hut, screaming as she fled from the black-armored killers. A Mag tripped her, and

another pulled the homespun shift off her body. Pollard was about to order them away from the out-lander

female since she looked young, healthy and uninjured. Then he saw she was at least six months' pregnant.

He turned away, allowing his men to take their pleasure.

He strode up to where MacMurphy and Swayze were herding the prisoners together. As per baronial

edict, the survivors weren't executed. They were ex-amined. The Mags arranged them into two columns,

separating the old, the infirm and the seriously wounded from those who were young and suffered only

superficial injuries. None of the eighteen survi-vors had come through the assault completely un-scathed.

Even children manned the walls, using sling-shots.

Pollard inspected the youngest and most lightly in-jured of the prisoners, marching from one end of each

column to the other, repressing a curse at the low number. There appeared to be only nine that met Baron

Cobalt's standards. He had no idea of why the baron had assigned him to lead a Mag squad into California

and capture outlanders. All he really knew about his mission was he'd been ordered to get in and out with

healthy prisoners before Baron Snakefish learned that Mags from Cobaltville were in his terri-tory.

Planting his gauntleted fists on his hips, Pollard gazed at the nine people. A mixture of women, men and

two teenagers, they averted their eyes. Their clothing consisted of simple tunics and pants, both of

brightly colored cloth embroidered with fancy curli-cues along the seams and hems. The tunics of the

women bore beautifully crafted images of swans, cranes and fish, all worked in multicolored thread. The

quality of the needlework and the fabric itself seemed too rich for a community of fisherpeople.

Pollard deliberately struck a pose as if he were on display in a museum case. He knew the sunlight

glint-ing off the black polycarbonate exoskeleton encasing his stocky body lent him a fearsome aspect.

Like all hard-contact Magistrates, Pollard's armor was close-fitting, molded to conform to the biceps,

triceps, pectorals and abdomen. Even with its Kevlar undersheathing, the armor was lightweight and

pro-vided no loose folds to snag against projections. The only spot of color anywhere on it was the small

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disk-shaped badge of office emblazoned on the left pec-toral. It depicted, in crimson, a stylized, balanced

scales of justice, superimposed over a nine-spoked wheel. The badge symbolized the Magistrate's oath to

keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine villes.

Pollard's regulation side arm, the Sin Eater, was holstered on his right forearm. A big-bored automatic

handblaster, it was less than fourteen inches in length at full extension with a magazine that carried

twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo. When not in use, the stock folded over the top of the blaster, lying along

the frame, reducing its holstered length to ten inches.

When the Sin Eater was needed, Pollard would simply tense his wrist tendons and sensitive actuators

activated a flexible cable in the holster to snap the weapon smoothly into his waiting hand, the stock

un-folding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eater had no trigger guard or safety, the blaster fired

immedi-ately upon touching his crooked index finger.

The weapon was more than a murderous weapon; it was a badge of office almost as important as the one

he wore upon his breastplate. All Mags were ex-pected to know it more intimately than anything else in

the world.

Attached to his belt by a magnetic clip was his close-assault weapon. The Copperhead was a chopped-

down autoblaster, gas-operated, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire. The magazine held fif-teen

rounds of 4.85 mm steel-jacketed bullets. Two feet in length, the CAW featured a grip and trigger unit

that were placed in front of the breech to allow for one-handed use. An optical image-intensifier scope

was fitted on top, as well as a laser autotargeter. Because of its low recoil, the Copperhead could be fired

in a long, devastating full-auto burst.

Like the armor encasing his body, Pollard's visored helmet wa&made of black polycarbonate. Fitting over

the upper half and back of his head, it left only a portion of the mouth and chin exposed. The slightly

concave, red-tinted visor served two functions—4t protected the eyes from foreign particles, and the

elec-trochemical polymer was connected to a passive night sight that intensified ambient light to permit

one-color night vision.

The tiny image-enhancer sensor mounted on the forehead of the helmet did not emit detectable rays,

though its range was only twenty-five feet, even on a fairly clear night with strong moonlight.

There was another reason behind the helmet and the exoskeleton, which were designed to inspire awe and

fear. When a man put on the armor, he was sym-bolically surrendering his identity in order to serve a

cause greater than a mere individual life.

