“You’re familiar with the mandate of the Consortium, right?”

Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, and try to figure out a way to enslave your fellow human beings.”

Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead.”

“Thanks,” retorted Grant. “I will.”

“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently. “Why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”

Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”

“Whose attention?” Kane asked, a steel edge in his voice.

Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost walkers.”

Ghostwalk

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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

Ghostwalk

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

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

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence. What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

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 1

Kane did not hear the shot or see anyone with a gun.

The shock of the bullet’s impact high on his right shoulder jerked him around, his feet tangling, his back slamming hard against the adobe wall.

Kane let his body sag to the ground. He could hear only his own strained breath as he swallowed air into his emptied lungs. As quickly as he could, he crawled behind a heap of chipped masonry. Pain streaked up and down his arm like flares of heat lightning, but he didn’t think any bones were broken. Still, he had to clamp his jaws tightly shut against a groan of pain. He fingered the small hole punched through his tricolor desert-camouflage blouse and winced.

His mind swam with anger. Your own fault, dumbass, he snapped at himself. He knew he should have checked out every structure in the ruins of the old village before leaving the shelter of the walls, but concern over a missing team member had made him reckless.

A single dirt lane led to the settlement, which was a cluster of small huts, most of them roofless, surrounding a well. The north wall had collapsed into rubble and dried mud bricks long ago. The place looked like a typical abandoned Outland village so Kane hadn’t strolled through it with any particular caution.

He hitched around, careful not to dislodge any loose stones and give away his position. The lowering sun was a blinding red ball, and if nothing else, Kane appreciated his sunglasses. His eyes swept over the featureless sandy plain. Less than a hundred yards to his right rose a range of low hills with a rolling tongue of sand dunes between them.

High, rust-red mesas towered between the low hills. He resisted taking a drink from his canteen, straining his hearing for any sound of movement. He heard only the singing silence of the desert stirred by the constant hot breeze. Sand and the dry wind sapped all the juices from his body, parching the throat and dehydrating the flesh.

The sun dropped down behind one of the flat-topped outcroppings, and long shadows stretched toward him. Heat waves blurred the far horizon. The peaks of the Jemez Mountain Range were only a wavering mirage many miles to the south.

Kane had been walking point, a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate because of his uncanny ability to detect imminent danger. He called it a sixth sense, but his pointman’s sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing. Most of the time, he could sense danger from far off.

Now he wondered if his senses, his instincts, were failing him. In potential killzones, he normally walked with such care it was almost a form of paranoia. He had grown accustomed to always being watchful and alert, to expecting the unexpected. This time his pointman’s sense had let him down.

Or, he thought sourly, I’m just getting old.

Reaching up behind his right ear, he tapped the Commtact, a flat curve of metal fastened to the mastoid bone by implanted steel pintels. Sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder embedded within the bone. Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal conveyed the radio transmissions directly through the skull casing.

Kane touched the volume control and a hash of static filled his head. Quickly he dialed it back down, grimacing both in frustration and pain. A frequency-dampening field spread out like a vast umbrella over the village, blocking all radio communications. He could think of only a couple of groups with access to that kind of tech.

Brewster Philboyd had volunteered to scout out the zone to prove his suspicions. When Kane declined to grant him permission, Philboyd had gone anyway. He had not returned.

Clenching his teeth, Kane inched toward one of the lengthening shadows. Although his shoulder burned fiercely from the impact of the bullet, he carefully flexed the tendons of his right wrist. With the faint drone of a tiny electric motor, cables slid the Sin Eater from its forearm holster and into the palm of his hand. His fingers tingled with a painful pins-and-needles sensation and they barely stirred.

The Sin Eater, the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, was an automatic handgun, less than fourteen inches in length, with an extended magazine carrying 20 9 mm rounds. When not in use, the butt folded over the top of the weapon, lying perpendicular to the frame, reducing its holstered length to ten inches.

If the autopistol was needed, a flexing of wrist tendons activated sensitive actuator cables within the holsters and snapped the weapon smoothly into his waiting hands, the butt unfolding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eater did not have a trigger guard or a safety switch, the autopistol fired immediately when his index finger touched the firing stud.

The wrist actuators ignored all movements except the one that indicated the gun should be unholstered. It was a completely automatic, almost unconscious movement practiced by Kane.

Kane heard a faint crunch, as of a foot coming down on loose stone. Carefully he leaned over, peering around the base of the rock heap. The figure of a man stepped through a wide crack in the adobe wall. Because he was backlit by the shimmering corona of the setting sun, Kane couldn’t pick out specific details beyond the very long-barreled pistol in the man’s right fist. The man moved quickly and purposefully, walking heel-to-toe with expert ease, keeping the wall to his right.

Inhaling a deep breath through his nostrils, Kane pushed the Sin Eater back into the holster, hearing the lock solenoid catch with a pair of soft clicks. He noted the foot-long sound suppressor that was screwed into the bore of the man’s autopistol. The silencer had successfully reduced the noise of the gunshot, but had also reduced the bullet’s velocity sufficiently so it had only knocked Kane down rather than penetrating the Spectra fabric of his shadow suit.

A sound suppressor seemed a very strange attachment for a man on foot out in the wastelands of New Mexico, but Kane had no time to wonder about it.

With his left hand, he drew the fourteen-inch-long combat knife from the sheath at his waist. He gripped the Nylex handle tightly while he grimly tried to coax more feeling into his right arm. He waited, barely breathing, listening for sounds of the gunman’s progress.

Built with a lean, long-limbed economy, most of Kane’s muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. A wolf’s cold stare glittered in his blue-gray eyes. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his left cheek. His thick dark hair glistened with sweat at the roots.

He listened to the stealthy tramp of feet, realizing that the way the man soft-footed through the loose gravel and sand indicated he wasn’t sure of his shot. Kane felt pressure moving along his nerves and he rose to a crouch, favoring his injured shoulder.

A shadow crept slowly across the ground toward him, then it halted. Kane figured the gunman was eyeing the pile of rock, studying the tracks in the sand, guessing that his quarry more than likely hid behind it.

The man advanced silently in a smooth, fast rush. In his eagerness to get past the heap of stone, he grazed the wall with a knee and was thrown slightly off balance. He stumbled, reaching out to steady himself.

Kane slashed out with the knife, the razored edge penetrating the leather of a jump boot and slicing the tendon at the man’s left heel. He uttered a strangulated screech and staggered forward, leg buckling.

The man’s shoulder slammed against the wall, and a webwork of cracks spread out across the sun-baked clay. Kane caught an impression of a smooth, round face contorted in agony and surprise. The hollow bore of the sound suppressor swung toward him. Although he gave the handgun only the most fleeting of glances, he identified it as a Calico M-950 rimfire.

Kane dodged to one side, hearing a faint thump, then the sharp whine of a ricochet somewhere behind him. With his right hand, he knocked the pistol aside, then whipped the blade of the combat knife forward, stopping the razor edge a hairbreadth from the man’s throat.

For a long second, the two men stared into each other’s eyes. A round button on the man’s dun-colored coverall glinted with dim sun sparks. The inscribed image showed a stylized representation of a featureless man holding a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, in his left hand and a sword in his right, both crossed over his chest. No words were imprinted on it, but none were necessary.

“The Millennial Consortium,” Kane said softly.

“I should’ve known.”

The man’s lips writhed back over his teeth in a sneer. In the same low tone he said, “The Cerberus crew. We did know.”

Chapter 2

The millennialist struggled, trying to align the bore of the noise suppressor with Kane’s head.

Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater slapped into his palm, the barrel smacking the side of the man’s head as it popped from the holster. He cried out in pain and fear, squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation of a bullet plowing a path through hair, flesh, bone and brain.

Kane didn’t depress the trigger stud or even increase the pressure of the knife blade. Calmly he said, “You’re leaking a lot of blood, pal. If you want to keep enough of it in you to stay alive, I’m your only option.”

The millennialist’s lips twisted in pain and frustration. His skin was pinked by the sun, and his wispy blond hair was cut very short. He resembled most of the other consortium grunts Kane had met over the past few years. He looked to be in his early thirties.

