“Grant’s brain is fractured,” Kane said.

“More like his consciousness is spread over two levels. Like a shadow cast on an uneven surface,” Brigid told him. “Here, he’s a ghost. Pure ego.”

“And in the past, his body is running around with…what?” Kane asked.

“A good vocabulary, but not much memory, going by our encounters with him,” Brigid explained.

“So Grant’s not operating at his best,” Kane said.

He could read his own face reflected in Brigid’s concerned features.

“We’ll find him. We’ll bring him home and make him whole again,” Brigid told him.

Kane squeezed his eyes shut, then looked down at the darkened pit, where weak, helpless moans rose. He didn’t want to think of what horrors Grant had to face five millennia in the past.

Cradle of Destiny

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The present life of men on earth, O king, as compared with the whole length of time which is unknowable to us, seems to me to be like this: as if, when you are sitting at dinner with your chiefs and ministers in wintertime…one of the sparrows from outside flew very quickly through the hall; as if it came in one door and soon went out through another. In that actual time it is indoors it is not touched by the winter’s storm; but yet the tiny period of calm is over in a moment, and having come out of the winter it soon returns to the winter and slips out of your sight. Man’s life appears to be more or less like this; and of what may follow it, or what preceded it, we are absolutely ignorant.

—The Venerable Bede

c. 673–735

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

Prologue

Were his face capable of showing more than just the crudest replication of human expression, Ullikummis’s features would have been cast in a brooding, troubled scowl. He had come to Earth in an effort to usurp this fragile blue globe from the talons of Enlil and his brethren, only to find himself dealing with humanity itself. What had most troubled the godling was a face that he had encountered millennia ago, before his banishment.

The one whom he knew by the name of Enkidu, the warrior who had pummeled one of his thralls into unconsciousness, lived in this time as a man called Grant. The last time Ullikummis had seen him was when he was still a child, in the court of his half brother, Humbaba….

As a boy of eight, Ullikummis was already different from his fellow Annunaki. He was larger and stronger than those his age, and the early buds of stone that would form his famous invulnerable hide were mottled discolorations on his scales. As he walked with his mother in his half brother’s court, the beautiful alien rulers of Earth cringed at the sight of him.

Ullikummis knew he was a freak, but his mother told him of the glories that would be bestowed upon him at the hand of Enlil. As it was, the young Annunaki covered his distortions beneath his cloak, glaring from the shadows of a hood at those who knew not the beauty of raw power that had been cooed in his ear by Ninlil, his mother.

“Your half brother, Ullikummis, and his mother, Ninlil,” spoke one of Humbaba’s reptilian Igigi slaves, introducing the pair.

The master of the court of Urudug cast his cold amber eyes to his kin, taking in his height, taller than many of the reptilian slave folk who worked in Humbaba’s court, whose flesh resembled a dried clay tablet, stony with a cracked and pocked surface. Humbaba’s mouth, catlike in nature with a deep cleft, the upper lip dimpled with the bases of several undulating, tentaclelike whiskers underneath a black triangular nose, turned up in a semblance of a smirk, or as close as the feline giant could manage. It was an ironic grin as he recognized his father’s tinkering with the Annunaki perfection.

Humbaba himself was a cast of the die thrown by Enlil. Where the child before him, growing plates of granitelike skin, was obviously an effort at recasting Annunaki genes in a silicon-based life form, Humbaba was combined with one of the races discovered in northern Africa, the Anhur. Conquered by Enlil’s armies, the lion folk had impressed their mutual father enough to warrant experimentation. Though Anhur had been all but scourged from Earth, Enlil had saved a bride from the feline colonists as an experiment to relieve his boredom, curiosity and lust.

The result was nine feet and four hundred pounds of rippling, coiled muscle sheathed in a blend of golden fur and glimmering scales along his chest, belly, arms and legs. Humbaba had proved his might in single and multiple combat with Nephilim and Igigi, showing his might as a match for any five of those servitor beings. Humbaba mused over Ullikummis and what kind of beast he would be in adulthood.

He was tempted to throw the brat before his new prize, but Humbaba didn’t want to waste his slave or incur the ire of his father, depending on who won their conflict. Even under Shamhat’s influence, Humbaba was not certain the man-beast would accept orders. Enkidu had arrived, unable to speak the language of the apekin the Annunaki ruled over, not a problem with the mental abilities of the overlords. Telepathic communication enabled Enkidu to understand their words, even though the wild man’s brain was a scramble of disjointed information, making it nearly impossible to know his origin. All they could tell was that he was human, and he bore technology far beyond the simple tools that the apekin had developed.

The cloak he wore, the weapon strapped to his arm, even the small implant put subcutaneously on his mandible, were materials either thousands of years distant for humankind, or inspired by the technological genius of the Annunaki and their slaves. The cloak and weapon hung on a pillar, not far from the bound giant. His skin was shades lighter than the ebony of the natives of the continent of Africa, indicating that somewhere along the course of his family, the blood of Europeans and Asians had mixed into his genes. He was a melting pot of all manner of humanity’s strengths—that much was apparent from Humbaba’s gene crafters. They had even seen some of the hand of such gene tampering in the protein strings that decided his form.

His musculature had only improved in the time since he had first appeared, and his will was still strong, despite the brainwashing techniques of Shamhat, the finest of Humbaba’s scientists. That iron determination not to be dominated and the odd scrambling that had stripped Enkidu of his identity had stopped them cold.

“Do you like my man-bull?” Humbaba asked his half brother.

“He’s…impressive,” Ullikummis replied. As tall as the young Annunaki was, this was the first human who towered over him. Dark eyes blazed with rage and defiance, a fire inside that was not quenched. “How long have you had him?”

Humbaba frowned. “Not long enough.”

“He hasn’t been broken,” the son of Enlil said. “I repeat…how long have you had him?”

“Four months.” Humbaba sighed with resignation.

Ullikummis looked at the chains wound around Enkidu’s wrists. Shoulders swelled like melons, his forearms corded so tightly that the veins stood out on them. He was straining against secondary orichalcum, one of the strongest alloys developed by the Annunaki. “He’s that strong?”

“He could not burst the links on the steel chain we put him in,” Humbaba said. “But he used those bonds to crush the throats and break the necks of four Nephilim.”

Ullikummis tilted his head.

“He’s just a human,” Humbaba said.

Ullikummis narrowed his eyes.

Humbaba didn’t sound quite so convinced of his superiority as the chained apekin stood. This was not a beast who railed savagely against his captivity. This one quietly flexed, his muscles struggling to find a single weakness in his bonds, all the while watching for the opportunity to get the upper hand.

Either Humbaba and Shamhat would break him, or this giant among humans would see their downfall.

It would be worse should Enkidu remember his true name.

The man who would be known as Grant five thousand years from now bided his time, waiting for his chance to break free, to find out who he truly was, and return to where he knew the language and the people.

Chapter 1

When Grant’s eyes fluttered open, consciousness seizing him once more, the first thing he saw was the tanned, soft shoulder of Shizuka. The beautiful, black-haired woman breathed deeply in the peace of sleeping bliss. The jet-black silk of her hair poured over his right biceps and her back pressed against his barrel-like chest, while his left forearm rested in the saddle formed by the curve of her waist between her rib cage and one sleek, muscular hip. Nothing separated their bodies save for a thin sheen of perspiration. The only other things that touched them were the cool predawn air, the futon mat they lay upon and a thin sheet of slick gossamer cloth.

Shizuka was entwined with him, her supple form spooned against his, and Grant let the heaviness of his eyelids drag themselves closed. He didn’t want to disentangle himself from the Japanese goddess, her cheek lying on his muscle, using it as a pillow. He allowed himself a small smile, enjoying the scent of her hair, the warmth of her skin.

For all intents and purposes, Grant and Shizuka were man and wife, one heart that had been repaired when the warriors of Cerberus redoubt had encountered the Tigers of Heaven from New Edo. It had been hard weeks since he had last seen her, his time claimed by the arrival of a grim godling from the stars. At the memory of Ullikummis, Grant’s joy at his reunion with Shizuka was plucked out like a worm in soft, moist soil.

“Grant?” Shizuka asked sleepily, roused from her slumber by the deep, guttural rumble that rolled through his chest, riding the crest of disappointment washing over his heart.

“Sleep,” Grant whispered, kissing the back of her head, but Shizuka was a leader, not a follower. Her strength of will and her warrior spirit were strong enough to dispel centuries of tradition to make her the commander of the fabled samurai of the Tigers of Heaven.

She turned with effortless grace, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes stood out in the premorning gray that crept through the rice-paper wall panels of Shizuka’s Spartan abode. Concern had creased her brow and Grant’s frown followed the downward curve of his gunfighter’s mustache.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.

“I felt your turmoil when you first stepped from the mat-trans,” Shizuka answered. Her slender but rope-muscled arm reached up, looping around his neck, and Grant winced as he realized that his deltoids were drawn taut with tension. “We managed to put it away for a while, but it’s returned strong enough to wake me.”

“Can’t even take a full night’s sleep.” Grant folded his arm, putting his hand under his head as a pillow between his head and the futon, fighting down the regret that weighed heavily on his broad, powerful shoulders. His eyes met Shizuka’s, drawn into the dark pools, succumbing to the depths as he peered through the windows of her soul.

Grant had loved Shizuka almost from first sight, and while the attraction to an athletic, confident and beautiful woman was hardly a mystery, there was something in her that seemed a sort of anchor, a bond that immediately formed between the two warriors. He cupped his free hand at the nape of her neck, black silk cascading over his fingers like cool water, and pulled her gently to him, meeting her halfway in a kiss. It was a cleansing of his mind, driving away his doubts, regrets and worries as he sheltered himself in her loving embrace.

Shizuka’s delicate fingers caressed his cheek as the kiss broke. “It’s time for me to wake up anyway.”

Grant sighed. Shizuka was disciplined, and as much as he would have enjoyed having her in his arms again, she would do her exercises, the regimented katas that honed her into one of the finest samurai warriors on the planet. For his sake, however, Shizuka forwent putting on her robe. Her muscles glided under her tanned skin like sinuous serpents writhing beneath a blanket as she moved. Each motion was precise, intended to insure limberness, not an actual movement to counter an enemy’s attack. Her daily training was designed to keep her muscles supple and joints flexible, able to respond to any threat.

Grant looked down at his own body. There was no doubt that he was a powerful man, his lifestyle keeping the tone of his arms and shoulders prominent as he was active, often serving as pack mule for the Cerberus explorers as he was reluctant to go anywhere underprepared. Still, his frame was not lean and taut. He was too old for his waist to slim down to hard-packed abdominal muscles, his torso becoming a sculpted V. While everyone else who knew him saw a slight thickening of his waist since his years as a Cobaltville Magistrate, he hadn’t tried to fit into the perfectly tailored polycarbonate armor that served as the uniform of the Magistrates, or enforcers of the villes. No longer young, Grant was indisputably powerful and menacing, and he could arm wrestle any two of his fellow Cerberus allies with one arm, except for Edwards. But even then his strength was an edge higher.

Grant had even been powerful enough to go hand to hand with Maccan and Marduk. The former was the last of the pure-blooded Tuatha de Danaan princes on Earth, while the latter was an Annunaki lord standing a full seven feet of perfectly sculpted muscle and otherworldly strength. The battles had been inconclusive, to be honest, but they had been tests of might that showed Grant’s guile and his brawn. He was capable of holding his own with nearly any opponent on the planet. That was before the arrival of the stone-bodied son of Enlil, a towering eight-foot creature with limbs as thick as small trees and eyes that glowed like magma.

