Dark Goddess

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgments

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

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

Prologue

The former barony of Beausoleil, the Tennessee River Valley

Sean Reichert moved in quickly, knocking the cudgel aside and striking the slagjacker hard in the belly with his right fist.

Air exploded from the small man’s lungs with a sound like a protracted, phlegm-saturated cough. The wooden club clattered to the floor and the man clutched at his midriff, doubling over. Reichert drove a knee into the slagjacker’s face, enjoying the sensation of the man’s nose collapsing under the impact.

Blood spewing from both nostrils like an opened faucet, the man collapsed to the floor of the tavern and lay there, twitching. Reichert swept the people watching from the tables with a bright-eyed stare and boyish grin. “Want to see me his kick his head loose of his shoulders?”

The patrons of the Tosspot Tumor didn’t answer. The few who hadn’t averted their gaze glared at the young man with angry, resentful eyes. Larry Robison, sharing a corner table with a nude woman with hair the color and texture of a hayrick, called out, “Yeah, we so fuckin’ want to see it.”

He chucked the blonde beneath her chin with a finger. “Don’t you, baby?”

The woman blinked her glassy, unfocused eyes and reached for the bottle on the table. “Uh-huh.”

“That’s what I thought,” Reichert said. “So, here goes—”

Grin widening, he drew back his combat-booted right foot, then kicked it forward. The thickly treaded sole skimmed over the prone man’s face as Joe Weaver caught Reichert by the collar and pulled him off balance.

“That’s enough, you bloodthirsty moron,” Weaver snapped, dragging the younger man across the room. He slammed him hard against the slab of rough-hewed pine that served as the bar.

Reichert struggled, but Weaver applied a wrist lock to the youth’s right arm and kept him in place. Reichert strained to get free for only a few seconds. “I showed the son of a bitch,” he shouted jubilantly. “I put him in his place, by God. Nobody disses us—Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!”

Despite his Germanic surname, Sean Reichert was Latino, with straight black hair, a dark complexion and a carefully maintained mustache. Although only of medium height, his athletic body carried tightly packed muscle.

Joe Weaver was considerably taller, heavier and older, his square-chinned face framed by a bronze- hued beard. A pair of round-lensed spectacles covered his slightly slanted eyes. Wearily, he said, “The poor bastard didn’t dis you. I think he’s hard of hearing.”

Reichert paused, glanced at Weaver, then at the unconscious man whose blood filled the cracks between the floorboards. “Well, he’s fuckin’ hard of breathing now, too.”

He laughed uproariously at his own joke and with a disgusted head shake, Joe Weaver released him. Larry Robison joined in with the younger man’s laughter. Tall, with a deep chest and wide shoulders, Robison had a big head covered by a mop of dark brown hair. Like Weaver, he affected a beard, but trimmed closer to the jawline. The nude woman caressed his beard with trembling fingers, then she slid sideways, draping herself over his lap.

The Tosspot Tumor tavern was fairly typical of most such establishments in the Tartarus Pits of any barony—one big common room redolent with the reek of home-brewed liquor and unwashed bodies. A makeshift bar coursed along the rear wall, a row of wooden barrels with rough planks nailed atop them to serve as a buffet. A scattering of tables and chairs completed the furnishings.

The tavern did double duty as a brothel, so a single doorway behind the bar led to a small, dark bedroom. From the room came a hoarse cough and then a gravelly male voice snarled, “For fuck’s sake, can’t a man get a decent night’s sleep anywhere in this shithole world?”

Reichert and Weaver glanced toward the shadows shifting beyond the open door, hearing the squeak of bedsprings and the thump of booted feet on the floor. “Sorry, boss,” Reichert called. “We didn’t know you were supposed to be sleeping.”

“Besides,” Robison said, “it’s near the middle of the afternoon.”

A teenage girl stepped through the door, brushing a strand of brown hair away from her eyes. She clutched a frayed sheet around her thin frame, leaving one knobby shoulder bare. Robison was reminded of a sorority girl returning from a particularly boisterous toga party, but he doubted she was old enough to attend even the most liberal-arts college. He never was quite sure what a liberal-arts college was supposed to be, but he presumed it was a place that liberals sent their kids to learn how to be artists, so he hated them as a matter of course.

Mike Hays lumbered out of the room, absently smoothing his shaggy silver mustache with a scarred thumb. His burly body was clad only in olive-green boxer shorts with the words Hays, Maj. stenciled onto the elastic waistband. A pair of unlaced combat boots flipped and flopped on his feet. From his right hand dangled his Belgian Fabrique Nationale Mag-58 subgun. He didn’t even visit the outhouse, much less sleep, without it.

“Fighting with the locals again?” the gray-haired commander of Team Phoenix demanded.

Reichert leaned against the bar, propping his elbows up on the edge. “What the fuck else is there to do here, Major? This is the only ville we’ve found that ain’t controlled by Magistrates, so there’s nobody to fight but the locals.”

Hays hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the litter-strewed floor. Pushing between Reichert and Weaver, he asked, “What’ve you been taught about winning hearts and minds, Sergeant?”

Robison brayed out a short, scornful laugh. His female companion laughed, too, but very querulously. “Whoever came up with that shit never tried to make a life for themselves in fuckin’ twenty-third-century Tennessee…in the fuckin’ Tartarus Pits, no less.”

Hays rapped his knuckles autocratically on the bar top, and the man behind it sullenly placed a bottle half-filled with amber fluid in front of the ex-Marine. He also put down a glass tumbler, which Hays contemptuously slapped aside.

Picking up the bottle by the neck, he said flatly, “Maybe we can all go back into the fuckin’deep freeze. Sleep long enough, we’ll wake up where we started.”

“That’s assuming the nature of time is circular, instead of linear,” Weaver said. “So far, it seems pretty much like a straight line. And speaking of circular…do all of you guys have to use ‘fuck’ every other word?”

“It’s part of our mission statement,” Reichert replied. “‘Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!’ I thought you knew that.”

“I knew it,” Weaver said. “I guess I’ve been trying to forget it.”

“Me, too,” Hays agreed gloomily. “So we’re stuck here, in this place, in this century, with nobody to fight.”

“The eternal lament of mercenaries during peacetime,” Weaver commented.

“Fuck, there are definitely wars out there,” Robison snapped, pushing back his chair and rising from the table. His female companion fell onto the floor and appeared to go instantly to sleep. “There’s a big-ass fuckin’ war going on.”

“Yeah, but those Cerberus pricks won’t let us fight it,” Reichert said.

“Won’t let us fight it with them,” Joe Weaver corrected. “Guess we shouldn’t have killed all those friends of theirs, huh?”

Hays shrugged, not responding to Weaver’s sarcasm. “Bunch a’ ersatz injuns with feathers in their hair and paint on their faces. Good old collateral damage. No loss.”

“Not to us, mebbe,” Robison agreed. “But Kane sure seemed to set big store by them.”

At the mention of the man’s name, an image of Kane’s pale, cold eyes flashed into the mind of Major Mike Hays and he repressed a shiver. He involuntarily glanced over his shoulder, made uneasy by mere utterance of the name.

Although he and his subordinates had promised to never speak of what actually happened when they had been lured into the trap laid by the Cerberus warriors, Hays still shuddered at the most oblique reminder of the encounter.

Mike Hays gusted out a sigh, then tilted the bottle to his lips and drained it in several noisy swallows. Reichert watched him with slitted eyes. “Fuck, this is worse than that Rwanda mission…didn’t do nothing there but drink and fuck.”

Hays dropped the bottle to the floor and made swooping and rising gestures with his hands, intoning a prolonged, “Smoo-o-oth.”

Weaver pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

“Oy,” the bartender said angrily, “don’t drop your shit on my floor.”

Hays speared him with a challenging stare. “I drop my shit where I please.”

“Yes, I can see that,” the man shot back. “That’s why I mentioned it.”

Hays locked eyes with the bartender, hoping he would notch up his objections from the verbal to the physical. He wished he could vent a fraction of his frustration by shooting several holes in the man’s head with his Mag-58.

His frustration sprang less from boredom than the knowledge he had once again failed to achieve an erection, even under the ministrations of the girl he had bribed with several MRE packs.

When the bartender dropped his gaze, Hays announced loudly, “I think it’s time we leave this fuckin’ burg and take the fight back to where it fuckin’ belongs.”

Reichert groaned wearily. “Not more fuckin’Indians.”

Hays scowled at him. “It don’t have to be Indians, but—”

He broke off when a high-pitched whine touched his hearing. Hays, Weaver, Reichert and Robison stared around in puzzlement. Little sprinkles of dust sifted down from the ceiling as the drone grew in volume.

“A chopper?” Robison asked. “One of those old Apache 64s the Magistrates call Deathbirds?”

Reichert shook his head. “We’d hear the fuckin’ rotors.”

Hays spun toward the door, hefting his subgun. “Let’s recon.”

The four men rushed out into the humid afternoon air and stood in a muddy street that twisted between ramshackle buildings, past hovels, shacks and tents. There was no main avenue, only lanes that zigged in one direction and zagged in the other.

They looked toward the latticework of residential Enclave towers connected to the Administrative Monolith, a massive round column of white rockcrete that jutted hundreds of feet into the sky.

A featureless disk of shimmering silver twenty feet in diameter hovered above the flat top of the tower. The configuration and smooth hull reminded Joe Weaver of the throwing discus he had used in his college days. Perfectly centered on the disk’s underside bulged a half dome, like the boss of a shield.

As the four men gaped in silent astonishment, the craft settled down on top the monolith and from the rim sprouted three tentacles of alloy. They curved out and down, plunging through the slit windows.

“What the fuck is that?” Robison half gasped, voice quavering. “It’s like a fuckin’ flying saucer—!”

“No fuckin’ way!” Reichert blurted, but he didn’t sound completely certain. “Maybe we’d better get Bob warmed up—just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Weaver asked, a slight mocking edge to his voice. “Just in case it is a flying saucer?”

Sean Reichert glared at him through narrowed eyes, then he nodded. “Yeah. Just in case.”

The four men sprinted down a narrow alley running alongside the Tosspot Tumor. The alley opened up into a wide courtyard where Bobzilla was quartered. The huge, armor-plated LAV-25 had been modified by the Phoenix Project designers to serve as the team’s rolling base of operations.

As they reached the rear hatch, a shadow momentarily blotted out the sunlight and in unison they heeled around, necks craning, heads tilting back. Reichert’s face paled despite his dark complexion, and he muttered, “Fuck.”

Another silver disk hovered barely five yards overhead. As it slowly sank toward the courtyard, Robison fumbled with the hatch latches and swung the heavy metal panel open on squeaking spring hinges. “Let’s get our asses heeled!” he bellowed.

