Wolverine: Road of Bones
Narrated by Qarie Marshall
David MackUnabridged — 9 hours, 13 minutes
Wolverine: Road of Bones
Narrated by Qarie Marshall
David MackUnabridged — 9 hours, 13 minutes
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Overview
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175669757 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Wolverine: Road of Bones
By David Mack
Pocket Star
Copyright © 2006 David MackAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1416510699
1
A single leap and Miyoko Takagi was over the electrified fence. She landed, silent as a flake of snow falling on water, behind a patrolling security guard who had just turned his back.
Her gloved hand covered his mouth as her kusari-gama found his heart. He twitched in her lethal embrace for a moment, then his body went limp. She pulled her blade from his chest, wiped it clean on his leg, and lowered his corpse into the shadows.
Ahead of her, two more of her fellow ninjas neutralized two more perimeter guards -- one with a poison blow dart, the other with a throwing star. Both guards fell without a sound in the darkness, out of view of the security cameras that ringed the exterior of Tanaka Biotechnology's world headquarters.
Miyoko plucked three shaken from inside her black uniform and hurled them all with a single flick of her wrist. The throwing stars sailed apart on precise but subtle angles. Each one severed the data line of a different security camera. The path to the rear loading dock was now clear for the second team to move up. The loss of video signal would be certain to provoke an alert inside the building's security center, but if all was proceeding as planned, two of her ninjas were already there.
She traversed the underside of the loading dock's overhang in an inverted climb and stopped above the door to thebuilding's main shipping office. Through the slats of the door's top ventilation grating, she saw inside the main freight-handling area. Its workers and managers lay unconscious on the floor. Good, she thought. Sumotomo released the gas already. That should take care of all but the secured floors upstairs.
Two more security guards turned the far corner and walked toward her. Pressed against the ceiling overhang, Miyoko remained absolutely still. Another trio of shaken was ready in the fingers of her right hand. This part of the dock was well lit and monitored by the cameras; she would have to wait until the security cameras deactivated before neutralizing the two men below. Killing them now could compromise the entire mission.
All this effort for the benefit of fools. Miyoko resented the daimyo for burdening her with two gaijin on this mission. My ninjas could have acquired the daimyo's prize without help from these amateurs. Maybe not tonight, but eventually.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the daimyo was not willing to be patient this time. She blamed Alexei Pritikin, the Russian to whom the daimyo had given her as a consort. Though the daimyo had told her that her assignment was to defend Pritikin, she'd understood that her presence had been requested by the Russian for a purpose entirely different from protection.
The fact that Pritikin was undeniably in love with her only slightly ameliorated her contempt at having been offered up like a geisha. Quiet fury coiled her muscles as the guards walked closer. If they glanced up even for a moment, she would be revealed. Like so many full-time security personnel, however, they had grown bored and performed their tasks by rote.
Above the main door to the freight area, the security cameras' red power indicators dimmed. Her ninjas inside the skyscraper had prevailed; its security system was offline.
Miyoko unleashed two of her shaken at the guards, struck each in the carotid artery. They fell dead before they had time to know that they'd been killed. Then she flung her third throwing star toward the main gate along the rear alley, cutting its lock in a flash of sparks.
Now we get to see what the gaijin can do, she mused darkly.
Surge and Slake -- a.k.a. Gregor and Oskar Golovanov -- waited in the shadows near the T-shaped intersection of two narrow alleys.
"Chort vozmi, juice me up," Gregor said. "I can fry the grid and frag the fence, and we can walk in."
"No," said his twin brother, a fellow mutant. "The daimyo said to let the ninjas clear the way."
"Whatever," Gregor said, shaking his head in disgust. He could unleash enough different types of energy to burn, disrupt, disintegrate, stun, or kill just about anything on earth -- but only if his brother first drained the power from something else and transferred it to him. A "symbiotic link" -- that's what it had been called by the Soviet researchers who had poked and prodded and measured and tested the brothers since they were old enough to remember . . . and until they became old enough -- and powerful enough -- to escape.
He looked at Oskar and brooded. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same cleft chin -- and not a damned thing in common. "This is ridiculous, Oskar," he said in an irritated whisper. "We could be inside by now. Charge me!"
"From what, Gregor? The electric fence?" Oskar rolled his eyes. "There's not enough amperage to get us inside, never mind take out the security grid. . . . Just wait for the signal."
Several dozen meters beyond the electric fence, past a perimeter patrolled by armed guards and ferocious dogs, the imposing glass-and-steel faÇade of the Tanaka Biotechnology Corporation's world headquarters loomed high and mighty into the night, a new fixture on the skyline of Osaka, Japan. Somewhere inside this tightly defended fortress of science was the prize that the brothers had been sent to acquire and deliver.
