“New humanity,” Kane muttered, looking down at the soiled, scrawny figure at his feet. He spoke into the helmet comm link. “Grant?”
“Right here.”
“You heard?”
“Your side of it.” His voice was strained.
“Where are you?”
“Where you left us.”
“Stay there. I’m”
A pulse of sound drove into Kane’s head, penetrating his helmet and eardrums like a white-hot nail. He reeled in a sudden blaze of pain, his scuffling feet unsteady and seeking purchase in the puddle around him. A bass humming sound, almost physical, tightened around his brain like a steel vise.
He managed to keep from falling, shambling around in a half turn to see a quartet of hybrids approaching. The one occupying a center position wore the gray metallic suit and he held a slender silver wand in his right hand. The wand was about three feet long, and it hummed and shivered, its gleaming length somehow blurred.
The man with the wand said calmly, “I’ve seen him before, in the Cliff Palace.”
The one beside said, “Subdue him or kill him.”
Kane raised his blaster. The tip of the wand dipped toward him. Shrieking violence filled his head, and he collapsed, hammered to the floor by the storm of pain.
He caught himself on his elbows, steadying the Sin Eater in a double-handed grip. His first target was the man with the wand. He worked the trigger.
The gleaming rod swept out, fanning in a hazy semicircle. It hummed, popped and Kane heard the sharp clang of impact, then the whine of a ricochet. The slender man stood unharmed and smiling a gentle, patronizing smile.
Kane fired again, a 3-round burst, aiming for the middle of the high, unlined forehead. Again the wand inscribed a humming arc, its tip dancing from left to right. Three pops concussed the air, and bullets buzzed and screamed in all directions, crashing against and bouncing away from metal.
Somehow the rod produced an invisible field that deflected the bullets, yet at the same time directed energies that made his head feel as if it were about to burst. Kane couldn’t understand the dynamic at work, and he doubted his questions would be answered if he asked them. He shifted the barrel of the Sin Eater a fraction to the right and squeezed the trigger.
The little hybrid standing beside the man with the wand catapulted backward, his torso squirting out blood like a squeezed sponge. The creatures on either side of him yelped in terror and reacted by trying to run blindly away, without even attempting to watch where they were going. Kane fired again, the blaster’s roar painfully loud.
The heavy-caliber round took another hybrid in the chest and spun him around in a grotesque pirouette. Banners of blood streamed from the wound, draping his companions and the walls with red liquid ribbons. The man holding the wand stumbled aside, his face crimson bedaubed, trying to clear his vision with frantic swipes from his left hand.
Kane gathered his legs beneath him, sprang to his feet and began a dizzy, shambling run. He tasted blood sliding warmly over his lips, streaming from ruptured capillaries in his nose. He had no idea what kind of weapon the hybrid employed, but he was fairly certain his helmet had saved him from exploded eardrums or worse.
The floor pitched and yawed beneath him, and he had trouble running in a straight line. He fixed his gaze on the top of the filtration tank as a landmark and he raced toward it. Pale figures flitted near him, on either side in the red-tinged gloom, lithe and swift, seeking to draw ahead and cut off his escape.
He reached the base of the tank and was running around it when he heard Brigid yell, followed by the door-slamming bang of her handblaster. A fraction of a second later came the deep, stuttering roar of the Sin Eater. Piping voices, squealing in rage and fear, fluted all around.
He saw Brigid coming toward him, holding her Hamp;K in a double grip, backed by Grant sweeping the perimeter with his Sin Eater. A faint twist of smoke curled from the barrel.
Kane tried to stop, but he skidded and stumbled and would have fallen if Grant hadn’t steadied him.