“All right,” he said hoarsely. “All right.”

He opened his hand and the Calico dropped to the ground.

Picking up the man’s pistol, Kane took the knife away from the man’s throat. “What’s your name?”

“What difference does it make?”

Kane shrugged. “None. I just thought it was the polite thing to ask of a man I’ve probably crippled.”

Wincing, the man reached for the scarlet-seeping slash at the back of his boot. “Call me Mr. Gray.”

Kane smiled slightly, recalling the pair of color-coded millennialists he had met in Europe. “You can call me—”

“Kane,” Mr. Gray broke in harshly. “I’ve seen pix of you. Your file is black tagged.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you’re a high-priority target. Big bonus pay for any of us who nails you.”

He glanced sourly at the Calico in Kane’s hand. “Guess I got too eager. But I could swear I got you.”

“You did, just not as good as I got you.” Kane eyed the man’s injured foot. He popped the magazine out of the Calico and tossed the weapon over his shoulder. It clattered loudly against rock. “Let me see what I can do about getting that boot off.”

Gray looked longingly toward the Calico. “They’ve been making us pay for every gun we lose.”

“Yeah, the consortium has a reputation for squeezing every penny until it screams.” Kane applied the edge of the knife to Gray’s bootlaces, and after a quick sawing motion they parted easily.

“We’re thrifty,” Mr. Gray said defensively.

“There’s a difference.”

Kane didn’t reply as he carefully tugged off the man’s boot. Blood acted as lubricant. Although the pain must have been excruciating, Gray didn’t cry out, although he sank his teeth into his lower lip.

The Millennial Consortium was, on the surface, a group of organized traders who dedicated their lives to recovering predark artifacts from the ruins of cities. In the Outlands, such scavenging was actually the oldest profession.

After the world burned in atomic flame, enough debris settled into the lower atmosphere to very nearly create another ice age. The remnants of humankind had waited in underground shelters until the Earth became a little warmer before they ventured forth again. Most of them became scavengers mainly because they had no choice.

Looting the abandoned ruins of predark cities was less a vocation than it was an Outland tradition. Entire generations of families had made careers of ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe. The locations of those hidden, man-made caverns filled with hardware, fuel and weapons had become legend to the descendants of the nukecaust survivors.

Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally a hitherto untouched one would be located. As the Stockpiles became fewer, so did the independent salvaging and trading organizations. Various trader groups had combined resources for the past several years, forming consortiums and absorbing the independent operators.

The consortiums employed and fed people in the Outlands and gave them a sense of security that had once been the sole province of the barons. There were some critics who compared the trader consortiums to the barons and talked of them with just as much ill will.

Since first hearing of the Millennial Consortium a few years earlier, the Cerberus warriors had learned firsthand that the organization was deeply involved in activities beyond seeking out stockpiles, salvaging and trading. The Millennial Consortium’s ultimate goal was to rebuild America along the tenets of a technocracy, with a board of scientists and scholars governing the country and directing the resources to where they saw the greatest need.

Although the consortium’s goals seemed utopian, the organization’s overall policy was pragmatic beyond the limit of cold-bloodedness. Their influence was widespread, but they were completely ruthless when it came to the furtherance of their agenda, which was essentially the totalitarianism of a techno-tyranny.

Nor were their movements restricted to the continental United States. Not too long before, Cerberus had thwarted a consortium operation in Slovakia.

Kane examined the knife wound. His blade hadn’t completely severed Gray’s Achilles tendon. Even so, Kane doubted the man would ever be able to walk without a limp again.

From a pouch pocket of his pants, Kane took out a long bandanna and folded it, then expertly knotted it around the man’s wound to staunch the flow of blood.

Conversationally he said, “Once I hook back up with my team, I’ll have access to a medical kit and get you some proper bandages and even a painkiller.”

Gray responded only with a muffled groan.

In the same studiedly casual tone of voice, Kane continued, “You don’t seem surprised to hear about my team…. or even what I’m doing out here.”

Gray’s sweat-pebbled face tightened. “We expected you.”

“And why is that?”

The millennialist sighed and said almost regretfully, “We found your spy.”

Kane laid a hand on Gray’s injured ankle. In a level voice he asked, “What spy?”

“He said his name was Philboyd, that he was a scientist and that we should back off.”

Kane tightened his fingers around Gray’s ankle. “Where is he?”

“He’s not dead,” Gray replied quickly. “I swear to you. We didn’t kill him.”

“I asked where he was.”

Gray winced. “I can show you.”

“I’m sure you can.” Kane released the man’s ankle and stood up. “And you’ll show us a lot more besides.”

He gazed beyond Gray. “You hear any of that?”

Mr. Gray’s face registered momentary confusion, then he turned to see Cerberus Away Team Alpha stepping through a break in the wall.

THE SIX PEOPLE WERE ATTIRED in tricolor desert-camouflage BDUs and thick-soled, tan jump boots. All of them carried abbreviated Copperhead subguns attached to combat webbing over their field jackets. Under two feet long, with a 35 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing one-handed use.

Optical image intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts. Four members of Team Alpha also carried XM-29 assault rifles.

Grant strode up to Gray and stared down at him, his eyes shadowed by heavy, overhanging brows. He towered six feet five inches tall in his thick-soled jump boots, and his shoulders spread out on either side of a thickly tendoned neck like massive planks, straining at the seams of his field jacket.

Although he looked too huge and thick-hewn to have many abilities beyond brute strength, Grant was an exceptionally intelligent and talented man. Behind the fierce, deep-set eyes, the down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, granite jaw and broken nose lay a mind rich with tactics, strategies and painful experience. Like Kane, he had lived a great deal of his life surrounded by violence. He had been shot, stabbed, battered, beaten, burned, buried and once very nearly suffocated on the surface of the Moon.

Kane nodded to Gray. “Gray, this is Grant. Grant, this is Gray.”

“I know who he is,” Gray snapped. “The consortium is very thorough when it comes to identifying its enemies.”

Grant regarded him with no particular emotion on his face. In his lionlike growl he intoned, “All of you millennialists look like you were mass-produced. Same build, same haircuts.”

“And you usually say the same things when we meet any millennialists,” said a well-modulated female voice, purring with an undercurrent of humor.

“I almost forgot.” Grant nodded to Gray and said almost apologetically, “I hate you guys.”

Brigid Baptiste stepped between Grant and Kane, gazing down at Gray with bright emerald eyes. She was a tall woman with a fair complexion. Her mane of red-gold hair fell down her back in a long sunset-colored braid to the base of her spine. Like the other members of CAT Alpha, she wore desert camouflage. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist.

Kneeling down beside Gray, she lifted the lid of a square medical kit. “I think we can dress your injury a bit more properly.”

Gray gave her a beseeching look of gratitude. “Something for the pain, too, please. I’m really hurting.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Brigid replied sympathetically. She busied herself with the contents of the kit, then paused. “Of course, you’ll have to give me something in return.”

The expression of gratitude on Gray’s face turned to resentment. “Like what?”

“What do you think, dipshit?” Edward barked. The ex-Mag from Samariumville marched forward and prodded Gray roughly in the ribs with a boot.

“Information.”

Edwards, whose head was shaved, wasn’t as tall as Grant, but he was almost as broad, with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. He usually served as the commander of CAT Alpha in the absence of Kane and Grant.

“I don’t know anything,” Gray retorted. “I’m just a grunt.”

“That’s the pat response we expected,” Grant rumbled. “I’m sure you can guess our response.”

He positioned his right boot over Gray’s bandaged ankle and, balancing on his heel, slowly began exerting downward pressure.

Gray swallowed hard. “Okay, okay.”

Grant lifted his foot, but kept the thickly treaded sole hovering over the millennialist’s ankle. “Okay what?”

“If you’re here at all, you probably know as much as I do about the operation.”

Kane repressed the urge to exchange meaningful glances with Brigid and Grant. In truth, Cerberus knew very little. The information about sudden and suspicious activity on the outskirts of the little settlement near Los Alamos had reached them by the most inefficient of means—by word of mouth.