They were near the building's rear loading docks, which were secured by a fifteen-foot-tall electric fence topped with barbed wire. Every fourth fence post was topped by a slowly swiveling video camera, of a kind that Gregor knew had been made to detect everything from infrared radiation to tachyon interactions, a feature that revealed most "invisible" interlopers. Whoever had designed this building's security systems had done so with mutants in mind. Gregor wasn't sure he wanted to know what was waiting for them inside the building, but he knew that if it relied on energy to work, then it would be no match for his brother's power-siphoning touch.
He looked at his watch. "We've been standing here for over an hour," he grumbled.
Oskar arched one eyebrow, an expression of his contempt for Gregor's impatience. "What, are you in a hurry? Got a hot date?"
"Maybe I do," Gregor said, trying not to sound defensive.
"No, you don't," Oskar said, just a touch too confident in his tone for Gregor's liking.
"And how would you know?"
"We won't be here long enough," Oskar said, his eyes fixed on the building across the alley. "And Miyoko would kill you."
"Mm-hm," Gregor mumbled dismissively. "I can handle her."
"Sure you can," Oskar said.
"Give me enough juice, I can fry anybody."
"You have to see them to fry them, Gregor. She's a fucking ninja. You'd be dead before you knew what hit you."
Gregor looked at his watch again and sighed. "What'd she say the signal would be?"
"That we'll know it when we see it."
No sooner had he said it when, on the other side of the electric fence, two security guards stopped in the middle of their rounds and collapsed silently to the ground. At the same moment, the cameras on the fence posts halted in mid-swivel, and their red indicator lights dimmed and went dark. An evanescent flurry of sparks spat from the gate's lock as it was bifurcated by a shaken moving faster than the human eye could see. With a long, whining creak of dry hinges, the rear gates of the Tanaka Biotechnology Corporation's headquarters lolled open.
"I guess that's our signal," Gregor said.
Oskar grimaced with disdain. "You think?"
The brothers moved quickly across the dark alley, toward the loading docks. They passed two unconscious dogs and approached a door that was sandwiched between two of the platform's tall metal-slat gates. Before they were halfway there, the door opened, spilling dim light onto the dock outside.
Gregor still found it odd to observe the effects of the ninjas' actions without ever seeing the hooded assassins themselves. Oskar moved ahead of him and preceded him up a short but steep flight of stairs and then through the door.
Half a dozen TBC workers in gray coveralls lay sprawled on the concrete floor. Inside a nearby office, their balding, slightly overweight night-shift supervisor was splayed across his own desk, facedown on a pile of papers. There was no blood in sight anywhere, just the faintly medicinal odor of expired chloroform gas. True to form, the ninjas had chosen the path of least resistance and least effort; the workers had been unarmed and had posed no threat, so it had been deemed sufficient simply to knock them unconscious. Gregor knew that the guards waiting upstairs would not receive such mercy. At least, not from me, he promised himself, unable to suppress a sadistic smirk of anticipation.
On the left was a door that led to a fireproofed stairwell; on the right was an open freight elevator.
The brothers faced each other and shook hands.
"Good luck," Gregor said to his twin.
"Good hunting," Oskar replied. He jogged away from Gregor and opened the door to the stairwell, then bounded down the steps toward the subbasement.
Gregor walked briskly into the freight elevator and shut its safety cage, which closed from the top and bottom, like a set of metal-mesh jaws. Seemingly of its own volition, the elevator jerked and lurched into motion, then rattled upward on steel cables that vibrated with an almost musical resonance.
If their accomplices had done their jobs properly, Gregor knew, Oskar would have an unimpeded path to the building's primary power center. From there, he could drain the building's dedicated generators and tap into an almost limitless supply of raw power from its connection to the municipal electrical grid. With all the unbridled electromagnetic forces that Oskar's efforts would unleash in the subbasement, there had been no point in equipping him with any kind of radio-frequency transmitter; the signal would be garbled by all the EM interference, and it likely would be unable to penetrate the steel and concrete shell of the skyscraper's foundation.
Not that Gregor needed any such link to Oskar to know when it would be time to attack. When his brother tapped into the juice, Gregor would know. He'd feel the tingling in his fingers, the heat on the back of his neck, the trembling adrenaline rush.
Soon enough, he'd have more raw power than he'd know what to do with -- but he was certain he'd think of something.
It had been a quiet evening on the sixty-eighth floor until the wall behind the elevator bank exploded.