Pollard's father had chosen to smother his identity, as had his father before him. For that matter, all

cur-rent Magistrates, the third generation, had exchanged personal hopes, dreams and desires for a life of

ser-vice to a baron.

To the prisoners, Pollard said dispassionately, "We'll be moving out shortly and taking you with us. If you

cooperate, you won't be harmed. If you resist, you'll be chilled on the spot Those are your only choices."

None of mem said anything as MacMurphy and Swayze moved down the column, fastening heavy,

yokelike collars of leather and wood around their necks. The pair of Mags threaded a slim length of chain

through staples on the collars, fettering the peo-ple together.

Pollard would have preferred to bind their hands, as well, but the prisoners would make better time with

their limbs unencumbered, especially over some of the appallingly rugged terrain they had to cross. Also,

the barony of Snakefish lay only forty-odd miles to the northwest, and as far as he knew a patrol or

trad-ing convoy was on its way. The reports provided by the Intel section described how the fishing

village of Port Morninglight was tolerated by Baron Snakefish because it provided his ville with a source

of food other than that grown in the fields. The standing pol-icy shared by most of the baronial oligarchy

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was to raze Outland settlements to the ground in order to prevent noncitizens from becoming self-

sufficient and therefore rebellious.

Peeling back the cuff of his gauntlet, Pollard stud-ied the LED face of his wrist chron, then glanced at the

position of the sun. He swore beneath his breath, then bellowed to the Mags spread out around the

vil-lage, "Pick up the pace, you bastards! We've got only five hours of daylight left!"

The Magistrates policing the killzone sped up their movements, snatching up spent cartridge cases and

jamming them into canvas bags. Pollard wasn't too worried about the treaded tracks made by their boots

in the soft, sandy soil, since the steady sea breeze would obliterate them in a matter of minutes. Baron

Cobalt's order was to leave no clue, no hint of what happened to the residents of Port Morninglight—or at

least no clue that could be traced back to him.

MacMurphy tugged at the length of chain, pulling out most of the slack. Swayze attached a metal

cross-bar to the trailing end. "We're ready to go, sir," he announced.

Pollard nodded brusquely, pretending to ignore the baleful glares directed at him from the prisoners. Most

of their faces were smoke streaked and begrimed, but at least they appeared to be in fairly good health. A

woman stared boldly at him from beneath her hayrick tangle of dark blond hair.

"Where are you taking us, sec man?" she de-manded.

An obsolete term, "sec man" was applied to men who served in baronial security forces. Nowadays it was

used only in the hinterlands and over the past century had become something of an insult Magis-trates

weren't the descendants of ragtag crews of thuggish blastermen who obeyed self-styled barons; rather

they were enforcers of law, opponents of an-archy, spiritually sanctioned to act as judge, jury and

executioner.

That was the bare-bones history Pollard had been taught at the academy, but rather than correct the out-

lander woman, he cuffed her openhanded across the face. He didn't put much of his strength into the

blow, since he mainly wanted to remind her of what she was. Still, she reeled backward, causing the

entire line of prisoners to stumble and stagger.

As they regained their balance, cursing both him and the woman, Pollard opened the comm-link chan-nel

and spoke into the transceiver built into the jaw guard of his helmet. "Quantrell, Ranee, Turner. Front and

center."

Three armored men jogged toward him from all points of the perimeter. When they stood at attention in a

semicircle around him, Pollard gestured diffi-dently to the column of survivors who were too wounded,

too old or otherwise unfit to make the jour-ney to the Sierras.

"Those are the culls," he said matter-of-factly. "Flash-blast them."

As one, in almost mechanical unison, the three Magistrates turned toward the men and women, the barrels

of their Copperheads snapping up. The people bleated wordlessly in terror, broke formation and

scat-tered.

The chattering, ripping rasps of three subguns on full-auto overwhelmed their screams. The rounds

smashed into the running people, slapping them down amid scarlet sprays, their arms and legs flailing.

Even after all of them had been hammered to the ground, the Copperheads continued to stutter, spent shell

cas-ings spewing from ejector ports like glittering rain.