The information had been conveyed along a chain of Roamer bands until it finally reached the ears of Sky Dog in Montana. He in turn had brought it to the Cerberus redoubt, cloistered atop a mountain peak in the Bitterroot Range.

“Tell us what you know, anyway,” Brigid said smoothly.

Gray gestured vaguely in the direction of the sand dunes and mesas. “You’re familiar with the mandate of the consortium, right?”

Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, polish it up and try to figure out a way to use it to enslave your fellow human beings.”

Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead. It’s not true, but keep on believing it if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Thanks,” Grant retorted. “I will.”

“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently.

“Like for instance, why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”

Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”

“Whose attention?”

Gray shifted uncomfortably, fingering the bandage around his ankle.

“Whose attention?” Kane asked again, a steel edge in his voice.

Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost-walkers.”

Chapter 3

“What the hell does that mean?” Kane demanded.

Mr. Gray swallowed the pentazocine tablet handed to him by Brigid before answering, “I don’t really know much. Just what I was told.”

“Which was?” Grant challenged.

“We’ve had reports from the locals that when anybody starts digging around Phantom Mesa, ghosts show up.”

“Ghosts?” echoed Brigid, casting glance over her shoulder at the rock formations. “Which one is Phantom Mesa?”

“Third from the left…your left. The reports say the ghosts walk around like they’re guarding the place. Supposedly they even kill people who defy their orders to leave.”

“Folklore,” Brigid stated matter-of-factly. “The whole history of the Southwest is a patchwork of legends and superstitions.”

Mr. Gray flashed her a fleeting, appreciative smile. “That’s what our section chief thought, too. But I figure it’s called Phantom Mesa for a reason, right?”

The man’s smile faded. “We’ve seen some strange-ass shit, though…enough so we take precautions. The locals claim the ghosts don’t show up unless you make a lot of noise, so we use silencers on our guns.”

“Speaking of them, where are the locals?” Grant asked.

Gray gestured out toward the sand dunes. “We gave them jobs, put them to work with our excavation crew.”

“Right,” Kane drawled. “I remember the employment opportunities offered by the Millennial Consortium. Another name for it is forced servitude. Just what are they excavating out here?”

Gray shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure about anything specifically. But this whole part of New Mexico was a testing site for all sorts of predark research—weapons, aircraft, even genetics.”

“We know,” Brigid said grimly, her face not betraying the involuntary surge of revulsion as she recalled the bioengineering facility known as Nightmare Alley hidden deep beneath the Archuleta Mesa. Several years ago, she had participated in its complete destruction.

“The consortium found a facility in almost pristine condition,” Mr. Gray declared.

“A COG redoubt?” Grant asked skeptically. “Like the one you millennialists occupied in Wyoming?”

The predark Continuity of Government program was a long-range construction project undertaken by the U.S. government as the ultimate insurance policy should Armageddon ever arrive. Hundreds of subterranean command posts were built in various regions of the country, quite a number of them inside national parks. Their size and complexity ranged from little more than storage units to immense, self-sustaining complexes.

The hidden underground Totality Concept redoubts were linked by the Cerberus mat-trans network to the COG installations.

The Totality Concept was the umbrella designation for American military supersecret research into many different arcane and eldritch sciences, from hyperdimensional matter transfer to temporal dilation to a new form of genetics. The official designations of both the COG facilities and the Totality Concept redoubts had been based on the old phonetic alphabet code used in military radio communications.

In the twentieth century, the purposes of the redoubts were classified at the highest secret level. The mania for secrecy was justified since the framers of the Totality Concept feared mass uprisings among the populace if the true nature of the experiments was ever released to the public.

Before the nukecaust, only a handful of people knew the redoubts even existed. That knowledge had been lost after the global mega cull. When it was rediscovered a century later, it was jealously and ruthlessly guarded. A couple of years earlier in Wyoming, the Millennial Consortium had discovered a COG-related storage depot.

Mr. Gray considered Grant’s questions for a few seconds, then shook his head. “Don’t think so. It’s aboveground, not like most of the redoubts. It’s more like a station of some sort, set in a little valley between Phantom Mesa and another one. Very well hidden, unless you know where to look.”

“If that’s the case,” Kane said, “how’d you know where to look?”

Gray shrugged. “Our section chief knew where to look, not us grunts.”

“Who’s that again?”

“We just call her Boss Bitch…not to her face, though.”

Kane’s eyes narrowed, recalling the last time they had questioned a couple of millennialists. They had referred to a female section chief, too.

“How did she know?” Brigid asked.

“She took over from another chief…Mr. Breech. He laid the groundwork.”

“And where is he now?” Grant inquired.

Gray hesitated before saying in a low tone, “A lot of us would like to know that.”

Edwards edged closer. “What about Philboyd?”

Mr. Gray blinked up at him curiously. “What about him?”

Edwards bared his teeth in a silent snarl. “Where the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know. He was taken away to be questioned. But he was alive.” Gray coughed and asked, “Could I have a drink? That pill is stuck in my throat.”

Kane nodded to Edwards. “Give him your canteen.”

The big ex-Mag scowled, but he didn’t object. Kane glanced meaningfully toward Brigid and Grant and jerked his head. The three people walked away, out of earshot of the consortium man.

Kane asked softly. “Do we believe him?”

Brigid sighed, running a hand through her hair. “I don’t see why not. If the consortium is out here, something big has attracted their attention.”

“I don’t mean that,” Kane retorted impatiently.

“He could be giving us wrong directions.”

Grant narrowed his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. “Even so, we’ve got to check out his story, no matter what.”

Brigid smiled wryly. “Unfortunately.”

Kane worked his shoulder up and down, wincing in pain. “Dammit.”

Brigid eyed him questioningly. “What?”

“That son of a bitch shot me. Didn’t get penetration, but it hurts like hell.”

“Let’s make sure,” Brigid suggested.

Kane shucked out of his field jacket and opened a magnetic seal in the upper half of his bodysuit, peeling it down over his right shoulder. His upper torso still burned where the bullet had punched him.

A livid red-and-purple bruise spread in a star-shaped pattern around the impact point.

Brigid probed with gentle fingers at the injury. “I think you’ll be all right, but your arm will be probably be very stiff in a couple of hours. When we get back to Cerberus, have DeFore look at it.”

Kane resealed the seam, setting his teeth against a groan of pain. Brigid and Grant wore identical midnight-colored garments under their BDUs. Although the material of the formfitting coveralls resembled black doeskin and didn’t seem as if it would offer protection from flea bites, the suits were impervious to most wavelengths of radiation.

Upon finding the one-piece garments in the Operation Chronos facility on Thunder Isle several years earlier, Kane had christened them shadow suits. Later they learned that a manufacturing technique known in predark days as electrospin lacing had electrically charged polymer particles to form a single-crystal metallic microfiber with a dense molecular structure.

Kane maintained the shadow suits were superior to the polycarbonate Magistrate armor chiefly for their internal subsystems. Also, they were almost impossible to tear or pierce with a knife, but a heavy-caliber bullet could penetrate them. And unlike the Mag body armor, the shadow suit wouldn’t redistribute the kinetic shock.

Turning, Kane called to Edwards. The man strode toward him swiftly. “Sir?”

“Me, Baptiste and Grant will scout out ahead.”

An uneasy expression settled over Edwards’s face. “With our comm signals being jammed, you could walk into a trap and we’d be none the wiser.”

“The jamming umbrella works both ways,” Grant pointed out. “Gray couldn’t have transmitted a warning, so the consortium is just as much in the dark about us as we are about them.”

“Unless Brewster talked,” Edwards said.

Brigid’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Brewster is accident prone and he’s pretty bad mannered even by ex-Mag standards, but he wouldn’t betray us.”

Edwards nodded contritely. “No, ma’am, I guess he wouldn’t.”

Kane said, “We’ll only go a little way…just to get the lay of the land. Worst-case scenario is that we run into trouble and fire off a couple of shots to let you know.”

Edwards didn’t seem comforted. “Yes, sir.”

Kane, Grant and Brigid moved away from the perimeter of the settlement and followed a scattering of footprints up along the face of a dune. The wind made the sand hiss around their feet.