Swiftly, he took an AK-108 and then passed one of the lightweight carbines to Weaver. Hays reached around Robison and snagged an FIM-921 Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft rocket launcher. Reichert grabbed an M-203 grenade launcher combined with an M-16 rifle. With expert fingers, he loaded the weapon with three blunt-nosed 40 mm explosive rounds.

The disk slowly descended, but it didn’t come to rest. From the half dome on its undercarriage snaked out three gleaming legs. They in turn sprouted three claws that sank deeply into the muddy soil and lent the machine a resemblance to an old-fashioned milking stool coated with a shifting sheath of quicksilver.

A chill fist of dread squeezed Weaver’s heart and he said to his companions, “Let’s not jump the gun, boys. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

Hays snorted in derision, placing the tube of the launcher on his right shoulder. “I’d say it’s those fuckers that don’t know what they’re dealing with.”

Weaver fearfully eyed the tripodal machine. “Heard that before, Major. But this time we’re not facing a bunch of childish savages with bows and arrows. We need to discuss tactics before we—”

The disk emitted a harsh, electronic hoot, which to Weaver sounded like a warning to get out of its way. Three legs moving in unison, the machine took a weirdly graceful step forward.

“Here’s your tactics, Joe!” Hays bellowed. “Turn out the dogs!”

The weapons in the hands of the four men spit flame, thunder and multiple kinds of projectiles. The courtyard became a crashing, exploding, blazing inferno. Steel-jacketed bullets sparked a dozen miniature constellations on the rim of the disk ship’s hull.

Mike Hays squeezed the trigger of the FIM-921 and the Stinger rocket leaped from the hollow bore, propelled by a wavery ribbon of smoke. It struck the disk ship broadside, the warhead detonating amid a billowing mushroom of black smoke and a blinding gush of flame that rolled over the hull.

The flurry of grenades fired by the howling Sean Reichert burst all around the tripod, eardrum-compressing detonations blooming against and below it. Dirt and mud erupted, raining down in all directions.

Smoke billowed, a shroud of gray enveloping the courtyard, completely obscuring the disk from view. As the roiling canopy of haze and smoke spread, Team Phoenix ceased fire.

Coughing, fanning the air in front of his face, Robison declared hoarsely, “Overwhelming firepower trumps tactics every fuckin’ time.”

Hays dropped the rocket launcher and gusted out a satisfied sigh. “Smoo-o-oth.”

He and Reichert bumped knuckles. The young Latino crowed triumphantly, “Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!”

Weaver squinted through the thinning vapor, his leaking eyes picking out the orange smears of flame. He realized that the entire rear of the Tosspot Tumor tavern had been pounded into a litter of broken, firelaced kindling. The roof had collapsed, but he saw no sign of the silver tripod.

Weaver lifted his spectacles and cleared his blurred vision with swipes of his fingers. When he was able to see more or less normally again, he realized why he couldn’t find the disk. The craft had simply retracted its three legs and floated soundlessly above the barrage. It hovered thirty yards above them, not so much as a smudge mark visible on its iridescent hull.

But where the tripodal legs had been planted now stood three motionless figures. The drifting scraps of smoke imbued them with an eerie, ghostly quality. Although all three of them wore formfitting silver-blue armor, two of them were almost identical in physique and features. Set deep beneath jutting brow ridges, their white eyes did not blink, nor did their craggy, scale-pebbled faces register emotion.

Ovoid shells of alloy rose from the rear of their body armor, sweeping up to enclose the back and upper portion of their hairless skulls. From the undersides of the shells, hair-thin filaments extended down to pierce both sides of their heads. Conduits stretched down from inch-thick reinforcing epaulets on their shoulders, connecting to the alloyed gauntlets that sheathed their extended right forearms and hands.

From raised pods on the gauntlets rose three small flanges, curved like the letter S cut in halves. The ends of the flanges flared out like cobras’ hoods, and red energy pulsed in the gaping mouths of the stylized serpent heads.

The third figure was leaner, slighter in stature, but still obscured by floating planes of smoke and settling dust. “How dare you threaten a member of the Supreme Council? Lay down your weapons and beg me not to have you killed where you stand!”

The tone, pitch and timbre of the voice was sharp, imperious, and although holding a sibilant echo, it sounded undeniably female.

Major Mike Hays stiffened in surprise and his expression molded itself into one of contempt. He glanced toward Robison and Reichert. “That’s just some mouthy bitch out there!”

Sighting down his Mag-58 subgun, Hays snarled, “Beg this, bitch!”

Although he had no idea of what kind of council the sharp-voiced woman referred to, sudden terror galvanized Joe Weaver to slap down the barrel of the Mag-58. “Mike—no!”

Reichert uttered a sneering laugh, bracing the stock of the grenade launcher against his hip, aiming it at the three armored figures. He roared, “Team Phoenix for America—”

A series of crack-sizzles cut off the rest of his mantra. Bolts of energy, glowing like globules of molten lava flung from catapults, struck Sean Reichert directly in the head, blowing away his trim mustache and face in a pinwheel burst of flame.

Frozen in place, Joe Weaver watched two more balls of seething energy explode against the heads of Mike Hays and Larry Robison. He caught only a fragmented glimpse of the one blazing toward him before his world turned to a dazzling orange flare, instantly followed by impenetrable darkness.

LILITU WRINKLED her delicate nose at the concatenation of odors wafting throughout the Tartarus Pits. During her ninety years as Baroness Beausoleil, she had never ventured within a thousand yards of Tartarus, fearing that she would contract loathsome diseases. Now she realized she had not suffered from an infection phobia so much as the place simply stank.

Narrowing her vertical-slit-pupiled eyes, Lilitu glanced up at the Administrative Monolith. The sunlight winked on the surface of the disk of smart metal still attached to the roof. The uppermost floor of the high, round tower had served as her sanctuary and home for many years—no, not a home, she corrected herself, but a cocoon, one that had sheltered the chrysalis form of the baroness until she shed it and emerged as Overlord Lilitu.

Gesturing diffidently with the metal-shod fingers of her right hand, she waved toward the four smoldering corpses of the humans who had threatened her.

“Make sure those dung beetles can crawl no more,” she commanded her armored Nephilim. “Then begin razing this entire cesspit.”

Quarlo, her personal bodyguard, glanced toward her, no emotion in his dead white eyes. “The complete barony, Goddess?” His whispering voice held a hollow quality, as if only the echoes of his words passed his lips.

Lilitu’s beautiful, scale-patterned face creased in a smile. “And everyone who still lives in it. They no longer serve my purpose, and the mandate of the Supreme Council of the Annunaki has ever been that all humans must serve a purpose for their gods.”

Chapter 1

Coral Cove, the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Kane raced through the night, cursing the heat and cloying humidity that sapped most of his stamina. His legs felt as if lead weights were tied to his knees. The sweat that stained his camo-striped T-shirt and flowed down from his hairline stung his eyes.

He wanted nothing so much as to fling himself facedown in the palmetto scrub and drink from his canteen. He also wanted to forget why he had agreed to lend Cerberus’s support to a rebellion against the coastal pirates led by the ridiculously named Billy-boy Porpoise.

Over the rhythmic boom of the surf, the faint baying of hounds and shouting of men reached his ears. Kane swore beneath his breath, but he continued to run. Twice bullets had skimmed very close to him, and once he had nearly been caught beside the waters of the drainage canal that cut in from the Gulf of Mexico and served as a moat around the Porpoise estate. Only the fact that he could dive and swim like an otter saved him.

The pillared trunks of cypress, pine and palm trees surrounded him. Palmetto plants, their fan-shape fronds gleaming with patterns of ebony and silver in the moonlight, rose up on either side of the narrow trail. Insects chirped and buzzed from the shadows. His chest feeling as if it were pressed between the jaws of a tightening vise, Kane halted in the murky lee of a log overhang, where lumber had been piled to use as palisade walls in the settlement.

He breathed deeply, regaining his breath. He ran a hand through his longish dark hair. It was soggy with sweat, stiffening with salt. His clothes reeked of sewage and brine, but he took a little solace in the fact he knew he had smelled worse.

A hoarse male voice bellowed beyond the far edge of the canal. The words were unintelligible, but the tone was angry. Kane’s palm itched where his Sin Eater would have fitted if it were not packed away with the rest of his equipment in the settlement. He stepped deeper into the shadows, his movements fluid but cautious, like a man in a jungle wary of poisonous snakes. He often thought of the world in which he lived as nothing but a snake-infested jungle.

Kane struggled to tamp down a surge of homicidal fury at his pursuers, but he was honest enough to admit that distaste at playing the role of prey fueled his rage, not that his attempt to breach the Porpoise estate had been stymied.

Fleeing didn’t come naturally to a former Magistrate like himself. He was a tall man, as lean and sinewy as a timber wolf, and his pale eyes were the color of dawn light touching a blue-steel knife blade. A three-inch hairline scar cut whitely across his clean-shaved left cheek.

Kane had considered growing a beard for the op, so he could infiltrate Porpoise’s crew, but he couldn’t stand to go without shaving for more than a few days. His years as a Cobaltville Magistrate had instilled in him a loathing of whiskers longer than an eighth of an inch.

He heard a dog bark and he clenched his fists. It was bad enough he had been discovered while trying to climb the wall around Porpoise’s compound, but now he felt the hot breath of death on the back of his neck.

When Kane heard the men’s voices again, their words drowned out by the baying of the hounds, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a silent snarl. They were much closer, and he knew he had to start running again.

The brief rest had done him little good, but his anger added renewed vigor to his muscles. The men and the dogs probably viewed him as little more than a weary fox, fleeing before the hounds, but he felt more like the timber wolf. A wolf was a wise animal that had learned all the tricks of staying alive, spinning out the odds with a gambler’s skill to continually outwit death.

Kane sprinted full-out, achieving a long-legged, ground-eating stride, running on the balls of his feet. He swatted at the mosquitoes that made strafing dives at his eyes. Straight ahead, past a row of gnarled cypress roots, lay a stretch of mudflats that led directly into the ville of Coral Cove. There he would find alleys and doorways in which to hide until he could make his rendezvous.

The soles of his high-laced jump boots sank into the muck, releasing the sulfurous stench of marsh gas. Behind him rose the frenzied yelping of the dogs. Kane lurched into a shadowed area just inside the half-completed log wall surrounding Coral Cove and risked a glance backward.

Three bearded men held a trio of long leather leashes in their right hands, and rifles were slung over their shoulders. At the ends of the leashes strained and slavered six of the biggest mastiffs Kane had ever seen. The black-and-tan dogs yipped and bayed, eyes rolling, tongues lolling, froth dripping from their fang-filled jaws.

Kane wasn’t sure if the men had seen him, but they released the leashes. The mastiffs bounded forward, a line of red maws and yellow teeth pounding right through the mudflats at blinding speed.