Private security guard Yoshi Tamura dived to the floor behind the soda machine and covered his face. A hundred thousand needlelike splinters of wood were airborne, dancing on a plume of fire. Then the lights went out. Dust settled in the darkness. Yoshi's ears throbbed, his hearing dulled by the blast.
From the far end of the corridor, narrow flashlight beams cut through the stygian haze. As they sliced past one another, he barely glimpsed blurs of movement along the walls, floor, and ceiling, like dark phantoms or shadows unchained from substance. Ninjas, Yoshi realized. Most of his own training had been in a more noble vein of the martial arts, but he'd learned enough of the ways of ninjutsu to recognize it in action.
A lone figure emerged from the elevator shaft and swung on a rope into the corridor. The guards who were aiming the flashlights from the other end of the hallway fixed their beams on the intruder. He lifted his arm in their direction and showed them his empty palm.
"Freeze!" shouted one of the guards. "Get down on the -- "
A blinding flash and a thunder crack. The flashlight beams went dark, and the charnel odor of burnt meat filled the passageway. The intruders walked away from Yoshi's position.
He activated his two-way radio to call for help. Static, loud and constant, dominated every channel in his earpiece. Scrambled, he realized. So much for backup.
Moving with well-rehearsed grace, Yoshi stripped off his uniform shirt, revealing his long-sleeved black turtleneck . . . and the dark scabbard that was strapped diagonally across his back. He pushed off his shoes, under which he wore black-canvas tabi -- one of the few practices he had adopted from ninjutsu. After taking a moment to reassure himself that he was alone and undetected, he donned a black balaclava to maximize his harmony with the shadows. Steady in his hand, his wakizashi glided free of its scabbard without making a sound. Brandishing the short sword, he set out in pursuit of the intruder he had seen -- while remaining mindful of all the others that he couldn't see but nonetheless knew were there.
Darkness suited him. It was familiar, comfortable. He put on a pair of snug-fitting night-vision spectacles and skulked to the corner, stealthily navigating the obstacle course of broken concrete, pulverized brick and drywall, and fractured wooden debris. The air was thick with the cordite stench of overheated metal and broken stone. From the ragged gap in the wall behind him, he heard the snap and crackle of severed electrical wires.
Beyond the corner, there was only more darkness, dim even with the benefit of his UV glasses. Distant voices, panicked and plaintive, could have been only more security guards. One by one their voices were silenced -- a whisper of steel through the air, the heavy thump of bodies falling to the dusty floor. Yoshi prowled forward, following the faint trail of sound.
A vibration in the air was all the warning he had. It was enough. He dodged, and the ninja's blade lunged past him. One cut across the ninja's throat ended the battle. Yoshi caught the man's corpse and lowered it quietly to the floor, wary of alerting any of the other assassins lurking about.
The intruders were moving quickly. He had assumed that they would be after the stockpiles of rare pathogens that were used at TBC for top-secret research. As he passed the storage areas, however, he saw that they were untouched. The ninjas and their human cannon were after something else.
Yoshi stepped onto the syrupy slickness of spilled blood. To his left lay another guard. No sign of respiration, Yoshi noted. No point checking his pulse, he's gone. He moved toward the next intersection, which led into a heavily barricaded central corridor. Then the darkness turned to golden sunrise: a fiery blast erupted beyond the next corner, momentarily overwhelming his UV glasses. Squinting against the glare, he saw four ninjas perched along the corner or dangling in the nook between the wall and the drop-tile ceiling. They were silhouetted in the red-orange light. As surely as the blast had revealed their presence to him, it had announced his own to them. Subtlety immediately lost its value.
The explosive glow faded like dying hope, and the ninjas rushed toward Yoshi, as if they were one with the encroaching shadows. Still half blind, he felt their approach, read the patter of footfalls and the hushing song of arcing steel.
A block, a parry, and an uppercut. One of the ninjas fell.
Yoshi ducked and turned, swung his blade to make another block, closer than before. He feinted right, lunged left, drew the closest ninja forward into a careless thrust. Yoshi's wakizashi pierced the other man's throat, through muscle and cartilage, then flicked out, severing the carotid artery.
Weighted chains snared his ankles before he could dance free. A hard upward tug landed him on his back. Rather than struggle to escape, he pulled forward on the chains by tucking his knees to his chest. As the ninja holding the chains was pulled forward and down, Yoshi's wakizashi jabbed up and twisted, impaling the man as he landed against Yoshi's feet. Then Yoshi pushed back and launched the man at his last remaining comrade.