“I don’t know if firing off some signal shots is a good idea,” Brigid commented. “Remember what Gray said about noise attracting ghosts.”

Grant snorted in derision but said nothing.

The sand bogged around their ankles as they climbed. When they reached the crest of the dune, Kane studied the massive thrust of dark rock Gray called Phantom Mesa. It stood like a giant sentinel of the desert.

Brigid tested her Commtact and grimaced in frustration when she heard only static. Quietly but with a hint of reproach underscoring her tone, she said to Kane, “You never should have let Brewster go out alone.”

“I didn’t ‘let’ him,” Kane answered. “And you know it. He waited until my back was turned and took off with the power analyzer. He thought he could trace down the origin of the jamming.”

Brigid nodded, her emerald eyes clouded by worry. “Brewster is far too headstrong for a scientist.”

“I don’t know about that…but he’s sure as hell clumsy.”

Grant suddenly halted, indicating with a hand wave for his partners to do the same. He leaned forward, head cocked to the right, his expression intent. “Hear something,” he whispered.

Kane strained his hearing, but only the sigh of the breeze touched his ears. Then he heard a faint groan, seasoned with garbled words. Through narrowed eyes, he scanned the ridge of the dune thirty feet ahead but saw nothing. At the very edge of audibility he heard panting, hard and labored.

Then a figure suddenly lurched over the top of the dune and fell awkwardly, his body digging a trench through the sand. Long legs thrashed. The shape rolled to the bottom and lay there, struggling feebly.

The Cerberus warriors scrambled down the dune and surrounded the figure, whose wrists were bound behind his back. Terrified and pain-filled gasps burst from split and bloody lips.

Kane clutched the man by the shoulders and said, “Take it easy. You’re safe now.”

Kneeling, Kane carefully eased the limp body over. He saw the man’s face in the fading light and winced. It was Brewster Philboyd.

Chapter 4

Philboyd’s face was contorted with feral terror, but when he recognized Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant, his tense muscles relaxed in relief. In a slurred voice, he said, “About time.”

In his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a little over six feet tall, long limbed and lanky. Blond-white hair was swept back from a receding hairline. Normally he wore black-rimmed eyeglasses. Like CAT Alpha, he wore desert-camouflage BDUs.

Brigid pulled him up and held him in a sitting position while Grant cut through the ropes binding his wrists. Philboyd’s face was bruised, his left eye all but swollen shut. Dry blood caked the area around his nose and mouth. Though unsightly, his injuries were superficial.

“Are you all right?” Brigid asked.

“They just slapped me around some,” Philboyd answered, striving for a tone of indifference.

“Who is ‘they’?” Kane inquired, offering Philboyd his canteen.

“Four men jumped me about three-quarters of a mile from here. They tied me up.”

Philboyd paused to take a sip of water, rinse out his mouth and then spit. “They asked me some questions and all I told them was my name. I thought I heard a woman’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure. After that, they started asking me about Cerberus, how many of us were out here and if you three specifically were in the vicinity.”

“How’d they know about us?” Brigid asked, dismayed.

Philboyd took another drink of water before replying, “Beats the hell out of me.”

Grant uttered a weary sigh but said nothing. Both Kane and Brigid could guess his thoughts. Brewster Philboyd was one of many expatriates from the Manitius Moonbase who had chosen to forge new lives for themselves with the Cerberus warriors.

Although the majority of the former lunar colonists were academics, they had proved their inherent courage and resourcefulness and wanted to get out into the world and make a difference in the struggle to reclaim the planet of their birth.

Nearly twenty of them were permanently stationed on Thunder Isle in the Cific, working to refurbish the sprawling complex that had housed Operation Chronos two centuries before and make it a viable alternative to the Cerberus redoubt.

The other Manitius expatriates remained in the redoubt concealed within a Montana mountain peak as part of the Cerberus resistance movement. For three years, Kane, Brigid and Grant had struggled to dismantle the machine of baronial tyranny in America. Victory over the nine barons, if not precisely within their grasp, did not seem a completely unreachable goal—but then unexpectedly, nearly two years before, the entire dynamic of the struggle against the nine barons changed.

The Cerberus warriors learned that the fragile hybrid barons, despite being close to a century old, were only in a larval stage of their development. Overnight the barons changed. When that happened, the war against the baronies themselves ended, but a new one, far greater in scope, began.

The baronies had not fallen in the conventional sense through attrition, war or organized internal revolts. The barons had simply walked away from their villes, their territories and their subjects. When they reached the final stage in their development, they saw no need for the trappings of semidivinity, nor were they content to rule such minor kingdoms. When they evolved into their true forms, incarnations of the ancient Annunaki overlords, their avaricious scope expanded to encompass the entire world and every thinking creature on it.

Even two-plus years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a daily basis.

A number of former Magistrates, weary of fighting for one transitory ruling faction or another that tried to fill the power vacuum in the villes, responded to the outreach efforts of Cerberus.

Once the Magistrates joined Cerberus, Kane and Grant had seen to the formation of Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta.

“Do you have any idea of what the Millennial Consortium is looking for out here?” Brigid asked.

Brewster Philboyd waved to the desert at large. “I think we’ll have to find our own answers.”

“Nothing new about that,” Kane said sarcastically. “How did you escape?”

“To be honest, I don’t really know. About half an hour ago, I realized I was alone. Everybody had just left me.”

He paused, high forehead furrowed in thought. “I sort of got the impression that the consortium had a bigger problem to deal with than just me.”

“Something to do with ghosts?” Brigid ventured.

Philboyd swung his head toward her, his one good eye widening in surprise. “You know, I thought I heard one of the millennialists say something about ghosts, but I thought I misheard him. Figured he was talking about something else.”

“Do you at least know if the consortium has found a base out here?” Grant demanded impatiently.

“Logically, I’d have to say yes,” Philboyd retorted. “But I haven’t seen it. But the energy emissions were strongest in the direction of that big mesa over there.”

“How are they getting to and from the place?” Brigid inquired.

Philboyd opened his mouth to answer, then his shoulders stiffened. Grant looked at him quizzically, then tilted his head back to scan the darkening sky. “Everybody down.”

They huddled into the shadow cast by the dune. In the distance, they heard the thumping beat of helicopter rotors. Craning his neck, Kane glimpsed a big transport chopper angling in from the south. Red-and-yellow navigation lights glowed along its undercarriage.

“An MH-6 transport…not a common piece of ordnance nowadays,” Grant murmured.

He spoke very truly. After the atmospheric havoc wreaked by the nukecaust, air travel of any sort had been very slow to make a comeback.

The machine did not fly over them, but instead inscribed a half circle around Phantom Mesa and sank from view. The sound of its vanes faded away.

Kane straightened up, brushing sand from his clothes. “Brewster, do you think you can make it back to the settlement on your own?”

Philboyd frowned and slowly climbed to his feet, massaging his wrists. “I think so.”

“Good,” Grant said. “Tell Edwards to bring the team and follow our tracks. We’ll head out toward the mesa.”

“What about me?” Philboyd inquired.

“You’ll stay behind and guard our prisoner.”

“Prisoner?”

“Yeah, a guy named Gray,” Kane replied. “He’s hurt pretty badly, so he won’t give you any trouble. Doesn’t look like you can handle much more.”

Wincing, Philboyd touched his bruised face. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to go with you.”

“It’s not the same to me,” Kane declared harshly.

“You took off against my express orders to stay put. You got jumped and beat to hell and now you’re no good to us.”

Resentfully, Philboyd snapped, “Yeah, but the energy readings I picked up are localized in the area of that mesa. That’s where the jamming umbrella is transmitting the white noise.”

“We figured that out without being captured and having the crap kicked out of us,” Grant retorted unsympathetically.

Kane pointed in the direction of the village. “Do as I say for once. Go back and stay put.”

Philboyd looked to be on the verge of arguing, but then his shoulders slumped in resignation. Without another word or a backward glance, he began trudging up the face of the sand dune.

After he topped the rise, Brigid turned to Kane, her eyes glittering with anger. “There was no need to be so hard on him. He only wanted to pull his own weight.”

