Grailstone Gambit

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgment

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

Chapter 33

Epilogue

Acknowledgment

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

Prologue

Cornwall, the Penwith Peninsula

To the measured thunder of drums and the skirl of pipes, the warriors of the grail danced among the Merry Maidens.

The glow of the full Moon struck gray highlights on the stones that stood in a circle on the moor. The dark megaliths loomed like weathered sentinels, standing guard over the passing aeons. Centuries of erosion had carved deep fissures and furrows across their surfaces.

Many times in the dim past, the six-and seven-foot-tall stones had watched humans dance within their embrace, performing their ceremonies to bring rain or increase fertility. This night, the gathering was no common dance ritual.

The circle was full of excited people and more little groups straggled in across the moor. They were not dressed in the homespun linen usual for farmers or fisherfolk—the men wore leather and brass warrior’s harnesses, and the moonlight glittered from spearpoints and great broadswords. Peat and faggots had been laid in a shallow trench around the megaliths and they flamed with fish oil, so the ring leaped high with a border of flame.

The beat of the bodhrains, the Celtic drums, and the fierce screech of the pipes sped up the heartbeat and sent the blood coursing. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and home-brewed poteen.

As graceful as cats, the women danced to the wild music. Their skirts slit at the sides, and wearing silver ornaments on their pale limbs, they laughed as they circled the great stone slab in the center of the ring of standing stones. The slab crawled with symbols and glyphs, cup-shaped hollows surrounded by labyrinthine spirals. Radial lines stretched out in all directions.

The people knew the spiral patterns symbolized the maze of life and death, the departure from the womb and the return to it. The women clapped their hands and sang as they went through the wild, twisting convolutions of the dance that mimicked the designs cut into the stone.

A tall woman came forward, her carriage as erect and as straight as a tree. Her simple black robe clung to her supple figure. A scarlet sash girded her narrow waist. The fabric of the robe was so gauzy it concealed nothing, clinging to her breasts and buttocks and thighs like a layer of oil.

The woman’s long hair was as blue-black as a raven’s wing, intricately woven into round braids on either side of her head, with some strands spilling artlessly over her bosom. Fair skinned, her childlike face seemed all big eyes and full lips.

Her eyes were a black so deep, they were almost obsidian. Her hands were crossed over the hilt of a long, slender, golden sword. The point nearly dragged in the dirt. A man walked beside her. He wore a bronze helmet bearing the design of a goblet with a many-boughed tree growing out of it. The same image was worked into the boss of the round shield he carried on his left arm. In his right he gripped a six-foot-long lance.

He pushed the dancers aside, making a path for the tall woman. At the thick stone slab, she raised the sword and struck it three times with the edge. Bell-like chimes rose above the cacophony of music and song, shivering and vibrating through the air.

Abruptly the drummers ceased beating and the pipers lowered their instruments. Utter silence fell as if a gigantic jar had dropped over the stone circle. Everyone dropped to their knees, facing the slab. Nothing moved, only the wavering of shadows from the flames in the surrounding trench.

The silence lasted for nearly a minute. Then a blossom of light sprouted from the center of the stone slab. Threads of blue witchfire streaked along the grooves of the carvings, pulsing like the lifeblood through a circulatory system. In an instant, the entire inscribed surface of the stone blazed with a webwork of dancing light.

The kneeling crowd drew a single breath and then released it in one prolonged gasp of awe.

A bolt of energy erupted like a column of lightning. Instead of shooting straight up, it described a 360-degree parabolic fountain, emerging from and returning to the center of the stone, arcing back on itself in an ever-tightening spiral of energy.

The cascade of light spun like a diminishing cyclone, shedding sparks and thread-thin static discharges. As quickly as it appeared, the glowing light vanished, as if it had been sucked back into the stone. A tall figure stood there, leaning on a long wooden staff.

The kneeling assembly only stared, unmoving, as if transfixed by the light, eyes swimming with multicolored spots, shaken and stunned. The absolute silence was broken abruptly by a sharp crack as the figure rapped on the stone with the end of the staff.

“I greet you, my brothers, my sisters, my children—my warriors of the grail!”

The people leaped to their feet, roaring one name over and over: “Myrrdian! Myrrdian!”

The gaunt man standing inside the stone circle was old, his long, thin face a parchment of tiny furrows. The long hair that spilled from beneath the edges of a dark gray helmet was the color of aged ivory. The incurving jaw guards of the helmet framed the slash of his mouth. The forepart swept down his forehead like a widow’s peak made of silver. Right above the peak, a sphere of metal bulged outward like a blind third eye.

Despite his white hair and seamed face, Myrrdian’s eyes were a compelling, opalescent golden color. A faint interlocking pattern of scales ringed his brow ridges, extending over and meeting at the bridge of his nose.

He wore an ankle-length cloak of midnight-blue caught at the throat by a golden-jeweled torque. The illumination from the full Moon struck dancing highlights on the shiny metal strands that wove a pattern of arcane symbols throughout the fabric of the cloak. Beneath it he wore a scarlet tunic and a vest of light chain mail.

An unpolished yellow crystal topped Myrrdian’s gnarled staff, seeming to have grown out of a setting of fibrous roots.

Although he looked about seventy, he radiated the aura of a past age and time, but the cheering, the chanting of his name continued.

A smile creased the man’s thin lips. “For years I suffered in the dark places, in the land of Skatha, the kingdom of shadows. But while there, I found the lost secrets of the Tuatha de Danaan. I claimed those secrets, and with them we shall begin a new era for our people. Lest anyone still doubt my words—”

Turning toward the raised center of the stone slab, he tapped it with the crystal tip of his staff. “Behold.”

A finger of incandescence fluttered up from the surface of the stone. The crowd felt rather than heard a pulsing vibration against their eardrums, as of the distant beating of great wings. Then the entire slab erupted in a blinding explosion of white light.

The people cried out, clapping their hands over their eyes. When they lowered them, blinking, they saw Myrrdian still standing there, but atop the slab lay a collection of weaponry—pistols, carbines, even boxes of ammunition.

“With these tools,” Myrrdian announced, “we shall build a new world for ourselves, but be mindful of their true purpose. Else what I have given can be taken away—as can your lives.”

He swept the staff in a semicircle over the guns, and a creature flickered into view. The animal dimly resembled a hound, like a monstrous cross between a mastiff and wolfhound, but the bristles along its spine ridge topped Myrrdian’s waist.

The heavily muscled neck drooped with the weight of its massive, shovel-jawed head. Muzzle slavering, its long fangs glistened cruelly in a flickering firelight. The two round eyes held a red gleam. It growled, a sound like distant thunder.

The people shrank away in murmuring fear, many of them crossing themselves frantically.

“The hound of Cullan will sniff out any betrayers,” Myrrdian said flatly. “And will gnaw on the marrow of their souls for eternity.”

He waved the staff again and the phantom hound vanished, as if it had been no more substantial than a shadow cast by the flames. Facing the people, he drew in his breath and declared, “But I have not returned to threaten my own kind. I have come to lead you, as was prophesied long, long ago, when our people were still young.”

Myrrdian’s voice grew louder, stronger, more passionate. “There will be much bloodshed as we reclaim our old lands, but when it is over and the Celtic people are once again united, I shall give new life to all those who have fallen in service to me. The wounded, the sick and even the dead will be renewed. Once we regain the grail, there will be no more infirmities of age or sickness or death!”

The kneeling people gaped up at him in utter adoration, their eyes shining in the moonlight, mouths open and wet as if with hunger and thirst.

“Soon I will prove my words,” Myrrdian went on. “No one need doubt me or fear me.”

A cheer burst from the crowd, and with it came the beating of drums and skirling of pipes in a deafening uproar. They danced in triumph.

Myrrdian gestured with his staff, and by degrees the babble died away. “Where is my sword carrier…where is my darling Rhianna?”

The black-robed woman stepped forward her head bowed, still clasping the hilt of the weapon. “I am here, my lord.”

“Rhianna, my child,” he murmured in a rustling voice, “you have done well. You will receive many blessings from me.” He took three steps to the edge of the slab and reached out and caressed her cheek. “Special blessings.”

Rhianna smiled but still did not look at him directly. “Thank you, Lord Myrrdian.”

He gestured with his staff at the weapons on the stone slab. “My children, my warriors, all of you who are in my service—take what you need.”

Then there was bedlam as the crowd, shouting and cheering, rushed forward. A blond-haired woman stepped forward and curtseyed clumsily before Myrrdian. Past her prime and running to fat, she had hastily loosened her skirt and cinched the black sash tighter around her waist before speaking.

In a theatrical voice she called forth, “My lord, we are all at your service. We all wrought the manifestation ritual.”

Myrrdian gazed at the woman for a long moment before responding. “Is that so, Eleyne? I will reward you in the manner most befitting you.”

The woman smiled and curtseyed again. “Thank you, my lord.”

Myrrdian returned the smile, but it seemed stitched-on. “I grow fatigued. Take me to a place of rest.”

Bowing deeply, Rhianna allowed Myrrdian to take her arm and step down from the slab. She handed the sword to the man in armor and walked on without a second glance.

Hefting the weapon, the man in armor stepped up beside Eleyne. “Bloody hell, I didn’t really think it would work!” he whispered.

“Nor I!” she replied, surprise quavering in her voice. After a moment, she added smugly, “We are far more powerful than we thought. The ancient ways are still strong here, Conohbar.”

He stared at her incredulously. “You don’t believe he’s actually who he says he is—”

She shook her head. “Of course not. He’s a trickster.”

“Even so,” Conohbar said softly, “I think we should be very careful around him.”

They fell into step with the others, walking across the moonlit moor. The drums struck up a slow and solemn beat as the procession marched away from the stone circle.

Eyes flashing with resentment, Eleyne hissed, “That little slut Rhianna…she might as well be naked. I hope she catches the croup.”

Conohbar thought Eleyen had spoken in the faintest of whispers, but he saw Myrrdian’s shoulders stiffen. Ducking his head, he kept his gaze fixed on the cowpath at his feet and remained silent for another hundred yards.

When he dared to glance up again, the group was strung out along the field. Rhianna and Lord Myrrdian were far out of earshot.

