Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult by E. E. Knight

Author:E. E. Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-345-46172-X
Publisher: Del Ray
Published: 2004-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

11

After a night wrapped in hammocks they breakfasted on tinned meat and cereal-like breakfast bars.

After breakfast, with the sun now well up from the horizon thanks to their tropical latitude, Borg showed Lara his specialized climbing limbs. Still experimental, they fitted onto his stumps better than his everyday arms.

It was Lara’s first good look at his stumps. Metal capped the limbs just below the shoulder, complete with stout, knoblike fixtures for locking on his arms. A short wire, tipped with what looked like a USB plug, dangled from each metal cap.

“I had a second surgery in Japan. There are computer chips implanted in the stumps,” Borg explained. “They read tension put on them by different muscle fibers from my shoulders. My everyday arms only use it to open and close the working fingers. The climbing arms can do much more.

“A German engineering firm for climbing equipment and a Japanese robotics company worked together to make them.”

Borg knelt over the open case. The mechanical arms resembled props from a Terminator movie. Each appeared to be specialized.

“The left is really a piton gun. It works on the same principle as a nail gun, only it takes a slightly larger spike. I place a magazine of five pitons in the forearm, here.” He showed Lara the flattened, nail-like climbing anchors with their eye-holes for rope, linked together like a line of nails for a nail gun. “The right one, the ‘claw,’ has a grapnel that also works as an anchor.”

Lara found a moment to admire the four-fingered hand as Borg worked it. The talonlike fingers spread like flower petals, and could reverse themselves. “I have ten meters of cable I can play out, attached to a power winch. Takes me up or down.”

“Must have cost a great deal.”

“The idea was for me to make climbs no other single man could. So far all I have done with them is promotional videos and some easy climbs. Perhaps someday. For now, it will get us back up the Abyss.”

“There’s that boat again,” Heather said from the window. Her hair was bound up at the back of her head in a pair of thick rubber bands.

“The Tank Girl?” Lara asked.

“No, the other one. The boat with the yahoos that threw the dead animal.”

She left Borg and rushed to the window. The Plato waited on the banks of the river, only its bow visible among the trees.

Lara looked back to the landing, three kilometers away, but motion on the trail halfway up their mountain caught her eye. A dozen or more men in khaki pants and black T-shirts, gripping an assortment of assault weapons, rushed out of the forest. Some gestured to guide the others.

“We’ve got callers,” Lara said grimly. She went to her VADS pack.

“Perhaps Fermi has returned,” Frys said, a quaver in his voice. He went to the window, then ducked back. “Those are men from the ruins!”

“Not such a secret hideout after all,” the Tomb Raider said, mentally kicking herself for not going to the ruins the previous evening despite her fatigue.

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