“Brewster is an academic,” Kane shot back coldly. “And every time he goes out into the field, something like this happens to him. If we weren’t around to pull his ass out of the various fires he falls into, he would have been dead years ago.”

“But this time,” Grant interjected, “he gave us away to the millennialists.”

Brigid pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Not intentionally. Somebody recognized him. Whoever it was would have recognized us, too. It was just Brewster’s bad luck to be spotted first.”

“Yeah,” Grant grunted, “and either they didn’t think Brewster was worth wasting a bullet on or they wanted to save all they had to settle a larger problem.”

“Like what?” Brigid challenged.

Kane started forward. “Let’s go see, why don’t we?”

The three people marched swiftly toward the immense pinnacle of rock, noting the rubble piled high around its base. Brigid estimated it as nearly three hundred feet in height. As sunset progressed, the deep fissures scoring the surface of the gigantic monolith became fathomless black shadows. Alert for sentries or motion detectors, the Cerberus warriors didn’t speak. The only sound other than the scrape of their feet against sand was the thin piping of the wind around the rocks.

Brigid Baptiste’s steady gait suddenly faltered, then she trotted ahead. An unusual shape humped up from the ground. A small wave of sand had all but buried it, but in the dim light metal glinted. She picked up the rectangular power analyzer, a device designed to measure, record and analyze energy emissions, quality and harmonics.

“At least we don’t have to charge this back to Brewster,” she commented wryly.

She swept the extended sensor stem back and forth in short left-to-right arcs, then pointed it toward the mesa. The device’s LCD glowed steadily and the readout indicated the energy signature was very strong.

“Whatever it is,” Grant murmured, “we’re almost on top of it.”

The Cerberus warriors started walking again, scaling a shale-littered slope that led to a flat summit. They dropped to their hands and knees, then belly-crawled to the top. They stared for a long time in the fading light.

They saw a cuplike crater nestled at the base of Phantom Mesa, bracketed by broken edges of butte rock on the far side. The depression covered several acres and was surrounded by the remains of a chain-link fence. The floor of the crater was board flat. A road led toward a dark defile at the foot of the mesa. It was blocked by a metal gate.

Part of the open field was sheltered by a rooflike overhang of rock, jutting out from the side of the mesa. Metal gleamed under the roof, and a half dome of translucent Plexiglas reflected the dimming sunlight. The transport helicopter was parked near it, the rotors spinning.

Kane focused his attention on a large steel plate at the bottom of the shallow crater. Several people clad in dun-colored coveralls stood around it, as if they were waiting for something to happen. On the far side of the crater, men bustled about with a military precision.

Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste put her mouth close to Kane’s ear and breathed, “Hear something—”

Brigid Baptiste’s warning whisper came a split second before Kane heard the grate of boot soles against rock. Kane turned his head slightly as a tall shadow stretched up to the lip of rock. He carried a sleek black Calico M-750 subgun, outfitted with a long noise suppressor.

Chapter 5

Kane remained flat on the ledge of rock as the man in the dun-colored coverall reached the summit. He paused and sneezed.

Swearing beneath his breath, the man juggled the Calico as he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his garment. Kane rose silently and slammed his Sin Eater-weighted forearm against the back of the man’s head.

The sentry’s breath exploded from his lips and he staggered, half-turning to topple off the rim. Kane caught him by one arm and yanked him forward. The Calico clattered on the rock and Brigid snatched it up. The man fell heavily on his face, only a few inches away from Grant.

The Cerberus warriors waited quietly for a handful of seconds, watching and listening for a general alarm to be raised. Men down in the crater shouted to one another, and the sound of the chopper’s vanes increased in volume. The helicopter rose, the rotor blades whipping eddies of dust all over the crater. Swiveling, the aircraft’s nose pointed eastward, banked to port, then arrowed away.

“I wonder who—or what—is aboard the chopper,” Grant muttered. “They seemed to be in a hurry.”

Brigid didn’t answer. Moving swiftly, she removed a set of nylon cuffs from a pants pocket and slipped them over the unconscious man’s hands, snugging his wrists tightly together. Grant fashioned a serviceable gag from a bandanna and knotted the ends at the back of the man’s neck.

Kane gazed down at the activity in the depression, noting the swarthy complexions among the people standing around the gleaming metal plate. “It looks like they’ve got the locals busy.”

Grant rose to a knee, his eyes narrowed. “Busy doing what?”

“I get the feeling they’re packing up and moving out.”

Brigid checked the Calico. “Should we stroll down and ask what they’re up to or wait for the rest of the team? I’d like to avoid a firefight, if at all possible.”

“Yeah, so would I,” Kane replied.

Grant looked up at the sky. “No wonder our satellites couldn’t locate this place…shielded by the rock this way, we could fly over it at a couple of hundred feet and never know the place was here.”

Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two of them.

The Vela-class reconnaissance satellite carried narrow-band multispectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system.

The other satellite to which the Cerberus redoubt was uplinked was a Comsat, which for many months was used primarily to track Cerberus personnel when they were out in the field. Everyone in the installation had been injected with a subcutaneous transponder that transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponder was a nonharmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis.

The telemetric signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, and the Cerberus computer systems recorded every byte of data.

Suddenly the air filled a painfully loud high-pitched whine, like a gigantic band saw. “Down!” Kane exclaimed, falling flat to the lip of rock.

The whining grew louder just as what was left of the sun’s glow vanished below the horizon. But the crater was splashed by a multicolored shimmer. Down below, the laborers pulled aside the metal plate in the ground and then ran toward the gate at the base of the mesa. From a round aperture in the crater floor, a slender metal column rose straight up, pointing like a steel finger toward the sky.

“What the hell—?” Grant began.

The whining noise climbed to an eardrum-piercing crescendo. The top of the metal finger sprouted gleaming armatures, webworks of steel mesh unfolding and stretching outward. They formed shallow, disk-shaped dishes. The column continued to rise until it towered fifty feet above the crater floor.

Kane lifted his head, seeing activity by the gate at the base of the looming mesa. Movement shifted at the corner of his eye and he saw a man wearing the standard dun-drab coverall climb up to the ledge. A Calico was slung over his left shoulder and he stared downward at the crater.

As soon as Kane saw him, the millennialist turned his head and spotted Kane. Their eyes locked for what seemed like a long time. The sentry’s mouth worked as he yelled something, but his voice was completely smothered by the electronic whine from below. He struggled to bring his Calico to bear, but the long sound suppressor made swift movement impossible.

Kane launched himself from the ground as the guard unslung his weapon. He slashed the noise suppressor at Kane’s head, missed and hit his right shoulder. A fireball of pain exploded in Kane’s shoulder socket and then he knocked the man down. They rolled and bumped down the slope, hitting big rocks with bone-jarring impacts.

They thrashed together down to the base of the slope, the man’s breath hissing in his ear. Kane tried to hit him, but his right arm was numb, barely responsive. He grabbed the silencer of the Calico with his left hand, and the sentry twisted over with a steel-spring convulsion of his body. He threw his weight against the subgun, pressing the barrel across Kane’s neck, pinning him against the ground.

Kane tried to break free by arching his back and bucking upward, but the sentry was heavy and surprisingly powerful. His teeth bared in a grin of triumph as he put more pressure on the metal across Kane’s throat.

Kane glimpsed a shifting movement and even over the screeching whine from the crater, he heard a solid thump of metal colliding with bone. The millennialist cried out, went limp and fell half on top of him. Brigid stood over the man, feet spread, her appropriated subgun reversed in her hands. She had used to the blunt stock to club the man into unconsciousness.

Breathing hard, Kane elbowed aside the unconscious man. He staggered to his feet, rubbing his throat. “Thanks, Baptiste.”

From a pocket he produced his own set of nylon cuffs and bound the man’s wrists. While he worked, Brigid asked, “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”

“Because you said you didn’t want to start a firefight.” He picked up the millennialist’s Calico.

“Now we have a matched set.”

As they began climbing up the crater wall again, the mechanical whine ended. When they reached the top of the slope and rejoined Grant, they saw that the slender metal tower was slowly rotating, the disks made of mesh angling downward.