“All I’m saying is, you don’t know what you’re dealing with here,” Conohbar whispered. “Or who. I didn’t like the way he looked at you.”

Eleyne’s lips quirked in an arch smile. “Jealous, Conohbar? I thought you’d gotten over that.”

The armored man didn’t answer her. He had seen the light of triumph in her eyes at the thought of being the cause of his worry. He bit back the response that it had been a while since any man in the group had cared to have her, including himself. Eleyne might have been pretty twenty years before, but now she was fat and dumpy with thick ankles and a triple chin.

They reached a footpath just as the Moon was setting. The path skirted a thick wood and curved down between embanking hedges. The retinue crossed an expanse of meadow blanketed by heather and bracken and entered an area where cultivated fields intersected with marshland.

Rhianna led Myrrdian into a small village full of thatch-roofed cottages. Cattle and horses stirred restlessly as the group made its way past. Only a few of the houses had lights showing through the shuttered windows, the cook fires banked for the night.

The village spread out across a shallow valley for at least an eighth of a mile. The cottages were scattered in no particular order from one end of the vale to the next. The areas between the buildings were cluttered with small, fenced gardens, two-wheeled carts and hobbled ponies. The group quickly dispersed under the stars as Rhianna led Myrrdian to a timber-walled great house up a side lane.

It was a fortified place, surrounded by a stockade of sharpened logs. Several of the group seemed inclined to linger, but Eleyne shooed them away with brushing motions. She and Conohbar pulled the heavy plank door closed behind them.

The interior of the council lodge was cavernous, with an earthen floor strewed with flattened reeds, straw and sand. A high-backed chair with armrests carved in the form of dragons occupied a raised dais against the far wall. Beside it was large sideboard laden with cold meats and white bread.

A fire reeking of fish oil sputtered in a massive hearth. The flames cast a flickering radiance over masses of piled and jumbled objects spread out on a pair of heavy trestle tables.

Myrrdian rushed to the nearest table and pawed through the collection of silvery wheels, golden buckles, helmets, metal rods and artifacts that were completely unidentifiable to the people in the council hall. All they knew was that they were relics of the Tuatha de Danaan, of an ancient time that should have been long dead, but in this part of the world, the past still breathed.

Eleyne strolled to the hearth and stood with her hands behind her back, watching as items fell from the table and clattered to the floor.

“Where is it?” Myrrdian hissed. “Where?”

Rhianna, standing near the door, paused as she slid one arm into the sleeve of voluminous robe. Her eyes reflected confusion. “My lord?”

“The harp!” Myrrdian snapped. “I don’t need this other ruck to unlock and activate the grail, but I do need the harp! Where the hell is it?”

“Rhianna never found it, my lord,” Eleyne stated matter-of-factly. “You should have never charged such a silly chit of a girl with a task so important.”

Moving with amazing speed for a man of his years, Myrrdian whirled to face her, his cloak swirling about him. “It was a simple task—I told you where it could be found!”

He gestured to the collection of relics with a contemptuous sweep of his staff. “You found this garbage, did you not?”

Rhianna opened her mouth, groping for something to say, but Eleyne said boldly, “The girl did not find it…but I did.”

Eleyne brought her hands out from behind her back. Resting between them was an object about two feet long. It resembled a lopsided wedge made of iridescent gold. The leading edge was elongated, like the neck of a glass bottle that had been heated, rendered semimolten and stretched. A set of double-banked strings ran its entire length.

Myrrdian smiled, showing the edges of his teeth. “Clever, clever girl, teasing your master. Give it to me.”

He reached for the harp, but Eleyne stepped back toward the hearth. “Not so fast, my lord.”

Conohbar’s eyes widened, his face draining of blood. “Eleyne—no!”

“I know what I’m doing.” She smiled at Myrrdian defiantly. “I found this when your favored harlot could not. I was the one who crept through the vaults laid down by the Priory of Awen. I risked much for you and now I demand a reward.”

“You risk death now,” Myrrdian intoned. “A very painful one.”

“I think not.” Eleyne laughed mockingly and thrust the harp over the fire, holding it over the flames. “Shall we put it to the test?”

Myrrdian stepped toward her, and she moved as if to toss it into the hearth. He came to a halt. “Flames cannot harm it, you stupid bitch,” he growled. “It was crafted by the Danaan.”

“Make up your mind, my lord,” Eleyne challenged. “My arm is getting tired.”

“What do you want?” Myrrdian demanded in a whisper.

“When you find the Grailstone, the Cauldron of Rebirth, I want to be one of the first to benefit from its restorative powers. I want to be young and beautiful again.”

An expression of surprise crossed his face. “That’s all?”

She nodded. “That is all I ask.”

He chuckled, a sound like dry bones rattling in a tin cup. “My dear, you didn’t need to go these lengths. I would have offered the cauldron to you in return for your many services to me.”

The mocking smile on Eleyne’s face became a relieved simper. “Oh, my lord…I should have known. You are kind and caring. Forgive me.”

Myrrdian extended his left hand. “The harp, if you please.”

She moved toward him, handed him the object and curtseyed. “Forgive me,” she said again. “And when I have regained my youth and beauty, I will give you much pleasure.”

He grinned and said softly, “You will give me much pleasure now, you treacherous bitch.”

She gaped up at him, first in shock, then in uncomprehending fear. The forepart of his helmet swirled, then it formed a cone and stretched out a pseudopod, tipped by the sphere. Like an eyelid, the metal peeled backward, revealing a round gem that pulsed with a cold white light. A shimmering blue nimbus sprang up around it. Between one heartbeat and another, the radiance turned a deep, deep red.

Eleyne opened her mouth to scream but no sound came forth. A blood-colored spear of energy jetted from the orb and shot between the woman’s jaws. For an instant, her body swayed. Then her hair burst into flame and her flesh bubbled like wax, falling away as semi-liquid sludge, splattering the floor. Her skull burst open with a sound like a handclap. Her headless body toppled backward. The smell of roasting flesh hung thickly in the air.

Myrrdian spun to face Conohbar. The sphere no longer glowed red, but rather with a steady blue-white radiance. “Get rid of that cow’s carcass!”

Conohbar, sweating and terrified, only nodded.

Myrrdian turned toward Rhianna. “Bring me food and drink.”

With the harp tucked under one arm, he stamped toward the rear of the council hall and the chair.

Rhianna and Conohbar exchanged stricken, terrified looks.

“What now?” the girl whispered hoarsely. “How could she have been so stupid?”

Conohbar bent over Eleyne’s smoldering corpse. “I’ll attend to this while you distract him. I’ve got to figure out a way to send word to the priory without alerting him.”

Rhianna nodded grimly. “Sister Fand must know that what she feared the most has come to pass…he has returned.”

Chapter 1

Manhattan Island, the Upper West Side

The wind sweeping over the roof of the office building carried a chill autumnal bite. Lying flat on a cornice overlooking the walls of the narrow concrete canyon, Kane tugged up the collar of his jacket, but he didn’t shiver. He was more concerned about the effect the sudden temperature change might have on the trigger spring of the OICW rifle cradled in his arms.

The stiff breeze gusting up from the dark waters of the Hudson had to be considered for trajectory deflection. He would only have one chance to make the shot before he lost the element of surprise and drew the attention and the wrath of Baron Shuma’s followers.

Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. 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 for people who went deaf, as long as they wore a Commtact, they would still have a form of hearing. However, if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

Lifting a compact set of night-vision binoculars to his face, Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses that optimized the low light values, the street seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only gloom had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green. He squinted against the light of the Sun in the west where it touched the facade of the building on the opposite side of the boulevard.

“Edwards?” he subvocalized.

“Sir?” came the immediate response. The man’s voice sounded tense.

“In position?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Move in as close to the street as you can. Get prepped when you hear them coming.”

Kane couldn’t see the shaved-headed ex-Magistrate, but Edwards had proved his competence many times since joining Cerberus nearly a year earlier.

Another voice filtered into his ear. “Commander?”

“Yes, Brady?”

“I can spot ’em fine, Commander.”

“Hell, I can spot them,” Kane snapped. “I want a perfect triangulation.”

“I’ve got the shot, if that’s what you’re worried about it.”

“It is, but you wait for my order.”

Kane thumbed the tiny stud on the Commtact, opening another channel. “Domi?”

“Yeah?” The girl’s sharp, high-pitched voice made him grimace.

“Any problems?”

“I’m ready to join the pack.”

“Acknowledged. In your rig, they won’t give you a second glance.”

“Hope not.” There was a pause. “Kane?”

“Here.”

Her tone a bit softer, Domi said, “Aim good. You be very careful.”

“Aren’t I always?” he retorted.

The transceiver accurately conveyed Domi’s snort of derision. “Hell, no. That’s why I mentioned it.”

A trifle annoyed, Kane said, “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be…and be aware of all our people’s positions.”

“Gotcha.”

Kane knew Domi intended to blend in with the group of Farers, flowing unnoticed among their number in her patched denims and long, hooded coat that concealed the girl’s white hair and skin, Detonics Combat Master autopistol, grenade-laden harness and her signature knife, with its nine-inch-long, serrated blade.

Kane had been reluctant to put Domi in the midst of the Farers because of her inability to get along with others, but under the circumstances, she was the least conspicuous of the Cerberus rescue team.

He opened another Commtact frequency. “Baptiste?”

“Here,” Brigid Baptiste responded in her characteristically calm tone.

“Status?”

“Hanging out with some Roamer stragglers, half a klick north-northwest of your position. “

Kane turned his head in that direction and squinted. “Sun is in my eyes.”

“In the convoy’s, too,” Brigid replied. “I’m keeping a street between us.”

“Any sign of Grant?”

“None so far.” Someone who didn’t know her would not have detected so much as a hint of concern in her crisp tone, but Kane heard the worry underscoring her voice.

“He’s still alive,” he said reassuringly. “Baron Shuma won’t pass up the chance of show off his prize pig to the citizens.”

“Assuming,” Brigid replied, “nothing has gone wrong in the past few hours.”

“You’re always such an optimist,” Kane said sarcastically.

“About as much as you are…which is to say, not much.”

“Aren’t you the one who always tells me to watch my overconfidence?”

“Only when you need it,” she answered. “Like now.”

Kane smiled crookedly and adjusted the Commtact, opening all the individual channels simultaneously. “Status reports every two minutes now, people.”