The Mags didn't stop shooting until bolts snapped open loudly on empty chambers. The bodies lay where

the steel-jacketed fusillade had battered them, crumpled in bullet-slashed heaps. The sandy soil soaked up

their blood like a sponge, turning the ground around them into crimson-stained sludge.

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Turner, Ranee and Quantrell looked expectantly to-ward Pollard, awaiting further orders. Pollard impas-

sively surveyed the three men, then jabbed a finger toward Ranee. "You. You're the chosen man."

"Yes, sir." Ranee's Sin Eater sprang from the fore-arm holster into his hand. He stepped forward, mov-ing

among the bodies, pointing the handblaster down and squeezing off a single round into every head.

The Magistrate selected to fire final head shots was always known as "the chosen man." Pollard had

al-ways considered the practice a waste of ammo, but it was part of some old, murky military tradition.

He strode away through the settlement. He saw a few goats in a wood-railed pen but no beasts of bur-den.

There were freestanding racks with smoked fish and strips of seaweed stretched over the crossbars and a

few heaps of clam shells, but little else in the way of foodstuffs. It was apparent Port Morninglight lived

almost entirely on the bounty provided by the ocean.

Pollard paused to inspect a longbow lying on the ground. It was beautifully crafted, made of smooth, red-

lacquered wood. Like their clothing, the weapon appeared too beautifully made to have been fashioned by

the people of Port Morninglight. There was an elegance, an artistry to it, and he had seen none of that

among the possessions of the residents. Nor did the wood look like any he had seen on the day-long

march from Redoubt Charlie to the settlement.

Pollard had led his men down tree-dotted hillsides, then across a wind-scoured wilderness of ridges,

spines of stone, dry riverbeds, fields of tumbled rock and acres of scrub brush. To refer to the confusing

route as merely rugged was being more than impre-cise; it was an outright lie. Several times he became

disoriented, but he didn't allow his Mags to see him surreptitiously checking the map.

The men were already disoriented from arriving in Redoubt Charlie in groups of five. Except for Pollard,

none of them had ever heard of a mat-trans unit be-fore, much less stepped into one. The mat-trans

gate-ways—jump chambers—were in hidden redoubts, underground fortresses scattered across the nuke-

ravaged face of North America.

Pollard knew very little about the gateways, only what he had learned from his former superior officer,

Salvo. He understood they could transport a man in a flicker of microseconds from place to place, but

how this miracle was accomplished was beyond him, even if he stretched his imagination to its limits.

Over a year ago, such a mind-breaking concept was the last thing he had ever expected to encounter when

he pursued a group of insurrectionists into Mesa Verde Canyon. Later, Salvo had tersely explained mat

the matter-transfer units transported both organic and inorganic material from point A to a point Z

without the traveler stirring so much as a toe. As a menacing codicil to the explanation, Salvo added that

the de-vices were the deepest, most ruthlessly safeguarded secrets of the unified baronies. If Pollard so

much as hinted to anyone he knew they even existed, much less the fundamentals of their operation, his

life span could be measured in minutes.

However, Pollard never bought into Salvo's ver-sion of how the insurrectionists knew of the device. He

didn't ask questions, certainly not the wrong ones. He was content to be an active player in what was

privately referred to as "Salvo's Vendetta."

He knew full well that had he stumbled upon a gateway without the knowledge of anyone other than

Salvo, a swift execution was all he could look forward to in the way of career advancement.

Instead, he had been promoted—strictly through at-trition, true enough—but he was now division

com-mander and therefore privy to certain secrets. When briefed on the assignment by Griffin, the new

Mag Division administrator, he was apprised of more than mission parameters. Those were fairly

straightfor-ward.

Since Griffin knew that the long-vanished Salvo had provided Pollard with a thumbnail history of the mat-

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trans units, he dispensed with supplying him with more information. Pollard easily recalled what Salvo

had told him over a year ago—how the gateways were part of Project Cerberus, which was one of many

research projects connected to the Totality Concept.