Ullikummis was nominally an Annunaki, but the son of their mortal enemy had been genetically modified, his body augmented with materials that had allowed him to survive the cold vacuum of deep space for four-and-a-half millennia and repair bodily damage, even after being dropped in a furnace after being pelted by volleys of hand grenades.

Such a monster gave even Grant pause. Grant knew that he wasn’t the most physically powerful being on Earth. However, among the triad of heroes who had formed the core of the Cerberus resistance, he was the man who provided the muscle. Since few weapons could harm Ullikummis, it would take either the scientific genius of Brigid Baptiste or the skill and determination of Kane to bring down the mountain that walked as a man.

Grant let his head drop back down to the futon, rolled onto his back, and looked at the plain wooden boards of the ceiling. Their dark stain provided a sharp contrast to the white rice-paper windows that made it seem inky-black, even on the most moonlit of nights, giving him a focus on which to meditate. With the growing light of dawn, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the empty space to clear his mind of his doubts.

His clothes lay folded in the corner, the external component of his Commtact placed with them. Normally, the device was unobtrusive as it adhered to the pintels subcutaneously installed along his mastoid bone, but Grant was loath to have it on during his quiet intimacy with Shizuka. There were multiple threats in the world, and Cerberus would not hesitate to summon him in the event of an emergency. It was his first night here in New Edo, and he thought that he could get at least one evening of peace.

Reluctantly, he rose from the futon, folded their light blanket and went to get dressed. He held up the Commtact as if it were a dead rat, looking at it for a moment, hesitant to put it back on. Grant slipped it into place, and keyed it to call the redoubt. Given the time difference between Montana and New Edo, in the island chain of the remains of California, there was a good chance that he’d get in touch with Bry on his morning duty.

“Reporting in,” Grant said. “Everything quiet on the home front?”

“Boring as any other day.” Bry’s voice reverberated through his skull. “Well, most other days. Why? Afraid we’d call you back home?”

“Yeah,” Grant answered.

“Both Lakesh and Kane have threatened me in their usual manners if I pull you from home too soon,” Bry answered.

Home, Grant thought. That’s what this tiny island remnant of the sunken West Coast of the United States had become to him. New Edo and its neighbor, Thunder Isle, were among the new archipelago that had formed in the wake of the nuclear holocaust that nearly drove humankind into extinction on January 21, 2001. Powerful earthshaker bombs had shattered California, dumping entire cities into the Pacific Ocean, utilizing the instability of the San Andreas Fault to wreak havoc. While the nuclear war was primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union, the conflict had been touched off by an incarnation of the Annunaki god-king Enlil, then disguised as Colonel Thrush.

How many billions had been scoured from the face of the Earth, literally by the hand of their greatest enemy? With the arming of a bomb placed in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Thrush/Enlil had ushered in an age where the hidden and sleeping Annunaki overlords could awaken and recast the planet as their renewed jewel, as it had been millennia past.

This was history that had been drummed into Grant, so much that it came unbidden just as he thought of the island where his true love resided. A turmoil of those memories could flood unbidden if he couldn’t pre occupy himself. Right now, though, even the splendor of his unclad lover, flexing her taut, beautiful body in the near-poetic dance of martial arts katas, wasn’t enough of a distraction.

“Grant?” Bry asked. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Grant answered. He regretted using Shizuka as an excuse, but there was no other way to explain his inattention. “Just admiring the view this morning….”

“Say hi to Shizuka for me,” Bry said. “I’d say give her a kiss…”

“But I already got to that,” Grant concluded, trying to inject some lightness into his tone. He wished he could feel that bit of joy he’d fabricated.

“Kane says get to it some more,” Bry added. “His orders.”

“Since when is Kane my boss?” Grant asked.

“He figures that this will be his only chance to order you to do something and have you do it gladly,” Bry answered. “Forget the world for a while, okay?”

Grant nodded, then winced as he realized the motion was useless over the Commtact. “I’ll try.”

Shizuka appeared at his shoulder, and she put her head against Grant’s, skull-to-skull contact allowing her words to be heard, as well. “Grant will have some help.”

Bry laughed.

It was something that Grant hoped that he would remember how to do.

THE FERAL ALBINO outlander known as Domi swept her ruby-red eyes across the empty, desolate shores of the Euphrates River. They were dozens of miles from the nearest large settlement, and on this part of the mighty thoroughfare, there was no gradual drop-off to the water, no beaches. There was a six-foot miniature cliff on either side of the flowing river.

It was a lonely, desolate place where there was no irrigation, so vegetation was sparse, no different from the desert wilderness back in America. It was at once familiar visually, but alien in terms of scents, the feel of the sun’s heat beating down on her shadow suit’s shoulders. Domi was a small woman, just under five feet in height, but her body was athletically sculpted, muscles coiled like cables around her lean limbs. The black sheen of the high-tech shadow suit poking out from under her cargo shorts and multipocketed vest made her arms and legs seem sticklike where they poked out.

Given that she had accompanied Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste from the depths of Africa to the Moon itself, Domi knew the likelihood of running into an environment that would require the suit’s protective qualities. Also, even after two centuries, radioactive wastelands were not uncommon. Radiation poisoning was something that Domi had been lucky enough to avoid during her brief, hard-fought life. She wasn’t about to endanger that successful run by not taking the proper precautions.

Those precautions included a foot-long fighting knife worn in a cross-draw scabbard that hung off the belt of her cargo shorts, and the small but powerful Detonics .45-caliber automatic in a holster on her opposite hip. Backing it up was a steel-tube-framed crossbow that hung, folded on a sling, from her shoulder. Raised in the Outlands, Domi didn’t need much more than a knife to sustain herself, but the crossbow was good for hunting and the little handgun had evened the odds in countless battles.

More equalization came in the form of Edwards, a tall and broad-shouldered former Magistrate who had been recruited to the Cerberus cause with the fall of the nine baronies. The blunt-headed man stood at the other end of the small expedition. Edwards was a beast of a man, nearly as tall as Grant, but stocky and bulky, not long limbed and well proportioned by the man who often served as her surrogate father.

Edwards, like all Magistrates, had been given only one name by the hybrid barons, who once ruled the baronies before their evolution into overlords. Their singular appellations combined with the grim, black carapace-like armor to separate them from the rest of the barons’ subjects, all the better for brainwashing them and transforming them into the dreaded judges and juries who ruled as the ultimate enforcers. Domi and Edwards had tangled once when they were assigning the leadership of the Cerberus Away Team they shared. Edwards had been a difficult opponent, but Domi had put him in his place. Like most of the Magistrates, he was an alpha male, someone who felt that his brawn made him the most appropriate leader. But like all good wolves, Edwards had conceded when he was shown that he could be physically bested by the slender little albino wraith.

Since then, he and Domi were amicable allies and trusted teammates.

Edwards glanced over one thick, bulky shoulder, then shrugged his head back toward the two women who dug in the dirt around a small ring of stones with worn but barely readable inscriptions carved into them. Domi smirked. She knew that Brigid Baptiste was someone who could lose herself in scientific investigation easily, in the most unusual of climes. Though the sun beat down relentlessly on their uncovered heads, the environmental adaptations of the shadow suits kept their body temperatures low thanks to cooling systems woven into their high-tech fabric. Even sweating under a tied-off bandanna, Brigid was unwavering in her attention to the ancient scratches in the rock.

Brigid was a foot taller than Domi, and where the feral girl was cast in pale porcelain, the archivist was an explosion of color. Brigid was adorned with hair that looked like red silk interspersed with golden threads, sun-beaten skin that managed to tan despite her ginger tresses and emerald eyes that glimmered like precious gems. Right now she hid her orbs behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that allowed her to better inspect the stones around the small, nearly unnoticeable circle of rocks where the interphaser had deposited them.

The interphaser ferried the Cerberus explorers along a web of energy trails that connected at parallax points. So powerful were the currents rolling through these threads that when they intersected, humans felt the urge to build monuments to the power that coursed in the very ground. The Cerberus personnel had mapped many of the parallax points, both around the world and beyond, and built a device that exploited these naturally occurring focal points as a means of transferring people and goods.

Bored beyond the end of his usual impatience, Edwards resorted to sarcasm. “So, what are we looking for again? Humma Humma and the Cedar Chest and the city of Airy Do?”

“Humbaba and the Cedar Forest, and the city state of Eridu,” Brigid corrected. “Though I suspect that you, like Kane and Grant, have a better memory and comprehension than what you’re displaying.”

“Let me get this straight. We have an eight-foot stone monster running around, and you’re taking time out of dealing with this crisis to look for trees in the middle of a desert?” Edwards asked.

“Ullikummis is old,” Domi told Edwards. “Myth is old, and might have some truth. Maybe we can find weakness for Stoneface by looking in his old stomping grounds.”

“That freak was here?” Edwards asked.

Domi noted that the big ex-Mag was rubbing his forehead, brows furrowed in the unmistakable sign of a splitting headache. After Ullikummis’s first appearance, Edwards had been taking more aspirin of late, and his Commtact was no longer able to transmit; hence the bulky transmitter unit he wore on his hip.

Domi and the others could hardly blame the big man. Ullikummis had made Edwards one of his pawns by planting one of his seeds in his head. That kind of intrusion by a small pellet of intelligent stone must have been only slightly more comfortable than Domi’s own major headache after the mad god Maccan pumped unholy amounts of sonic energy straight into her skull. Domi had been on wobbly knees for a while after that, so she could empathize with her fellow CAT member. Such a violation would have been enough cause for a few weeks of rest and recreation, but Cerberus couldn’t spare the manpower.

At least Edwards retained his mobility and reflexes. Domi needed time to get back onto her feet after her brief coma.

“That freak,” Maria Falk spoke up. “Or one much like him, if Brigid’s reading is right.”

Falk was an older woman, her brown hair showing glimmers of silvering gray here and there. Domi loved the lunar scientist’s smile. She found more than a little kinship in the way that Falk always perked up but quietly chose to observe without drawing attention to herself. They shared a curiosity, but Domi felt for Falk. If the geologist was a house cat with just a little too much inquisitiveness, she wouldn’t be as adept at fighting her way out of trouble as the wildcat albino.

Falk was used to studying rocks, but she had complained before they made the interphaser jump. She wasn’t an archaeologist, but Brigid wanted a set of eyes that knew about terrain and natural earth formations. Tomb raiders were in short supply among the redoubt’s newly expanded staff.

Edwards tilted his head. “Okay, now I really am playing dumb. One like him?”

“Humbaba, or Humwawa, was appointed by Enlil himself as the guardian of the Cedar Forest. He was a giant with the face of a lion in some sources, and in others, his features resemble coiled entrails of men and beasts,” Brigid said.

“Maybe he’s a sloppy eater, or saving leftovers for later.” Edwards chuckled nervously.

Brigid raised an eyebrow at the thought. “That is a possibility.”

Edwards rested his face in his palm. “Great. A man-eating giant kitty cat.”

“He couldn’t be that big,” Domi said. “If he can wear the guts of his meal as a face mask.”

“Well, the legends said that Ullikummis was a giant who was so large his shoulders scraped the skies,” Brigid said. “The real one was nowhere that huge.”

“Small favors,” Edwards grumbled. “Humbaba’s alive, or dead?”

“Allegedly, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slew the beast,” Brigid answered.

“Who and what?” Edwards asked.

“King Gilgamesh, one of the original human heroes of mythology. His ally was a bull-man, sent by the gods to slay Gilgamesh—Enkidu,” Brigid said.

Edwards looked a little unfocused for a moment. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“Which? Gilgamesh is a rather—”

“The other one,” Edwards cut Brigid off.

Brigid stepped closer to the large man. “Perhaps it’s a residual memory?”

“From when Ugly Commish took me over?” Edwards asked.

Brigid nodded.