The fourth ninja ducked clear. Though it was a risk, Yoshi expended half a second to untangle his feet from the chain of the kusari-gama. Then he sprang back to his feet -- and realized that the last ninja had either fled or hidden himself beyond discovery.
Another explosion rumbled, again from the hallway that led to the top-secret laboratory. Forced to choose between seeking out the vanished ninja and going after the cannon, Yoshi decided that the man with the firepower seemed to be the one for whom the ninjas were running interference. That made him the higher-priority target.
Yoshi turned the corner and halted. A fiery tunnel of demolished metal and reinforced concrete stretched out ahead of him. He had expected to find the cannon man working his way through the multiple reinforced barricades; the blast that had cleared this path, however, had been singular and focused. As a further testament to the control of its creator, the devastation stopped shy of the final wall, which would have rent a smoking scar in the faÇade of the building, drawing all kinds of attention from the outside world. That wall was pristine, its paint unblistered and its "No Smoking" sign respectfully unburned, despite being illuminated by the firelight of all that had been laid waste in the dozen or so meters between there and the intersection where Yoshi stood.
Footsteps crunched across crumbled cement and broken glass at the far end of the hallway. Then a short, unimposing man was prodded forward, toward the smoldering impromptu passage. The man was one of the scientists Yoshi had often seen there, working late into the night, for the past several months. Fair-haired and bespectacled, he was in his late forties, and he wore a classic white lab coat over his wrinkled and coffee-stained dress shirt and rumpled trousers. Clutched in his folded arms was a metallic case. Behind him was the walking cannon.
Yoshi ducked behind the corner before either of the men saw him. Hostage situation. He abandoned all the strategies he had considered up until that moment and sheathed his sword. Changes all the rules. Can't risk getting our guy killed.
Using equipment left in place by the now-dead ninjas, Yoshi pulled himself above the drop-tile ceiling, then reeled in the rope and softly lowered the displaced tile back onto its square in the aluminum grid. Moments later, he heard the cannon say to the scientist in Russian-accented English, "Turn left."
The two men passed directly beneath Yoshi . . . then their footsteps stopped. Yoshi lifted the corner of the drop tile to see what was going on. Below, the cannon inspected the bodies of the three dead ninjas. He looked at the scientist. "Take a few steps back," he said. The scientist did so, and then the cannon pointed at the ninjas -- and disintegrated them, one by one.
"Keep moving," the cannon said as he gave his hostage a shove, and the two of them continued their quick-step march back toward the breach in the elevator shaft's wall.
Yoshi dropped back down, landed gently, and went into a crouch. Have to follow them, he decided, stealing forward in a hunched run. Trail them, get past this interference, and call for backup. Maybe slow their getaway. He was careful to remain far enough back to avoid being detected but close enough not to lose sight of the intruder and his hostage.
In less than a minute the pair was back at the breach in the wall. The cannon man took the briefcase from the scientist, then he knotted a rope harness around the smaller man's torso and pushed him into the elevator shaft. Reaching in, he grabbed a second, more professional-looking harness, stepped into it, and passed through the breach into the elevator shaft.
Rushing forward to the breach, Yoshi peeked upward first, to see if the intruders were heading toward the roof for extraction by helicopter. There was no sign of activity up there, except for the turning of the elevator's winches and the trembling of its cables. He edged forward and looked down to gauge the intruder's descent toward his escape.
A four-pointed shaken bit into Yoshi's throat.
Reflexively, his hand reached toward the wound, but he knew already that it was too late. The hira shuriken had severed his carotid artery and his larynx. Death would be swift and silent. He pitched forward and plunged headfirst into the elevator shaft. Falling was heavenly, like freedom. Then he was snared in a tangle of metal cables, jerked to a hard and sudden stop, trapped in a suddenly constricting noose of steel.
Yoshi Tamura, honored bushi of the Tanaka clan, offered a final heartfelt prayer to his ancestors, then surrendered as darkness took him into its silken embrace.
Alone in the subbasement, Oskar felt Gregor's appetite for power subside. When Gregor's need was at its greatest level, Oskar felt it like a hunger, a gulf of desperate emptiness in his gut. He had learned early in his career with Gregor that he couldn't store much energy; his body wasn't designed to act as a battery. He was more like a capacitor, a circuit through which vast reservoirs of raw power could be channeled to his brother.
One thing that Oskar could not do was take power from living things: plants, animals, people, fire -- all were immune to the effects of his energy-siphoning talent. Any nonliving power source would do, though: a live wire, a microwave beam, even sunlight, though it was too diffuse to be of any practical value to Gregor. The more concentrated the energy supply, the better. Car engines could pack a quick punch; a city's electrical grid was more reliable. Lately, Oskar had begun to wonder if he could absorb the normally lethal radiation of a nuclear reactor while siphoning its power. It was an experiment that so far he'd lacked the courage to attempt.