Blinking back the sweat from his eyes, Kane whirled and sprinted into the ville, the snarls and yelps of the dogs loud in his ears. Coral Cove’s buildings were old, many of them close together, arranged around a makeshift town square, the centerpiece of which was an old, immense and deep-rooted live oak. He glimpsed a slatternly woman dumping a pail of slops out of an upstairs window of a big frame house. When she caught sight of him running across the square, she retreated quickly, snatching a curtain closed.

The settlement wasn’t very large, but according to the Cerberus database, Coral Cove had been a small fishing village turned vacation resort. Of course, that been a very long time ago, before the skydark.

Kane’s eyes darted back and forth, looking for cover. He didn’t care for the idea of digging in and standing fast, since the dogs could surround him and tear him to pieces. He had not gone armed on the recon mission, taking the precaution that if he were apprehended, he wouldn’t provide more weapons to the enemy’s arsenal.

But Kane was never completely helpless. He dug his hand beneath his shirt to the waterproof utility pouch at his waistband and carefully pulled out a metal-walled sphere about the size of a plover’s egg. The pressure-fused CS powder grenade, usually employed as a diversion in a limited area, would cause extreme discomfort in a small room. To have flung the grenade back at the dog pack would have been useless—there was not enough concentrated spread in the vapor.

Kane sprinted to the trunk of the oak tree and leaped high. He caught hold of a thick, leafy branch and managed to swing up and balance himself precariously upon it. The limb swayed like a hammock under his weight.

Looking across the town square, he saw the first of the mastiffs bounding into view, tongue lolling, savage eyes glinting. The other dogs raced behind it, their smooth dark coats clotted with mud. Their teeth gleamed like ivory daggers.

The dogs milled around uncertainly, sniffing the ground and whining quizzically. Far back across the mudflats there were shouts, the thump of running feet. Kane held the grenade tightly in his left hand as he watched the mastiffs casting about in confusion.

The first dog to have entered the ville growled and slowly advanced on the tree with a twitching muzzle, nose still to the ground.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” Kane breathed. “Nose to the dirt. Don’t look up.”

The limb upon which he crouched suddenly creaked. Kane grabbed a branch overhead as the limb sagged half a foot. Wishing he were fifty pounds lighter, Kane kept absolutely motionless. The dogs would know he was nearby through scent alone, but if their attention wasn’t drawn upward—

The limb suddenly bent and the splintering crack of wood filled Kane’s ears for an instant.

With a startled growl, the mastiff circling below looked up, caught sight of him and barked ferociously. The other dogs clustered around the base of the tree, yipping and yelping. They slammed into one another as they all tried to squeeze around the trunk.

Kane wasted no time. He dropped the grenade straight down into the mass of milling dogs. One of the mastiffs snapped at it and the casing burst open, the small explosive charge within it detonating with a low, smacking explosion. A heavy cloud of white CS powder erupted, spraying in all directions, like a miniature blizzard.

Instantly, the baying of the dogs turned to high-pitched whines, whimpers and squeals. Pawing frantically at their eyes, the mastiffs reeled away, staggering, snorting and sneezing. Kane jumped down from the limb, landed on the far side of the tree and ran toward the nearest house, a rambling two-story structure built in the old antebellum style. The windows were boarded up, so he decided the door was mostly likely secured and began to angle away.

A black mass shifted in the shadows cast by a balcony overhang. “Kane!”

The urgent whisper cut through the cacophony of the distressed dogs, and Kane darted into the murk. The black shape was a small figure huddled within a mass of rags and tatters, decorated with gray streamers of Spanish moss. Under green stripes of camouflage paint he saw streaks of milk-white flesh.

“Inside! Be quick!” The figure scurried sideways and a door opened and closed.

Panting, Kane groped over the door, searching for a knob. His fingers touched nothing but damp, slightly warped wood. He pressed a shoulder against it, then the door swung inward and he stumbled into an unlit foyer. A small hand clutched at his right wrist with surprising strength and hauled him forward.

“In here, idiot!”

Kane caught a whiff of mildew and urine. The door closed, and he heard the faint snick of a locking bolt being drawn. Fingering his nose, Kane whispered, “And I thought I was the only stinkard here, Domi.”

“Shut up.”

Kane stiffened at the angry intensity of the girl’s voice, but he fell silent, listening to the yowling of the hounds. He heard men’s voice raised in breathless curses, the cracking of whips and the piteous yelps of the dogs.

“Where’d the son of a bitch go?”

“Guess for your own self, Lucas! Got my own problems with this goddamn hound—”

“Billy-boy ain’t gonna like it if we lose ’im.”

“Shit, tell me something new…but he’s gonna have to live with it.”

Ear pressed against the door panel, Kane listened to more whining, whimpering and cursing as the men got the dogs releashed. They didn’t intend to continue the pursuit. Although the citizenry of Coral Cove put up with a great deal from Billy-boy Porpoise and his gang, they wouldn’t tolerate a midnight door-to-door search. After a few minutes, the sound of the dogs and their masters faded away.

A flashlight suddenly glowed, startling Kane so much that he jumped and cursed.

“Relax,” Domi said softly. “Windows boarded over—nobody can see.”

Kane squinted toward her as she flung back the hood that shrouded her close-cropped, bone-white hair. An albino by birth, Domi was a small white wraith of a girl, every inch of five feet tall. Eyes like red rubies stared up at him through the mask of combat cosmetics she had daubed over her cream-white complexion.

“Had you goin’ there, huh?” Laughter was in her high-planed face, and the faint mockery added piquancy to her features.

“Yeah,” Kane said dryly. “You’re a gifted comedian. What would you have done if the dogs had caught me?”

Domi’s small right hand eased out from beneath the ragged cloak. Nestled within it lay her Detonics Combat Master .45. The stainless-steel autopistol weighed only a pound and a half and was perfectly suited for a girl of her size.

“Shoot ’em,” she replied frankly. “Then kill the men who made them killers.”

Kane nodded. “Figures. Where’s Grant?”

Domi shrugged out of the tattered cloak, letting it drop to the floor. “Upstairs. He was keepin’ an eye on you, too.”

Stepping around the heap of rancid rags, Kane pinched his nostrils shut. “Why does it stink so bad?”

Domi shrugged. “Cover up my own scent, in case the dogs got after me. Old Outland trick.”

Kane regarded her gravely. “You peed on it, didn’t you?”

“Among other things.” Domi turned toward a stairwell, casting the beam of the flashlight ahead of her. She wore a black tank top and tight-fitting denim shorts that only accentuated her compact body, with its pert breasts and flaring hips.

Kane followed her up the stairs, reflecting that after five-plus years of working with her, he shouldn’t be surprised by anything Domi did, even wearing a cloak soaked in her own urine.

The stairs opened onto a small room that led out onto a balcony. Grant stood there, peering through a screen of oleander leaves. The buttsock of the heavy Barrett sniper rifle was settled firmly in the hollow of his right shoulder. He pushed it forward on its built-in bipod as he leaned down to squint through the twenty-power top-mounted telescopic sight.

Without turning toward Kane, he said in his lionlike rumble of a voice, “I thought you were going to be in and out of here like the wind.”

A big man standing several inches over six feet, Grant had exceptionally broad shoulders and a heavy musculature, but with a middle starting to go a little soft. Beads of perspiration sparkled against his coffee-brown skin like stars in the night sky. Gray dusted his short-cropped hair at the temples, but it didn’t show in the sweeping black mustache that curved fiercely out from either side of his grim, tight-lipped mouth. Like Kane, he wore camo pants and T-shirt.

In response to Grant’s sarcastic question, Kane replied, “That was the plan. I guess they smelled my wind.”

Carefully, he moved to the balcony’s rail and looked down into the ville. He could still detect the chemical tang of the CS powder.

Grant stepped away from the Barrett and tapped the scope. “They caught more than that. Take a peek.”

Obligingly, Kane stooped and peered through the eyepiece. He glimpsed a tall figure standing just outside the log wall, trying to hide himself in the shadows. The rifle he cradled in his arms looked like a lever-action 30.06.

“They left one behind,” he commented. “A spotter.”

Grant nodded. “They want to see which house you come out of. And to find out if anybody in town is helping you, so they can be made an example of.”

Kane shrugged. “I don’t think they got a good look at me. And since you two didn’t arrive until after dark, they most likely don’t know you’re here.”

“Porpoise is probably sure it was you creepin’ around his place,” Domi stated matter-of-factly.

Kane cast her a quizzical glance. “Why do you say that?”

The girl shrugged. “He only saw you and Brigid together—stands to reason he’d figure you’d be the one to try and sneak in and steal her back from him.”

Chapter 2

The morning sky melted, pouring down heat. Kane stood on the shoreline, listening to the noise of the surf and gazing through the smoky spume rising from the breakers.

Although sunglasses masked his eyes, he squinted against the glare glimmering on the blue surface of the gulf. There was nothing to be seen except the blaze of white sand, sparse stalks of beach grass and the long line of combers lapping at the shoreline. He perspired heavily, as if the rising sun were a sponge sucking liquid from every pore of his body and soaking through his black T-shirt. Although he felt the sting of sunburn on his arms and face, the heat failed to thaw a hard knot of ice inside him.

Acceding to the demands of Billy-boy Porpoise, he was completely unarmed, not even carrying a jackknife. The only concession to his standard complement of equipment was the Commtact, a flat curve of metal fastened to his right mastoid bone and hidden beneath a lock of hair.

Despite heat that turned the beach into an oven, Kane stood motionless, hands loose at his sides. He knew he was being watched, and he figured Billy-boy would wait until he had virtually sweated out all of his strength before sending someone to fetch him.

But Kane had learned stamina in a hard school, a killing school. He retained vividly grim memories of former colleagues whose stamina failed them at the last critical second. Stamina in this case consisted of standing steadfast, husbanding all of his resources until they were needed.

A burst of static filled his head and Grant’s voice said, “Testing, one, two, testing.”

Resisting the urge to turn and look in the direction of Coral Cove, Kane reached up behind his ear and made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm was attached to implanted steel pintels; its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder embedded in the bone.

Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, as long as he wore a Commtact, he would still have a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

“Receiving you,” Kane subvocalized in a faint whisper. “Do you read me?”

“Reading you. Status?”

“Lots of sea and sand. I think I spotted a crab a few minutes ago.”

The Commtact accurately conveyed Grant’s grunt of disgust. “The bastard believes in making people wait for him.”

“I guess Billy-boy thinks it increases the anticipation.”

“No sign of the spotter he left behind?”

“No. He probably hung around until just before daybreak and then moved on.”

Grant didn’t respond for a long tick of time. Then he asked dourly, “How did such a simple op go so goddamn complicated?”