Edwards closed his eyes, as if looking inside of himself for answers. “I don’t know why I’d remember anything.”

With that, he opened a small pill bottle and downed a couple of pills without benefit of a splash of water from his canteen. “Not everyone can remember everything like you, Brigid.”

Brigid smirked at the subtle jab, then turned back to see Falk dig a little more furiously at the ground. The geologist’s spade hacked at rocklike sand that disintegrated as the steel of Falk’s tool smashed into it. Nervousness set in on the older woman’s features. “What’s wrong?”

Falk tugged on a length of stretchy fabric. Brigid knelt next to the woman, tugging it from deep, hard-packed sand. As soon as she touched the leatherlike material, Brigid knew what it was. She had never worn it, but Kane and Grant had donned the long, armored dusters, one sleeve outsized to accommodate the folding Sin Eater blaster. Domi recognized the jacket sleeve, as well, and her stomach twisted. Edwards had not brought his duster.

“This is a Magistrate jacket,” she pronounced. “How long has it been here?”

“Given the density of the sand, it’s hard to say,” Falk hedged.

“That’s a lie,” Brigid answered. “How long has this been trapped here?”

Falk looked at Brigid, swallowing before she dared to answer.

“It’s been here for nearly five thousand years,” Falk answered.

Brigid looked down at the uniform embedded in the stone. “We need to dig deeper. See what else is in there.”

“I haven’t found any skeletal remains,” Falk replied.

“They might not have been buried here with the clothing,” Brigid answered.

Domi could tell from the stress and urgency in her friend’s voice that one of the Cerberus people was going to be lost in the depths of time.

The question was, who would go missing?

Chapter 2

Gongs reverberated throughout the Tigers of Heaven dojo in the heart of New Edo. Though the transplanted Japanese had access to technology such as radios, they were also traditionalists. Alarm Klaxons produced by loudspeakers were not an improvement over the classic padded hammer striking a gigantic dish of bronze. The loud, air-shaking noise drew attention and focused it like few other sounds could.

Instinct pushed Grant and Shizuka to grab their weapons, the big ex-Magistrate sliding the Sin Eater holster over his thick right forearm. Shizuka slid her katana through a single loop of the sash around her waist, slung a quiver of ya arrows over her shoulder, and scooped up her kumi samurai bow. Every member of the Tigers of Heaven was trained in the arts of the samurai, so that even with a wild supply of automatic rifles and handguns, they were still deadly with their “primitive” weaponry. The penetration ability of a ya launched was insufficient to spear through the polycarbonate plates of full Magistrate assault armor, but Shizuka’s aim was quick and accurate enough to slip her deadly arrowheads in the gaps between those panels and through the Kevlar and Nomex underneath.

Still, the exchange of technologies and ideas between New Edo and the Cerberus redoubt had been enough for the Japanese archers to utilize shafts and bows of carbon fiber over a laminated wood core, and stiff nylon supplemented turkey and swan feathers to make the ya fly true. While Grant himself was a man who appreciated powerful firearms like the Sin Eater or his Copperhead, Shizuka had been teaching him kyudo, the samurai’s “way of the bow.” His upper-body strength was more than sufficient to handle a kumi with an eighty-eight-pound draw and keep the bowstring nocked and on target with very little vibration. It was a slow process, however. Grant was familiar with the basics of marksmanship, but it was akin to the early six months of training that he had been given on the dangerous, lightning-fast Sin Eater machine pistol. He could hit a bull’s-eye given a few moments, but he was not adept at utilizing the bow in combat. Shizuka, on the other hand, could nock, draw and launch a ya shaft in the space of a second.

A 20-round, full-auto machine pistol firing armor-crushing 240-grain 9 mm slugs would have to do for now, Grant mused. He paused and looked at his folded Magistrate trench coat. Shizuka had already slithered into the bamboo-and-polymer-plate armor, and Grant was loath to go into action without some protection. He had left behind the shadow suit at Cerberus redoubt, but the protective long coat was sufficient armor, its leatherlike material interwoven with polycarbonate strips and ballistic-resistant cloth, and extremely comfortable. The duster fluttered as he picked it up, whirling it like a cape around his shoulders as he shrugged into the roomy but supple garment.

“You really need to wear that with your shadow suit,” Shizuka spoke up. “You look magnificent with your coattails flapping.”

Grant managed a smile. “I sometimes worry about snagging this thing.”

“Have you ever?” Shizuka asked.

Grant thought about it for a moment as he and the samurai commander prepared to rush to the Tigers of Heaven’s small fleet of motorized launches. “Nope, but I don’t wear this much.”

The two lovers exited Shizuka’s Spartan dwelling and at the railing saw the gong ringer, his brawny arms and shoulders glistening with sweat as he swung the hammer to alert the city. As the gong was centrally placed, everyone could quickly get their bearings by the row of lanterns mounted on the support beam that the great bronzed dish hung from. Grant could see that the lantern indicating trouble on Thunder Isle had been ignited.

“Shit,” Grant muttered.

“We’ll get to the boats,” Shizuka said. She pulled her radio from its place on her sash. Now that the Tigers of Heaven had been alerted, they would be waiting for indications of who should respond and where they should go. “Nagumi, harden the perimeter in case this is a diversion. Ichira, Honda, bring your squads with me to the island. Full force.”

Grant knew that “full force” was not inconsiderable. Twelve samurai warriors with composite armor, high-tech bows and arrows and thousand-folded pure steel blades with nearly monomolecular edges were easily a match for Magistrates with submachine guns, grenades and bulletproof armor.

Grant and Shizuka took their places aboard the Gamera-maru, the same vessel that the two of them and their samurai allies had been on when they’d prevented an assault by the barons on New Edo when the island colony was first discovered by the Cerberus explorers. It was unofficially the flagship of the New Edo fleet, and as such, it had been upgraded with new motors on the aft. While the engines had been designed for twentieth-century inflatable rafts called Zodiacs, they had easily been adapted to the rattan-hulled craft. The increase in speed from traditional outboard motors had been dramatic, enabling a quicker response to a crisis on Thunder Isle.

Grant perched on the bow of the Gamera-maru as the twin Mercedes engines pumped out hundreds of horsepower, producing rooster tails of white, frothy spray, writing the massive energy impulse in twelve-foot-high jets as the craft accelerated from its berth. Two other craft, each laden with a quartet of Samurai, as well as their crews, had started only moments apart, but that was sufficient for Grant and Shizuka to achieve a twenty-foot lead on the other boats.

The two archers assigned to the Gamera-maru strung their bows, the composite nature of their laminated-wood-and-carbon-fiber cores building enormous potential energy. The mist of seawater coming over the rail of the speeding sea craft wouldn’t affect either the resin-lacquered bows or the inelastic cord, which couldn’t be warped by absorption. A bowstring that stretched under any conditions lost efficiency in transferring the potential energy of the bow to the arrow. Pig tendons and horsehair were two of the materials that the Tigers of Heaven had used, and even late twentieth-century polymers provided by Cerberus hadn’t improved on the archers’ capabilities.

The boat archers used larger bows than Shizuka wore, as they were not expected to wade in close. The Japanese warriors had called them “two-man bows,” as they were the height of one man riding on the shoulders of his friend—about eight feet tall, given the average diminutive stature of the Asians.

“Grant,” Kane’s voice crackled over his Commtact from a thousand miles away. “Bry told me you were on the way to Thunder Isle. Don’t go ashore.”

“Too late. We’re on our way to a four-gong emergency,” Grant answered. “Why?”

“Baptiste just called me to say she found one of our off-duty Mag coats buried under around five thousand years of sand in some sort of tomb,” Kane told him. “Thunder Isle’s one place we know of that has an operating time-travel machine….”

“Mag coats?” Grant asked. He looked at the armor-laced duster, its tails flapping from his hips. “I’m wearing mine right now.”

“Damn it, Grant,” Kane growled. “Baptiste thinks one of us—”

“Well, if she found the damn duster buried for a few thousand years, then we’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole,” Grant answered, cutting him off. “Nothing’s going to change that. Did she find any bones sticking out of the sleeves?”

“No, but she only found a piece of it sticking out,” Kane replied. “That doesn’t mean our carcass isn’t nearby.”

“Let me know if she finds any bones. Otherwise, what’s happened has happened,” Grant said. “We’ll be jumping at shadows every time we get called here.”

“Grant…” Kane’s voice was laced with frustration, but Grant knew that there were people in danger; otherwise the alert wouldn’t have sounded on New Edo.

“Kane, we can discuss this all you want later, right now, people who are our friends may be dying,” Grant grumbled. “Or am I worth more than them?”

Grant knew that Kane’s answer would be a hard choice. The two former Magistrates were closer than brothers, bound by blood, sweat and tears, but Kane was driven by the same selfless urge to protect innocents that had made them the finest enforcement team in Cobaltville.

“You don’t have permission to die,” Kane said. “If you do, I’ll drag you back to life and beat you to death again.”

“It’ll take a lot to get me out of your life. If I don’t see you for five thousand years, you’d better behave. Remember, the more you complain, the longer you live, and five millennia ain’t going to be shit off the bitching I’ve done,” Grant answered.

There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the Commtact. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Grant managed a smirk, seeing the shore of Thunder Isle. “Grant out.”

THOUGH HER HEADBAND was meant to keep the sweat and her flowing red-gold hair out of Brigid Baptiste’s eyes, she still needed to mop her eyes as she paused. Her hands had been callused from her years of adventure, but the effort of prying apart the sunbaked sandstone with a foot-long utility knife was raising new blisters on her fingers. The pebbling on the Micarta Fiberglas handle had worn a red patch between the base and knuckle of her index finger.

So far, she’d gotten the sleeve out to the shoulder, and from the tailored length of what she’d freed, there was no doubt as to the owner of the duster. She sat back, a wave of nausea rumbling in her stomach.

Brigid raised Kane on her Commtact. “Did you warn Grant?”

“Yes,” Kane answered. “His response was that you’ve found the coat, so he’s already destined to go on a trip to the ancient past. You’re sure it’s his coat?”

“By now, absolutely,” Brigid answered. “No one else in Cerberus has arms as long as he does.”

Brigid glanced to one side, and saw Domi’s ruby-red eyes locked on the armored leather spilling out of the crack in the temple remnant.

“You heard what Kane said?” Brigid asked.

“Was on party line,” Domi answered, her diction returning to the abbreviated Outland form of speech. It was a sign of nervousness or heightened stress, and Brigid could feel sympathy for the young albino. Usually, when her words became terse and tense, she at least could engage in combat to deal with what had gotten under her skin. When Domi couldn’t utilize the energy pumped into her bloodstream by the fight-or-flight reflex, Brigid could see her grow morose and withdrawn.

Domi was walking an emotional edge, especially considering how close she had grown to Grant since he had first saved her life back in the Tartarus slums under Cobaltville. Grant had been the first person in a long time to show the wild woman kindness. Domi had gone from fighting, literally tooth and claw, for survival to being one of pit-boss Guana Teague’s prostitutes. Gentleness and humanity had been a rarity in her life, and Grant’s act of protection had earned her undying loyalty, first demonstrated when she stopped Teague from strangling Grant to death.

There’d been a brief period when Domi had thought their relationship was sexual in nature, but it eventually settled down that she had found a father figure. When Cerberus was a much smaller staff, before the influx of lunar staff, she had finally found her family. The added freezies from the Manitius Base had made her uncomfortable, intruding on her sense of community, which only drew her closer to Grant, Kane, Brigid and Lakesh.

Brigid didn’t want to think of the pain Domi would be in if Grant was gone forever.

“We know roughly when he was transported,” Brigid said. “And this place has none of the traditional indications of a Sumerian crypt.”