“Yes, sir,” Edwards said.

“Yo,” Brady announced.

“Gotcha,” Domi stated.

“Acknowledged,” Brigid said.

Kane took a deep breath. The stock of the OICW rifle felt smooth and warm in his hands. He eyed the sky, noting that in a few minutes the autumn sunset would plunge the narrow concrete valley below into deep gloom. The laser optical scope would help, but he prayed Shuma’s triumphant procession arrived while it was still daylight. If anything went wrong on the op, light levels wouldn’t matter.

A faint, faraway rumble of a distant engine reached his ears. Hitching around, Kane shifted position. A tall man built with a lean, long-limbed economy, most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. The cold stare of a wolf glittered in his blue-gray eyes, the color of dawn light on a sharp steel blade. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his clean-shaved left cheek. The wind ruffled his thick hair, its color a shade between chestnut and black.

He resisted the urge to stand up, not wanting to risk being spotted by any of Baron Shuma’s advance scouts. Shuma was a known killer who operated for hire, using the bombed-out ruins of Newyork City as his base of operations. Manhattan Island no longer held even the ghost of a thriving metropolis, only the hecatomb of a vanished civilization. The fields of devastation stretched to the horizon in all directions. The few structures that still held the general outlines of the buildings they had once been rose at the skyline, then collapsed with ragged abruptness.

All of the skyscrapers and towers had been broken by titanic blows combining shock and fire. Entire city blocks were nothing but acres of scorched and shattered concrete, with rusting rods of reinforcing iron protruding from the ground like withered stalks of some mutated crop.

Why anyone would want to stake out Newyork as an empire was beyond Kane’s understanding, but he knew a number of self-styled and self-proclaimed tyrants had rushed in to fill the power vacuums in the former baronial territories. Shuma was not unique in his dreams of ruling over others. He was, however, a scalie, so by virtue of his pedigree, he stood high on the rung of the unusual ladder.

But even taking overweening ambition into account, Newyork seemed a singularly unappealing place to build an empire of any sort, situated as it was in the longest hellzone in the country.

Manhattan had never been claimed as part of a baronial territory, partly due to its inaccessibility. All the bridges connecting it to the mainland had fallen during the massive quakes in the first few minutes of the nukecaust.

In the company of Brigid Baptiste, Grant and Domi, Kane had visited the shockscape of ruins over five years earlier, when they found it inhabited mainly by the peculiar mutie strain known as scalies.

The engine rumble grew louder and Kane peered over the edge of the building. Lights bobbed along the dark ribbon of the road, already cast into shadow by the structures rising on either side. Faint cheers and shouted laughter were audible through the mechanical roar.

“On his way,” Brigid’s voice whispered.

“Acknowledged,” Kane replied as he checked the direction of the wind with a moistened forefinger.

He eyed the sky, noting that in less than fifteen minutes, sunset would give way to dusk, then full night. A shot would be exceptionally risky, depending on where Grant was positioned in the promenade.

Brigid’s voice came again. “Shuma himself just passed. Big as life and about five times as ugly.”

“Did you see Grant?”

“Yes.” Her tone quavered slightly. “It’s going to be close, I’m afraid.”

“It’s what I figured. Stand by. Edwards?”

“Yes, sir,” the man calmly responded. “Target coming into sight.”

“Brady?” Kane inquired.

“Got them in my crosshairs, Commander,” Brady stated.

“Acknowledged. Wait for my signal.”

A single shaft of sunlight slipped over the top of the building and cast a shifting yellow halo on the road below. A thunder of drums, a rhythmic engine throb and sharp voices echoed between the walls of the concrete canyon. Kane crept closer to the cornice edge and peered through the rifle’s scope.

Straight down the potholed street came the procession, and on either side milled the Farers and Roamers, lean people wearing rags, but their faces were those of predatory animals. They yelled and shouted and waved at the vehicle chugging slowly over the potholed blacktop. In a previous incarnation, some two centuries earlier, the long automobile had been a bright yellow Cadillac convertible. Garlands of artificial flowers festooned the bodywork, from the gleaming grillwork to the sharp tail fins. Four men marched beside the vehicle, hammering on drums made of old metal containers.

Although he had never seen him before, Kane had no problem identifying Baron Shuma. An enormous man stripped to the waist stood upright in the rear seat, his arms folded over his thick chest. His hairless head was small in proportion to his massive torso. He resembled a toad more than a lizard. His blunt-featured face was coated in overlapping scales of a dark gray-green. His nose was a blob, a lighter shade of gray. His pendulous lips drew back over yellowed teeth in a savage grin. His black-rimmed eyes glittered brightly even in the dim light.

Kane recalled that Lakesh had speculated the scalies were the descendants of humans modified for war. Most likely the first generation were little more than expendable fighting machines, with their brains modified to ensure that they remained under the control of those guiding their actions.

With a sudden surge of disgust, Kane realized that Shuma was under no one’s control. He made that very clear by parading his captive down the street in full view of his subjects.

Grant lay spread-eagled on the broad hood of the Cadillac, arms and legs held at painful angles by taut lengths of rope. His olive-drab T-shirt was ripped and stained. Kane was unable to tell if the gleam on his brown-skinned body was from perspiration or blood.

Grant was a big man with a heavy musculature. His black hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples. Beneath the fierce, down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, his teeth were bared either in a silent snarl or a rictus of pain.

Kane adjusted the scope and sighted through the lens, carefully pushing a cartridge home into the chamber, gauging the distance at 250 yards. He gave the small figure sitting hunched over in the back seat beside Shuma only a brief visual appraisal, dismissing him as a servant.

His Commact buzzed and Domi’s voice whispered urgently, “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me…” Domi’s voice trailed off.

“What is it?” Kane demanded impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

The Commtact squirted out a burst of static and Kane squinted against the needle of pain boring into his skull. “Domi?”

There was no reply.

“Domi!”

Nothing.

He opened the channel to Brigid. “Baptiste, can you see Domi?”

“No…why?”

“She was cut off.”

“Cut off how?”

“How the hell do I know? That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Do you think something has happened to her?”

Kane inhaled a slow, thoughtful breath before answering, “I guess we’ll find out.”

“That’s no answer,” came Brigid’s sharp, reproving response. “Until we know what’s happened to her, we should scrub the mission.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Dammit, Kane—”

Edwards’s voice blared through the comm unit. “Sir, I’ve got Shuma dead center. I haven’t heard from Domi.”

Brady announced, “Commander, I just tried checking in with Domi, but she didn’t respond. Do we scrub?”

“Stand by,” Kane said flatly. “Everybody, just stand by.”

Brigid said curtly, breathlessly, “We need to pull back and regroup before—”

“Shut up, Baptiste,” Kane snapped.

The Cadillac lurched as the tires rolled into a rut and Shuma reached out a claw-tipped hand to steady himself. Kane settled the rubber-cushioned stock of the OICW into the hollow of his shoulder and held his breath. The skin between his shoulder blades seemed to tighten and the short hairs at the back of his neck tingled.

He squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 2

When the crowd first glimpsed Shuma, a simultaneous roar erupted from every Farer and Roamer throat. All of Manhattan seemed to echo with it.

Standing at the mouth of a litter-choked alley, Domi narrowed her ruby eyes and tugged the hood of her long coat farther over her face, casting it into shadow. She had visited the ruins of Newyork before, but back then it had been strictly a place of the dead. To see it filled with screaming, roaring people unnerved her.

According to the intel briefing, people had been pouring into Newyork across the river for the past two years, coming from the distant Adirondacks and the barren lands south of the Atlantic seaboard. Domi recognized and could easily tell the difference between the Farers and the Roamers, even though they dressed alike.

Farers were essentially 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 Newyork was very unusual.

Roamers, on the other hand, were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

The reports of both groups assembling in such great numbers on Manhattan Island was alarming enough to dispatch the Alpha Away Team from the Cerberus redoubt. They returned in full rout, beaten and bloody and minus of one of their members, a woman named Wright. She had been captured four days before by Shuma’s followers and all contact with her was lost.

Activating her Commtact, Domi whispered, “I’m ready to join the pack.”

“Acknowledged,” Kane responded. “In your rig, they won’t give you a second glance.”

“Hope not.” She took a deep breath. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“Aim good. You be very careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

Domi snorted derisively. “Hell, no. That’s why I mentioned it.”

Sounding irritated, Kane shot back, “Just make sure the target is where he’s supposed to be…and be aware of all our people’s positions.”

“Gotcha.”

Domi cut the connection and stepped away from the mouth of the alley. She didn’t care for crowds on general principle. Her senses had developed in the savage school of the Outlands, and it felt to her that the wind gusting through the ruins carried with it the whiff of blood about to be spilled.

An albino by birth, Domi’s skin was normally as white as milk. She was every inch of five feet tall and barely weighed one hundred pounds. On either side of her thin-bridged nose, eyes glittered grimly like polished rubies. The hood of her long beige coat concealed her short, bone-white hair.

As the laboring of the engine grew in volume, she stepped out of the alley onto the cracked sidewalk and she was immediately jostled and elbowed. Although her temper flared she managed to keep it in check, although she did shove a man who stepped on her toes.

The bellowing crowd surged and swayed as if it were a single-celled organism she had fallen into. The repellant odors of unwashed bodies, as well as the acidic reek of home-brewed liquor, assaulted her sensitive nostrils.

Gritting her teeth, tamping down her disgust, Domi wriggled through the bodies, seeking a closer vantage point to the street. Before she could decide on a course of action, she needed to identify Shuma. She had only seen him once, glimpsed him from afar the previous night in flickering, uncertain firelight. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t matter that Shuma was a murderer or organizing an army of the disenfranchised. As far as she was concerned, the important thing was that Shuma had captured Grant during the dark territory probe. In her mind, Grant’s rescue had become the mission objective, taking priority over all other considerations.

She recalled the briefing within the vanadium-sheathed walls of Cerberus. Baron Shuma was like many other self-styled and self-proclaimed dictators who popped up in the Outlands more often than she and her friends cared to think about.