Grant glanced over his shoulder at them. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Kane said hoarsely. “Thanks for all your help.”

Grant shrugged. “I knew you could take him—with Brigid’s help.”

They eyed the metal tower. Although the electronic whine had faded, miniature skeins of lightning played along the rims of the dishes.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Kane asked.

Brigid shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“My market for speculation is open.”

“I’d sell it if I had it. At first glance, I’d say it looks like a microwave pulse transmitter. But my gut tells me it’s something else entirely.”

Grant hoisted himself to a knee. “Let’s go take a closer look, since nobody is around.”

“There could be a good reason nobody is around,” Kane commented.

Brigid tried the Commtact frequencies again but heard only static. “There’s no calling for help if he get ourselves trapped.”

Grant snorted. “Since when do we call for help?”

Kane assumed the question was rhetorical. He rose and walked along the ridge until he found the path that the sentries had climbed. The Cerberus warriors descended into the crater, alert for other guards but they saw no one.

They strode across the crater, giving the steel column a wide berth. They heard a deep bass hum emanating from within the tower, a low throbbing that set up shivery vibrations within their eardrums.

The Cerberus warriors walked toward the metal gate and saw it hanging ajar, dim light spilling out from between the flat slats. The square-cut passageway beyond the door stretched away into gloom. Keeping close to the right-hand wall, they followed the curve of the tunnel until it ended at a circular well pit, with metal steps spiraling down.

“Why does it always have to be underground?” Brigid murmured with mock weariness.

Kane responded with a crooked half smile and took the first step, careful that the risers did not creak or squeak beneath his weight. The staircase corkscrewed down only a couple of yards before ending at a low-ceilinged foyer. Stenciled on the wall in red were the letters: Property OF DARPA, IEEE Approved. Must Have A-10 Clearance ID To Proceed.

Brigid’s eyes darted back and forth as she read the words. “Definitely a predark scientific testing facility.”

“What kind?” Grant asked, familiar with but annoyed by the fixation on acronyms.

She pointed to each letter, enunciating the words clearly, “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers gave this place its seal of approval, if that means anything.”

“It doesn’t,” Kane muttered, but he didn’t question her.

Although Brigid Baptiste was a trained historian, having spent over half of her thirty years as an archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division, there was far more to her storehouse of knowledge than simple training.

Almost everyone who worked in the ville divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid’s secret was more arcane than the commission of petty crimes or manipulating the baronial system of government for personal aggrandizement.

Her secret was her photographic, or eidetic, memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and detailed visual memories. When she was growing up, she feared she was a psi-mutie, but she later learned that the ability was relatively common among children and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare among adults, but Brigid was one of the exceptions.

Due to her memory, everything she read or saw or even heard was impressed indelibly in her memory. Since her exile, Brigid had taken full advantage of the redoubt’s vast database, and as an intellectual omnivore she grazed in all fields. Coupled with her memory, her profound knowledge of an extensive and eclectic number of topics made her something of an ambulatory encyclopedia. This trait often irritated Kane, but just as often it had tipped the scales between life and death, so he couldn’t in good conscience become too annoyed with her.

Kane started walking, cradling the appropriated Calico in his arms. “Let’s see what we’ve got here. Let’s explore a little.”

“What do you expect to find?” Grant demanded.

Kane shrugged. “How do I know? That’s why I suggested we explore.”

“Just about every time we explore one of these places, we end up having to run out of it as fast we can,” Grant muttered.

At a cross corridor, they passed a small cafeteria-type dining room, equipped with two upright refrigerators and a large coffeemaker, but no one was seated at the long tables. On the opposite side of the passageway lay an office suite, furnished with a dozen desks, computer stations and file cabinets.

“Where is everybody?” Grant asked. “We saw them come in here, and the place can only be so big.”

“Maybe there’s a back way out,” Brigid suggested.

The corridor turned to the left like an L. They passed a sign on the wall at the angle that read Los Alamos Shuttle. An arrow pointed ahead, in the direction they walked.

Kane glanced around uneasily. “Maybe that’s the back door they took.”

“Could be,” Brigid conceded. “But why?”

The hallway terminated in a door emblazoned with the warning No Unauthorized Admittance.

“That means us.” Grant tried the knob and to his surprise, it turned easily.

Carefully, he pushed the door open and entered a narrow passage illuminated by naked light bulbs in ceiling fixtures. The three people navigated through a labyrinth of pipes, fuse boxes and cooling systems, all the machinery that kept the installation alive and self-sufficient.

Grant, Kane and Brigid became aware of a low hum ahead of them. It was almost like the bass register of a piano, which continued to vibrate long after a key had been struck. Their neck muscles tensed and their diaphragms contracted at the same time they became aware of a dull pain in their temples.

The passageway opened directly into a large circular room, the curving walls lined by consoles. The control surfaces flashed and glowed with various icons and indicator lights. A stainless-steel shaft mounted in a drum-shaped socket rose from the floor and continued through the domed roof.

“Here’s where the tower is raised,” Kane commented. “Whatever the hell it really is.”

Three crystalline hoops surrounded the drum socket at the base of the shaft. The hoops turned slowly and emitted the deep drone. The sound seemed to tighten around their craniums, squeezing and compressing as if their heads were trapped in tightening vises.

Wincing, Kane said, “Let’s get out of here. My head is really hurting.”

“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “Like my skull is being pinched against my brain or something.”

“Just a second,” Brigid replied absently as she inspected the control boards.

She noted the similarity of symbols and letters glowing on various monitor screens. The circle-and-ovoid combination representing the Greek letter theta was repeated over and over. The center screen showed a column of numbers, the digits clocking backward.

Suddenly, realization washed over her like a flood of icy water. She whirled toward her friends. “We definitely should get out of here before the pinching sensation gets any worse.”

She moved swiftly toward the door. Grant and Kane fell into step behind her.

“What’s the problem, Baptiste?” Kane asked.

“I think what we’ve got here is a theta-pinch transmitter,” she said over a shoulder.

“A what?” Grant demanded, face drawn in a scowl.

“It’s a form of experimental fusion physics,” she said, speaking quickly, ducking under a low-hanging pipe. “By magnetically compressing electrically conducting filaments, it creates an electromagnetic field that implodes rather than expands. They occur naturally in electrical discharges such as lightning bolts.”

“What the hell is something like that for?” Kane asked.

“Research into the supergravity theory, from what I recall,” Brigid replied, breathing hard. “I think it’s set on a countdown to some sort of energy discharge. I’ll explain when we’re out of here.”

“Looking forward to it,” Grant said dourly.

They quickly retraced their steps, climbing back up the spiral staircase. As they ran toward the gate, Kane couldn’t completely suppress a sigh of relief when he saw it still hung open.

A towering figure suddenly appeared on the other side of the gate, and Kane’s sigh of relief turned into a curse. He snapped up the Calico, finger curling around the trigger.

Kane reflected grimly that they had been lucky so far—but now, typically, their luck had run out.

Chapter 6

Edwards frantically hurled his body to one side, shouting, “It’s me!”

Kane gusted out a profanity-seasoned breath, feeling angry and ashamed. He, Brigid and Grant left the tunnel, slamming open the door. The other members of CAT Alpha stood in the crater, gazing at the spark-shedding and crackling metal transmission tower.

“What’s going here?” Edwards asked. “Where the hell is everybody?”

“How’d you get here?” Grant asked.

“We followed your tracks.”

Kane’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t find a couple of consortium guys tied up?”

Edwards shook his head. “No, sir. Were we supposed to?”

Brigid eyed the dishes on either side of the metal tower apprehensively, noting the greenish aura shimmering around them. “I think we’ve been had. Let’s double-time it out of here.”

“We’re going to leave this place unsecured?” Edwards asked, gesturing with his rifle barrel to the tunnel entrance.

Brigid’s lips compressed. “I don’t think we have much choice. I think the consortium abandoned this place for a reason.”

“Like what?” Kane inquired. “Besides headaches.”

Edwards eyed him in surprise. “All of us have headaches…and I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach.”

“What’s causing this?” Grant asked. “Radiation?”