“So not cemetery,” Domi muttered, looking around. “Not much temple.”

“Not now, but we have millennia of erosion and deterioration that’s removed most of what this place used to be,” Brigid answered.

“Erosion?” Domi asked. Her face screwed into a mask of skepticism. “Or bombed.”

Brigid frowned as she looked around. “We’ve only been digging for a few minutes—we can’t tell.”

“Snake-faces ruled here,” Domi mentioned.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that,” Brigid answered.

“Never forget anything,” Domi agreed. “But didn’t say so.”

“You’re trying to say that I’m keeping information from you?” Brigid asked.

Domi looked away from the sleeve, the first time in the several minutes since they’d discovered the armored garment. “No. Softening news. Maybe. Not say lying.”

Brigid rested her hand on the diminutive albino’s shoulder. “We would have found skeletal remains if he was killed here. This was just a memento…buried and lost in time.”

“Too hot for long coat here, even then?” Domi asked.

“Absolutely,” Brigid answered.

“News is getting better,” Domi said, recovering some of her language skills, stress lessening.

“Plus we’re not even sure he’s going to be tossed through time just this minute,” Brigid said. “It could be some time in the next thirty years, for all we know. Or even Grant’s son, if he has one.”

Domi snickered. Brigid tilted her head.

“Remembered line about assumptions,” Domi said. “You make an ass out of you and umption.”

Brigid nodded.

“Because, you know, I’m pretty big, too,” Edwards interjected from his overwatch of the temple dig. “Grant could have lent me his coat.”

“Too fat,” Domi replied.

Edwards grimaced. “That’s muscle.”

“You want to get punier?” Domi asked.

Mariah Falk let out a sigh. “Brigid, I thought that you wanted to see the chamber that this coat seems to be walled into.”

Domi tilted her head.

Brigid explained for her friend. “That device she has is a sonar locater. It registers echoes off loud noises returned from objects of heavier density.”

Domi smiled with comprehension. “So when Mariah set off the boom stick on the ground, she was looking through the sand.”

“When did you start getting so smart?” Edwards asked.

“Boyfriend cuts holes in universes as shortcuts,” Domi noted. “Brigid friend is living encyclopedia. Six years hanging around with them, knowledge rubs off, newbie.”

Edwards smirked. “Attitude rubs off, too.”

“It’s not attitude if you can back it up,” Brigid countered. The archivist walked over to Falk, who had put another image on her portable tablet computer. “You’ve double-checked this?”

“I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with in this time, but I didn’t get assigned to Manitius by being sloppy and second-rate,” Falk answered.

“Point taken,” Brigid said. “My apologies.”

“None necessary,” Falk replied. “I just wanted you to know who you were working with.”

“How deep is that pit supposed to be?” Edwards asked.

“From ceiling to floor, we’re looking at thirty feet,” Falk explained. “The overall floor space looks to be the size of four football fields blocked together, with pillars that could easily be five feet in diameter.”

“Football fields?” Edwards asked. “Say it in postapocalyptic terms for those of us without a frame of reference.”

“Two hundred yards long, and we’re looking at about fifty yards wide,” Falk translated. She snorted with amusement.

“What’s so funny?” Edwards asked.

“First time I knew more about football than someone who is so stereotypically a jock,” Falk said. “Football was a game full of men who wished they were as big as you or Grant.”

Edwards smirked at the obvious compliment. “You know, instead of fucking around with knives and shovels, why don’t we blow a hole in the side of this thing?”

“We want to see what’s inside, not collapse the whole damn place,” Brigid explained.

“The roof’s thick, easily two yards,” Falk said. “And the support pillars are thick and intact according to the sonar.”

Brigid frowned as she thought about it.

“I’m not talking about a nuclear blast,” Edwards said. “A controlled, focused explosion. Back when the Magistrates had to get into a place without bringing down the whole shantytown, we used loops of detonation cord that cut through walls without a blast wave that would level huts around our target.”

“Kane generally just throws grenades,” Brigid mused.

“He also was a pilot on a Deathbird gunship,” Edwards told her. “Firepower is its own solution for those guys.”

“I guess the old saying is correct,” Brigid said.

“There’s no problem that can’t be solved with the application of high explosives?” Edwards asked.

Brigid nodded. “And not to judge a book by its cover.”

Edwards shrugged his huge shoulders. “Don’t attribute it too much to brains. Just a good memory and some damned impatience.”

“Do you have that kind of explosive power?” Brigid asked.

Edwards scooped up his war bag. “I can roll my quarter kilogram blocks of plastique into det cord.”

“Why do you have them separated into quarter kilogram blocks?” Brigid asked.

Edwards smiled. “Sela told me about her time with Special Forces who made these things called ‘eight balls.’ A wad of C-4 with a detonator made a big stunning sound without throwing shrapnel all over the place. You could deafen a room full of bad guys with one of these, maybe even knock them cold, but they’re still useful enough for ripping shit apart when packed properly.”

“Then set it up and let’s see what this place really is,” Brigid said.

The explorers worked together to open the ancient underground temple, hoping to learn when and where their friend Grant lost his coat in this foreboding tomb.

BRONDA STRODE along the perimeter that the Millennial Consortium had placed around the Thunder Isle facility. The barrel of his 9 mm Calico submachine gun rested on his left forearm, and his finger lay on the frame above the weapon’s trigger in an effort to keep the weapon safe but ready to go. One twitch of his finger, and he could start spitting out bullets from the Calico’s 100-round helical magazine, sawing an opponent in half.

He reached the end of his patrol circuit and saw Lonmar. Where Bronda had been a grim, brutal raider who had attacked caravans that crossed the Outlands, Lonmar was a tall, powerful giant who was once been a Magistrate from Beausoleilville, a violent enforcer who obeyed the whims of the bitch-goddess who had evolved into the merciless Annunaki overlord Lilitu. These were the raw-muscled head breakers who the millennialists had known were the backbone of their effort to set up a technocracy over the shattered Earth. Both men were given power and the freedom to utilize it in service to that scientific cabal.

That Lonmar and Bronda got to engage in their heartless excess of cruelty was icing atop a cake whose ingredients were pay, logistical support and the backing of an army of like-minded brutes.

The guards and scientists who were manning the Operation Chronos time trawl facility had given a modicum of a fight—they had even brought down a couple of millennial mercenaries—but it hadn’t been enough to slake the two sentries’ blood thirst. There was a little hope, though. A radio message had gotten out to New Edo.

The Tigers of Heaven had received that call.

Bronda took a deep breath, and nodded to Lonmar. “Any sign of those primates?”

“The samurai are going to be sneaky,” Lonmar answered. “I heard from Snakefishville about a raid their Mags went on. They had their asses handed to them.”

Bronda’s crooked scar of a mouth turned up at one end. The other side had been immobilized by scar tissue and nerve paralysis when he’d been slashed across the face on one of his first caravan raids. “Scared?”

Lonmar’s bushy eyebrows wrinkled, inching together like hairy caterpillars over his black, soulless eyes. “Snakefishville is full of pussies. If I’d been there, I’d have broken off their own damn swords up their asses.”

Bronda chuckled. “Keep your eyes open.”

“You, too,” Lonmar replied.

Bronda turned and went back along his section of perimeter. With the consortium, the former raider had found the closest thing he could call kinship and family. Maybe it had been a design by one of the technocrats, some form of social engineering that turned the mercenary thugs under their sway into a more cohesive fighting unit. Bronda liked people like Lonmar and the rest of the hired guns working with him. It might have been a form of manipulation, but Bronda didn’t mind. The group he fought alongside worked. Let the Tigers of Heaven come get them. When the Calico drained empty, the Outlands pirate would draw the wicked foot-and-a-half-long sword and show the primitive Japanese how to really carve up flesh.

There was the smack of fist on flesh from behind, and Bronda whirled. Lonmar staggered backward, recoiling from a punch hurled by a tall monster of a man dressed in a long black coat. Lonmar had been a physical giant, but the titan in the leather duster threw a follow-up punch that felled the ex-Magistrate like a rotted tree. Bronda didn’t think that anyone could have laid out the man, but the stranger whirled to look at the raider.

Seeing the skin of dark mahogany, the drooping gunfighter’s mustache and the swelling musculature shifting under the coat, Bronda had a moment of recognition.

It was Grant, one of the three who had escaped from Cobaltville, turning their backs upon the barons of the monolithic city-states. A jolt of panic passed and Bronda swung up his Calico to rip the bald, black giant in half.

The machine pistol stuttered out a short burst, and Bronda knew that he’d hit Grant, but the outlander ignored the impacts of his bullets. If Bronda hadn’t been distracted by a goose-feather shaft jutting from his rib cage, he’d have had the time to realize that Grant’s coat had been armored. Bronda looked at the end of the arrow that had transected his torso, then into the woods. The arrow had flown scant moments before Bronda had opened fire, his ability to recover from surprise only a moment quicker than the archer’s estimate.

For a brief moment, he saw a beautiful woman in samurai armor nock another arrow onto her bowstring, her hands moving swiftly. It had felt like minutes to the dying, shocked Bronda, but Shizuka had gotten off her second deadly missile in under a second, this razor-sharp point slicing through Bronda’s left eye, pinioning his brain.

Shizuka heard the ugly crunch of neck bones disintegrating, and she turned to see Grant rise from Lonmar’s corpse. The samurai wondered why Grant would have killed an unconscious man, but her eyes fell to the bloody scalps hanging off the millennialist’s belt. The broken neck was swift, painless justice, sparing the murderer potential reprisals in the form of torture.

Grant’s eyes met hers, and he jerked his head toward the entrance that the two millennialists had been guarding. Other cold-blooded killers were crawling the halls of the Operation Chronos laboratory. If there had been hostages, their captors would have been alerted by the brief stutter of automatic fire. Grant was spurred on by the impetus of imperiled lives.

With the silence and grace of a jet-black tiger, the big Cerberus warrior slipped through the side access.

Chapter 3

With Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta broken up, Kane pulled in the remaining third of Domi’s team, Sela Sinclair, to join him on an emergency jump to Thunder Isle. Right now, in the mat-trans chamber, Donald Bry and Daryl Morganstern were busy trying to override the lockout placed by the Millennial Consortium hijackers at the Operation Chronos facility. Kane didn’t doubt Sinclair’s ability. The woman had fought for Cerberus redoubt for a year, proving herself as brave and skillful a warrior as any he had met. Sinclair had been born in a different time, an air force security officer whose training had been geared toward protecting United States military bases from terrorism. She was a freezie, a cryogenically preserved relic from centuries in the past, and upon awakening, she had sided with Kane, Brigid and Grant in battling another temporally displaced set of opponents.

Kane was in his shadow suit, the high-tech polymers conforming to his lean, wolflike musculature like a second skin, except this skin would protect him from hard vacuum decompression and intense heat or cold, though it could not redistribute kinetic shock from small-arms fire. Due to its high-tech composition, the shadow suit did protect its wearer from hard impacts such as falls and even punches from foes of great size and strength.

Kane preferred the shadow suit over his old Magistrate armor. It provided him better mobility and superior comfort. It also hid easily under other clothing, being low profile and formfitting. He didn’t mind being able to ignore the biting, frostbite-inducing chill of arctic winds or the blazing, mercilessly hot suns of deserts in nothing more than the shadow suit and its hood. Other features, such as camouflage and protection from radiation, were simply icing on the cake.