Rather than ignore them, Cerberus had established a policy to conclusively overthrow their empires before their influences spread beyond small, contained fiefdoms. Most of the time, the little pocket-sized tyrants were content to rule over isolated settlements in the hinterlands. Very often, their own subjects assumed the responsibility of ending their reigns. Once the barons became too overbearing, their subjects either moved away or joined forces to kill them.

But every once in a while, one of the local lords expanded his influence and gained enough resources to become a formidable power. Shuma was one of those, but he was also a showman and a politician. He knew that true, lasting strength derived from developing a political movement more than operating a mere criminal enterprise. He called his group the Survivalist Outland Brigade and invited the homeless, the down-trodden—and the ruthless—to join the SOB, promising them a future of soft beds, food and endless luxuries.

The brigade consisted mainly of a loose confederation of bandits, but enough poor outlanders had sworn allegiance to Shuma to swell the ranks of the SOB significantly.

Outlanders were born into a raw, wild world, accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive, in the postnuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great-grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semibarbarism.

In the Outlands, people were divided into small, regional units. Communications were stifled, rivalries bred, education impeded. The people who lived outside the direct influence of the villes were reviled and hated. No one worried about an outlander, or even cared. They were the outcasts of the new feudalism, the cheap, expendable labor forces, even the cannon fodder when circumstances warranted. Generations of Americans were born into serfdom, slavery in everything but name. Whatever their parents or grandparents had been before skydark, they were now only commodities and they cursed the suicidal foolishness of their forebears who had brought on the nightmare.

Recently, the numbers of the SOB had grown large enough to be noticed by other groups, like renegade Magistrates who had turned to the mercenary trade or the Millennial Consortium. Neither possibility was comforting, so Domi, Grant, Kane and Brigid traveled to Newyork through the mat-trans gateway network. They set out to scout the area and ascertain if the reports about Shuma’s Survivalist Outland Brigade had any foundation.

Posing as Farers, the team hadn’t experienced much difficulty in blending in at first, and the easy acceptance made them careless, although Domi was alert from the start. As an Outlands child born and bred, Domi had learned how to hunt and had been taught the way of the hunted.

Still, the ambush had caught her almost completely unaware. She and Grant had scouted out the area around Shuma’s headquarters, in the tangled fastness of Central Park. Domi suspected that something they had done or not done had given them away, but whatever the case, she and Grant had been set upon by shadowy figures wielding ropes and clubs.

Although her first impulse was to remain and fight by the big man’s side, she realized they were severely outnumbered and couldn’t hope to shoot, slug or slash their way clear. When Grant ordered her to run, she had done so—reluctantly and shamefully, but she had obeyed him, melting into the gloom and the overgrowth.

Domi had never considered herself a soldier, as someone dedicated to fighting for a cause, but over the past few years she had accepted the need to prevent an unstable world from being overrun by human and inhuman tyrants alike.

Now, as she squirmed between the shouting people toward the curb, Domi closed her right hand over the checkered walnut grip of her Detonics Combat Master, holstered at the small of her back.

Kane’s voice suddenly whispered in her head, “Status reports every two minutes now, people.”

“Gotcha,” Domi stated.

She inched her way to the edge of the sidewalk, pushing in front of a short, flat-faced man wearing a ragged mackinaw and beat-up bottle-green derby. Judging by his clothes, he was a Farer. Roamers tended to prefer clothes made of animal hide, which reflected their more barbaric mind-sets.

“Watch it, you li’l bitch,” he growled in a voice slurred by liquor.

Domi ignored him. Her belly slipped sideways as she sighted the yellow Cadillac and the big man spread-eagled across the hood like a hunting trophy. Word had traveled fast through Shuma’s followers that he had captured Grant, one of the renegade baron blasters.

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 before. Domi knew that 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.

With a conscious effort, Domi tore her gaze away from Grant, at once relieved that he did not appear to be seriously hurt but enraged that he was injured at all. Beneath the overhang of her hood, she watched Shuma intently, only vaguely aware that there was something not right about him beyond his obvious physical deformity.

She had seen and even killed scalies before, but her belly still roiled with nausea and her hand automatically went to the hilt of her long knife, fingering the pommel. For six months she had been enslaved by Guana Teague, the Pit Boss of Cobaltville, and she had never forgotten the greenish tint of his skin and its odd, faintly scaled pattern. A number of people had suspected that Guana had a scalie in the family—hence his nickname. The loathing for her former master still ran deep within Domi, even years after slitting his throat with the very knife sheathed at her hip.

Shuma’s reptilian appearance didn’t trigger a mental alarm, since he looked pretty much like the other scalies she had seen. Her eyes focused on the figure slouched in the seat beside him. He was a very small man, probably no more than four feet five. However, a massive, almost rectangular head rose from between a pair of down-sloping shoulders.

The pale flesh of his freakishly high forehead showed a blue-and-red network of broken blood vessels spreading up to his hairline. His mouth was a short, lipless gash. His ash-gray hair was thin, almost downy, stirred slightly by the breeze atop his flat skull. A great shelf of bone jutted above his eyes.

They were unusual in shape and color—disproportionately large, completely round with tiny irises and pupils totally surrounded by the whites. They seemed to glow, like two pinpoints of fire.

His eyes swept the crowd disinterestedly, and they rested momentarily on Domi. In that instant she felt a faint touch on the surface of her mind, as if it had been brushed by a cobweb. His eyes moved on, but she instantly realized what the little man was.

She reached up for her Commtact. “Kane?”

“Here.”

“The car is about twenty yards from me….” She hesitated when the little man’s round eyes flicked back toward her as the Cadillac rolled past. A thick, ropy vein pulsed along his the right temple.

“What is it?” Kane asked impatiently.

“Not sure…. I see something that—”

Domi caught only the most fragmented impression of an arm whipping toward her from behind. She ducked, but still a hard object struck the side of her head, just under her ear. She staggered and would have fallen into the street if not for the press of bodies all around her.

Senses reeling from the impact of the blow, fighting off unconsciousness, Domi moved on pure animal instinct. She drew her knife and lashed out blindly. A vague figure jerked away from the nine-inch serrated blade.

Blinking through the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming across her vision, Domi saw the flat-faced man in the derby flail at her with a metal truncheon. She sidestepped and slashed again, feeling the point of the knife catch and drag through cloth and flesh.

She heard the profanity-seasoned howl of pain and as her eyes cleared she saw the man stumble backward, clutching at his right arm. Blood seeped between his fingers.

When a hand closed in a painful grip on the back of her neck, Domi leaned forward, her left leg flashing up in a back kick. She felt a solid, satisfying impact against the toe of her combat boot. A heavyset man uttered a muted squeal and doubled over, clutching at his groin.

More people shuffled toward her, arms spread wide to prevent her from bolting into the crowd. Domi backed away, weaving and swaying, reaching under her coat for her autopistol. Then she pivoted on her heel and ran full-out up the boulevard, in the opposite direction from which Shuma and his entourage had come.

Coattails flying, Domi ran as fast as she could, hearing shouts and the sound of pounding feet behind her. She knew she wouldn’t get far, but she didn’t intend to. She reached for her combat harness, her hand closing around a small, metal-walled sphere.

The rifle shot sounded like a distant firecracker going off under a tin can and she smiled grimly. She yanked the M-33 fragmentation grenade free of the harness and its safety lever.

Chapter 3

What you fear the most rarely comes to pass.

That refrain cycled through Brigid Baptiste’s mind on a continuous loop as she stood with her flank against the crumbling brick wall. Her heart pumped and her throat constricted as the screams of the crowd reached her.

Brigid forced herself to calm down, knowing that Domi and Kane were supremely competent in almost any situation. Still, she felt almost relieved something was finally happening. For the past two hours she had been loitering along a narrow side street, separated by the ruins of two buildings from the main activity of the city.

Brigid had visited Manhattan in the twentieth century, during an abortive time-travel mission a few years earlier. What she saw now was scarcely recognizable as the remains of one of the one largest metropolises in the world. Centuries of human history had been reduced to hundreds of square miles of smoldering rubble within a handful of minutes. Some of the towers still stood, shattered and cracked, yet with an indomitable appearance.

A tall woman with a fair complexion, Brigid’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual.

She wore black denim slacks, loose enough in the leg for free movement, the cuffs tucked into thick-soled combat boots. A camouflage jacket covered her torso. Her waist-length mane of red-gold hair was now a short, tightly bound sunset-colored club hanging at her nape. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist, and a Copperhead subgun hung from a harness beneath her coat.

Under two feet long, the Copperhead had a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, the extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for 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.

On the other side of the crumbling heaps of masonry and massive chunks of fallen concrete Brigid listened to the chorus of voices chanting Shuma’s name, and she shivered despite the jacket. Carefully she touched the dabs of soot applied to her face to conceal her peaches-and-cream complexion. She knew she would pass a quick visual inspection by a Farer or a Roamer, but she also knew she didn’t smell as rank as they did.

However, her devotion to the masquerade had its limits. As it was, her nostrils recoiled at the potpourri of odors wafting on the wind. To Brigid, whose nose had sampled aromas from all over the world, the place simply stank.

A gangling Roamer youth with a scraggly brown beard made decorative by the addition of little silver beads twisted into the whiskers slid along the brick wall and stood beside her. She ignored him until he reached out and rubbed her right shoulder.

“I been watchin’ you, big sister,” he said in a husky whisper. “You got me swoll up.”

“Fade, little brother,” Brigid retorted in a flint-hard voice, employing the Roamer pattern of speech.

“You be a beaut babe,” he said, rolling his shoulders beneath the tattered, patchwork coat that hung nearly to his ankles.

“Skid off, kid off.”

“And them eyes, they’s like emeralds. You be for me, big sister.”

Brigid stared directly into his face, catching the acidic whiff of home-brewed whiskey that hung around him like a cloud. “I told you to skid off, little brother. I want to see Shuma.”

The Roamer’s lips stretched back over cavity-speckled teeth, and his right hand drifted from her shoulder to breast. “We got the time.”

“Your hand,” Brigid said.

The youth blinked. “What about it?”

“Take it off or I’ll break it off.”

The Roamer’s grin widened. “Tough, you be tough. I likes my big sisters tough. Helps get me more swoll.”

“Dandy,” Brigid replied. “Then this should help, too.”

