Ghosts of Punktown Read Online Free Page B

Colonies had more practical uses for.
     
         Wisps of this vapor curled out of the giant’s gaping mouth like its last dying breath being expelled.
     
         The statue’s flesh was scaled in blue tiles. The eyes were almond-shaped. The way he looked at this moment, Stake himself might have been its model. Before embarking from his unit’s position, he had stared long and hard at a photo of a Ha Jiin that he kept on file in his palm comp. His fellow soldiers had helped him spray-dye his skin blue, and he had changed into a Ha Jiin uniform. One of his comrades had pointed a pistol at him and joked, “I don’t know, Stake...I think you’re one of them pretending to be one of us pretending to be one of them.”
     
         The face on his computer screen had no scars on its high cheekbones. No family members lost yet. But aside from the lack of a metallic red sheen to his dark pupils and hair, Stake had been thoroughly convincing as one of the enemy when he had set off alone into the lush blue forest.
     
         He waited, watching the head of the buried colossus, until he felt fairly safe in approaching it. Stake emerged from the undergrowth, and a moment later was ducking into the head’s dark maw, with its blended scents of earth and dampness and incense, and the subtle taint of the precious blue gas itself. But all of this barely masked the strongest, underlying note: the smell of countless dead bodies secreted deep beneath the forest.
     
         He descended the rust-scabbed metal staircase. In his right fist he carried a Ha Jiin pistol but it had been modified to fire silently, with Earth’s more advanced technology.
     
         At the bottom, copper pipes stained green with verdigris ran across the walls to glass globes, in which gas was burned to give off light. Three passages branched off from this chamber, but their entrances were covered by thick yellow curtains. Stake was very much on edge. Sometimes these caverns were utterly empty, except for the bodies of the dead – slotted into the honeycombs chiseled into the walls, slathered with a yellow mineral that crudely mummified their forms. Other times, members of the Ha Jiin clerical order would be down in the tunnels; maybe a solitary monk, or maybe an entire group. And then other times, the tunnels might have been converted into a base camp for a unit of Ha Jiin soldiers. It was frowned upon by their own kind, to take their battle into these places where only the dead were meant to be sheltered, but the Ha Jiin fighters knew that they were not the first to have desecrated the sacred netherworld. That the only way to protect it sometimes was to desecrate it themselves.
     
         Stake strained his ears beyond the soft hissing of gas through the pipes. A ghostly distant voice. A chant? So...he would not be alone this time.
     
         From his backpack he withdrew two narrow black devices speckled with faux rust, which he clipped to the railings at the base of the staircase. He activated an invisible field that ran across the bottom stair. It was a frequency that would not disrupt the anatomy of Earth humans, but would prove fatal to a Ha Jiin passing through it...either descending into the catacombs after him, or pursuing him should he need to make a quick retreat.
     
         Now Stake moved to the central curtain. A glance at his wrist scanner had told him there was only one person in the vicinity, down this passage. This person would have to be neutralized before he could assemble the teleportation apparatus stored in his backpack, which would allow the gases to be siphoned to the collection and processing station in the allied city of Di Noon. If it were a cleric, he’d flip a toggle on his gun and simply hit him with a gel capsule filled with a paralyzing drug. But if it were an armed fighter...
     
         Just beyond the curtain as he shifted it aside, the tunnel was full of the bluish mist. These days Stake was no