Over two centuries ago, before the sky darkened with massive quantities of pulverized rubble propelled

into the atmosphere by hundreds of simultaneous atomic explosions, the Totality Concept was an ultra-

top-secret scientific undertaking whose different re-search branches were housed in hidden redoubts. The

official designations of the redoubts had been based on the old international radio code, as in "Charlie"

representing the letter C.

During the mission briefing, Griffin supplied him with a string of numbers, confusing jumbles of digits he

was to enter into the jump chamber's keypad con-trols. Destination-lock coordinates, Griffin called them.

After handing Pollard a strip of paper bearing the numeric codes, he commanded him to memorize them,

then destroy the paper.

For the two days preceding the jump from the mat-trans unit hidden on A Level of Cobaltville's

Admin-istrative Monolith, Pollard had tried his best to com-mit the digits to memory, but ultimately he

failed. He had already participated in several failed missions, so he was too afraid to inform Griffin he

was unable to accomplish such a simple task.

The three digits and procedures to open and close the sec door in Redoubt Charlie were easy to

remem-ber, but the coordinates of where the prisoners were to be sent refused to be impressed into his

mind. Therefore, he impressed them into his flesh. Using indelible ink, Pollard wrote them on the inside

of his left wrist.

An alarmed shout dragged Pollard's attention back to the present. He whirled, visored eyes tracking across

the village, squinting to see through the drift-ing veils of smoke. He heard the characteristic stutter of a

Sin Eater set on triburst, the reports sounding like staccato whipcracks.

He spotted a man standing on the crest of a dune on the far side of the village, waving his arms in a

strange rhythmic manner. He held a pair of long-handled, flat, paddlelike objects in his hands. Pollard

barely glimpsed the complex symbols inscribed on the surfaces before a storm of 9 mm rounds stitched a

series of dark holes across his back.

The man's arm movements became spasmodic, and his entire body convulsed under the multiple impacts.

He fell heavily, toppling face first to the sand.

Pollard watched as a Mag struggled up the slope of the dune. He wasn't sure which man it was until his

helmet comm-link hissed with static and Franco's breathless voice said, "Chilled him, sir."

"So I see," Pollard growled. "What are those things he was waving around?"

Pollard saw Franco pluck one of the objects from the dead man's hand. His voice, sounding slightly

troubled, said, "They're like fans, sir."

"Fans?" Pollard echoed derisively. "He wasn't waving them because he got overheated."

"No, sir." Franco turned, looking out toward the sea. His ebony-encased body suddenly stiffened. "I think

you should take a look at this."

"What is it?" Pollard demanded, not wanting to scale the sand dune.

"I'm really not sure, sir," Franco admitted.

Uttering a grunt of disgust, Pollard stamped across the village, breathing shallowly through his splayed

nostrils so as not to inhale too much of the astringent smoke. He lumbered up the dune, his boots slogging

through the loose sand. Twice he nearly fell. By the time he reached the crest, he was panting, sweat

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slid-ing down his bulldog-jowled face.

The man Franco had backshot lay spread-eagled, his face buried in the sand. Blood streamed from his

bullet-holed torso, puddling darkly around him. Pol-lard paid him no attention. Instead, he followed

Franco's gaze, toward the open ocean.

A collection of small one-masted sailboats was beached upon the shore, among nets and fishing tackle.

The heaving waves swept over jagged rock formations. The limitless blue expanse of the Cific evoked a

spark of awe within him. The largest body of water he had ever seen was a lake, and its opposite shore

was easily visible.

The ocean looked as vast as the sky, with foaming whitecaps instead of clouds. For an instant he couldn't

help but wonder what lay on the other side of it. Pollard knew the tiny black specks barely visible on the

horizon were barren islets known as the West-ern Isles, pieces of California that had not completely

submerged.

Franco pointed in a southwesterly direction. "See it, sir?"

Pollard narrowed his eyes. "See what?"

"That fog bank."

Pollard stared hard, and finally spied a yellowish vaporous smudge far down the shoreline, about three-

quarters of a mile away. He started to demand pro-fanely why Franco had summoned him to look at a fog

bank, when he realized the weather wasn't right for fog to form. Nor did the mist really look or behave

like fog. It billowed against the wind, some scraps twisting away, but appearing very thick at the water-

line—or just above it.