Kane almost lifted a shoulder in a shrug but stopped himself. “Happens sometimes,” he retorted with a nonchalance he did not feel. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I do,” Grant said. “I also know Brigid hasn’t answered any of our thousand and one hails, so we may want to—”

“Her Commtact is probably malfunctioning,” Kane broke in harshly. “She was knocked into the pool when Billy-boy’s crew put the arm on us. That’s all there is to it.”

“Right,” Grant drawled, his tone studiedly neutral. “So let’s cut to the chase here. Billy-boy wants to parley with you for Brigid’s return. Why?”

“Why what?”

“He’s already got her, so why does he want to bargain with you for her? What does he need you for? It’s the Cerberus armory he wants, not her…unless he thinks having two bargaining chips is better than one.”

“That possibility occurred to me,” Kane admitted. “He was pretty disappointed when we came to him yesterday bearing no gifts, particularly of the lethal kind.”

“I got that. But I don’t think you can trust this son of a bitch to do a simple exchange, Brigid for blasters. You may have to—”

“I hope you’re not trying to prepare me for the possibility that she’s already dead,” Kane interrupted.

“Now that you’ve brought it up,” Grant said, “what if she is? This guy reps out as a stone-cold murderer, not a businessman.”

“If she is,” Kane intoned flatly, “then all the more reason for me to be in Billy-boy’s company. If she has so much as bruise on a leg, he is most definitely a dead man.”

“And what about you?” Grant argued. “You’re waltzing in there unarmed and even if you manage to get close enough to kill the bastard, there’s no way we can extract you before you’re killed, too.”

Before Kane could formulate a response, he heard the grinding of an engine.

He turned toward the south and saw a red Jeep emerge from a copse of royal palm trees. The chassis was painted a bright cherry red with the illustration of a shocking pink porpoise emblazoned on the hood. The vehicle rolled smoothly on oversize beach tires across the expanse of searing sand where it met with the surf line.

The driver was a tall man who looked half Viking and half pirate. His long white blond hair was tied back in a foxtail, a sharp contrast to the deep bronzed tan of his naked torso. A black eye patch embroidered with the outline of a pink dolphin covered his right eye. Sunlight winked from the three-inch gold ring piercing the lobe of his left ear.

The man’s single eye glinted with cobalt brightness, and his hands on the steering wheel were very big and powerful. As the Jeep drew closer to Kane, he flashed a taunting grin. His teeth gleamed startlingly white in his bronzed face.

A young woman sat beside him, her eyes the deep amber of a Siamese cat’s, slanted, cold and dangerous. They looked at Kane with contempt. Her hair was a thick glossy black, cascading in loose waves over her bare shoulders. Little-girl bangs hung in feathery arcs, inky against the white of her forehead. Her eyelids and sullen mouth were heavily rouged, and the bright red blossom of a flower made a splash of color in her raven’s-wing hair.

The woman’s full breasts strained against the tight confines of her slate-gray bikini top. The cloth was almost the same color as the S&W Airweight .38-caliber revolver she aimed at him around the frame of the windshield. Kane had been introduced to the man and girl the previous day. Their names were Shaster and Orchid.

“Here’s my ride,” Kane murmured.

“Acknowledged,” Grant replied. “Standing by.”

Shaster braked the Jeep a few yards away and sat with the engine idling. He stared at Kane and Kane stared back.

After a few seconds, the tanned man challenged, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you trying to see how long it will take to pass out from heatstroke? Don’t you have a breakfast sit-down scheduled with B.B.?”

“You tell me,” Kane retorted.

“You do,” Orchid snapped petulantly, gesturing with the short barrel of the revolver. “Get your ass over here.”

Kane’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Don’t you want to frisk me, sweetheart?”

Shaster glanced toward the girl. “Don’t you, Orchid?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Maybe later. Right now it’s too goddamn hot. Besides, you were told to come unarmed, just like yesterday, right?”

The half smile disappeared from Kane’s mouth. “Right.”

“Good enough for me,” Shaster said. “Climb aboard, muchacho, so we can get back to the pool and the piña coladas.”

Swallowing a sigh, Kane crossed the stretch of scalding-hot sand, feeling the heat even through the soles of his boots. Orchid slid into the backseat, affording him a glimpse of her well-molded backside and the pink porpoise tattooed at the center of her back.

“Billy-boy really believes in this brand-recognition thing,” Kane commented as he climbed in on the passenger side. “Even on his hired help.”

He felt the cold tip of the pistol press against the back of his neck. “Shut the fuck up, sec man,” Orchid said, voice sibilant with spite.

Kane felt his shoulders stiffening at the epithet, then he forced himself to relax. “Sec man” was an obsolete term dating back to preunification days when self-styled barons formed their own private armies to safeguard their territories. It was still applied to Magistrates in hinterlands beyond the villes, so Kane figured Orchid was either a former Roamer or a Farer. Roamers were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

Farers, on the other hand, were nomads, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts and traders. Their territory was the Midwest, so Farer presence in and around Florida was a little unusual. Regardless, Magistrates were feared and despised all over the Outlands by Roamer and Farer alike.

Shaster turned the Jeep and drove up the beach, the coarse sand flying from beneath the knobby tire treads in a double cresting of rooster tails. After a quarter of a mile, he turned off onto a bumpy asphalt road that led directly to a glass-walled toll booth. Within it sat a man wearing swim trunks and a gold chain about his neck, but little else.

He saluted Shaster with the barrel of a shotgun as the Jeep rolled past. The vehicle followed a narrow lane stretching over a moat filled with brackish water and flowering hyacinths. The canal Kane had been forced to swim less than eight hours before fed the moat.

The lane curved into a community of pale pink stucco houses with red-tiled roofs. Palm trees sprouted from the small lawns. The houses faced a beach that sloped gently toward the waters of the gulf. White-winged gulls wheeled over the shoreline. A number of boats floated on the brilliant blue sea, and although most of them looked like fishing vessels, Kane knew a number of them were disguised fast-attack craft. The bows of several boats bore the outline of leaping pink porpoises.

The beachfront marina was one great open market, just like the intel had indicated. Shops and stalls were brightly painted, the vendors selling the wares looted from other coastal communities by Billy-boy’s fleet. People from all over the region mingled with the tanned locals who came to trade, exchanging valuable items like drugs for guns or artifacts dredged up from the Gulf coast’s plentiful supply of submerged ruins.

Shaster steered the Jeep through an open gate in a five-foot-high whitewashed wall. Bracketing both sides of the gate, painted in pink on the surface on the wall, was a pair of sporting dolphins. A deeply bronzed blond man, stripped to the waist and cradling a lever-action 30.06 rifle in his arms, pursed his lips at Kane, blowing him a kiss as the vehicle drove into the compound.

Shaster cast Kane a sly grin. “Lucas is checking you out.”

“I noticed,” Kane grunted.

“He didn’t get the chance to formally meet you last night.”

“That’s a shame,” Kane replied blandly.

Brigid Baptiste had described the Porpoise compound as the model of an exclusive beachfront estate—it had been built as such more than two centuries earlier, when land development was the chief economic force on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Kane had been less interested in the history of Billy-boy Porpoise’s little seaside fiefdom than the man who had put it together over the past few years. The only reason he and Brigid had traveled from Montana to Florida was to learn what kind of man he was and if he could be recruited into joining their struggle, as other former and potential adversaries had done.

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past five years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Kane and Grant had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they had found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Due in part to her eidetic memory, Brigid spoke a dozen languages and could get along in a score of dialects, but knowing the native tongues of many different cultures and lands was only a small part of her work. Aside from her command of languages, Brigid had made history and geopolitics abiding interests in a world that was changing rapidly.

She and all the personnel of Cerberus, over half a world away atop a mountain peak in Montana, had devoted themselves to changing the nuke-scarred planet into something better. At least that was her earnest hope. To turn hope into reality meant respecting the often alien behavior patterns of a vast number of ancient religions, legends, myths and taboos.

However, Billy-boy Porpoise had exhibited behavior patterns that were all too familiar to Kane. After inviting the two emissaries from Cerberus to a council with the promise of giving their proposal serious consideration, he had chosen treachery over diplomacy. Although not particularly surprised by Billy-boy’s choice, Kane had been enraged when Brigid was held hostage so as to force a new session of talks.

Shaster wheeled the Jeep down a crushed-shell driveway and braked to a stop at the foot of a flight of stone steps. Orchid stepped behind Kane and pressed the bore of the revolver against his back. “Let’s move it on up, sec man.”

Kane climbed the steps with the girl and Shaster walking behind him. At the top of the steps a gently sloping path curved through an area lush with shrubs and tropical plants—huge ferns, enormous, glossy elephant ears, green philodendrons and orange birds-of-paradise.

Kane heard the murmur of voices and the clanging rhythm of steel drums, as well as the bleat of trumpets and the wail of an electric slide guitar. He sidled between two date palm trees and came to a halt, looking down into a slightly sunken area dominated by a huge, blue-tiled in-ground swimming pool.

A score of people, most of them nearly naked and some of them completely so, milled around on the concrete deck of the pool. A four-piece reggae band played a vigorous piece that sounded like a tuneless racket to Kane’s ears.

He saw only two people in the pool. One was an enormously fat man sitting in an inflatable purple rubber chair, floating motionless in the deep end. A pink foam dolphin bobbed in the water beside his right hand. It was almost the same color as Billy-boy Porpoise’s bare skin.

On Porpoise’s left hand, reclining in an identical chair, was a tall woman of five-nine or so with flowing curves, long, lovely and unbruised legs—and an abundant bosom almost completely exposed by the two narrow triangles of yellow cloth that were scarcely more than token acknowledgments of clothing.

The woman’s thick hair shone with the fiery hue of molten lava, and although Kane couldn’t see her eyes behind the lenses of the sunglasses she wore, he received the distinct impression Brigid Baptiste was completely at ease as she lounged beside Billy-boy Porpoise.

Chapter 3

Kane strode down to the poolside, very conscious of how he was being ignored by the revelers. He wasted no time looking for hidden guns—it was enough to know they were around.

He saw a big moon-faced man, tall and wedge shaped, with a thick chest and wide shoulders that led to a size-eighteen neck. He had a flat face, with a bulging forehead and about two pounds too much jawbone. His hair looked like the sprout of black hog bristles. His skin was unhealthy, blotched, mottled by the scars of old radiation burns that came of digging around hellzones. The garish colors of the tropical-print shirt complemented his complexion.

The man’s gristle-buried eyes followed Kane’s every step, and the expression on his face was one of concentrated hatred. It took him a few seconds to put a name to the ugly face—Blister McQuade, the former pit boss of Mandeville who bore no one from Cerberus a feeling that even approximated goodwill.

A small girl, stark naked except for fluorescent pink body paint laid on in loops and a fall of blond, silken hair that covered her upper body like a cloak, glided up to him. Silently she handed him a fluted glass filled with a bright orange fluid.

Kane waved her off. “Too early for me, sweetheart.”