She jacked her knee up into his groin. The youth grunted, doubling over at the waist, his hands leaving Brigid’s body to clutch convulsively at his crotch. Swiftly, Brigid gripped him by his greasy hair and pulled him hard against the wall, the crown of his head striking the brick with a sound like two concrete blocks colliding.

As he slumped bonelessly to the ground, Brigid stepped casually away from him. No one else in the vicinity noticed the scene. As far as the Roamer definition of violence was concerned, the little struggle barely qualified as a harsh word.

The rumbling of a big engine grew louder and Brigid crossed the side street, peering past broken walls and over the heads of the assembled Farers and Roamers. The long yellow vehicle rolled into sight. The crowd chanted “Shuma! Shuma!” like a religious mantra.

“On his way,” Brigid whispered over the Commtact.

“Acknowledged,” came Kane’s quick response.

Homemade drums beat a discordant fanfare. Brigid joined the other Roamers thronging toward the parade. Despite herself she felt the tingling warmth of excitement at the prospect of danger spread through her.

For a very long time, she was ashamed of that anticipation, blaming her association with Kane for contaminating her. Now she had accepted the realization that his own desire for thrill-seeking hadn’t infected her, but only forced her to accept an aspect of her personality she had always been aware of but refused to consciously acknowledge.

In her years as a baronial archivist, Brigid Baptiste had prided herself on her intellect and logical turn of mind. She was a scholar first and foremost. Back then, the very suggestion she would have been engaged in such work would have made her laugh. Now she was a veteran warrior, and at some point during her time with Cerberus she realized the moments of danger no longer terrified her but brought a sharper sense of being alive.

Her life in Cobaltville’s Historical Division had not been a full life, but only an artifice, a puppet show she had performed so the string-pullers wouldn’t become displeased and direct their grim attention toward her. Of course, eventually they had. Over the past few years, she had left her tracks in the most distant and alien of climes and breasted very deep, very dangerous waters.

The crowd clogging the alley was too densely packed to move among easily, so rather than force her way through the shouting mob, Brigid chose to run parallel to the parade route. As she picked her way through the rubble, she absently noted the ripple pattern spreading across the asphalt. Weeds sprouted from splits in the surface. She had seen the rippling effect many times, mainly in the Outlands. It was a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by nuclear-bomb shock waves.

When Brigid came to a knitted mass of wreckage that appeared to be several buildings that had toppled atop one another, she paused to study it, looking for a way through it or over it rather than around.

A series of concrete slabs formed something of a crude staircase over the top of the rubble and she began clambering up them, leaping from one to the other until she pulled herself to the summit. Breathing hard, she looked toward the street, just as the yellow Cadillac rolled behind a pile of bricks. She saw the broad dark bulk of Shuma standing in the rear of the vehicle, waving to the shrilling mob. She caught only a glimpse of the big black man spread-eagled across the hood and her heart jumped in her chest.

Quickly she opened the Commtact channel to Kane. “Shuma himself just passed. Big as life and about five times as ugly.”

“Did you see Grant?” he demanded.

“Yes.” Her tone quavered ever so slightly. “It’s going to be close, I’m afraid.”

“It’s what I figured. Stand by.”

Brigid knew Kane was in contact with the other members of the away team, Brady and Edwards, so she did not linger. Swiftly, she bounded down the face of the rubble heap. The footing wasn’t treacherous, but it wasn’t particularly trustworthy, either. Twice, stones turned beneath her feet and she nearly pitched headlong to the ground below.

When she reached the base, she started running, hoping to get ahead of the Cadillac and provide support for Brady, Edwards and Domi, although she knew all three people were experienced. Domi, of course, had lived most of her young life in the wild places, far from the cushioned tyranny of the baronies. She had spent years cautiously treading the ragged edge of death, and her inner fiber had been forged into an iron strength and an implacable stoicism.

Edwards and Brady were, like Kane and Grant, former Magistrates and were now trusted members of the Cerberus away teams. Lakesh had initially opposed the formation of the three Cerberus away teams, made uncomfortable by the concept of the redoubt’s own version the Magistrate Divisions, ironically composed of former Magistrates. However, as the scope of their operations broadened, the personnel situation at the installation also changed.

Kane, Grant, Brigid and Domi couldn’t always undertake the majority of the ops and therefore shoulder the lion’s share of the risks. Over the past year and a half, Kane and Grant had set up Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta. CAT Delta was semipermanently stationed at Redoubt Yankee on Thunder Isle, rotating duty shifts with the New Edo’s Tigers of Heaven, and CAT Beta was charged with the security of the redoubt and surrounding territory.

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.

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus. 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, Domi, Kane and Grant had tramped through jungles and ruined cities, over mountains and across deserts. 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, more than half a world away atop a mountain peak in Montana, had devoted themselves to changing the nuke-blasted planet into something better. At least that was her earnest hope. To turn hope into reality meant respecting the often alien behavior patterns influenced by a vast number of ancient religions, legends, myths and taboos.

Brigid ran through a scattering of machine parts, her Copperhead bumping in an irritating rhythm against her left hip. Most of the rusted hunks of metal were so corroded as to be unidentifiable. Brigid continued along the front a row of roofless brownstones. As she crossed an overgrown strip of gravel alley between a pair of buildings, she heard the roar of the crowd as Shuma’s vehicle hove into view.

Vaulting over a web of rusty iron pipes, Brigid sprinted to a low brick wall and knelt down behind it, catching her breath. Urgency vibrated along all the sensitive nerve endings of her body. Kane’s voice suddenly entered her head.

“Baptiste, can you see Domi?”

From a jacket pocket Brigid withdrew a small monocular and pressed it against her right eye. She swept the crowd swarming on both sides of the street, but she saw no one standing out to attract her attention.

“No…why?”

“She was cut off.”

“Cut off how?”

“How the hell do I know?” Kane snapped impatiently. “That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Do you think something has happened to her?” Brigid demanded, still peering through the lens of the monocular.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Brigid focused on the dark bulk of Shuma’s figure. “That’s no answer. Until we know what’s happened to her, we should scrub the mission.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Dammit, Kane—”

“Stand by,” Kane broke in tersely. “Everybody, just stand by.”

Brigid’s gaze was drawn to the strange figure hunched down beside Shuma. He looked shrunken, almost dwarfish. A chill finger of dread stroked the base of her spine as she studied his features. His eyes were his most disquieting characteristic. They were wide, unblinking and not completely human. Tiny red pinpricks blazed brightly within the pupils. The eyes fixed on her, and she felt a sudden pressure in her temples.

Heart trip-hammering in her breast, feeling out of breath, Brigid jerked the monocular down and said into the Commtact, “We need to pull back and regroup before—”

“Shut up, Baptiste,” Kane snapped.

Her face filmed with cold sweat, Brigid did not reply. The gunshot was sharp and sudden. Even at such a distance, she saw the spark flaring from the Cadillac’s polished grillwork. A plume of steam jetted from the radiator, obscuring Grant from sight.

Pushing herself up from behind the wall, she reached for her TP-9. A sudden explosion behind the Cadillac sent a cloud of black smoke billowing into the air. The sound boomed back and forth, and Brigid felt the concussion like the slap of a languid hand across her face.

She recognized the characteristic crump of an M-33 fragmentation grenade, and she had no doubt at all who had thrown it.

Chapter 4

When Grant awoke that dawn, he tasted blood in his mouth. The blood had dried on his lips and he licked them, his tongue exploring the lacerations on the tender lining of his cheeks. He came out of unconsciousness like an exhausted swimmer pulling himself ashore, and he became aware of a consuming pain in his head and a burning thirst. He remained motionless, listening to the sound of voices speaking in low tones below him. The abraded flesh around his left eye felt swollen and raw.

Grant lay in a wooden cage, a bit under five feet tall at its apex, six feet in diameter. The slats were lashed together by rawhide thongs and many turns of a heavy-gauge wire. The entry gate was sealed by a length of rust-flecked chain and an old-fashioned iron padlock.

All things considered, the cage hanging from the cross-brace framework ten feet above the ground wasn’t the worst place he had ever been imprisoned, but it was a long way from the most comfortable.

The events that had led up to his imprisonment were only a set of disjointed images, fragmented memories of ugly dreams.

Grant remembered how he and Domi sauntered into the camp of the Survivalist Outland Brigade without being challenged by sentries, mainly because none was posted. They hadn’t seen any pickets, nor did there appear to be a clear-cut perimeter of the camp. The place was a sprawling mess of people and slapdash structures.

Tar-paper shacks, lean-tos, huts and tents stood jumbled in Central Park, spread out like a spilled garbage can. Four huge fires sputtered redly in the drizzle. In front of some of the dwellings stood poles of stripped saplings with skulls mounted on top, not all of them animal.

The people they saw in the camp ranged from youths with wispy beards to sharp-eyed, hard-bitten warriors. The clothing styles were varied and eclectic—colorful wool serapes, wide-brimmed cowboy hats with snake-skin bands and scruffy fur caps.

Grant easily differentiated between the Roamers and the Farers—the Roamers were festooned with weaponry, bandoliers crisscrossed over their chests, with foot-long bowie knives and big, showy handguns at their hips.

The Farers dressed a bit more sedately, and their weapons of choice were utilitarian longblasters, bolt-action rifles and a few autocarbines.

But neither Roamer nor Farer gave Grant or Domi so much as a second glance, which, he realized in retrospect, should have aroused his suspicions. Despite being dressed in standard Farer wear—patched denim jeans and leather hip jacket over a khaki shirt—he still stood four inches over six feet and much of his coffee-brown face was cast into sinister shadow by the broad brim of an old felt fedora. Walking side by side with a petite albino girl barely five feet tall should have drawn some curious glances, even from the most jaundiced member of the SOB.

He had almost no memory of being buffeted on all sides by a surging mass of bodies that overwhelmed him with such swift efficiency he had no chance to draw his weapon. As he was borne to the ground under the weight of many men, he heard Domi blurt in wordless anger. He shouted for her to run, then a flurry of blows fell on him and hands ripped the big revolver from his shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

A soft, lisping voice said, “Move aside, let me see him. Move aside, let him up so I can see him.”

When the crushing weight obligingly left Grant’s body, he lunged upward—then he felt as if an immense fist slammed into the back of his head. The impact drove all light and consciousness from his eyes. For a long time, he saw nothing but black and heard only silence.

