The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

“You can. I’m not.”

He grunted and returned his attention to the craft. “Better hand it to Martin. He's paid to deal with the shit that comes through that rift, not us.”

Meaning if I wanted to find out exactly what they were using this rift for, Martin needed to be my next target.

The hover's engines kicked into gear and her skirts began to fill and lift. I grabbed the seat belt and pulled it across my body, brushing my fingers against the driver's arm as I did so. Seeking was a psychic skill all lures had, and one that had made us very successful at uncovering information during the war. It wasn't exactly telepathy—shifters tended to be sensitive to that sort of mental intrusion—but rather the ability to see various memories as images. And while my seeking skills had been honed for use during sex, I could still snatch information from a brief touch if I went in with a simple question that needed answering.

Although in this particular case, I not only needed to know who Martin was but where we were going.

Pictures snapped into my mind, providing a glimpse of a thickset man with a flat nose and oddly shaped eyes, and what looked to be an intersecting series of round metal and sand tunnels. If the latter was part of an old military bunker, then it was one I'd never seen before.

“Are we going to beat the storm?” I asked.

He glanced at the radar and screwed his nose up. “It'll be nipping at our heels before we reach the compound, I think.”

The hover slowly spun around, and then the big engines kicked in and we rumbled forward. Thankfully, it was too damn loud in the cabin to allow much talking, so I looked through the door’s small portal, trying to find something remotely familiar. But even the few stunted trees we passed bore no resemblance to anything I'd seen before.

The wind picked up, buffeting the big craft and sending it sliding sideways. The stabilizers kept us upright but from the little I knew of these types of hovers, they weren't designed for use in any sort of dust storm—a fact borne out a few seconds later when an amber light began to blink on the console. The intake valves were losing efficiency.

The driver responded by increasing our speed. Maybe he thought he could outrun the problem, even though the storm was a huge red mass that now dominated half the radar screen.

As a red light joined the amber one, the comms unit on the console crackled to life, and a harsh voice said, “Identify.”

The driver hit a switch. “Pickup three, Lyle and Banks.”

“Code?”

“Two-five-three-zero.”

“Access granted, guidance on. Open in five.”

Lyle punched another button on the console, switching to auto mode, and then leaned back. “It's going to be a bitch of a night to be on surface duty.”

Which suggested we were headed underground, and that meant we might indeed be dealing with another old military base. The three bases in which we déchet had been created had certainly used the earth as protection and, though I hadn’t seen any of them, I knew other human military installations had also buried their main centers deep.

The hover swung left and slowed. Up ahead, an odd sort of turret emerged from the ground. Sand poured off its domed top and slithered down its metal sides. As it rose higher, I realized it was some sort of elevator. Two guards wearing breathing apparatus stood on either side of the open doorway, but there didn't appear to be any cameras or scanners in the shadows beyond them—which didn't mean anything given my companion's comment. I might not be able to see any other security measures, but they were obviously around here somewhere.

The hover came to a halt and settled onto its skirts. The driver rolled the neck of his uniform up over his mouth and nose, then opened the doors and got out. I recorded my position then grabbed the pack and followed. The wind hit me immediately, throwing me several paces sideways before I could catch my balance. Sand stung my face and hands and felt like stones as it pounded my body. The air was so thick that I could barely see the hover, let alone the driver or the elevator. Then I remembered the eye visor and quickly flicked the switch. The world sprung into focus again.

I slung the pack over my shoulder and followed Lyle into the elevator. One guard stepped out into the storm and headed toward the vehicle. The other placed a rather gnarled-looking hand against the control panel; his prints were scanned and the elevator began to descend.

I returned the visor to normal vision and looked around. There definitely weren't any security measures aside from the guard, which was odd—just as there was something decidedly odd about the guard. While the breathing mask covered his entire face, his domed head was almost reptilian, and the stray tufts of pale yellow that poked out from the top looked more like the strands found on a wire brush than any sort of hair. His uniform was bulky and loose, giving little indication of his body shape, but his spine was so badly curved the top part of his body angled sharply away from his lower. His scent rather reminded me of meat left too long out in the sun, but the undertones were once again human in origin, even as his reptilian dome suggested otherwise.

Of course, smelling human didn’t mean he was. We lures had been designed with the ability to alter our base scent, and if either Dream or Cohen were a surviving déchet scientist or a handler—as we now suspected at least one of them was—then they’d be aware of that skill.

The one thing this man couldn’t be, however, was a surviving déchet—not when he was so deformed. The scientists involved in the Humanoid Development Program had been merciless; if a déchet had been imperfect in any way, they were killed and their DNA carefully studied to see what had gone wrong.

Which meant he was either a life form I'd never come across before—and surely nature could not be that cruel—or the trio had been playing around with DNA and pathogens far longer than we'd presumed.

And that was a scary thought.

The elevator continued to drop. I had no idea how deep we were going, as there were no level indicators. Maybe this base only had the one, although that would be rather unusual if it was another repurposed military base. Most did have several levels, if only for security reasons.

The elevator finally came to a bouncy stop. The guard pulled his hand away from the console and the doors opened, revealing a small landing and stairs that led down to a massive circular room with a domed ceiling supported by thick metal struts that arched across the space and met in the middle. There were five tunnels leading off it; the one directly opposite looked big enough to take large vehicles, but the other four were smaller in diameter. There was a multitude of wooden boxes and pallets of plastic-wrapped items stacked in haphazard piles, and rusty-looking forklifts were scooting about, some of them driving loads into the smaller tunnels and others returning from them. This area was obviously some sort of receiving bay.

What I didn't see were any sort of additional security measures. Did they believe the sand hid them so well nothing else was needed, or were the measures here, but simply very well disguised?

Instinct suggested the latter. And that presented a problem, given I couldn't get around what I couldn't see.