He spoke loudly in order to be heard over the band. Billy-boy Porpoise’s eyelids fluttered. His sagging pectorals with shocking pink nipples rose and fell. He inhaled, and then exhaled a deep breath, causing small wavelets to break at the pool’s edge.

He peered up at Kane with dark eyes surrounded by pouches of fat. They were round eyes with no discernible lashes and bore no resemblance to those found on a dolphin. Kane figured they had originally been intended for a barracuda but due to a production error, ended up in Billy-boy’s hairless head.

“Kane,” he said in a soft voice.

“Billy-boy,” Kane replied. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Nonsense. We were just conserving our strength.” He glanced toward Brigid Baptiste. “Weren’t we, doll-baby?”

Brigid did not reply, her face expressionless. With the sunglasses concealing her eyes, she might as well have been wearing a mask.

Kane nodded toward her. “Good morning, doll-baby. You’re looking rested.”

Slowly, she lifted the sunglasses and regarded him with dispassionate, emerald-green, jade-hard eyes. “I don’t know what would give you that idea.”

A slender woman with a fair complexion, Brigid Baptiste’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual. Her mane of thick hair hung in a long sunset-colored braid, tossed over her left shoulder.

As he sat up straighter in his floating chair, Billy-boy Porpoise’s pudgy fingers pulled a lever that activated a small prop positioned at the rear of the seat. With a faint whir, the chair moved toward the concrete steps at the shallow end of the pool.

Grasping the handrail, Porpoise heaved himself out of the pool, rolls of fat jiggling as he mounted the steps in a slow, careful motion. Water streamed from his balloonlike belly, dripping down his tree-trunk-thick thighs. Although at first glance he appeared naked, he wore tiny Speedo briefs, almost absorbed by the multiple bulges of flabby, wet flesh. His dripping body was totally hairless, heavy pendants of fat creasing his torso and limbs. Barely visible within the folds of the man’s triple chins wealed the trace of an old scar, the memento of a long-ago throat cutting. Sunlight glinted from the multitude of rings on his pudgy fingers.

Brigid rolled out of her chair and swam with languorous strokes to the edge of the pool, effortlessly heaving herself out of the water. She casually padded barefoot toward a buffet table. It required a great deal of effort on Kane’s part to fix his attention elsewhere.

The girl who had offered Kane the drink picked up a multicolored beach towel only slightly smaller than a sail and carefully began patting every part of Porpoise’s skin dry. He smiled at her fondly. “Thank you, Dixie.”

He lifted his arms so Dixie could wipe down the undersides. Each touch of the towel sent little ripples jiggling over the expanse of pink flesh. Trying not to allow his revulsion show on his face, Kane guessed the man stood a little less than six feet tall, but probably tipped the scales at four-hundred-plus pounds.

Reacting to a gesture from Porpoise, the reggae band instantly stopped playing, as if a volume control knob had been turned all the way down. As the girl blotted the swag belly that rolled out and nearly hid his pelvis, the pink man said genially, “I’m a little surprised you came back, Kane…especially after last night’s failure.”

“What failure was that again?” Kane asked in a bored tone, as if he inquired only to be polite.

Porpoise shook his head in good-natured frustration. “It doesn’t matter. It’s enough you kept your word and returned here.”

“It’s not like I had a choice.” Kane nodded toward Brigid, who was examining the items on the dessert cart with great interest. “You baited the hook pretty damn effectively.”

Porpoise smiled. “Thank you.”

“Is that what this party is about? Celebrating that I came back?”

“Hardly. I’m holding it in honor of a former acquaintance of yours who may become a business associate.”

Kane glanced toward Blister McQuade, snapped off a salute with a finger to the brow and called, “Yo, Blister. How you been?”

To Kane’s surprise and great unease, McQuade’s lips writhed back from his broken, discolored teeth in a grin. “Gotcha, Kane. Finally gotcha.”

“You got me?”

McQuade chuckled, a sound like old bones being crushed underfoot. “Well, you’re sure as shit got, ain’t cha?”

“You have a point.”

Turning back to Porpoise, Kane demanded, “Is this whole routine just a trap to turn me over to some smalltime trash like Blister?”

Dixie held up a pink terry-cloth robe and Porpoise thrust his arms into the voluminous sleeves. “Come now,” the fat man said patronizingly. “You and Brigid are bright people. You’re too valuable to me to waste you like that.”

“I don’t get you.”

“You must’ve known when I permitted you to walk in here yesterday that there was a chance I’d take one or the both of you hostage.”

“To force Cerberus to deal with you,” Kane stated. “To trade our freedom for weapons. Like I said to you yesterday, it’s not going to happen.”

If Porpoise had possessed eyebrows, they would have arched upward over his scalp. “I think you’re very much mistaken. It’s not so much your freedom I’m bartering with, but your reputations.”

Brigid dropped the pretense of being uninterested in the exchange. She turned around, demanding sharply, “What do you mean?”

“The so-called Cerberus warriors are more than just legends in the Outlands,” Porpoise said, his eyes glinting shrewdly. “You’re symbols, valuable propaganda tools, far beyond your reputations as baron blasters.”

Like “sec man,” the term “baron blaster” was old, deriving from the rebels who had staged a violent resistance against the institution of the unification program a century earlier. Neither Kane nor Grant enjoyed having the appellation applied to them. Their ville upbringing still lurked close to the surface, and they had been taught that the so-called baron blasters were worse than outlaws, but were instead terrorists incarnate.

Regardless, the reputations of the core Cerberus warriors had grown too awesome, too great over the past five years for even the most isolated outlander to be ignorant of their accomplishments, even if it was an open question of just how many of the stories were based in truth and how many were overblown fable.

Kane folded his arms over his chest. “How can our reps be of any use to you?”

Porpoise accepted a glass from the girl and sipped at it appreciatively. “In the three years I’ve run my operation from here, rarely a month has gone by without word of the notorious Cerberus marauders. Even before I settled here, reports were circulating about your group.”

Brigid smiled coldly. “And you thought we were fairy tales?”

Porpoise shook his head. “No, I figured you were real enough. I wasn’t sure how much of what I heard was true or just folklore…like how you assassinated Baron Ragnar, blew up a major baronial outpost in New Mexico, took out a couple of Magistrate Divisions, destroyed Ambika’s pirate empire and royally screwed a big Millennial Consortium operation.”

He raised his glass in Brigid’s direction. “I really must thank you for that, doll-baby. Saved me the trouble of dealing with the competition.”

“All true,” Kane declared flatly. “And that’s just the stuff we let our PR department circulate.”

Porpoise’s eyes flicked back and forth between Kane and Brigid. “I personally don’t care about the other stuff or even it’s true or not. What’s important is if the outlanders believe it.”

Brigid frowned. “Why?”

“Their belief in the tales makes you extremely valuable assets. Once word spreads that you’re working for Billy-boy, whatever agenda Cerberus is putting together will fall apart. They’ll be flocking to me as their new hope.”

Kane opened his mouth to retort, then shut it. Porpoise was far more perceptive than his initial assessment. The Cerberus agenda called not just for the continued physical survival of humanity, but for the human spirit, the soul of an entire race.

Over the past five years, the Cerberus warriors had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.

Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the overlords, all of them wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. Kane often feared that everything he and his friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict, the Armageddon yet to come.

The Cerberus warriors had hoped the overweening ambition and ego of the reborn overlords would spark bloody internecine struggles, but in the two years since their advent, no intelligence indicating such actions had reached them.

Of course, the overlords were engaged in reclaiming their ancient ancestral kingdoms in Mesopotamia. They had yet to cast their covetous gaze back to the North American continent, but it was only a matter of time.

Before that occurred, Cerberus was determined to build some sort of unified resistance against them, but the undertaking proved far more difficult and frustrating than even the cynical Kane or the impatient Grant had imagined. Even two years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, of utter chaos, with various factions warring for control on a day-by-day basis.

“For the sake of argument,” Brigid said, “let’s assume you’re right, that our colleagues view us the way the Outlanders do. Wouldn’t it make more strategic sense to be known as our ally?”

Porpoise sipped the piña colada. “Not really. From both a personal and business perspective, becoming a Cerberus satellite would be detrimental to my business model. I’ve got a lot of overhead.”

“You’re a goddamn pirate,” Kane rasped impatiently. “Whatever you need, you steal. Overhead, my ass.”

“I’m an entrepreneur,” Porpoise countered defensively. “A visionary. I’m building a colony and when I’m done, I’ll be the major trading port on the gulf. I’ve got big plans—a rut farm, casinos, a major marketplace. But I need personnel.”

“Personnel?” Brigid echoed, a contemptuous undercurrent in her tone. “Slaves, more like it.”

Porpoise snorted disdainfully, blowing orange froth over the rim of the glass he lifted to his lips. He gestured expansively to the people assembled at poolside. “Do they look like slaves to you?”

Eyeing the naked, docile Dixie, Kane remarked, “Now that you mention it—”

“Enough.” Anger entered Porpoise’s voice. “The colony I’m building will be self-sufficient and will not owe its existence to the fucking barons or to Cerberus. So here’s the deal, Kane—I know you’ve got people hidden in Coral Cove. From the reports I’ve received, there’s usually four of you out in the field…doll-baby here, an ex-Mag named Grant, you and a little albino piece. You’re going to write out a list of what Cerberus will give me to expand my operations and I’ll arrange to have it delivered to them.”

“And what I am supposed to tell these contacts of ours?” Kane asked impatiently. “That me and doll-baby have decided to stay here and par-tay with you and Blister? You don’t think they’ll buy that, do you?”

Porpoise shook his head. “No, and that’s why I’m not going to sell it. I’m keeping you here as hostages, plain and simple. That’s the deal. If they don’t accept it, then they can take parts of you back home, Kane. I’ll keep doll-baby around until she bores me…which, after hearing her talk, probably won’t be that far in the future.”

Kane sighed, presenting the image of seriously pondering Porpoise’s words. At length he said, “I have a counterproposal.”

The fat man cocked his head at a quizzical angle. “Which is?”

Matter-of-factly, Kane said, “If you let us go in the next hour, those contacts of mine you mentioned won’t raze this trading port of yours to the ground. It’s an either-or situation, Billy-boy. The safety of your giant plushy-pink ass depends on you making the right choice.”

Porpoise’s expression did not change, but his gaze shifted, eyes looking beyond Kane. Glancing over his shoulder, Kane saw that Blister McQuade had moved closer. He was not alone. Shaster and Orchid stood slightly behind him and both of them were armed with pistols.

Billy-boy snapped his fingers and turned away. He said, “Hurt him.”

Chapter 4

Kane’s battle-trained muscles, tested and refined in a hundred situations where a fraction of a second gave him all the edge he needed, exploded in a perfect coordination of mind, reflexes and skill.