He regained his senses in piecemeal fashion when a cup of icy water dashed into his face roused him. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Agony tore his skull apart. He tasted the salt of his own blood in his mouth.

Then the pain ebbed, fading to a steady throb. Grant squinted around, trying to focus through a series of what seemed to be gauzy veils draped over his face. Finally, he realized he was surrounded by planes of pale gray smoke. He made a motion to touch his head, but he couldn’t move his arms. He sat tied to a heavy, wooden, straight-backed chair, arms and legs bound tightly by strips of rawhide. Glancing down at himself, he saw he wore only his T-shirt and jeans. Everything else, including his boots and socks, had been stripped from him.

The acrid fumes of the smoke seized his throat and dragged a cough from him. Lying on a far table were several long-stemmed clay pipes, the bowls discolored and smoldering. The place reeked of marijuana and overcooked meat, of stale and sweaty bodies.

The fact that he could even smell the stink of the room told him just how powerful the stench was. His nose had been broken three times in the past and always poorly reset. Unless an odor was extraordinarily fragrant or fearsomely repulsive, he couldn’t smell it; he was incapable of detecting subtle aromas unless they were literally right under his nose.

Grant coughed again, then cleared his throat.

“You may speak if you wish.”

The voice was a low, ghostly whisper, touched with a faint lisp. He remembered hearing the voice before, and he turned his head toward a shadowy figure looming on his right.

He felt a quiver of revulsion at the sight of Shuma and his enormous scaled belly bulging over his sweat pants. He glanced up into his face, expecting to see it twisted in a triumphant smirk. Instead, Shuma’s expression was vacant, his eyes hooded and distant as if they were focused on another scene entirely. His flaccid lips hung open, slick with saliva.

The voice spoke again and Shuma’s lips did not move. “Do you find your host revolting, Mr. Grant?”

Not responding to the question, Grant rumbled in his lionlike voice, “Who the hell are you?”

Shadows shifted behind Shuma’s bulk, and Grant caught a whistling, asthmatic wheeze. “I am the voice, the mind, the spirit behind the Survivalist Outland Brigade.”

Grant hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the floor. “Bullshit.”

The voice tittered, sounding somewhat like an out-of-breath owl. “Why are you so sure?”

Straining against the rawhide bindings, Grant tried to peer around Shuma. “Let me see you.”

“All in good time, Mr. Grant…all in good time.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, your spy—Wright was her name?—was most forthcoming about everyone and everything.”

Grant did not allow his sudden apprehension to show on his face or be heard in his voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

There was another breathy giggle. “Oh? What a pity…because I definitely know what she was talking about.”

The note of certainty, of complete confidence in the speaker’s voice sent a tingle of fear up Grant’s spine. He gusted out a weary sigh. “All right. But she wasn’t a spy.”

“She was here on an intelligence-gathering mission, correct?”

“More or less. We wanted to find out more about Shuma and this SOB of his.”

“Of his?” A mocking lilt touched the voice, but Grant detected an edge of anger there, as well.

“Who else?” He eyed Shuma surreptitiously, looking for a glimmer of intelligence in his eyes. They were covered by a dull sheen, the lids drooping.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

“Nothing,” came the dismissive response. “That is, nothing that’s isn’t wrong with any other addict of jolt and various other opiates.”

Grant knew that jolt was a combination of various hallucinogens and narcotics, like heroin. To sample it once was to virtually ensure addiction.

He hesitated, started to ask a question, then closed his mouth, shaking his head.

“You were about to ask how a jolt-brain could command his own bowels, much less an army.”

Grant nodded. “Something like that, yes.”

“I command Shuma and he commands the SOB.”

“Which brings me back to my first question—who the hell are you?”

“My name would mean nothing to you…but if you must call me something, you may call me Esau.”

Grant inhaled a deep breath, held it, then released it slowly. “What are you?”

“I believe you have already guessed.”

When Grant declined to respond, he heard a shuffle of movement and a small figure stepped out from behind Shuma. At first Grant thought it was a crippled child, leaning as it did on a pair of crutches. But when the figure lurched closer he knew with a rise of nausea he was vastly mistaken.

Esau stood a little more than four feet tall, his emaciated body lost in a baggy flannel shirt and pants several sizes too large for him. An old extension cord cinched the waistband tight. The frayed cuffs of the trousers dragged on the floor, but Grant couldn’t see any sign of feet.

Esau’s face was dominated by a thick shelf of bone bulging above his huge eyes. The forehead rose like a marble wall, angling upward to join with the flat crown of his skull. A mat of thin gray hair covered it.

Grant struggled to keep his expression neutral, to disguise the fear swelling within him.

Esau’s small mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “I revolt you more than Shuma, do I not?”

Grant didn’t respond for a few seconds, visually examining the blue-and-red mapwork of broken blood vessels spreading over Esau’s forehead. “Not exactly. I’ve come across your type a time or two.”

Esau’s smile widened in mock ingenuousness. “And what type is that, Mr. Grant?”

“Doomies,” he retorted matter-of-factly. “You’re a doomseer. I didn’t think there were many of you left.”

In the Outlands, people with enhanced psionic abilities were called doomseers or doomies, their mutant precognitive abilities feared and hated.

Most of the mutant strains spawned after the nuclear holocaust were extinct, either dying because of their twisted biologies, or hunted and exterminated during the early years of the unification program. Doomseers weren’t necessarily mutants, but norms with true telepathic abilities were rare in current times.

Extrasensory and precognitive perceptions were the most typical abilities possessed by mutants who appeared otherwise normal.

Esau uttered a scoffing, contemptuous laugh. “Hardly a doomseer. I can’t foretell the future any more accurately than you can.”

“Then what do you call yourself?”

Casting a sideways glance up at Shuma, Esau answered confidently, “A mastermind. I call myself a mastermind.”

Grant cocked his head in puzzlement. “A what?”

“I can master minds not my own…like Shuma’s here.”

His gaze narrowed, Grant asked, “How can you do that?”

Esau’s shoulders jerked in what appeared to be a nervous tic but was an attempt to emulate a shrug. “By a variety of measures. The drugs help, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I have the ability to stimulate certain parts of his brain so I can flood his nervous system with endorphins.” Esau paused for a handful of thoughtful seconds, then asked, “Do you know what those are?”

Grant nodded. “I do.”

“Then you know that when the nervous system is exposed to endorphins, a biochemical reaction takes place. The reasoning parts of the brain are inhibited.”

“And therefore easy to control,” Grant interjected.

Esau’s smile widened. “It doesn’t work the same for everybody. It helps if you’re a self-indulgent voluptuary in the first place, like Shuma.”

“I gathered that,” Grant replied dryly. “So you’re really the boss and Shuma is just the front man?”

“Something like that. Clever, wouldn’t you say?”

Grant nodded in grudging agreement. “I suppose so…Roamers would never take orders from a crippled little pissant like you.”

Esau’s lips tightened and he stepped closer to Grant, staring at him unblinkingly, as if challenging him to look away. Grant did not. “Are there any further questions?”

“Plenty of them, but first, where is the Wright woman?”

Esau’s brow acquired a line of concentration. “Oh, I do apologize. I should have reunited you much sooner. She can actually answer most of your other questions.”

“You don’t even know what they are.”

In a voice barely above a whisper, Esau stated, “You would ask me to reconsider leading the Survivalist Outland Brigade and join with Cerberus in an alliance against these so-called overlords…whatever they are.”

Grant stirred uneasily. “How do you know that?”

“Because that is what the Wright woman asked.”

“And what did you tell her?”

Esau turned toward Shuma. On the right side of his massive head, a thick vein pulsed. Shuma lumbered forward, grasped the back of Grant’s chair and lifted it clear of the floor without apparent effort. He turned it and set it down at a different angle.

Peering through the gloom, Grant saw heavy wooden beams supporting the ceiling. Four chains dangled from a block-and-tackle assembly attached to the rafters. The ends of the chains were tipped with sharp meat hooks of the type used in slaughterhouses.

From two of the hooks hung a naked body, gutted like the carcass of a pig he had seen once since in a butcher’s shop. One of the big hooks had been inserted through the underside of the chin, and the tip of another pierced the left armpit.

Through the fog of horror clouding his vision, Grant looked into the glassy, dead eyes of Wright.

Teeth clenched, a wordless snarl of rage vibrating in his throat, Grant hurled himself against his bonds, rocking the chair back and forth, hoping to tip it over on Esau. Shuma’s huge hands fell onto his shoulders, pressing him down, holding him motionless.

Esau lurched into view on his crutches, staring levelly into Grant’s eyes. “She told me quite a bit, but not everything. You’ll do that for me, Mr. Grant.”

“Goddamn you to Hell, you little mutie piece of shit.” His voice was so guttural with fury it sounded more like the growl of an animal.

Esau leaned forward, stroking the side of Grant’s face with tiny baby fingers. “God has done enough to me already, Mr. Grant. I do the damning to Hell here.”

His unnaturally large eyes suddenly seemed to increase in size, as if they were squirming from their sockets. Tiny red flames flickered within the pupils. Grant sensed rather than heard a multitude of tiny voices, all chittering like faraway crickets. The sound slid along the edges of his awareness, and terror pushed away his rage. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

A nova of pain exploded within the walls of his skull and he heard himself crying out, as from a million miles away. His body spasmed, thrashed. He felt his mind being pulled into a whirlpool of dark energy that sucked his blood and bones and soul out through the pores of his skin, and turned them to dust.

He whirled, orbiting every instant of his life, spiraling through memories of joy, of loss, of grief, of victory and defeat. He spun through a sea of images, and no matter how hard he tried to stop them from flying to the forefront of his mind, he knew Esau saw them, rifled through them, memorized them.

The most intense pain gradually abated but didn’t fade completely. There was a ringing in his ears and numbness in his extremities. He felt blood inching from his right nostril and flowing over his lips. He breathed shallowly because of the bile burning in his throat. Then he doubled over and vomited between his legs. He felt as if a violent tornado had ripped a mile-wide path of destruction through the field of his mind.