Sinclair wore another shadow suit, identical to Kane’s, but her forearm was not adorned with the Magistrates’ weapon and badge of office, the folding Sin Eater machine pistol. Rather, Sinclair had her Beretta M-9 pistol hanging on a pistol belt, along with a collapsible combat baton, a fighting knife and various bits of security kit that gave her a continuity of force from mild restraint to lethal response that compensated for the relative lack of size compared to big, muscular men like Kane, Grant or Edwards. There was no doubt, thanks to the curve-hugging properties of the shadow suit, that Sinclair was athletic and strong, but without the feral ferocity of someone like Domi, she had to supplement her strength and skill with an assortment of equipment that would give her an edge against the rare opponent whose greater might was matched with fighting ability.

Kane, after years of adventuring with some of the most dynamic women on the planet, had no doubt that a woman with training and experience could handle herself quite well in almost as many situations as he could. But he also appreciated Sinclair knowing her limitations and adapting strategy and preparations for them. Kane himself knew that he was not the strongest or the most skilled warrior on the planet, nor was he the smartest. That was one of his strengths.

Grant had relayed some wisdom from the Tigers of Heaven from a swordsman named Musashi, one of the most celebrated samurai warriors in the history of Japan. Musashi had said that “to know one’s limitations is to be limitless.” Kane had innately understood that, and it was what had carried him and his allies to victory over gods, armies of cultists and other threats to humanity’s tenuous existence in the dangerous world that existed in this postapocalyptic time. That bit of philosophy passed on from a swordsman hundreds of years ago was simply a confirmation for what Kane didn’t have the words. Right now, however, he was more interested in the limitations of technology.

Because the mat-trans unit on Thunder Isle was part of the Totality Concept, a Continuity of Government program in the event of an apocalyptic event, it would have been easy to pop into the Operation Chronos facility if it weren’t for the fact that the mat-trans was on total lockdown because of the millennialist’s attack. Kane had suggested using the interphaser, a unit that acted in concert with natural vortices of magnetic energy.

The Thunder Isle facility was constructed around such an intersection of magnetic force lines, often called Ley Lines by western alchemists or Dragon Roads by Asian geomancers. The interphaser would drop them somewhere in the control room. While the sudden appearance of Kane and Sinclair would give them some advantage, there was no way to know if they would emerge in a murderous crossfire.

“You will end up in their mat-trans, which could easily be put under guard. You’d be gunned down—” Lakesh said.

A glare from Kane cut him off.

Right now, Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man for running the functions of the Cerberus redoubt, was working code and math together with Clem Bryant and Daryl Morganstern. Bryant wasn’t a computer expert or a mathematician like Bry or Morganstern, but he had rapidly become one of the premier scientific problem solvers. His field of expertise had been oceanography, something that was not immediately necessary in the struggle against the Annunaki and other forces threatening the freedom of humanity. He’d originally become the chef for the redoubt, but his ability to think outside of the box had granted Lakesh and the others the spark to reach conclusions.

The three men were an odd amalgamation, from the slender, rust-haired Bry to squat, pudgy-faced Morganstern to tall, goateed Bryant.

Kane looked to Sinclair. “We could just take a Manta…”

“No good,” Bry said. “Grant’s already in motion, from what I heard over his Commtact.”

“Lakesh, we don’t have time to dick around,” Kane said. “Just jump us in. No one has a gun that can punch through the armaglass chamber doors.”

Sinclair managed a smile. “I do have something that could help us with that.”

With that announcement, she drew a flashlight from her well-stocked utility belt.

“Flashlight,” Kane noted.

“I’d show you what it does, but it’d take you a few seconds to get over the strobe setting,” Sinclair answered.

“What kind of candlepower does it put out?” Kane asked.

“Ten thousand,” Sinclair said. “It’ll still be sharp enough to leave a millennialist seeing spots for about fifteen seconds.”

“That should buy us enough time to get out into the open,” Kane returned. “Lakesh?”

The chief scientist of Cerberus frowned, but his decision process was quickened simply because of the swiftness of Kane’s decision. The former Magistrate was a man of action, but also one with an uncanny danger sense that had kept him alive in conflicts against menaces powerful enough to erase the solar system. “Bry, can we send them?”

Bry nodded and he and Morganstern exited the mat-trans unit. Kane and Sinclair entered the armaglass chamber with swiftness and purpose.

Kane wasn’t going to let Grant, his partner and best friend in the world, disappear into history without a fight.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA STALKED through the entrance into a well-lit corridor. The millennialists were too savvy to allow stretches of shadows to obscure the approach of enemies. It didn’t matter, since the hallway was empty of sentries, which made this approach all the more suspicious. For a brief instant, Grant wished Kane, with his uncanny point man’s sense, was by his side instead of the beautiful samurai Shizuka. She was highly skilled, but Grant had yet to encounter another with Kane’s instincts and reflexes.

The former Magistrate pushed the thought from his mind. Instead of occupying his thoughts with what could have been, he needed to concentrate on the here and now. His eyes and ears couldn’t pick up on minuscule details with the same razor-sharp precision that Kane could, but he hadn’t survived years as a Mag without relying on his own well-honed awareness. That’s when he saw the smears of mud tracking along the otherwise mirror-polished floors.

Grant slowed and Shizuka, shadowing close to him, did likewise, her attention falling to the mess on the tiles. Neither of them spoke, but they both realized that something else was waiting down the hall, out of sight. The smell of the mud was the same primal stench of jungle that they had passed through. The Tigers of Heaven had done their best to clear the road between the beach and the installation of the dangerous feral predators trawled from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, then utilized speakers producing uncomfortable infrasonic pulses to keep them away.

The speakers had made manning Thunder Isle much safer, but nothing was perfect, necessitating sidearms and a contingent of sentries on the island at all times, just in case a predator’s taste for human flesh was stronger than the discomfort that pumped through his eardrums every time he neared their world.

Those speakers, unfortunately, had a limited range. Behind the walls of the facility, anything carted past them would be unhindered, save by locked bulkhead doors, just like the one that sat at the end of this corridor. As Grant and Shizuka kept to the cover of a wall outcropping, minimizing their exposure to security cameras, they realized that something else could have been curled up in nooks down the way.

“Judging by the size of the mud smears, trailing off into man-size footprints, we’re looking at deinonychus,” Shizuka said.

Grant, who had grown familiar with the time-displaced dragons of Thunder Isle, nodded in agreement. “More than one, too. And check it out, feathers. Definitely those little ‘terrible claws.’”

The predators that they’d referred to were the height and weight of German shepherds, but were infinitely more dangerous, possessing intelligence and teamwork in addition to flesh-rending killing claws on their hind legs and mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth. The deinonychus were masses of muscle that could sprint at upward of thirty miles per hour, as well. All of that combined into an opponent that was a lightning-quick slashing wind that could bring down elephantine sauropods outweighing an individual raptor tenfold. The Tigers of Heaven had suffered losses because of these cunning, dangerous creatures, and Grant and his other Cerberus companions had nearly succumbed to their threat, as well.

“Damn consortium must have drugged them and brought them here to be guard dogs,” Grant grumbled.

As if on cue, a feather-crowned head poked out, cat-slitted eyes staring manically over a grin full of daggers. Though the deinonychus had existed millions of years before humans had even developed consciousness, there was something primevally terrifying about that wild, unhindered smile that reached down into the mammalian DNA and still resonated in modern humans. This was the cackling wyvern, a fanged cockatrice that was the horror of mankind’s nightmares, the source of myths and horror tales.

Another head, then a third, all looked down the hall, nostrils flaring, heads tilting and twitching inhumanly to locate the source of any sound.

Grant grimaced, realizing that even hushed, his voice carried to the sharp ears of the deadly predators. Shizuka tensed, knowing that they didn’t see all of their dinosaur opponents. A sudden movement would be the trigger to the raptors’ charge. The three hunters, given the height of their heads around the outcroppings they’d nested at, were crouched on haunches of coil-wound muscle that could launch them as swiftly as even Shizuka’s arrows.

One of the raptors padded warily into the open, body and head held low and parallel to the floor tiles. Grant could see the predator’s killing claws, three-inch-long hooks of gleaming black talon, cocked perpendicular to the ground, its other nails providing it traction in the polished corridor. The raptor’s thigh muscles flexed and swelled, the promise of blinding speed stored in the tightly clenched limbs.

Grant sneered. The dinosaurs were simple animals, no matter how dangerous they could be. They were pawns of the millennialists, who simply saw every living thing as their subjects. That these creatures, magnificent examples of an evolutionary line ended sixty-five million years prior, would either kill or die was of no matter to the conspirators. At the same time, Grant was not a man who relished killing animals unnecessarily and hated it even more when those creatures were used as fodder for cowards too lazy to fight their own battles. As much as the initial sight of the deadly predators had awakened instinctual horror in the pit of his stomach, these dinosaurs were not malicious or gleefully violent. The only adversaries whom Grant had ever encountered who had taken joy or pride in their violence were humans. The deinonychus hadn’t made a choice to be here and be killers.

Still, Grant wasn’t going to stay his hand, not with Shizuka’s life at stake. The Tigers of Heaven commander had similar feelings. While one of them could have possibly retreated back out of this corridor, the two of them would not be able to dive through the door without entangling each other. They had to stand and fight, especially since there were citizens of New Edo and Cerberus on the other side of the door the raptors protected.

Grant would make note to provide a little extra pain to the sociopaths who threw away lives like table scraps as he extended his fingers for a countdown. Shizuka nodded, understanding his intent. From the behavior they observed, there was a path that didn’t involve violence and would result in their betrayed presence and injuries inflicted at the talons and fangs of the deinonychus. As Grant’s index finger folded down into his fist, the two warriors stepped into the open swiftly and suddenly, so much so that the lone predator crouched in the center of the hall stepped back, startled into recoil.

Grant’s step was punctuated by the sharp clack of his Sin Eater extending into his hand. The only sound that Shizuka had made was the creak of her bow flexing under the force of her strong arms. Both people were ready to let their weapons speak, and they stood with confidence and strength. Of course, this was surrendering any attempt at stealth on their parts, thanks to the noise the Sin Eater would make.

There was a method of dealing with animals, and predators were not too interested in engaging in combat with prey that could injure them. Successful hunters sought out targets that would provide them minimum risk, or stack the odds in their favor due to surprise and terrain. Here, in an open corridor, with foes who were armed and obviously capable of fighting back, the deinonychus would pause before a foolish head-on rush.

Those yellow-black slitted eyes locked on to Grant, which meant that Shizuka could slip back behind his bulk and head toward the bulkhead access to the outside. If they were to have a chance to advance farther without gunshots warning the millennialists on the other side of their blast shield, Grant and Shizuka would need a path for the deinonychus to run away.

It helped that the two adventurers could tell the difference between territorial challenge and hunting mode. From what they knew, no raptor would expose itself if there was no net of fellow predators to catch fleeing prey. This was the deinonychus pack standing their ground against a threat, the pack leader taking point and presenting the knowledge that the humans were approaching a very defensive, confused and frightened group.

Grant didn’t flinch, keeping eye contact with the pack leader, but other than showing off his size and weapon, he made no menacing actions toward the raptor. This was a fine line, a balance between a show of strength and passive standing. Too strong, and the deinonychus would take Grant as a threat. Too passive, and the prehistoric killing machine would advance, perhaps even attack.

Grant heard the door behind him—they hadn’t come that far down the corridor—and the smell of the jungle beyond the sonic fence rushed him. The pack leader’s nostrils flared at the familiar scent of home. The predator’s sensitive ears, or rather the feathers around their ear holes that funneled sound akin to mammalian ears, turned to the doorway, and they recoiled momentarily. He spoke in low, calm tones. “Don’t forget…”

“I haven’t. Just locating the speaker,” Shizuka replied just as softly.

Grant didn’t need any verification that his love had disconnected the infrasound generator. The sudden decrease in uncomfortable sonics was flagged by the reaction of the deinonychus pack leader and its kin.