Kane jumped for Billy-boy Porpoise. The obese man yelled and tried to fend Kane off with one hand. Kane caught the flailing arm, hooked it at the elbow and wrenched it around ruthlessly in a hammerlock. He muscled Porpoise around in front of him. It was like trying to wrestle with a beached whale.

At the same time, Brigid Baptiste snatched up a short-bladed knife from the buffet table and laid the edge against the side of Porpoise’s throat, right above the scar. Orchid, Shaster and McQuade rocked to halts as Porpoise squawked hoarsely, gesturing with his free hand for them to stop.

Orchid raised her revolver, sighting down its length, training the bore on Brigid. “Want me to kill your know-it-all bitch, Kane?”

Brigid pressed the knife harder against Porpoise’s neck. “Want me to kill Billy-boy? No? Then stand aside or I’ll finish what a throat slitter started a long time ago.”

The woman’s tone was hard, grim and confident. Even Kane knew she wasn’t bluffing, so that meant her loathing of Billy-boy Porpoise was profound.

McQuade’s eyes narrowed. “You kill him, then you’ll die sure as shit.”

“We know that, Blister,” Kane said with a genial smile, bearing down on the hammerlock. “But if we do it our way, nobody has to die and this happenin’ party place will stay standing. If we do it anybody else’s way, then just about everybody here will be dead.”

McQuade scowled, fists clenching. “You’re so full of shit, Kane.”

“Are you one-hundred-percent certain about that?” Brigid asked, a taunting note in her voice. “I don’t think Billy-boy is…are you?”

Porpoise sighed heavily, sounding like a dolphin expelling air from a blowhole. “All right, all right. You two can leave. Neither one of you is worth all of this bullshit—”

To Kane, it felt as if Billy-boy Porpoise suddenly exploded within his grip. He twisted wildly to the left, then hurled himself to the right, kicking backward with both heels. The knife blade in Brigid’s hand dragged along the side of his neck, drawing a thread of blood.

Kane tried to bear down on the hammerlock, to force Porpoise to his knees, but the man exhibited enormous strength. He kicked out with a huge splayed foot, catching Brigid in the stomach and driving her backward.

With his free hand, Porpoise jabbed up and behind him at Kane’s eyes, fingers hooked like claws. Kane lowered his head and saved his vision, but Porpoise secured an agonizingly tight grip on his hair. He heaved with his shoulders, as if performing an expansive shrug, then tore free of his terry-cloth robe, leaving it in Kane’s hands.

Releasing his grip on Kane’s hair, Porpoise heeled around, snatched the hem of the robe and hurled it up and over the taller man’s head. A fist pounded into his stomach, jarring him several feet to the left. As he tried to struggle free of the enveloping robe, a hard object struck the side of his head through it, and what felt like Billy-boy’s forearm pile-drived against his chest, knocking him down.

A rain of blows and kicks fell on him, his ears filled with breathless curses and furious female shrieks. Pain flared all over his body. He heard Brigid’s voice raised in anger.

Two more kicks, landing just below his rib cage, drew a grunt of pain from him. Rolling onto his back, Kane tensed every muscle in his body and performed what gymnasts refer to as a “kip-up,” the easiest and quickest way to go from lying prone to an upright posture. He kicked his legs straight out at a thirty-degree angle, bent his knees swiftly, planted his feet and used the momentum of the kick to spring erect.

The draping folds of the robe fell away and Kane glimpsed a glitter above his head, descending in an eye-blurring arc. Half turning he caught a slender wrist in his right hand and twisted viciously, hearing bones snap like brittle wood. A female voice screamed in pain. Kane caught a fragmented glimpse of Dixie falling to her knees, cradling her broken arm. The knife Brigid had wielded lay at her feet.

Kane snaked his upper body to the right and spun backward with his right fist. The ram’s-head punch impacted solidly with Blister McQuade’s chin. Pivoting on his toes, he shot his elbow into the man’s throat.

McQuade staggered backward, holding his throat in both hands, his tongue protruding from his mouth. He toppled into the pool, raising a great splash that sloshed water on everyone in the vicinity. Kane whirled toward Porpoise.

For all of his bulk, Porpoise launched himself forward nimbly, cannonballing his entire weight into Kane’s torso, forcing him backward, smashing all the wind out of him. Kane crashed over two deck chairs before hitting the concrete deck and skidding several feet.

Fighting off the instinct to curl up, he shambled to his feet, only to be knocked down again by the butt of a gun that came down like a hammer on the top of his head.

The pool became a huge black hole and Kane plunged into it headfirst.

HE BECAME AWARE of a blessedly cool trickle of water on the flushed skin of his face. Kane did not open his eyes or otherwise move, trying to adjust to the fierce throbbing pain in his skull, pulsing in cadence with his heartbeat.

His thought processes were remarkably clear, and he remembered everything up to the point where he had been cold-cocked. Shame made a bitter taste at the back of his throat. He had misjudged the entire situation with Porpoise, but he couldn’t have left Brigid in the man’s custody while he, Grant and the other members of Cerberus Away Team Alpha staged an assault on the compound.

The thought of Brigid motivated him to open his eyes. He saw nothing but patterns of dark gray and pitch black. He tried to sit up but the effort sprayed his brain with needles and he bit back a groan. He lay back down.

“Kane?”

“Baptiste?” His whisper was a hoarse rasp.

“Right here.” He felt the cool, damp touch of cloth against his forehead.

Squinting, Kane could barely make her out, kneeling over him, dabbing at his face with a wet cloth. Gingerly, he touched the crown of his head and felt the moisture, as well as a very tender lump. His scalp wasn’t split, so he assumed the liquid was water. He tried to focus on Brigid again, but his blurred vision prevented him from fixing on single reference points in the darkness.

He got his hands under him and slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, silently enduring a spasm of vertigo and nausea.

“Are you all right?” Brigid asked, voice pitched very low. “That little bitch Orchid really laid one on you.”

Kane started to nod, thought better of it and said, “I really hate being whacked unconscious and then waking up somewhere else.”

Brigid forced a chuckle. “It’s a pretty clichéd transitional device, isn’t it?”

Assuming her question was rhetorical, Kane felt around him. His fingers touched damp sand. “Where are we?”

“Some sort of storage shed, about a hundred yards away from the pool.”

“How long was I out?”

“About half an hour, I think.”

“They didn’t hurt you?”

“Not seriously. Billy-boy made some over-the-top threats about forcing me to be the bottom bitch in an offshore whorehouse. I guess he figured that would scare me into obedience.”

Kane grinned, even though the motion hurt his cheeks. “Billy-boy is one enterprising bastard, isn’t he?”

“He makes me want to puke for a week,” Brigid shot back coldly. “Can you stand up?”

“Let’s find out.” Carefully, Kane heaved himself to his feet. He stumbled and Brigid put out supporting hands. He probed various aches and pains around his body, particularly his ribs. Nothing felt broken.

“What’s the plan?” Brigid asked.

“In about half an hour, maybe less, Grant, Domi and CAT Alpha will come storming in here by land and by sea. I’d prefer to be out of here by then.”

He walked slowly toward an area of gray, noting how threads of yellow light peeped along the lines of a door. As he touched it and rapped on the wood gently, Brigid stated, “It’s locked, of course.”

“Of course.” Kane felt around the doorframe with his hands, touching the metal hinges and the lock.

He stepped to the left, moving slowly around the walls, his body responding sluggishly from the bruises of the beating. He ignored the pain and probed the cinder-block walls with his fingertips, scraping his nails at the mortar. Lifting his right arm, he laid the palm of his hand flat against the ceiling.

“I’d judge the size of our accommodations to be about ten by ten,” he commented.

“More like twelve by twelve,” Brigid corrected.

He continued moving sideways, not finding any furniture or anything of use in the storage shed. As he circled back to the door, he bumped into Brigid. His vision had cleared, adjusting to the gloom, and he could make out her face and figure, seeing a bruise on the left side of her face where someone had struck her. She was also naked to the waist.

“You don’t have a top on,” he said awkwardly.

Crossing her arms over her breasts, she said angrily, “Thanks for the revelation, Kane. You try fighting half a dozen scumbags wearing only a bikini sometime.”

“The parts tend to fall off?”

She nodded grimly. “They do.”

Quickly, Kane stripped out of his T-shirt. “There’s no way you could’ve won. You shouldn’t have mixed it up with them.”

Brigid uttered a deprecating chuckle. “If I hadn’t, Blister and Billy-boy would have stomped you to death, poolside.”

Handing her his shirt, Kane said quietly, “Thanks.”

“My pleasure, but we’ve got to worry about getting out of here…or signaling Grant and Domi to either hold off on the attack or launch it as scheduled.”

Reaching up behind his ear, Kane fingered his Commtact. “It’s not functioning. Got too stomped on, I guess.”

Brigid sighed. “Figures.”

Kane forced a laugh. “Doesn’t it just. Well, we’ve relied on nothing but our fists and wits plenty of times before.”

“Maybe one too many times.”

Disturbed by the uncharacteristic note of resignation in Brigid’s voice, he said, “I think we’ve still got a reservoir of luck to draw on.”

She struggled to pull the shirt over her head. “Over five years of this, Kane. Five years of playing the odds, and when all else fails, placing our faith in luck. There’s got to be a limit to both.”

“It’s not just luck that’s kept us alive,” he said defensively. “Not always, anyway.”

“No, not always,” she agreed with a wry weariness. “Just most of the time. Face it, Kane—we’re fugitives from the law of averages.”

Kane knew Brigid spoke the truth, but he didn’t let her know that. Lakesh had once suggested that the trinity he, Brigid and Grant formed seemed to exert an almost supernatural influence on the scales of chance, usually tipping them in their favor.

The notion had amused Kane, since he was too pragmatic to accept such an esoteric concept, but he couldn’t deny that he and his two friends seemed to lead exceptionally charmed lives, particularly him and Brigid.

Kane shied away from examining the bond he shared with Brigid. On the surface, there was no bond, but they seemed linked to each other and the same destiny. He recalled another name he had for Brigid Baptiste: anam-chara. In the ancient Gaelic tongue it meant “soul friend.”

From the very first time he met her he was affected by the energy Brigid radiated, a force intangible, yet one that triggered a melancholy longing in his soul. That strange, sad longing only deepened after a bout of jump sickness both of them suffered during the mat-trans jump to Russia, several years earlier. The main symptoms of jump sickness were vivid, almost-real hallucinations.

He and Brigid had shared the same hallucination, but both knew on a visceral, primal level it hadn’t been gateway-transit-triggered delirium, but a revelation that they were joined by chains of fate, their destinies linked. The idea that he and Brigid had existed at other times in other lives had seemed preposterous at first. Perhaps it still would have if he hadn’t experienced the same jump dreams as her, which symbolized the chain of fate connecting her soul to his.