Slowly raising his head, he squinted through his watering, blurred eyes toward Esau. The vein on the little man’s temple pulsed violently as if a worm squirmed just beneath the thin layer of flesh. The network of broken blood vessels on his forehead appeared to be even more livid. His arms trembled as if he was having difficulty maintaining his balance on the crutches.

“Interesting,” he said in a faint, tremulous voice. “Far more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m going to keep you alive a while longer, Mr. Grant…at least until your friends come to rescue you, an eventuality of which you seem certain. But it wouldn’t be so if our situations were reversed.”

A small, bronze-hued curve of metal clinked to the floor at Grant’s feet. He recognized it as the Commtact.

“You are quite isolated, my large friend,” Esau went on. “You live only at my sufferance and my continuing interest in your memories. Many of them are intriguing to the point of fascination.

“Shuma, I think he needs some fresh air. Take him to the cage.”

Chapter 5

A cold rain pattered down through the leaves that formed a loose canopy over the top of the cage. Grant shivered in the early-morning chill, but he turned his face upward so the raindrops fell into his open, as-dry-as-dust mouth.

The water soothed the cuts on his lips and cheek lining and eased his thirst somewhat. When the drizzle intensified, his torn T-shirt was quickly soaked through and plastered to his skin.

“Well, here I am,” he rasped, a little dismayed by how hoarse and weak his voice sounded.

Grant retained little memory of being half dragged, half carried to the cage by Shuma. His arms and legs refused to function, the muscles feeling as if they were filled with half-frozen mud. He wasn’t sure if the impaired movement was due to his being in a chair or an aftereffect of Esau’s psionic rape.

He tried to dismiss the concept, but he felt violated. Esau had virtually torn open his mind and ransacked its contents. Although he didn’t know exactly how the little man had accomplished it, he knew with a grim certainty there would be a final reckoning.

When the sun came up and filtered feebly through the interwoven branches, he moved carefully to the entry gate of the cage. Sliding his hands between the wooden slats, his fingers explored the iron padlock. He briefly considered ripping loose a splinter of wood and using it to pick the lock, but he discarded the idea when he saw a pair of armed men approaching him.

Grizzled, bearded Roamers, they didn’t warn him not to touch the lock. All they did was glare, and he withdrew his hands.

Biting back a profanity, Grant sat down and listened to the camp stirring around him, watching dim shapes hustle back and forth between shacks and cook fires. He grew cold in his wet clothes, but he maintained his stoic exposure. As a Magistrate, he had been taught techniques to manage pain and discomfort, but he wasn’t a Mag anymore. He realized with bleak humor that he had experienced more periods of physical suffering in the five years since his exile than during his entire two decades as a hard-contact Magistrate.

In his first few years as a Mag, as he rose up the ranks, he had undergone periodic training exercises to toughen him and increase his stamina, and that included exposure to extremes of temperature.

Even now he recalled those exercises with loathing. They were days of pure, unadulterated torture, of walking naked in a desert or clambering among rocky mountains, waiting for the commander to ration out just enough food and water to survive from one dawn to one sunset.

But Grant learned to live by instinct, reflex and training, to focus solely on putting one foot in front of the other and slogging on. Those of his fellow Mags who didn’t learn didn’t survive.

Despite the twinges of protest from his knee joints, Grant sat cross-legged and stared at a white spot on the floor of the cage, where the bark had peeled back from the wooden slat. He tried to relax his neck and shoulder muscles, working his way down to his bare, cold toes. He concentrated on regulating his respiration, putting himself into a quasihypnotic state.

He was trying to achieve the “Mag mind,” a technique that emptied his consciousness of all nonessentials and allowed his instincts to rise to the fore. He had been trained to do it while serving the Magistrate Division of Cobaltville. He used it for handling pain and dealing with exhaustion. Brigid Baptiste had referred to it as a form of yoga, but Grant still thought of the process as Mag mind.

After memorizing the white spot, he closed his eyes, visualizing it. He struggled to superimpose a mental image that matched the actual spot, but he was unable to do so. His concentration was scattered.

Grant wasn’t sure if it was due to the pains of the injuries inflicted by the SOBs or whether he was emotionally drained. Rather than seeing the white mark in his mind, he kept seeing Esau’s huge eyes with their red pupils, like a vid tape on continuous replay.

Despite his situation, worry about his friends consumed him. He felt sure the Cerberus personnel knew he still lived—in fact, they were probably aware of his general state of health, due to his biolink transponder.

All permanent residents of the Cerberus redoubt had been injected with subcutaneous biolink transponders that transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponders were composed of nonharmful radioactive chemicals that bound themselves to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis. The constant signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, one of the two satellites to which the installation was uplinked.

The telemetry transmitted from Grant’s subdermal biolink transponders would be directed down to the Cerberus redoubt’s hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetric signals using special human biological encoding.

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 them. One was of the Vela reconnaissance class, which 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. Conceivably, they could fix Grant’s present position in Central Park—not that it would do him any good.

Kane was far too canny a tactician to try to penetrate the SOB’s camp in broad daylight. As it was, Grant knew he and Domi had somehow been identified and allowed to get as far as they had before being jumped. He assumed Esau’s mental powers were responsible.

He also assumed Esau planned to use him to lay a trap for Kane, Brigid, Domi and whoever else participated in a rescue attempt. He didn’t know if the little man wanted to capture them or kill them, but he had seemed exceptionally intrigued by what he had seen in Grant’s mind. He guessed the information about the Annunaki overlords was of special interest, since it was connected to the fall of the united baronies.

Humankind’s interaction with a nonhuman species had begun at the dawn of Earth’s history. That relationship and communication had continued unbroken for thousands of years, cloaked by ritual, religion and mystical traditions.

According to information gathered by the Cerberus personnel over the past few years, most myths regarding gods and aliens derived from a race known in ancient Sumerian texts as the Annunaki, but also known in legend as the Dragon Kings and the Serpent Lords.

A species of bipedal reptiles that appeared on Earth at the dawn of humanity’s development, the Annunaki arrived from the extrasolar planet of Nibiru. They reared great cities, built civilizations and spaceports and influenced the evolution of humankind.

The Annunaki were also consumed by abounding pride and arrogance, and more than a few maintained an insatiable appetite for conquest and control. The faction led by Enlil had developed and imposed complex, oppressive caste and gender systems on early human cultures to solidify that control.

As far as Enlil was concerned, the nukecaust was a radical form of remodeling and fumigation. The extreme depopulation, as well as the subsequent atmospheric and geological changes, approximated Nibiruan conditions. Earth would become the new Nibiru.

Before that occurred, Cerberus was determined to build some sort of unified resistance against Enlil and the other overlords, but the undertaking proved far more difficult and frustrating than Grant had imagined. Even long months after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a daily basis.

Grant heard a murmur of many voices rising around him like the sound of rushing water. Opening his eyes, he saw a crowd of about twenty people gathered below the cage, clustered around it like a swarm of bees.

Most of them were Roamers, a rough-looking gang—bearded, wild haired, wearing a variety of rags and furs.

A tall woman strode up to the cage and leaned forward to stare between the slats. She stood well over six feet tall, naked to the waist except for crisscrossing cartridge belts over her blue-tattooed breasts. Tattoos writhed all over her bare arms and torso, like a formfitting body suit imprinted with fantastic designs.

She wore green camouflage pants and high-topped boots. Her black hair was cropped to her scalp except for a crest that sprouted up six inches from the center of her skull. The ends of it were dyed a bright purple. Silver-studded red leather bands encircled her wrists. She cradled a heavy Stoner M-207 machine gun in her muscular arms.

At one time her blue-eyed face might have been pretty, but that was before it was disfigured by the wide cicatrix scar indenting her left cheek like a fault in snowy terrain.

She stared speculatively at Grant, and Grant gazed at her. Neither person spoke for a long moment, then the woman turned and nodded to her companions. “Yep, it’s him all right. It’s Grant, just like Shuma said.”

Grant stirred uneasily. “You know me?”

The woman turned back to him. “We’ve never been formally introduced. We traded shots about eighteen years ago, in the Great Sand Dunes hellzone. You ’member that?”

Grant did, and the memories weren’t pleasant. He and a Magistrate squad had been ambushed by a group of surprisingly well-armed Roamers. He touched his left cheek. “I give you that?”

She uttered a spitting sound of derision. “Shit, no. My first husband did, back when I was a sprout. Claimed I was steppin’ out on him. Hell, I was only fourteen. But I kilt him for it all the same. Had me six more husbands since then.”

A bell of recognition chimed faintly in Grant’s memory. “Didn’t you used to be called the Merry Widow?”

The woman grinned in genuine amusement. “Called that still. Glad to find out I still have a rep…wasn’t sure with all this fuss made over that Shuma bastard and this SOB of his.”

The derogatory tone in the woman’s voice caught Grant’s attention. “You’re not a part of it?”

The Merry Widow shook her head. “Not yet. Brought my people here to check the whole thing out. Lot of other clans I have problems with are here. Can’t say I’m too inclined to take orders from a mutie, neither, much less a fuckin’ scalie.”

Grant inched closer to the bars. “You’re only about half right.”

Lines furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

Grant eyed the Roamers standing behind the Merry Widow and asked, “Are all these your people?”

She nodded.

“Can you trust them?”

“Trust ’em to do what?”

“Not to sell you out.”

“Why would they do that?”

Dropping his voice to a whisper, Grant said, “Because I’ve got some information that you might find pretty interesting. But I think it should it be for your ears only.”

The Merry Widow opened her mouth to retort, closed it, then turned, sweeping the ragtag band with a challenging stare. She made a brushing gesture with her right hand. “Fade.”

Reluctantly, the Roamers shuffled away, some of them casting Grant resentful glares, others looking merely puzzled.

The woman turned back to Grant. “Spill, sec man.”

Grant felt the back of his neck heating with a flush of anger. “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 the far hinterlands beyond the villes.

He swallowed his irritation and said lowly, “Shuma is just the puppet. A crippled mind-mutie named Esau really pulls the strings.”

The Merry Widow eyed him skeptically. “I thought that little slug was his ass-wipin’ servant or something.”

“That’s what he wants you to believe. He’s really the brains of the whole outfit.”

Taking a deep breath, Grant told the Roamer chieftain everything he had witnessed and been told by Esau. He didn’t embellish or even try to conceal the reasons he and his friends were in Manhattan. He spoke directly and honestly. He knew the Merry Widow distrusted him and didn’t blame her.