The pack leader’s yellow eyes flicked from Grant to the jungle behind him. The human stepped aside, allowing the confused, uprooted predators a way back to where they were comfortable. Slowly, cautiously, the dinosaurs walked out into the open, the pack leader padding up to Grant. Their eyes were still locked, the raptor’s signal was clear.

To harm my family, you must go through me.

The deinonychus, five of them, zipped past their pack leader, darting through the doorway and beyond, disappearing into the jungle. Once its family was safely away from this place of humans, the leader backed away from Grant, showing its strength while giving itself distance from a potential opponent and the freedom of the forest. Grant hoped that Shizuka hadn’t reset the infrasound projector, but once the lead raptor’s feet felt soil, not tile, it whirled and exploded away into the wilds of Thunder Isle.

Though he had not incurred the wrath of the dinosaur’s claws and fangs, Grant had to lean against the wall. He’d flexed his muscles, making himself appear larger and more menacing. That and the concentration needed to keep the animals at bay had taken its toll. Shizuka appeared in the doorway, closing it behind her before tending to him.

“You all right?” she asked.

Grant nodded, taking a few deep breaths. “Staring down a killer dinosaur is hard damned work.”

Shizuka brushed her hand across his broad chest, sparing a slight, tight-lipped smile. “So taking on some hired guns should be a snap, right?”

Grant chuckled and kissed Shizuka’s forehead, or rather the helmet chevron over her eyes. “Yeah. Can’t go taking a nap now.”

The two warriors headed down the hallway.

BRIGID BAPTISTE WAS impressed with the precision of Edwards’s breaching charge. The reshaped plastic explosives had cut a perfect hole large enough for Brigid, Domi and Maria Falk to slither through. Edwards had no intention of climbing into an ancient underground temple, and a hole large enough to fit his muscular, massive form would risk a weakness in the wall that might cause the improvised entrance to collapse.

Domi took point, putting her head and shoulders through the opening. Though not much sunlight got past even her slender frame, the albino’s ruby-red eyes were attuned to even the deepest of shadows, and could pick up details as necessary. She came out of the hole and reached into a gear bag, pulling a length of rope adorned with knots every two feet.

“Anchor,” she ordered.

Edwards nodded and secured the end of the cord and the grapnel hook to which it was attached in some rocks. When the steel tines of the grapnel were anchored, Edwards gave the hook a tug with all of his strength. If the former Magistrate couldn’t unseat the grapnel, then the combined weight of Falk and Brigid wouldn’t be too much for it.

“Shall we?”

“Maria last. You second,” Domi said to Brigid, slithering through the hole. A slender arm snaked out, snatched up her gear bag and yanked it into the shadows. Brigid waited a moment, wondering what would be the feral girl’s signal to follow her. The hiss of a flare, followed by a reddish glow in the darkened hole was a good preamble.

“Come on,” Domi called.

Brigid slipped through the hole, holding on to the rope. The drop to the ground was only twenty-five feet, but it was certainly nothing that she’d have wanted to attempt in the dark. Chunks of broken stone on the floor provided an uneven surface to simply hop on to, promising a broken ankle if she’d made the attempt. The knotted rope also provided an easy, low-profile ladder with which they could leave the temple. Thanks to Falk’s ground sonar, the hole itself was braced by sufficient struts to be fairly stable, if too small for Edwards to want to go through.

Even if he wasn’t wary of crawling into a claustrophobic space, Brigid, Domi and Edwards all agreed that someone standing guard at their entrance would be vital. There was no telling who was here on the Euphrates. The explorers had arrived in via parallax point, so knowledge of local bandits, pirates or tyrants was slim. If it weren’t for a heretofore unknown threat from the time of the Annunakis’ rule, and now new hints of another monstrosity from past millennia, Brigid wouldn’t have come here, making a wild stab for historical data that could be an edge in their next conflict with the Annunaki overlords.

Blindsided by Marduk’s horde alongside New Olympus, then the blade of Ullikummis and later Ullikummis himself, Brigid was getting tired of being caught behind the curve.

The vaulted underground chamber was large enough to be an aircraft hangar. Knowing the ships of the Annunaki, Brigid wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that this been a parking garage for ancient astronauts. She didn’t see any form of doors through which skimmers could flit in and out, but she wasn’t able to perceive the wall opposite the one they’d entered through, thanks to the gloomy shadows and the interruption of support studs. She remembered Falk’s original measurements as the geologist finally made her way down the rope.

Two football fields in area.

“Anything, Domi?” Brigid asked.

“Stale air,” she answered. “Scurrying vermin. Not much.”

Outside of Kane, Domi had some of the sharpest senses of any human that Brigid had ever known. Part of it was due to the sensitivity inherent in an albino’s eyes, the rest coming from growing up in the wilderness. Though her skin was alabaster in color, and her closely shorn hair was the hue of aged bone, the feral woman was hardly the fragile creature that albinos of previous centuries had been. She was strong and tough, having survived trauma that would have killed a less resilient human.

Brigid couldn’t have asked for a better companion to slink through the darkness of a temple that might also be an Annunaki tomb. She glanced over to Falk, who checked the Glock in her belt holster. Brigid saw a mirror of herself in the older woman, a scientist who was willing to journey into the unknown but who hadn’t been tested or tried in conflict. There was a difference between the two scientists, though. Falk was beginning her adventuring in her later years, while Brigid was still young and fit. The former archivist was also tall and heavy enough to make her gender less important should she ever get into conflict with a man. Falk was more petite, larger than Domi was but with none of the animalistic fury and wilderness instincts of the albino warrior.

The Glock was the simplest and easiest firearm to operate in the Cerberus armory, so Falk wouldn’t be completely inept if it came to gunplay. Without spending time on learning the operation of the mechanism, Falk and the other Manitius Base scientists could be grilled on marksmanship. The archivist knew the scores from their training, and Falk was above the median in skill, able to tear the heart out of a paper target. Still, Brigid knew that she’d have to watch out for the geologist, because a printed silhouette was very different from a menacing opponent.

Domi had stopped, looking at the other part of Grant’s trench coat. It hung like a flag, and from this side, there was no doubt that it had been crafted for a giant of a man. Below the empty coat was a pile of rodent-chewed bones. Brigid swallowed hard, but the feral girl knelt and picked up one of the bones.

“Too big,” she announced.

“How do you know?” Brigid asked.

Domi stood up the bone she was examining. It was a femur that was nearly as long as Domi’s entire leg. “Grant’s tall, but his thigh don’t reach to my waist. Someone else was wearing his coat.”

Brigid looked at the sunken, buckled ceiling, wondering how the skeleton had gotten nearly through the roof of the temple. She could only hope that it was a victorious situation for Grant.

She didn’t want to think of how someone else had gained possession of her friend’s coat.

Chapter 4

Merkel’s head shot up as two simultaneous events were announced by the consortium mercenaries under his command. One of the mercenaries was not so much a hired gun but a computer technician named Milo Donaldson, the key tapper who was given charge of the mat-trans and the time trawl. He was, to Merkel’s mind, the perfect example of a computer nerd, slender and full of himself because he had abilities that were as vital to the scientists as those of a dozen gunslingers. He got on Merkel’s nerves simply because of his perceived sense of power, which was only as good as his fingertips dancing across a keyboard.

The other was Kovak, who was a former Magistrate like Merkel. However, Kovak was not a war leader like Merkel was. Kovak was just another minion, someone who cleaned up. Merkel would be the one through the door first, while Kovak would hang back, fire a few shots into a twitching corpse and scoop up any dropped magazines. He was simply a cleaner, someone who took care of any messes that Merkel made while he was actively doing.

Not that Merkel himself was in any good mood. Ever since the fall of the baronies, he’d been in business for himself, a walking trigger finger for hire, living hand to mouth in the basest of mercenary lifestyles. He’d long ago sold off any pretense of ethics when he’d learned that he didn’t have a retirement plan. He had felt that his work as a drone under another baron was ignored and degrading. His desire for recognition and glory, despite only excelling at the lowest of achievements, was what finally got him to go from picking up profit in the baronial system to going all out to become his own man.

Of course, that manhood was predicated on being a brute, stripping his office of lawman down to its lowest common denominator. He was a thug, alone in the wilderness. He’d momentarily thought of throwing in his lot with Kane and the people of Cerberus, like a few other Magistrates had done, but Merkel knew he could do better than Kane. Kane had thrown away his life of power and prestige for a half-assed idea of freedom and equality.

Merkel saw a world that he could take on, provided he could scrounge the right people. He’d regarded Donaldson and Kovak as necessary pains, and maybe at some time in the future, he could pick someone better or use them as faceless drones of his own.

Merkel knew that if he told the right lies, he could get his followers. He knew that the consortium had lied about Kane, but most of the soldiers hired by them didn’t care, or had their own vendettas, just like Merkel did.

Men like Allen, another Magistrate who’d been through the same disillusionment. Allen had served under the barons’ whims. He’d upheld baronial law, and when the barons said to kill without mercy, Allen had no compunction about putting a bullet into the head of every single person he was told to. It was his job; it was his life. When the barons abandoned the Magistrates, there were all manner of options that the lawmen could have gone with. They could have gone to Cerberus or continued their career of upholding law and protecting the citizens of the few bastions of civilization in postapocalyptic America, but Allen and Merkel knew that they could do so much better.

The two former law keepers knew better. Serving the unwashed masses without profit didn’t fit their mercenary feelings. The Magistrates had been raised in law, but as Kane and Grant had proved, such rearing was not infallible. Dozens had strayed from the course. Merkel and Allen figured they could convert their strength and training into sustenance of a life they preferred, one where they were in control, and to hell with anyone else’s concepts of what mattered and what was important. Having that power was everything to Merkel, so anything that got in his way was more than an annoyance: it was a declaration of war.

Kovak and Donaldson were simply the messengers of bad news, but Merkel was willing to shoot them.

“Sir! Movement in corridor Alpha!” Kovak announced. “The dinosaurs are leaving.”

“We’ve got an incoming matter transmission,” Donaldson said.

“Shut the door! Lock down the chamber!” Merkel shouted, responding immediately. “Allen! Don’t let the hostages be recovered alive!”

“You’ve got it,” Allen said. “If those Goody Two-shoes bastards want to save something, they’ll be returning corpses to be buried.”

Merkel sneered. “If we can’t have Thunder Isle, they’ll have a tomb. No one takes what I own,” Merkel growled. “Not without great price. Not even Kane and Grant, damn their very existence!”

AS SHE MATERIALIZED the mat-trans chamber, Sela Sinclair felt as if her stomach was a few hundred feet behind her, in the void they’d just crossed. Bry and Morganstern had cracked the lockout codes put in by the millennialist raiders, but since it was a standard jump, there was residual jump sickness. It was nothing that she hadn’t hardened herself against, but it was still disorienting. Her knees went rubbery for a moment, but Sinclair was a strong woman. She hadn’t fought her way into the traditionally male-dominated world of the United States Air Force without having guts.

“Sinclair,” Kane called out, getting her thoughts refocused.

As if it were a code word, a post-hypnotic suggestion trigger, Sinclair reached down to her security torch and swept it out of its spot on her utility belt. Kane saw consortium mercenaries rush down the corridor to hem them in, Calico machine guns held in firing position for the moment that the chamber door hissed aside.

Sinclair focused the lens of her flashlight on the hallway, then thumbed the panic button on the side. Kane ducked his face behind his shoulder, and the normally nonreflective shadowsuit was painted with a brilliant blue-white glow.

The trio of consortium gunmen in the hall let out grunts of pain as their eyeballs were seared by the brilliant burst of light pulsing from the torch. Sinclair had been on the other end of the lens, so she knew that the only thing residing in their optic nerves was an orange halo around a void of nothingness. The effect would last for as long as ten seconds, an eternity when it came to close-quarters combat, but they wouldn’t feel long-term effects, depending on how mercifully Kane and Sinclair treated them.