It had required nearly a year before the two very different people achieved a synthesis of attitudes and styles where they could function smoothly as colleagues and parts of a team, sharing professional courtesies and respect.

Although they never spoke of it, Kane often wondered if that spiritual bond was the primary reason he had sacrificed everything he had attained as a Magistrate to save her from execution. The possibility confused him, made him feel defensive and insecure. That insecurity was one reason he always addressed her as “Baptiste,” almost never by her first name, so as to maintain a certain formal distance between them. But that distance continued to shrink every day.

“I’m open for suggestions about how to get out of here,” Kane said sarcastically, “even if they do rely primarily on luck.”

Brigid opened her mouth, but whatever she was about to say was interrupted by the sound of footsteps and murmured voices on the other side of the door. A key rattled in the lock.

“How’s that for luck?” he muttered.

“The bad kind,” she retorted in an acerbic whisper.

Chapter 5

With an arm, Kane swept Brigid to one side and flattened himself against the opposite wall beside the door just as it was pulled open from the outside. The light pouring into the small building was blinding, and they averted their eyes. Billy-boy Porpoise’s voice had a peculiar, petulant quality to it.

“Come out to where we can see you. Both of you!”

Kane did not stir, gazing across the open doorway toward Brigid and touching a finger to his lips. From outside came a mutter of orders. Kane recognized Orchid’s icy voice, but everyone was too wary to step in through the doorway.

“We’re not going to hurt you anymore, Kane,” Porpoise said in a wheedling tone. “We proved our point. Just come on out.”

When neither he nor Brigid responded, Porpoise commanded, “Goddammit, get your asses out here!”

“It’s nice and shady in here,” Kane said mockingly. “Why don’t you join us?”

Billy-boy Porpoise said nothing for a long tick of time. Then, in a low, quavering tone, he demanded, “Who are they, Kane?”

“Who be who, B.B.?”

“My sentries have spotted armed men in the landside perimeter. They’re yours, right?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Well, I can,” Blister McQuade growled hoarsely. “You’re coming out so they can see we have you. We can chuck tear-gas grens in there and give you the same treatment you gave the dogs last night.”

“Yeah,” Orchid said, a note of cruel laughter twisting around her words. “Would you like that? I would.”

Swallowing a profanity-seasoned sigh, Kane exchanged a questioning glance with Brigid. Her face was expressionless, but after a thoughtful few seconds, she nodded curtly.

“All right,” Kane said loudly. “Here we come.”

Kane pushed himself away from the wall, set himself, then bounded through the door, head down. As he half expected, McQuade was ready to greet him. The scarred man’s fists pounded a double pile-driving rhythm into his belly. Letting himself go limp, Kane fell to the ground, covering up.

“That’s enough!” Porpoise squawked. “I need him mobile.”

Blister uttered an animalistic snarl of disappointment and stepped away. Spitting out grit, Kane lifted his head from the sandy soil and saw Orchid pulling Brigid through the doorway, S&W revolver pressed against the side of her head. Her unbound mane glistened like a flow of molten lava in the relentless sunlight.

Porpoise, once more wearing his pink terry-cloth robe, tied shut with a long strip of cloth, prodded Kane with a sandaled foot. “Blister really, really, really wants to kill you, Kane.”

“But you’ll talk him out of it, right?”

“Not for very long. Besides, I really, really, really want you dead, too.”

“Who’ll sign off on your Cerberus wish list, then?” Kane demanded.

Porpoise snorted and reached out to caress Brigid’s sleek thigh. “No reason why she can’t. I’ll keep doll-baby around for a while…I can always cut out her tongue. But for the time being, I need both of you looking healthy.”

Brigid kicked at him. Porpoise immediately swung his left paw and backhanded her across the face. The gaudy, jeweled rings cut red furrows across Brigid’s right cheek.

In a fury, Kane tried to rise, but a foot in the center of his back flattened him against the ground.

“You liked that love pat?” Porpoise asked, grinning at Brigid. “That’s your first lesson as a slave. Kneel at my feet and kiss my dick.”

Brigid didn’t move. Her eyes seethed with loathing, with hatred. “Maybe you should show me where it is first. I left my magnifying glass at home.”

Porpoise lifted his hand again. Kane struggled to his hands and knees, but Blister McQuade’s foot came up and kicked him on the chin, snapping back his head.

Orchid grabbed Brigid’s right arm and bent it behind her, twisting sharply upward. “Kneel and kiss, bitch!”

Three distant crumps came almost together. The air shivered.

Orchid turned her head toward the house. “What was that?”

The lane that led to Porpoise’s compound suddenly spewed columns of flame and smoke. A woman screamed, a sound of fear, not pain. Orchid, Blister McQuade and Porpoise stood in openmouthed, disbelieving shock, staring in the direction of the explosions.

Kane lunged up from the ground, driving his right fist into Blister McQuade’s crotch. The big man roared, throwing out his arms, blunt fingers hooking around Kane’s bare upper arms. For a long moment, the two men grappled, Blister’s fingernails peeling away strips of skin. Orchid leveled her pistol at the back of Kane’s head.

All of them heard a swishing whisper that almost instantly became a steady pressure against their eardrums. Barely twenty yards over their heads, a pattern of light twisted and shifted. Dark, ambient waves shimmered, then revealed the bronze tones of an aircraft’s hull like water sluicing over a pane of dusty glass.

The craft held the general shape and configuration of a manta ray, and at first glance was little more than a flattened wedge with wings. Sheathed in bronze-hued metal, intricate geometric designs covered almost the entire exterior surface, interlocking swirling glyphs, cup and spiral symbols and even elaborate cuneiform markings. The wingspan measured out to twenty yards from tip to tip and the fuselage was fifteen feet long.

Blister stopped struggling, although he didn’t release Kane. Everyone shielded their eyes as fine clouds of sand puffed up all around. Balanced on the balls of her feet, Brigid pivoted at the waist toward Orchid, her forearm slapping the girl’s S&W aside while the edge of her stiffened palm slashed against the base of her delicate throat.

The electric tingling sensation in the socket of Brigid’s armpit told her of the power of her blow. Orchid staggered backward, arms windmilling. She fell without uttering so much as a whimper, arms and legs flung wide. Consciousness went out of her eyes with the swiftness of a candle being blown out.

Bawling in wordless panic, Billy-boy Porpoise lunged for the pistol nestled within Orchid’s slack fingers. The nose cannon of the Manta erupted with a series of stuttering thunderclaps. The short burst of explosive tungsten-carbide shells punched three-foot-high geysers of dirt into the narrow stretch of ground between Porpoise and the girl.

Brigid glanced up and waved as the Manta listed to the left and right, a waggling of the wings to let her know that Grant sat in the cockpit. The hulls of the Mantas were equipped with microcomputers that sensed the color and shade of the background and exactly mirrored the image.

Porpoise whirled and ran, big sandaled feet kicking up gouts of sand. Brigid snatched the pistol from Orchid’s hand and sprinted after him, pausing only long enough to strike Blister McQuade on the back of the neck with the short barrel. She ran on, leaving the man for Kane to finish off. Her objective was Billy-boy Porpoise, and she wasn’t wasting any time on underlings or guests. She knew Kane could take McQuade, even if he lost some skin and blood in the process.

The staccato hammering of subguns and the cracks of small-arms fire from two different directions reverberated against Brigid’s eardrums as she ran. The sounds were punctuated by the heavier crumps of the detonating grenades launched by the H&K XM-29 assault rifles carried by Cerberus Away Team Alpha as they rushed in through breaches blown in the wall.

The dozen members of CAT Alpha wore tricolor desert-camouflage BDUs, helmets and thick-soled jump boots, as well as PASGT vests that provided protection from even .30-caliber rounds. Stuttering roars overlapped as the barrels of their autorifles spit short tongues of flame as the team spread out across the perimeter.

Porpoise’s personal guard put up a disorganized counteroffensive, but they were unprepared and under-armed. CAT Alpha consisted primarily of highly trained former Magistrates, and they ruthlessly overran the defenders’ positions. The high-caliber rounds fired by the XM-29s spun Porpoise’s men like puppets with their strings suddenly cut. Survivors ran for cover, squalling in fear, throwing away their weapons.

Brigid glimpsed the second Manta planing along the shoreline, lancing toward the marina. She guessed Edwards sat in the cockpit. A pair of mini-Sidewinders burst from the pod sheaths under the aircraft’s wings and inscribed short, descending arcs. Although she did not see where they struck, she heard the double explosions, followed instantly by mushrooming fireballs of orange and black that spewed high into the air, mixed with fragments of wood and fiberglass.

Brigid’s lips compressed in a grim smile of satisfaction as Billy-boy’s pirate fleet was thoroughly deep-sixed. Distantly, she heard Domi’s high-pitched, forceful voice issuing orders to the team.

She saw Porpoise squeezing his bulk between a pair of palm trees, heading for the rear of the house. As Brigid followed him, long legs pumping, Shaster stepped into view, snapping up a pistol and squeezing off a hasty shot in her general direction. The bullet fanned cool air on her right cheek.

Raising the S&W, she worked the double-action trigger. The .38-caliber bullet took the man in the left leg, blowing away the kneecap in a welter of crimson and cartilage. Howling, Shaster pitched forward, dropping his pistol so he could claw at his maimed leg.

Brigid leaped over him, aware of explosions blazing orange from all points around the compound. The roof of the house erupted in a column of flame, and debris rained down, splashing into the pool. Thick smoke reeking of chemicals swirled, stung her eyes, burning the soft tissue of her throat and biting at her nostrils. A multitude of voices cried out in pain and terror.

Coughing, half-blinded by the haze, Brigid didn’t see Porpoise until he loomed up behind her. Before she could lift the pistol, she felt herself imprisoned by a pair of arms that hugged her close in an agonizingly tight embrace. Lifting her from her feet, Porpoise shook her savagely from side-to-side and the revolver slipped from her fingers, clattering to the deck.

Billy-boy’s hoarse voice, strained by exertion and smoke inhalation, whispered, “You’re still my hostage, doll-baby. Tell these bastards to hold their fire and call off the attack.”

Brigid lowered her head, then reared back, slamming the crown of her head into Porpoise’s face. He cried out, stumbled backward and slipped off the curb. Still clutching Brigid, he plunged into the pool.

Fighting free of the dazed man’s grasp, Brigid twisted to face the sputtering Porpoise. Blood streamed from his flattened nose and split lips. Baring red-filmed teeth, he lunged for her, thick fingers tangling in her hair.

He shoved her beneath the surface. She struggled frantically and he pulled her to him, tightly pressing her face against his belly, intending to smother her in his flab, as well as drown her in the water.

Brigid fought, fingernails raking across the fabric of the man’s robe. She tore it open and clawed at his flesh. Billy-boy Porpoise’s grip did not relax and with a surge of comingled horror and self-disgust, she realized all the man had to do was stand patiently for a couple of minutes and she would die a humiliating death.