Glancing up at the indigo sky and the first emerging stars of the evening, Brigid answered bluntly, “I have no idea. But if they don’t want the place, we probably wouldn’t, either.”

Kane opened his mouth to voice a question, but the muffled boom of a subterranean explosion made him jump. He bit back a curse. A second later they heard another explosion, followed by a third. The ground trembled under their feet.

Several sharp cracks burst from the disks mounted atop the metal tower. They sounded like huge sticks breaking simultaneously. From the mouth of the passageway gushed a billow of flame and smoke. Acrid black fumes grabbed everyone by the throat and set them to coughing.

A tremendous explosion cannonaded up from the throat of the tunnel, and a brutal column of concussive force slammed into them like an invisible tsunami, buffeting them backward.

A series of hammering blasts thundered up. The entire crater floor shook and trembled. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and dirt, shaken loose from the mesa, sifted down. A fissure opened up around the mouth of the tunnel with a clash of rending rock and a distant shriek of rupturing metal.

Boulders toppled down from above, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The people moved away, staggering on the convulsing earth. They ran out in the center of the crater to avoid being crushed by rocks falling from the mesa.

The metal tower bent and with a prolonged creak, it sagged downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The crackling, popping pyrotechnic display around the metal mesh disks didn’t ebb.

When the ground tremors ceased, Edwards demanded angrily, “What the fuck is going on?”

Brigid shook her head, fanning the dust-laced air away from her face. “The station was set to self-destruct. God knows why.”

“We can tell you.” The voice, amplified by a loud-hailer, was high-pitched but male.

The crater floor lit up with blinding rods of brightness. The searchlight beams stabbed through the night and intersected with the bodies of Cerberus Away Team Alpha, pinned like butterflies to a board. Squinting, Kane shielded his eyes, bringing up his Calico.

“Don’t move,” the voice said. “It’s very important that you stay as motionless as possible.”

“Fuck them,” Edwards growled, finger crooking around the trigger of his rifle.

“If they meant to kill us,” Grant muttered to him,

“they’d have done it already, not threaten us.”

“I think we’re being warned,” Brigid said, “not threatened. They didn’t tell us to drop our weapons.”

Trapped in the dazzling exposure of the light, Kane figured the Millennial Consortium really didn’t care one way or the other if they were disarmed. They had other matters occupying them.

Beyond the blinding circle of the handheld spotlight, he could barely make out man-shaped shadows arrayed on the ridgeline. He asked, “Who are we talking to?”

“Shh!” came the reply. “Call me Mr. Blue, call me late for dinner, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you don’t move until we tell you to.”

“Why?” Brigid asked.

“Shh!”

“Don’t shush me,” Brigid snapped irritably. “Are you responsible for blowing up the installation?”

“Shh! Don’t make any noise. Be as quiet as you can and don’t move. Stay in the light if you value your lives!”

Mystified, but feeling sweat form on his hairline, Kane cut his gaze over to Brigid. “Is he crazy or what?” he whispered.

She shook her head slightly. “For the time being, we probably should do as he says—until we can get a better idea of what’s going on here.”

“Nothing is going on around here,” growled Higson, a CAT team member. “Except we’re being set up to be slaughtered.”

Kane considered Higson’s words for a thoughtful second, then the sparks dancing along the rims of the disks suddenly faded away. He found the phenomenon worrisome, not comforting.

At the same time, the glare of the spotlight dimmed. He sensed it hadn’t been done to spare their vision. Faintly, he heard a murmuring from the people on the ridgeline. Mr. Blue’s voice whispered frantically, “Shut up! Be quiet!”

Kane blinked, trying to clear his vision of the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming over his eyes. His flesh suddenly prickled with a pins-and-needle sensation, almost as if a multitude of ants crawled over his skin. He felt rather than heard a feathery fluttering against his eardrums. His stomach surged with nausea.

Edwards shuddered and muttered, “Something is going on here.”

The spotlight dimmed even more, becoming little more than a faint yellow halo.

“It’s like the power is being drained,” Brigid said wonderingly. “Localized ionization of the atmosphere, too.”

Higson shifted his feet nervously and said in a guttural whisper, “What the fuck is that?”

Kane followed the man’s gaze toward the smoke-occluded opening in the base of the mesa. Movement shifted within the roiling vapors, and a green-hued light flickered in the haze. A faint, cold breeze touched his face, ruffling his hair, and he heard a distant hiss. The green light whirled, bathing the entire crater in an emerald glow. Then, slowly, the light contorted into the outline of a human figure.

Kane gazed, transfixed, his mind a whirl of bewilderment. He felt his throat constrict, and his heart began pounding in a sudden terror. The green figure twisted, stretching outward, growing broader. It split into another shape of identical size and dimension.

“Too late!” Mr. Blue bleated from the ridgeline. His voice thickened with horror and he screamed,

“Run!”

Cerberus Away Team Alpha retreated from the ghostly, nebulous bodies, backing away toward the crater wall. The figures resembled cadavers glistening with a coating of green phosphorous. Their facial features were always in flux, sliding and re-forming, like smoke. Two more appeared, gliding over the ground toward them. Fingers like wisps of emerald smoke reached out at the end of skeletal arms, convulsing with grasping and clutching movements. The wraiths spread out in a horseshoe formation, clouds of fluorescent particles swarming around them.

Kane raised the appropriated Calico to his shoulder, sighted down its length and shouted, “Fire!”

He squeezed off a long rattling burst. Bright brass arced out of the smoking ejector port, tinkling down at his feet. Grant, Brigid and the other members of CAT Alpha triggered simultaneous full-auto fusillades.

The barrage ripped through the wraiths, punching holes, ripping them to shreds. The figures instantly re-formed, resolving into a dozen wavering, green ghostly shapes. Tiny pieces of green light floated over their heads, like a swarm of radioactive fireflies. The keening whines of ricochets reverberated and echoed all over the crater. The hailstorm of bullets struck bell-like chimes from the metal tower. The slugs bounced off with high-pitched whines.

Kane released his pressure on the Calico’s trigger and shouted, “Cease fire! Fall back!”

CAT Alpha sprinted up the slope to the ridge surrounding the crater, causing miniature avalanches under their feet. Kane, Higson and Grant remained at the base of the crater wall, eyes and gun barrels fixed on the cluster of green ghosts less than ten yards away.

Higson snatched a round V-60 minigrenade from his combat webbing, and ran at an oblique angle away from the rest of the team. He shouted, “Keep going!”

“Get your ass back here!” Grant bellowed.

Higson paid no attention to the command. Swiftly he unpinned the grenade and hurled it overhead into the center of the glowing green wraiths, then he flung himself flat, covering up, face buried the cradle of his arms. The V-60 exploded in a ballooning ball of flame. The concussion slapped Kane and Grant backward a few paces. Dust sifted down and they impatiently waved it a way.

Although they didn’t see the ghostly figures, they saw the little swarm of orbs surrounding Higson. Howling, he leaped to his feet and flailed at them with the frame of his rifle, without making solid impact.

The cloud settled over the man’s head and shoulders, spreading over his face. When he opened his mouth to scream, two of the orbs darted past his lips and his shriek turned into a gargling croak. Dropping his rifle, he ran in a blind panic across the crater, hands clapped over his eyes.

“Baptiste, get everybody back to the parallax point!” Kane snapped.

He didn’t wait to find out if she obeyed his order or had even heard it. He and Grant kicked themselves into sprints as they chased after the frantically fleeing Higson.

The man stumbled over an irregularity in the ground and fell heavily. He writhed, crying out, limbs thrashing in wild spasms.

By the time Grant and Kane reached him, the swarm of green orbs had lifted from the man’s body and circled high overhead. Higson lay sprawled on his back, saliva bubbling over swollen lips, his respiration shallow. A puff of gray-green vapor rose from his mouth.

Kane recoiled at the sight of his face—the blotched flesh leaking and suppurated as if suddenly exposed to a horrific blast of heat. Tiny blisters formed on his cheeks and burst with pops. The whites of his eyes showed only bloodshot streaks.

“He’s still alive?” Grant rasped.

