Immortal Twilight Read Free Page A

slaves; that’s why they remained partners long after Jake had become permanently impatient with the dumb son of a bitch.
    “The difference,” Jake explained, waving his arms theatrically in the air, “between grave robbers and tomb raiders is the reward. See, Joe Grave-Robber, all he cares about is the money. He finds a nice gold wrist-chron or a pretty necklace and he figures he’s made a big score. But for tomb raiders, it’s all about the history. We don’t do it for the money, Milo, my friend, we do it so that the people of the future can look back at the past and go, ‘Hey, those old people wore clogs on their heads. Who knew?’ You get me?”
    Milo shook his head but didn’t slow down his digging. “Not really, Jake. I thought you said that we’d be paid handsomely for what was waiting in this place.”
    “That we will,” Jake assured him, “but we ain’t in this for the money, are we?”
    As usual, Milo was confused. “We ain’t?”
    Jake clapped his hands together and smiled. “Men like you and me, we’re better than that. We seek knowledge, understanding, great...things. And if we happen to discover a treasure trove of artifacts that we can sell on, well—that’s the almighty baron’s way of telling us we done good, we deserve it. See?”
    Milo didn’t see, but then more often than not he didn’t really have a clue what his partner in crime was talking about. Jake was the brains and he was the brawn; that was the arrangement they had always had, and Jake had always seen him right once the sweat work was over and they cracked open whatever the heck it was that Jake had heard about through his admirable network of contacts. One time they’d gone diving to a shipwreck off the Samariumville coast where they’d found so much gold they hadn’t had to pull another job for eighteen months. But funds dried up eventually, so here they were again, looking for another big haul. How had Jake described it? A man had offered him a map, something military, he thought, that showed an ancient redoubt, the kind of place where the prenukecaust people would hide armaments, vehicle specs and crappy food that had turned to dust. It wasn’t a shipwreck, but it was something.
    Clunk!
    “Found something,” Milo muttered, his beaming smile shining in the filtered moonlight. This kind of work was best done by moonlight, as it didn’t pay to attract attention when you were acquiring unclaimed property. There were too many groups around, these days, from one-man operations all the way up to big outfits like the Millennial Consortium, all of them wanting a piece of the historical pie. Those Millennial bastards were the worst, Milo knew—he and Jake had gotten themselves mixed up with those whackjobs once, and Jake wound up losing a thumb and two fingers during the interrogation before he had finally squealed about their find. That was a long time ago now, back when Jake had still been married. What was her name? Belle? Was that it?
    Jake snapped his fingers in Milo’s face. “Hey, wake up, dumbbell.” He was leaning forward, his other hand pressed against his thigh as he studied the thing that Milo’s shovel had clanged against. The object glinted mysteriously as it caught the moonbeams.
    “I can’t see shit in this light,” Jake muttered, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. A moment later he produced a penlight, running its narrow beam across the hole that Milo had just finished digging. Beneath the pencil-thin beam the two men saw a metal plate that seemed to bulge a little out of the soil.
    “Hey, help me move this stuff, huh?” Jake ordered, kneeling down on the slope and brushing away loose soil.
    Milo brought his shovel down against the metal plate, working over it in sweeps that gradually uncovered more of its surface. Revealed, it was roughly three feet across, circular with a convex design that brought the center up in a raised mound like a shallow, upturned cone. There were rivets