In a tense voice, Franco said, "For a second, I thought I saw something inside of it"

Shading his eyes with his hands, Pollard glimpsed a dark, indistinct shape within the heart of the cloud.

For a microsecond, the sun glinted brightly from a reflective metallic surface. Then it was gone, obscured

by the vapor.

Hefting the paddle-shaped object he had taken from the dead man, Franco declared anxiously, "Sir, I

think this slagger was using these to signal…like the old semaphore code."

Lowering his hands, Pollard quickly studied the paddle in Franco's hand, noting how it did indeed

resemble an oversize hand fan. The symbol inscribed on it was utterly unfamiliar, like a sunburst

containing three geometric shapes. Although he had no way of knowing, it seemed Oriental in design. He

didn't like the cold chill that suddenly crept up the base of his spine.

Franco tapped the sigil on the paddle. "I think this mark is called an ideograph. It means something."

Pollard did not respond, waiting for the younger man to say why it was significant.

"The fog may be a smoke screen generated by a ship," Franco continued. "He was either warning them off

or calling for help with these."

Neither possibility made Pollard's chill go away. Although the Intel section hadn't indicated that the ville

of Snakefish possessed anything like a navy, there was no reason why its own Magistrates couldn't use

boats to patrol the coast. Cobaltville and its sur-rounding territories were landlocked, and so the no-tion

that another barony might employ seagoing craft had never occurred to him. Still, for a reason he could

not name or understand, he knew if a boat lurked within the smear of fog, it had not been dispatched by

Baron Snakefish.

He felt a jolt of near panic, a sudden mad desire to put as much distance between the sea and his

pris-oners as possible. At the same time, he fancied he could feel the numbers he had written on his wrist

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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty

burning his skin.

Swiftly, Pollard opened the all-channel frequency on the helmet comm-link, barking, "Every one of you

bastards prepare to move out. We're triple-timing it. Standard deployment of personnel and firepower."

He snapped the orders as he clumsily climbed down the dune. None of the men protested that they hadn't

finished policing the area, and Pollard wouldn't have listened to them if they had. The art-istry of the

bows, the hand fans and the fog bank all slid together in his mind to create a mystery that, if not

frightening, posed a threat to the success of his mission. He feared failing Baron Cobalt far more than

whatever menace might be rising from the sea.

Pollard raised his voice in a roar, knowing it was unnecessary and knowing he concussed the eardrums of

the entire Mag force. "You stupe bastards! I said, Start moving!"

Chapter 2

"Stop moving," Grant whispered, raising the knife to shoulder level.

Domi's eyes narrowed to slits, her snow-white lashes veiling the bloodred irises. "I'm not moving," she

snapped fiercely, her shoulders trembling. "I'm shivering."

Grant grunted. "Stop it, or you're dead."

"It sees you," Kane said softly.

"With all those fucking eyes," retorted Grant, his characteristic lionlike roar of a voice muted to a

rum-ble, "how could it not?"

Domi nipped at her full underlip. "I can feel it climbing," she murmured breathlessly.

The creature's six legs secured grips in the tough fabric of her khaki shirt and crept slowly up her back, its

sickle-shaped pincers opening and closing reflex-ively.

Grant slid the titanium-jacketed point of his combat knife closer, but the mass of compound eyes

consti-tuting the bug's head rolled in his direction. He checked his movement, muttering, "Lakesh told us

to expect mutie snakes, not mutie insects."

"It looks like a mutagenically altered relation to a scorpion, and scorpions are arachnids, not insects,"

Brigid Baptiste noted.

Domi stopped short of snorting in exasperation, but said lowly, "It's still a big fuckin' bug with a big

fuckin' stinger."

The black monster clinging to Domi's shirt did hold the general contours of a scorpion, with a black,

shiny carapace, long foreclaws and stinger-tipped tail that curled and quivered over its segmented back.

But the resemblance ended there. Nearly eight inches long, with a cluster of eyes atop its streamlined

body, the scorpion-thing seemed to study the fourteen-inch blade in Grant's hand, silently assessing its

severity as a threat. The manner in which it rolled its many eyes in all directions was very disquieting.