She turned off the light and was hot on Kane’s heels as the two Cerberus warriors charged the gun-wielding blinded men. The former Magistrate skipped the first of the millennialists, leaving him for Sinclair to deal with as he fell upon the two at the rear. It wasn’t a case of macho posturing on Kane’s part; it was simply the fact that he had the arm reach to engage the gunmen quickly, simultaneously if he moved correctly.

Sinclair drew her collapsible ASP baton, snapping it open with a flick of the wrist. The harsh snap of the telescoping steel tubing caused her target to “look” in the direction of the sound, despite the fact that all he could see was an all-consuming fireball. She whipped the tip of the baton around like a scythe, lashing it across the millennialist’s knees. The sudden impact knocked his feet from beneath him, and Sinclair pivoted the top section up and chopped it hard on his neck, just over his jugular.

That particular shot was a stunner. The blood vessel transmitted hydrostatic force back into his brain, not enough to rupture anything vital, but the sudden rush of fluid was overwhelming enough to interrupt the raider’s consciousness.

Sinclair looked up in time to see Kane using the toppling form of one of the consortium mercenaries as a brace to swing both feet up, one boot cracking the man’s jaw, the other spearing his breastbone. The millennial gunman’s head rebounded off the wall, and then he crashed face-first into the floor, a numb, groaning sack of insensate thug. Kane landed on the balls of his feet as his “support” folded to the ground, landing on his knees and vomiting. Kane turned and jammed a knife-hard hand into the stunned gunman’s neck, ending his suffering for the time being.

“Sinclair, make sure he doesn’t choke,” Kane ordered, gathering up the unconscious men’s firearms.

Sinclair knelt next to the man, dragging his head from the puddle he’d made after Kane struck him hard in the sternum and groin. She left him lying on his side, then took a rag from one of his pockets to clear the remaining bile from his mouth. He wouldn’t choke. It might be a waste of time, especially since these three hired guns may have been responsible for the deaths of a Tiger of Heaven sentry on the island. If they were murderers, their heads would roll.

Still, the Tigers of Heaven had a stringent code of justice, and the samurai were loath to kill incapacitated opponents, just like the Cerberus warriors. There was time for ruthless slaying ability, but cold-blooded murder didn’t live in the hearts of the two societies.

“He’ll live,” Sinclair announced.

“If he deserves to,” Kane replied, voice low and grim. The Sin Eater hissed into his hand, lightning swift. “These three are our last free lunch for a while.”

“I didn’t sign on for an easy time,” Sinclair answered, drawing the Beretta from her hip holster. She took a moment to affix a suppressor to the extended barrel. Kane latched a stealth module, a squared, vented device as opposed to the round pipe on her Beretta, onto the nose of his Sin Eater, as well. Neither gun would be whisper quiet—the enemy would definitely know that firearms went off—but they wouldn’t give away their positions so easily due to the alteration of the weapons’ acoustics.

“Bry, tell me you’ve cracked the security cameras,” Kane said into his Commtact.

“I have, but the millennialists are staying out of sight,” Bry answered. “These guys aren’t stupid…oh, my God… Grant!”

Sinclair could see Kane stiffen at the alarm in Bry’s voice. Then the Cerberus warrior exploded into motion, and she had to push herself to keep up with Kane.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA MOVED like shadowy wraiths among the corridors of the Operation Chronos laboratories. They had barely ducked out of sight when a group of millennialist gunmen hurried to the hall where they’d entered the base. They avoided notice, and as soon as they were out of earshot, Shizuka got on the radio to her Tigers of Heaven allies. The samurai would deal with the millennialists, bringing them down swiftly and silently.

The two people had the option of going right at the commander who had taken control of the installation, but the fear for the safety of the hostages, if there were any, kept them moving with silence and speed. They had to verify any captives the millennialists had taken and insure their safety. Grant thought of the difference between the consortium and Cerberus. The consortium would sacrifice their hired guns, cutting and running or blasting the facility to oblivion in a scorched-earth campaign. Grant, however, couldn’t write off an ally. These were friends, and if there was one thing that the ex-Magistrate had developed, it was loyalty to the people of New Edo, enough that he’d risk his life for them as readily as he did for his family at the Cerberus redoubt.

Grant frowned, deepening the angle of his gunslinger’s mustache as he mentally reviewed the map of the Operation Chronos labs. When he spoke to Shizuka, it was softer than a whisper. “Two places where they could be holding people.”

Shizuka nodded. “Specimen storage and the temporal dilator itself.”

“They save ammo by tossing the hostages…where?”

“When,” Shizuka corrected. “Prehuman times. The nuclear winter after skydark. Lots of eras would be fatal to modern humans.”

Grant sneered. “It’s scary that we can imagine the actions of sociopaths.”

“We’ve encountered enough to expect the worst,” Shizuka answered.

“I’ll scout specimen storage,” Grant said. “Call me and wait if you see anyone.”

Shizuka nodded and disappeared. Grant didn’t worry about her. If the Japanese woman didn’t want to be noticed, she wouldn’t be. And he had stressed that they were only doing a reconnaissance, not taking action. That didn’t mean either of them would sit still if a hostage was threatened with death, but the two of them were in contact with each other. One call for help, and the other would be with them in a heartbeat.

Grant slunk down the hall to specimen storage, where the scientists who ran Operation Chronos had deposited time-trawled people and animals, like the raptors that they had just encountered, and even larger creatures like the carnotaurus they had met on one of their first visits to Thunder Isle. The trawl could easily accommodate the one-ton, fifteen-foot-long predator with the unusual, almost demonic horns adorning its broad, powerful skull. Temporal disorientation made it easier for the Chronos whitecoats to control even the strongest of beasts.

The population of prehistoric animals on the island indicated that the scientists were prolific in their efforts. The breadth of specimen containment’s cells was another clue, a dozen cages of various sizes. On quiet feet, Grant looked into the darkened prison, listening for signs of habitation.

The hostage takers might have cast the area into shadows, but there was no way that they could muffle the nervous shifting and breathing of captives. Grant tossed a pocketed pebble into the hallway to make certain, but no reaction left him with the impression that this place had been cordoned off and abandoned. He turned away to rendezvous with Shizuka and spotted a half-dozen consortium soldiers moving with purpose toward the Chronos trawl.

“Shizuka, you’ve got company on your six,” Grant warned over the radio.

“Busy,” came the hissed reply.

From the grunts transmitted over her hands-free microphone, Grant knew that he was going to have to hustle. From stealth to explosive acceleration, the big man charged down the hall, his long strides ending in loud thumps on the tile floor of the laboratory, each footfall loud enough to be a gunshot. If things were going to hell, Grant wanted to draw attention away from Shizuka.

“Hey!” shouted one of the group of soldiers who’d passed only moments before, hearing the ex-Magistrate run.

As Grant rounded the corner, he saw that three of the millennialists were in midturn, the front half of the group continuing on its path. Three Calico submachine guns would still have the potential of causing Grant injury through his armored coat, so there was no pause on the brawny titan’s part. Leg muscles surged, and he sprinted forward like a human bull, his arms swept out like the horns of a steer. Instead of making himself a smaller target, Grant gambled on causing as much disruption as possible. His wide, sweeping limbs struck each of the three gunmen, bowling them over.

Grant could feel the jaw of one mercenary dislocate as his melon-sized shoulder slammed up against it. His fingers disappeared into the wet mushy holes in an other’s face as he sunk them into eye sockets. The last of the trio’s throat thudded hard against his right forearm, wrapped in the hydraulic forearm holster, and there was a dull pop as the gunman’s larynx collapsed and his neck bones separated. It was a brutal assault, and there was at least one fatality in the attack. It was necessary; if any of the three had managed to get their fingers on the triggers of their machine pistols, the resultant gunfire would have alerted all of the hostaged Chronos facility.

Things were already going downhill, and there were three more hired soldiers to deal with. The crash of Grant against their compatriots was now enough to draw the lead group’s attention. Two stunned men and a corpse fell to the tile floor as they turned. Grant snapped off a hard punch with his left fist, the blow crushing the cheekbones of a millennialist, the impact enough to toss the man insensate to the ground. The second of the gunmen swung his Calico up, but Grant launched the Sin Eater into his grasp by flexing his wrist tendons. A heavyweight 9 mm slug exploded through the stealth module on the machine pistol’s muzzle, making a throaty pop that was matched by the bursting of ribs and lung tissue. The mercenary jerked violently backward as 240 grains of high-density bullet turned his internal organs to froth and shattered his spine.

The last of the consortium thugs managed to aim at the center of Grant’s chest, the Calico only the blink of an eye away from opening up. Grant took another gamble, shoving his torso hard against the submachine gun’s muzzle. The contact range blast against his armored coat muffled the noise that the weapon would have made. The impact of the rounds hurt like a hammer to the ribs, but the gunshots were far quieter than even a silenced pistol. The thrust of Grant’s chest against the barrel had the added bonus of jamming the enemy’s weapon.

The gunman cranked the trigger again in vain as Grant leveled his Sin Eater at his enemy’s face. The Magistrate weapon chugged once, very effectively, exploding the mercenary’s skull in a brutal spray of a stringy, sticky mess. Grant looked at his Sin Eater in dismay. The gun had fired once, but he’d flicked the selector to burst-mode.

This is why we never use the stealth modules on these things, Grant thought bitterly. The suppressor for the Sin Eater was notorious for robbing energy from the weapon’s cycles and trapping gunpowder in the action, keeping casings from ejecting from the breech and jamming them up. It had always been kept concealed in a pocket of Magistrate armor, and only the stickiness of a hostage situation made the silencers a necessity.

Grant retracted the weapon back into its forearm holster and scooped up a Calico. It was going to be noisy, and not quite as intricately balanced as the Sin Eater, but it would have to do.

SHIZUKA HAD the advantage of leverage over Allen, but only momentarily. The millennialist commander had Magistrate training, and as such, he knew many of the same tricks that Grant had used against her. She’d held him at bay for this long, keeping the consortium’s lackey from hitting the control panel for the temporal dilator. On the transmitter plates below them, a dozen bound men and women, bloody and helpless, were on the verge of being disassembled on a molecular scale and squirted through a wormhole to some other point in the cosmos and the history of humanity.

There was no way that she could rescue the captives before the dilator engaged, and she knew that despite her strength and skill, she couldn’t hold off Allen forever. He had easily one hundred pounds on her lithe frame, and he knew enough martial arts to begin to counter her grappling against him. Sweat drenched her forehead, sticking her silky black hair to her face. If she could see herself, her pale skin against the midnight void color of her tresses, and the strain on her features, she would have thought herself a porcelain doll in the process of shattering and cracking.

Only for the speed and skill of her bow did she manage to bring down the three other sentries with Allen. Three corpses sported ya shafts from their upper chests and throats, the deadly potential energy stored in her kumi spearing them through Kevlar body armor and bone to sever major arteries within moments.

One of the three dead consortium mercenaries was folded over the railing next to the wrestling pair. Allen had appointed this particular gunman to work the controls in case a rescue attempt had been made. He had been Shizuka’s first target, her ya piercing his windpipe and spine in one shot. Paralyzed and unable to breathe, all that the millennialist lackey could do was collapse and sputter as he hung half over a steel pipe. No nerve impulses could impel his unplugged limbs to hit the transmit button.

Shizuka had perforated the other two gunmen, but Allen moved with the speed of a panther, his Sin Eater having shattered the top bow of her kumi, rendering the weapon useless. Shizuka discarded the broken tool, the need to save lives overriding her sentiment for the crafted bow. They had met in the middle, and Shizuka hit Allen with a nerve punch and proceeded to restrain him in an armlock.