Locking the muscles of her throat, lungs burning, Brigid opened her mouth as wide as she could and sank her teeth deep into a roll of Porpoise’s belly fat. Despite the thunder of her pulse in her ears and the muffling effect of the water, she distinctly heard the man voice a high-pitched squeal much like the sounds emitted by his namesake.

Fingers groping over the juncture of his thighs, Brigid found and seized his testicles while she continued chewing through Porpoise’s lower belly. Releasing his grip on her head, Porpoise kicked and flailed, screaming in pain.

Hovering on the fringes of unconsciousness due to lack of oxygen, Brigid shoved herself away, her head breaking the crimson-tinged surface of the pool. She spit out a mouthful of Porpoise and even over her strangulated gasps, she heard Billy-boy shrieking, “You bitch! You fucking bitch!”

He stroked toward her, water roiling and splashing in his wake, congested face contorted in a mask of homicidal rage. Brigid backed away, drinking in air, dragging her hair out of her eyes. Porpoise looped the robe’s belt over Brigid’s head and cinched it tight around her throat.

She managed to slide a hand between makeshift garrote and her neck, but as she strained against it and felt Porpoise’s strength, she knew she was spent. She swung her free hand, knotted into a fist, against Billy-boy’s chin, rocking his head back on his shoulders. But the pain of the blow was negligible compared to that of the wound she had inflicted on him with her teeth.

Through foggy eyes, Brigid glimpsed a bare-chested and scarlet-streaked Kane appear on the pool’s deck. Face as expressionless as if it were carved from stone, he extended his right arm and squeezed off a single shot with the S&W revolver.

Porpoise’s body jiggled and he half turned toward Kane, eyes widening in reproachful amazement. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and Kane shot him again, this time through the center of the chest. He coughed blood, and the pressure around Brigid’s neck fell away.

Slowly, Billy-boy Porpoise sank beneath the surface, crimson strings stretching out from various parts of his body.

Massaging her throat, Brigid stared at Kane and demanded, “What kept you?”

Kane shrugged, gesturing with the revolver toward a Manta skimming low over the burning roof of the house. “Luck. The good kind.”

KANE STOOD on the beach, smoking a self-congratulatory cigar. The Gulf of Mexico stretched away, as calm as a mirror, until the heat haze on the horizon melded it with the cloudless blue sky. He stared at the flotsam littering the sea and washing up on the shoreline. A few bodies floated amid the wreckage of the marina.

The Manta piloted by Edwards had virtually pulverized the fleet of Billy-boy Porpoise. The only seaworthy craft left were a couple of dinghies. He watched the gulls winging over the floating debris, diving down to pick up whatever offal caught their eye. Behind him, smoke boiled from many of the buildings in the compound.

Carefully, Kane rolled his shoulders, wincing at the scrape of the raw abrasions against his T-shirt. The analgesics he had taken from the medical kit blunted the sharp edges of the pain, even that in his head.

Although he had subdued Blister McQuade, he hadn’t killed him. So far, the man hadn’t been identified among those of Porpoise’s staff who had been rounded up. Kane wasn’t particularly concerned about Blister being on the loose—he had plenty of enemies on the hoof, and compared to most of them, McQuade barely rated as a nuisance, much less a genuine threat.

At the sound of feet crunching on the sand, he turned quickly, reaching for the revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants. Grant, Domi, Brigid and Edwards approached him. A patch of liquid bandage shone dully on Brigid’s right cheek, covering the abrasion inflicted by Porpoise’s rings.

“All of this before lunch,” Grant rumbled, gesturing expansively toward the smoke rising into the sky. “What do we do before supper?”

“Go home,” Brigid said curtly. She was attired in jeans, a military-gray T-shirt and low-heeled boots. “I’ve about had my fill of the Sunshine State.”

Kane touched the lump on the top of his head and winced. “Me, too. Kind of a shame about how everything turned out. I know you had hopes of cutting a deal, Baptiste.”

“Billy-boy should’ve believed you,” Domi stated. “Fat bastard brought this on himself.”

“What about the people here?” Edwards asked. “What should we do with them?”

Domi cast the big shaved-headed ex-Mag a cold stare. “Let ’em go. Not their fault Porpoise was an asshole.”

“True,” Grant agreed. “But they’re not exactly victims, either. They benefited from Porpoise’s marauding.”

Edwards nodded, wiping at the sweat pebbling his brow. “We can’t leave them to pick up the pieces themselves. They’ll just try to take over Coral Cove.”

Kane exhaled a stream of smoke. “Then we’ll post CAT Alpha here, under your command, for a couple of days. Just to make sure everybody behaves.”

Edwards looked as if he were on the verge of voicing an objection, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Brigid sighed, running fingers through her tangled mane of hair. “Why is it that so many of the deals we broker are ultimately decided at the barrel of a gun?”

Grant shrugged the wide yoke of his shoulders. “That’s the purest form of diplomacy, isn’t it?”

Taking a final puff of the cigar, Kane flipped the butt out into the breakers. “Let’s get to the Mantas. The sooner we launch, the sooner we’re back in the cool mountain breezes of Montana.”

Dourly, Grant said, “Not exactly.”

Both Kane and Brigid eyed him challengingly. “Not what exactly?” Brigid wanted to know.

Grant hooked a thumb in the general direction of the Mantas. “I received a comm. call from Lakesh a few minutes ago. There’s a situation he wants us to check out on the way back to Cerberus.”

“What kind of situation?” Domi asked suspiciously, ruby eyes slitted.

“Possible overlord activity.”

Kane frowned. “Where?”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Grant intoned, “Tennessee…the former barony of Beausoleil.”

Chapter 6

Alarm Klaxons warbled with a nerve-scratching rhythm, echoing through the redoubt. Personnel ran through the corridors in apparent panic, but in actuality they were racing to preappointed emergency stations as per the red-alert drills.

Farrell’s voice blared from the public-address system. “Intruder alert! Sealing exterior sec door! Intruder alert!”

Mohandas Lakesh Singh dodged adroitly as he rushed to the operations center. “Coming through!” he shouted in order to be heard over the alarm.

He heard his order repeated on his left by Brewster Philboyd. Lakesh glanced toward the tall man and nodded in acknowledgment. One of the three-score refugees from the Manitius Moon colony, Philboyd was an astrophysicist. In his mid-forties, Philboyd was tall, thin and lanky, and his pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline that made his already high forehead seem exceptionally high. He wore black-rimmed eyeglasses, and his cheeks bore the pitted scars associated with chronic teenage acne.

“What’s going on?” Philboyd demanded.

“Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” Lakesh retorted, squeezing between two people clad in the white bodysuits that served as the unisex duty uniform of Cerberus personnel. “I was in the commissary, steeping my pot of lunchtime tea.”

A well-built man of medium height, with thick, glossy black hair, an unlined dark-olive complexion and a long, aquiline nose, Lakesh looked no older than fifty, despite a few strands of distinguished gray streaking his temples. He resembled a middle-aged man of East Indian extraction in reasonably good health. In reality, he had recently celebrated his 251st birthday.

As a youthful genius, Lakesh had been drafted into the web of conspiracy the architects of the Totality Concept had spun during the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. A multidegreed physicist and cyberneticist, he served as the administrator for Project Cerberus, a position that had earned him survival during the global megacull of January 2001. Like the Manitius Moonbase refugees, he had spent most of the intervening two hundred years in cryostasis.

The central command complex of the Cerberus redoubt was a long, high-ceilinged room divided by two aisles of computer stations. Half a dozen people sat before the terminals. Monitor screens flashed incomprehensible images and streams of data in machine talk.

The operations center had five dedicated and eight shared subprocessors, all linked to the mainframe computer behind the far wall. Two centuries earlier, it had been one of the most advanced models ever built, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed when it was built, using protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.

The information contained in the main database may not have been the sum total of all humankind’s knowledge, but not for lack of trying. Any bit, byte or shred of intelligence that had ever been digitized was only a few keystrokes and mouse clicks away.

A huge Mercator relief map of the world spanned the entire wall above the door. Pinpoints of light shone steadily in almost every country, connected by a thin glowing pattern of lines. They represented the Cerberus network, the locations of all functioning gateway units across the planet. As they entered, Philboyd and Lakesh cast quick over-the-shoulder glances at the map. No lights blinked, so none of the gateway units were in use.

On the opposite side of the operations center, an anteroom held the eight-foot-tall mat-trans chamber. Rising from an elevated platform, six upright slabs of brown-hued armaglass formed a translucent wall around it.

Armaglass was manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century from a special compound and process that plasticized and combined the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.

Lakesh and Philboyd moved swiftly to the main ops console. Two people sat before it, gazing fixedly at the VGA monitor that rose above the keyboard. A flat LCD screen nearly four feet square, it flickered with icons and colors.

Farrell, a shaved-headed man who affected a goatee and a gold hoop earring, rolled his chair back from the console on squeaking casters. The brown eyes he turned toward Lakesh were anxious. “About time you got here.”

Lakesh stepped up beside him and saw that the top half of the screen glowed with a CGI grid pattern. A drop-down window displayed scrolling numbers that he quickly recognized as measurements of speed and positional coordinates. “Status.”

“A radar hit,” Donald Bry answered, inclining his copper-curled head toward a bead of light inching across the gridwork. A round-shouldered man of small stature, Bry acted as Lakesh’s lieutenant and apprentice in all matters technological. His expression was always one of consternation, no matter his true mood.

Electronic chimes sounded each time the bead of light left one glowing square of the grid and entered another. “When did you get the first hit?” Lakesh asked.

“About five minutes ago,” Farrell said. “Whatever the bogey is, it’s not traveling very fast.”

Philboyd eyed the numbers on the drop-down window. “About two hundred klicks per hour. Could it be a Deathbird?”

Bry shook his head. “When it first appeared, the altitude was around thirty thousand feet. The maximum flight ceiling of a Deathbird is about three.”

“It’s not that high now,” Lakesh pointed out.

“No,” Farrell agreed. “And the bogey is slowing down the closer it comes. Straightforward course, too.”

Philboyd adjusted his eyeglasses. “Almost like it’s trying to catch our attention, not evade it.”

Lakesh opened his mouth to reply, grimaced, then said to Farrell, “Turn off the alarms, but lower the security shields. Lock us down in here.”

The man’s hands tapped a series of buttons on the keyboard. The alarm fell silent, and the warbling was replaced by the pneumatic hissing of compressed air, the squeak of gears and a sequence of heavy, booming thuds resounding from the corridor. Four-inch-thick vanadium alloy bulkheads dropped from the ceiling and sealed off the living quarters, engineering level and main sec door from the operations center, completely isolating it from the rest of the installation.

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