He withdrew his hands from the electrical junction. Immediately, he missed the rush of connection, the warm glow of conductance that accompanied his transmissions of power to Gregor. His symbiotic connection faded slightly as the bond of energy diminished and returned to its normal level.
Steam hissed and ventilator systems throbbed in the sparsely lit, drab gray sublevel. Oskar stepped quickly, slipped through narrow passages between tall banks of machinery and generators and phone-switching clusters. In less than a minute, he was springing back up the stairs, climbing the three switchback flights to the loading bay.
The timing was perfect. He walked through the door just as the safety cage of the freight elevator parted to reveal Gregor and the man they'd come to get. "Dr. Falco," Oskar said to the pallid, trembling scientist. "So good of you to join us." Falco glanced suspiciously at Oskar and said nothing in reply.
Gregor grabbed the slim, bookish man by the cuff of his lab coat and pulled him toward the exit. "Keep moving, Herr Doktor," he said. "We're on a schedule." It had always troubled Oskar to see how his brother's personality changed immediately after one of their missions. Flush from the infusion of raw power, Gregor became edgy, aggressive, hostile. It brought out a cruel streak in him, one that had grown darker and more pronounced during the years that they had worked together as mercenaries.
Oskar followed his brother through the door to the loading platform, down the short, steep stairs, and back out the open gate toward the alley. From the darkness, a black van pulled up in front of the gate and skidded to a halt. Its side door slid open as the brothers and Dr. Falco approached. Gregor pushed the scientist forward; the man banged his shin roughly against the edge of the van's doorway and yelped in pain.
"Nice manners, Gregor," Oskar scolded, while helping the hobbled Dr. Falco into the van.
Shrugging his shoulders, Gregor defensively shot back, "What do I look like? His valet?"
"You don't dress well enough to be a valet."
A female voice from inside the van rebuked them sharply: "Both of you, shut up and get in." They did as they were told.
Gregor waited for Oskar to get in, then pulled the door closed behind them. The van accelerated smoothly and quietly as it hurtled headlong into the urban nightscape of Osaka.
"That place was wide open," Gregor boasted. He cracked his knuckles. "I shoulda got in some target practice, fried a few more walls just for fun. Coulda burned the whole place down."
"With us inside it," Oskar chided him. "Brilliant."
"I told you two to shut up," said the woman driving the van. The threat in her tone was as implicit as her instruction.
You'll get us both killed one of these days, Oskar brooded, unwilling to look at his brother while silently cursing him. Never thinking, never planning ahead. Foolish. Careless. Reckless. But that had always been the way with the two of them. Oskar had always been the thinker, the planner, the strategist; he'd had to be. Gregor had always been able, by instinct, to wield the power given to him by Oskar. But it had always been Oskar's responsibility to guarantee that there would be enough energy to get a job done and that he could get to it without putting himself in jeopardy.
Unlike Gregor's talent, Oskar's skills hadn't come naturally. Caution, foresight, contingency planning -- these were all vital contributions that Gregor mocked, but Oskar's penchant for overpreparation had saved them both on numerous occasions.
One of these days, he knew, it won't be enough.
With Gregor, nothing was ever enough. All his appetites were equally insatiable: gourmet food, luxury sports cars, vintage wines and liquors, designer clothes, five-star hotels, exclusive call girls . . . Gregor's philosophy was that with his great power had also come great entitlement.
Eventually, of course, all of Gregor's desires came to ruin. He would eat and drink himself sick, then vomit half the night and wake up the next day too hoarse to speak. Priceless bottles of wine often became targets for his demented variety of pulse-blast skeet shooting. All his cars ended up wrapped around trees or telephone poles, or smashed into other cars, or submerged beyond recovery in a lake or a river. Every suit he wore was reduced to tatters inside of a week. Hotel rooms were transmogrified, seemingly overnight, into boxes of rubble. And Oskar had yet to see one of Gregor's achingly beautiful, thousand-dollar-an-hour prostitutes depart his company without a black eye or a bloody, broken nose to remember him by.
The only commodity that Gregor coveted more than all those others put together, of course, was power itself.
It did not, in Oskar's opinion, bode well for their future.
Copyright 2006 by Marvel Characters, Inc.
Continues...
Excerpted from Wolverine: Road of Bones by David Mack Copyright © 2006 by David Mack. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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