At first, it had been brute muscle against biomechanically balanced strength, but Allen was not an idiot. Even as Grant’s voice came over her radio, Shizuka knew that Allen was struggling to twist his way out of her grasp. He was an eighth of a ton of honed, sculpted sinew and might. Though the physics of leverage were on Shizuka’s side, he was working his way to loosen her balance and apply gravity’s pull on him to escape what would have been an unbreakable grapple.

Shizuka could feel the veins stand out on her neck, her locked talons of fingers bursting at the knuckles. Blood from her partially uprooted fingernails was mixing with that which seeped from Allen’s torn skin. He was growing more slippery, though he was taking a toll on his own muscles as the iron-claw technique refused to yield to Allen’s struggle against it. The man’s fingers stretched, yearning to tap the transmit button.

“Gonna break soon, bitch,” Allen growled.

“Break this, fucker!” a stentorian roar split the air.

Both combatants froze at Grant’s challenge, giving the Cerberus warrior the pause he required to hurl himself through the air like a human missile. Shizuka, Allen, Grant and the dead mercenary all sailed through the air, landing in a tangle of arms and legs on the floor only a few feet below them.

“Get the hostages,” Grant ordered. His instruction to Shizuka was long enough for Allen to recover his wits and punch the big man across the jaw.

Shizuka knew better than to remain where she’d be a concern for Grant. She drew her tanto knife and raced forward, slashing through ropes with the precision of a surgeon. She tried to block out the sound of hammer impacts on meat and bone, but the rapid thuds and crunches were too quick and furious to ignore. All she could do was ensure the lives of the surviving Thunder Isle staff, hemp slicing apart against the finely honed edge of her forged steel.

“Shizuka!” Grant bellowed, a desperate warning that anchored her attention.

The console that Grant and Allen had been warring over was a spray of sparks, peppering them with burning embers of white-hot wiring and circuit board fragments. Shizuka glanced down to the alloy floor plates she and the last of the hostages were atop. The horns atop the central pylon glowed, and Shizuka saw fountains of odd light vomiting from their tips like volcanic kaleidoscopes.

“Move now!” Grant yelled, punctuating his cry by plunging Allen’s head into the gaping wreckage of the command console. The millennialist began a macabre dance as high voltage ripped through his nervous system.

Shizuka had shoved the last of the freed captives off the alloy floor plate when something gripped her. It wasn’t physical; it felt more like she was immersed in water, tiny pricklings running along the surface of her skin. The world outside of the odd glow and sensation fit her mind, but the people were rippling. Instead of moving, their limbs seemed to flow like quicksilver. She wanted to move, to speak, when she saw her hand above the surface of the event she was in.

Shizuka had experienced the mat-trans before, so she had a frame of reference for her body’s responses, but right now, the hand sticking out of the field seemed unseemly and alien. Fingers melted together, turning into a webbed fan or a smooth, featureless ball. It seemed like an eternity of watching her digits mutate crazily before she realized that she wasn’t watching her hand destroying and remolding itself but was instead experiencing her hand’s movement from an angle only available across a dimensional fold.

A strong arm gripped her hand. Shizuka wanted to cry out to the person coming to her rescue, but she saw the thick trunk of Grant’s thigh and lower leg press against the temporal dilator’s platform. If she could have made a sound—her lungs felt as if they were immovable despite the fact that she hadn’t needed a breath in what felt like hours—she doubted he could have heard her.

Shizuka grimaced as she was stretched across the event plane of the time field. When her head went through, it was as if she was being born again, parts of her brain exploding to life and normal status even as the rest of her mind reeled at its now disjointed nature. As soon as Shizuka’s head was in “real” time, she sucked in a ragged breath, trying to speak even though her larynx was seeming miles away.

Grant was half-submerged into the shimmering temporal disruption. His face was a grim mask as he struggled to push her to safety. She wanted to speak to him, but as she regained the ability to speak, his head subsided to the other side.

“Grant!” Shizuka cried.

Other hands grasped her free arm. She turned to see Kane and Sinclair hauling with all their might as Grant’s wall of muscle seethed from the other side of the time barrier. “Hold on to him!”

“We’re trying!” Kane snapped back. The muscles on his wolf-lean arms were swollen with effort. She noticed that Kane and Sinclair had anchored themselves by heavy electrical cable to the wall of the chamber. Grant had secured himself, as well, but the only thing left on this side of the malfunctioning platform was the cable and Grant’s right foot.

“No!” Shizuka yelled. Some instinct told her that if that last bit of Grant disappeared behind the wall, he would be gone, for no tether could resist the pull of currents across a dimension she couldn’t comprehend.

Suddenly, as if hurled by a tornado, Shizuka was free from the vortex. She collapsed to the floor of the chamber. She’d been birthed from seeming nothingness, her molecules yanked apart like taffy as she was drawn through a hole. If she hadn’t been one of the most physically fit people in New Edo, she’d be suffering a heart attack.

Instead, her heart broke as she knew that she was safe in the time she belonged, while Grant was gone, on the other side of the temporal event horizon. She looked and saw only an empty floor as the plates powered down, the shorn electrical cable that was Grant’s tether lying mockingly beside her.

“Damn it, Grant…”

Chapter 5

Never before had Shamhat been struck so soundly, even by Humbaba, his half-Annunaki master. The Igigi staggered back to his feet, wiping the ichor from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his reptilian scales. Four mindless Nephilim drones struggled against the human who had appeared in their midst in the court of Urudug.

“He is human, is he not?” Humbaba asked. “He’s large, even for the Africans we know as the Watusi.”

“Nearly the size of an Annunaki,” Shamhat said. “Much larger than we, your servants.”

Humbaba’s leonine head rose and fell in a slow acknowledging nod. “Human, yet he wears garments not of the people we idle among.”

Shamhat’s yellow eyes narrowed to slits. “Chemically processed polymers blended beneath a biologically refined shell for his cloak. Interwoven plant-based fabrics with metal and synthetic additions for the vestments on his trunk and limbs. His footwear—”

“I noticed their uniqueness, Shamhat. Do not bore me with the fashion critique,” Humbaba’s lion voice grumbled. “If I’m not mistaken, the creature also possesses two chemical-powered, repeating projectile weapons. Such technology shouldn’t exist on this backwater world for millennia, should Father have his way.”

Shamhat nodded. “Perhaps a slave or a descendant of a slave sent off world?”

Humbaba’s eyes narrowed. “No. The language he spoke…it was gibberish. Even telepathic contact is elusive. A slave would be far more communicative.”

Shamhat watched the long-coated newcomer avoid a punch from one of the Nephilim drones with practiced speed, deftly catching the extended limb and bending it using a knowledge of body mechanics that was rare among the peoples of this world. Certainly, the humans calling themselves the Greeks had a similar hand-to-hand maneuver in their wrestling art of pankraton, and those in the Orient were only now developing a fighting craft they called hwarong do. Whoever this man was, he combined strength with skill in such a way that his enemies appeared to be moving at half of his speed.

Shamhat cast out his thoughts in an attempt to reach into the man’s mind, and was repulsed by a torrent of confusion and disjointedness. Tears welled in his yellow orbs in an attempt to salve the sudden, piercing ache behind his brow.

“Ah, you’ve tried your mind against his, as well?” Humbaba asked. “And what say you?”

“That is no man. His brain seems as if it’s at right angles to this universe. What surface memories I could grasp are incomplete and scrambled,” Shamhat replied. “Is he perhaps a shadow from another dimension?”

“A higher plane of existence, perhaps the echoes that a three-dimensional intellect could comprehend only in the shape of a human?” Humbaba asked.

“Theoretically such a creature would exist, but to carry such mundane equipment and garments when his very body would be superhumanly charged in our almost ethereal plane?” Shamhat asked. “He’d also be much faster in reaction to my Nephilim. I’ve honed their reflexes to an edge few have ever known before. This creature seems to be operating at a different time scale, but it’s nothing unique.”

A Nephilim grew tired of the conflict and employed his ASP blaster, twin strings of yellow lightning twisting from the snakelike projectors wound about his wrist. The powerful bolts struck Grant solidly, and he collapsed to his hands and knees.

The other Nephilim fell upon him as one, fists raining down on him.

“Enough!” Humbaba bellowed, his roar causing every creature in the court of Urudug to freeze, even the battered Grant. “He is to be taken alive!”

Strong arms wrapped around Grant’s limbs, the effects of the ASP energy discharge scrambling his thoughts even more. He didn’t know his own name, and he didn’t know why the world seemed to be moving in slow motion around him, but the reptilian creatures who restrained his powerful arms were eerily familiar, though other beings were strange. Some part of him wanted to work his lips, to communicate, but what would fall from them, even if he could form the odd barking sounds shared by these inhuman strangers around him?

He was tired, and he ached from injuries old and new. Phantasms of memories, things that felt familiar and friendly, hovered just out of reach of his consciousness. While he could put terms to things like floor, wall, arm, Nephilim, he had nothing for the faces, the entities attached to the ghostly images in his mind. They should have names, but like Grant’s own name, they eluded him like frightened cockroaches before a sudden light.

I know how insects react to a man’s approach, yet I don’t know the men and women who are a part of my life, Grant thought grimly. Not even my name.

“You may tame this one,” Humbaba said. “Teach him some language if his consciousness will abide it.”

Shamhat nodded, glaring at Grant. “Come, giant. We have much to discuss.”

The Nephilim pushed Grant toward the doorway that Shamhat had indicated. Grant stomped the ground with all his strength, anchoring himself against their efforts. There were four of the reptilian guards, applying their incredible physiques against his own, and yet he was stalling them. This wasn’t right to the lost and confused Grant. He had no right to be this strong, as if he had traded his mental clarity for muscle. Though he felt no heavier, he was indeed even swifter.

Shamhat nodded to the Nephilim who had shot Grant. “Give him another taste of discipline. It will do him good to realize who his masters are.”

The searing energy of the ASP charge struck Grant in the kidneys, his legs buckling. Pain blinded him, and he thrashed, hurling his captors away from him out of agonized reflex. Despite the display of strength, he sank to the floor, unable to breathe.

Shamhat, having recovered from Grant’s first blow against him, reached down and pulled on the human. Grant’s coat sloughed off his shoulders as the man struggled to escape his captivity. “Hit him again!”

More ASP lightning burned through Grant’s nerves, an onslaught of punishment that would have left him a smoldering briquette of charred flesh.

Who am I? Grant thought, staggering back to his feet.

Grant looked up in time to see nearly ten feet of leonine godling, all sculpted muscle and long limbs, standing over him.

“I said enough! I am tired of this foolish game!” Humbaba roared. Grant felt all the solid power of the giant’s crashing fist on his jaw, as if the half-Annunaki lord of this time-lost court were the only other real thing in this turgid dream.

Blessed unconsciousness descended upon Grant.

SILENCE REIGNED in the Operation Chronos laboratories. Kane had watched his best friend in this or any world disappear into the ether in an effort to save Shizuka. The warrior woman trembled, her body trying to reacclimate itself to the reality outside of the strange energies she had been bathed in.

When Kane and Sinclair had burst into the temporal-dilation chamber, they had seen Grant anchored by a heavy cable, tugging on an arm attached to something that Kane was still trying to describe mentally. The limb was pulled thin, like putty that was extruded through a pinhole. The person it had been attached to was a featureless blue ghost shimmering as if underwater. Though his eyes weren’t transmitting the ghost’s identity to Kane’s brain, some instinct told him that it was Shizuka, even before Grant had bellowed her name as he grasped her hand.

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