"I don't think you can sneak up on it," Kane said quietly.

The curved tail stretched out to half the length of the creature's body and made a couple of forward darts,

as if in warning. A drop of amber venom formed on the barbed point of the stinger. Grant care-fully

withdrew the knife from the bug's range of vi-sion. After a watchful second, the scorpion began climbing

again.

The four people—and one mutie bug—crouched in a clearing amid an expanse of shoulder-high scrub

brush. All around was a semiarid landscape, not quite a desert but not a particularly hospitable place,

either. Here and there a solitary tree rose to break the mo-notony of the tableland. Now and then a rare

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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty

stream cut a shallow dell across the terrain. The night before, they had made camp in such a dell. They

could have pushed on, but all of them were tired after descending the rocky, arduous path from Redoubt

Charlie.

Kane's eyes flicked toward the distant mountain slope, absently noting the miles-long scar of a two-

century-old earth slip. He could see no trace of the entrance to the installation tucked beneath the lip of

the peak above.

For a reason she had not explained, Domi had spread out her bedroll some distance from the rest of them.

When she awakened, she found she was sharing her accommodations with an uninvited bunk mate.

Her urgent whisper drew Kane's attention back to her. "Do something before it lays eggs in my ear!"

Domi barely topped five feet in height, and she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her

slender build was insolently curved, with gener-ous hips, long slim legs and perky breasts.

A mop of ragged, close-cropped bone-white hair framed her pearly, hollow-cheeked face. Despite her

albinism and burning red eyes, she was weirdly beau-tiful, particularly with her complexion, the color and

texture of a polished pearl. Raised in the Outlands, she displayed the free style and outspoken rough

man-ner acquired in the scramble for existence far from the relative luxury of the villes.

Grant backed away before straightening to his full height of six feet four inches. His face was locked in a

stony mask as Domi scowled at him. The two peo-pie were a study in complete contrasts, not just

phys-ically but emotionally. Grant was broad shouldered and barrel-chested, and his high forehead was

topped by short, gray-sprinkled hair. A down-sweeping mus-tache showed ebony against the dark brown

of his face. He wore a black, high-collared coverall made of a Kevlar weave.

He hefted his knife uncertainly. "I'm open to sug-gestions."

To Domi, Brigid said soothingly, "Just sit tight. As long as it doesn't feel threatened, it won't sting you."

She tossed her loose tumbles of thick, wavy red-gold hair off her shoulders, affecting not to notice the

dour, dubious glance Grant cast in her direction. Bri-gid's big, slightly slanted emerald eyes fixed on the

scorpion-thing as it reached out tentatively with a foreclaw to touch the collar of Domi's shirt. Tall, long-

legged with a willowy, athletic build, Brigid did not allow the apprehension mounting within her to show

on her smoothly contoured face.

Kane eyed the position of the early-morning sun and said lowly, "We can't wait all day for the damn thing

to make up its mind."

An inch over six feet, Kane was not as tall or as broad as Grant, but every line of his long-limbed body

was hard and stripped of excess flesh. Most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, lending

his physique a marked resemblance to a wolf. His longish dark hair held sun-touched highlights, and his

high-planed face was deeply tanned. A thin, hairline scar showed white on his left cheek. His narrowed

eyes were faded to a pale gray-blue, the color of the high sky at sunset. He wore a black coverall identical

to Grant's.

Domi stiffened as she felt the pincer questing softly at her nape. She drew in a sharp breath between her

teeth. The bug stopped as it tried to determine the nature of the new substance. Carefully, she reached

down to pick up a fist-sized rock. In a steel-edged tone, Domi announced,' 'If nobody's going to do

any-thing, I will."

"And if it stings you?" Grant challenged.

Domi hesitated, then gestured slightly toward the flat, metal-sheathed case lying at the edge of the

campsite. "We got plenty medicine in that."

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JamesAxler-Outlanders-DoomDynastyDoomDynastyJamesAxlerIfyoupurchasedthisbookwithoutacoveryoushouldbeawarethatthisookisstolenproperty.Itwasreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher,andneithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedanypaymentforthis"strippedbook."FirsteditionNovember2000ISBN0-373-638...

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