Stooping over the body, Kane pressed two fingers against the base of Higson’s neck, timing the pulse. It beat fast and erratic. “Not for long.”

When Kane removed his fingers, a layer of Higson’s flesh peeled off. “It’s like he’s rotting from the inside out,” he said quietly.

Grant shook his head. “Not so much rotting as disintegrating.”

Even as he spoke, the left side of Higson’s face went slack, sagging from the bone. With the moist sound like a wet rag dragged over a rock, the flesh completely fell away, revealing red-filmed cheekbone. The man shuddered violently for a moment, then died.

As Grant and Kane watched in stunned, shocked silence, Higson’s body beneath his clothes collapsed in on itself, the flesh and bones dissolving into a foul-smelling green smoke. The cloud was shot through with tiny crackling flashes, like miniature versions of the pyrotechnics they had seen dancing on the tower’s disks.

Kane backed away, feeling bile rise up his throat. “Let’s get out of here.”

“And leave Higson?”

“There’s not much to take with us,” Kane retorted flatly.

He eyed the witch-fire glow of the green orbs still hovering overhead. He said quietly, “We need go before we end up like Higson.”

Grant’s teeth bared in a silent snarl. “We don’t know what was going on here!”

Kane nodded and backed away, keeping his gaze on the ghostly swarm. “Exactly. That’s why we need to get the hell out of here as fast as we can.”

Chapter 7

Grant and Kane scrambled down the rocky crater wall. The moon slowly rose ahead of them, casting a silver luminescence over the sand. The silence all around was ominous. They heard only the scuffling of their running feet as they sprinted in the direction of the village. As Edwards claimed, the bound and gagged millennialists were nowhere to be seen.

Kane resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder, looking for the swarm of green bees. He glimpsed them only once, whirling in the distance like jade-hued dust motes.

“I hate to say it,” Grant half gasped, half growled, “but we’ve been skunked by the consortium again. I don’t know what they were trying to pull, but they managed to do it.”

“You don’t really think they had anything to do with any of this, do you?” Kane panted.

The two men slowed their pace, noting the mess of footprints over a comber of sand. They stopped in order to catch their breath. Grant stared back toward Phantom Mesa. His face was beaded with sweat.

A thick plume of smoke coiled into the desert sky. Flames still erupted from some entrances to the complex, but the glowing orbs weren’t visible.

“I think they decided we’re not worth chasing after,” Grant commented. “Maybe the consortium called them off.”

“The Millennial Consortium isn’t behind those things,” Kane said flatly.

“What makes you so sure?”

“They wouldn’t have warned us about attracting their attention.”

Grant knuckled his chin thoughtfully. “Even so, I don’t think they were worried about our safety.”

Kane nodded in agreement. “Neither do I. But I have the distinct impression the millennialists bit off way more than they could chew.”

Grant gusted out a sigh, then stiffened. He hissed, “Shit!”

Bobbing like a multitude of tiny bubbles on the surface of a stream, a cloud of green orbs circled overhead. An icy hand clenched around the base of Kane’s spine. The orbs swirled in a clockwise direction, then back again. With each rotation, the glowing flecks sank lower and lower.

“What the hell are those things?” he demanded angrily. “Weapons? Tracking devices? Are they alive or what?”

Grant inhaled a deep breath, turned and started running again. “Let’s ask questions when we’re safe.”

They ran toward an area of rock formations, dust spurting from beneath their boots. They jumped over a tumble of stones, turning toward a narrow cleft, wide and tall enough for a man to enter. Kane risked a misstep by looking over his shoulder. The green-glowing swarm darted after them. He heard a strange hissing noise, like static over a dead comm circuit.

The two men sprinted toward the cleft and squeezed into the crack, sidling through the deep shadows. After a few feet, they were in absolute blackness. They kept moving forward, wincing at the clink and crunch of stones beneath their feet.

The sandstone walls of the cleft would provide some protection from the swarm, since pursuit in a straight line was impossible. Kane and Grant threaded their way through a labyrinth of cracks, slamming their knees and banging their elbows against outthrusts of rock.

They swore between clenched teeth, but kept running, stumbling and lurching from wall to wall. The farther they penetrated into the cleft, the narrower the walls became. A stitch stabbed along Kane’s left side, and the muscles of Grant’s legs felt as if they were caught in a vise. Both men’s vision became shot through with gray specks.

Even over the rasp and gasp of their own labored breathing, they heard the incessant hiss of their pursuers. It was like running on a conveyor belt and getting nowhere.

Then both men saw the wedge of relative brightness ahead of them and they struggled out of the cleft and into the cooling desert air. Looking behind them, they saw the green glowing swarm sliding around bends in the rock wall, like a stream of embers.

Panting, Grant snatched an M-33 fragmentation grenade from his combat webbing, slipping the spoon at the same time. “Enough of this shit.”

He threw the grenade underhanded into the cleft. He and Kane dropped flat behind a tumble of low rocks. The grenade rolled only a few feet before detonating with a brutal thunderclap. A hell-flower bloomed, petals of flame curving outward. A rain of shrapnel spewed from the end of every petal, rattling violently against the rock walls. Loose shale showered down from above and crashed from the sides of the cleft. The rolling echoes of the explosion faded, replaced by clicks and clatters of falling rock.

Cautiously, Kane and Grant rose to their knees, spitting out grit and particles of sand. They saw only a thick, roiling haze of dust and smoke. Quickly they got to their feet, backed away, neither man wanting to voice the hope that the swarm of ghostly pursuers had been crushed and buried.

Suddenly a hiss of static filled their heads and both men jumped in startled reaction. Then Brigid Baptiste’s voice filtered through their Commtacts. “Kane! Grant! Where are you?”

Glancing around, Kane saw the ridge of gravelly dunes that bracketed the settlement barely half a mile away. He said, “We’re close. Be there soon.”

“What was that explosion?”

“Our way of swatting bugs,” Grant replied dryly.

“When did the Commtacts start working again?”

“I don’t know,” Brigid replied. “The EM interference is still around, but it’s not as pronounced. Brewster is still picking up an energy signature on the sensor. There’s some sort of generalized power source around here, so I suggest you double-time back to us.”

Brigid closed the channel and Grant said grimly, “I don’t feel much like running anymore.”

Kane shrugged. “Me, neither. But you heard the lady.”

The two men sighed with weary exasperation and began jogging across the moonlight-splashed landscape. Both of them cast apprehensive glances over their shoulders, but saw no sign of anything small, glowing or green.

They reached the little settlement within ten minutes and found Brigid, Philboyd and CAT Alpha, tense, anxious and ready to move out. Two of the away team supported the man who called himself Mr. Gray between them. He looked pale and frightened. Brigid had already retrieved the interphaser’s cushioned and waterproof carrying case from its hiding place in one of the abandoned dwellings.

“I thought I told you to wait for us at the parallax point,” Kane said to her by way of a greeting.

Brigid lifted one shoulder in a dismissive shrug. “There wasn’t enough time to get there. Besides, I didn’t know that you weren’t going to get yourselves lost out there.”

Kane only smiled, not in the least offended by her mendacity, knowing it was her way of concealing her genuine concern and worry.

At the beginning of their relationship, it was very difficult for Kane and Brigid not to give offense to one another. Both people were gifted in their own way. Most of what was important to people in the early twenty-third century came easily to Kane—survival skills, prevailing in the face of adversity and cunning against enemies. But he could also be reckless, high-strung to the point of instability and given to fits of rage.

Brigid, on the other hand, was compulsively tidy and ordered, with a brilliant analytical mind. However, her clinical nature, the cool scientific detachment upon which she prided herself, sometimes blocked an understanding of the obvious human factor in any given situation. Accommodating their contrasting personalities, Kane and Brigid now worked very well as a team, playing off each other’s strengths rather than magnifying their individual weaknesses.

Philboyd swept the sensor wand of the energy analyzer in the direction of the mesa. Despite his swollen lips, he frowned. “There’s definitely a low-level pattern out there…it spikes, then flatlines, then spikes again.”

“It’s probably a good idea to get out of here during a flatline period,” Grant said uneasily.

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