His own work with the Cerberus exiles kept him in a shadow world of danger and eternal suspicion, of sudden crisis and alarm, where human beings died in a covert war that ranged from the sands of the Black Gobi to the utter remoteness of a forgotten colony on the Moon.

When he was done, the woman’s scarred features were drawn in a troubled frown. “I don’t like that,” she murmured. “Not a’tall. But…”

She trailed off and after waiting a few seconds Grant demanded, “But what?”

The Merry Widow shrugged. “But Shuma has made plans for you, and everybody is lookin’ forward to it.”

Grant felt his stomach lurch. “Plans?”

The woman nodded. “Yeah, a big parade down the street with you as the main trophy. A lot of people in this camp don’t like you, Grant.”

The corner of her mouth quirked in a wry smile. “Go figure, huh?”

“Yeah,” he echoed. “Go figure.”

Contemplatively, she continued, “But a lot of people in this camp don’t like taking orders from a scalie in the first place, and they sure as shit won’t like it if they find out they’re really taking orders from a little runt of a doomie on crutches.”

Gusting out a sigh, the Merry Widow ran a hand over the purple-dyed tips of her hair. “Mebbe there’s something we can do about that. Lemme think on it.”

Chapter 6

Kane ran across the rooftop with a long-legged stride. As soon as he had seen the geyser of steam burst from the Cadillac’s radiator, he dropped the OICW, leaped to his feet and started running.

A chorus of outraged screams and panicked yells erupted from the crowd below, and he smiled in grim satisfaction.

“Kane,” came Brigid’s voice into his head. She sounded more indignant than confused or concerned. “What the hell is going on?”

“Keep standing by,” he told her.

“I’ve been standing by. I need to know—”

Reaching up to the Commtact, he cut the channel. He knew she would heap vituperation on him when next they spoke, but he couldn’t afford a distraction. He heard the distant whip-crack of a rifle shot, and the angry yells from the crowd hit a fever pitch of fear. Either Edwards or Brady was taking the initiative.

Kane wasn’t concerned about leaving the OICW behind. His first priority was reaching street level as soon as possible, and so he concentrated on running. The Sin Eater snugged in its forearm holster weighed considerably less than the rifle, although the four grenades attached to the combat webbing beneath his jacket bounced painfully against his ribs.

Racing across the roof, he leaped nimbly over haphazard heaps of unidentifiable junk. He angled away from the cupola enclosing the stairway. He had no inclination to be trapped in the stairwell by enraged Roamers who he was sure were on their way up.

Obeying an impulse triggered by his point man’s sense, Kane had decided to stop Shuma’s vehicle rather than snipe at live targets. He wasn’t sure why he had reached his decision, but he put a great faith in his instincts as a general rule.

When Kane’s point man’s sense howled an alarm, he usually paid attention. His point man’s sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. Something about Shuma and his big-headed companion—some small, almost unidentifiable stimulus—had triggered the mental alarm.

Sprinting across the flat surface of the roof, he reached the edge and took an alleyway yawning before him in a single leap. He misjudged the distance to the adjacent building and landed too hard, falling onto his right side and rolling over and over. He came to a halt when he slammed up against the brick facade of a chimney.

Biting back a curse, he quickly examined the scrapes on the palms of his hands, then rose to a knee. Across the alley he heard a door slam open and he cast a glance over his shoulder.

A pair of bearded Roamers bulled their way out of the cupola, looking this way and that. Both men cradled lightweight deer rifles in their arms. Kane gauged the weapons to be .22-caliber, and therefore they had little stopping power unless the shooters were very accurate. He assumed the Roamers would be, so he sidled out of sight on the opposite side of the chimney.

The two men glared around with wild, angry eyes and when they spotted the OICW lying on the rooftop, they jogged toward it. Kane took advantage of their distraction to stand up and start running again.

He heard a wordless bellow of rage behind him, then the snapping of a rifle shot. A bullet drilled into a stack of lumber on his right, throwing up a little cloud of splinters. Increasing his speed and the length of his stride, he reached the far edge of the roof and dived off it, to the building fifteen feet below.

Kane landed on the balls of his feet, and he threw himself forward into a somersault. The layer of rotting wood and roofing material sagged beneath his weight and collapsed inward. He dropped amid a seething cascade of plaster, drywall, boards, insulation and broken rafters.

Fortunately, he didn’t fall far, but the impact still very nearly jolted all the wind from his lungs. Gasping, his vision blurred, Kane dragged himself to his hands and knees, hearing splintery shards and timbers crashing down all around him. The swirl of dust and dirt particles stung his eyes and coated his tongue.

Coughing, fanning the air in front of his face, he staggered to his feet, glancing up at the ragged hole his hurtling body had made in the ceiling. Faintly, he heard the Roamers yelling in frustration, but he doubted they would risk following him. They no doubt hoped he had broken his neck or at the very least his back in the fall.

Kneading the small of his back, Kane squinted through the dust, seeing a hallway piled high with the detritus of two centuries. Though the light was dim, he moved toward the mouth of a stairwell. Dark doorways yawned on both sides of the passage. He saw only shambles inside the rooms and evidence they were used as nests for vermin. The interior smelled stale and musty.

Carefully, he went down the steps, wincing as the risers creaked and sagged alarmingly beneath his boots. The banister wobbled whenever he touched it. He could only dimly hear the sounds of commotion out in the street, more screams and sporadic gunfire.

Activating his Commtact, he opened the channel to Brigid. “Status?”

Her tone of voice flat, Brigid responded, “Shuma threw himself over that weird little man. Edwards and Brady have been shooting into the crowd, keeping anybody from getting too close to Grant. I haven’t seen Domi, but I know she was the one who—”

Brigid broke off, then said crisply, “Stand by.”

“Baptiste—”

“It’s your turn to stand by.”

THE GRENADE ROLLED ONLY a few feet before detonating with a brutal thunderclap. A hell-flower bloomed, petals of flame curving and spreading outward. Spewing from the end of every petal was a rain of shrapnel, ripping into bodies and the facades of buildings.

Fragments rattled violently against the half-fallen wall behind which Domi had taken cover. The explosion was followed by the shattering of glass and several keening screams. Domi caught glimpses of men staggering backward with their hands clapped over their ruined faces. Other people stared in wide-eyed shock, frozen in horror.

Two rifle shots, sounding like the snap of dry twigs, cut through the echoes of the detonation. A pair of men standing on opposite sides of the street fell thrashing to the ground, their heads misshapen by the high-powered bullets. Domi knew the bullets had been fired by Brady and Edwards.

The crowd ran in a howling, panicky rush that bowled people off their feet and trampled more than a few of them. Domi stayed behind the wall until the main mass of the crowd had passed. She resheathed her knife then rose to her feet.

She lunged back in the direction she had come, plunging through the smoke. As she ducked beneath an outstretched arm, she drew her Combat Master, appreciating the feel of the checkered walnut grip against the palm of her right hand.

A Roamer, blood streaming from a shrapnel-inflicted gash on his cheek, jumped in her path, his discolored teeth bared in a snarl of rage. With neat precision, she clubbed him across the mouth with the barrel of her autopistol. He reeled away, spitting scarlet and crumbs of his shattered teeth.

As Domi stepped around him, she saw a dark-complexioned man wearing a yellow turban racing toward Grant with a three-foot-long sword held over his head, readying himself to deliver a decapitating blow. Because of the roar of the crowd, she couldn’t hear what he said, even though his lips worked as if he was shrieking a stream of imprecations.

Moving on impulse, almost without thought, Domi leveled her autopistol and swiftly brought the turbaned man into target acquisition. Twenty yards was long range for the handgun, especially aiming at a moving target, but she had made far more difficult shots. When the sword-wielding figure was framed within the weapon’s sights, she adjusted for elevation and windage, then she squeezed the trigger two times.

The big automatic pistol bucked in her hands, sending out booming shock waves of ear-shattering sound. The first .45-caliber bullet hit the man directly in the center of his turban and the other struck his neck. He catapulted backward amid a spouting of blood.

The people around him scattered at the sound of the shots, running in all directions. Because the majority of the crowd was composed of hard-bitten, violence-prone Roamers, they didn’t indulge in a panic-stricken flight. They took cover either in the ruins or they dropped flat to the street, eyes and guns seeking targets.

Domi glimpsed the huge dark bulk of Shuma hustling away from the Cadillac, a limp shape cradled protectively in his arms. She guessed the scalie was ferrying his small companion away to safety, but she couldn’t understand why he would care.

She didn’t devote any further thought to the matter. She kept her gaze fixed on Grant as he strained against the bonds that held him to the hood of the vehicle. Wisps of steam from the punctured radiator still curled around him, like an early-morning fog.

Through a part in the vapors, Domi a saw a scar-faced woman with a bizarre purple-tinged Mohawk haircut shouldering her way through the press of bodies, using the stock of a Stoner machine gun to hammer a path. Her narrowed eyes were turned toward Grant.

Domi came to a halt and sighted down the length of her pistol, aiming at a spot between the woman’s exposed, tattooed breasts. Too late she sensed a rushing body behind her. Arms encircled her in an agonizingly tight grip, lifting her from the ground. She smelled stale sweat and hot, rancid breath washed over her cheek.

As she tried to bring up her pistol, the arms tightened around her in a crushing embrace, pumping all the air from her lungs. Gasping, she kicked backward, the edge of her boot heel striking his shin. Her next tactic was to butt the man with the back of her head. This move was marginally more effective because he swore in pain, but the pressure of his pinioning arms increased, closing like the jaws of a vise.

Through blurry eyes, Domi saw the bare-breasted woman raising her Stoner, resting the stock against her hip, the hollow bore staring at her like a cyclopean eye. Domi struggled wildly.

A short tongue of flame lipped from the muzzle. The sound of the single shot was like a muffled handclap. Domi squeezed her eyes shut. She felt the man holding her jerk violently as if he received a blow. His grip loosened and his arms fell away altogether. Domi stumbled when the man dropped, but she saw the neat red-rimmed hole in the middle of his forehead and the far-from-neat cavity in the rear of his skull.

She threw the Mohawked woman an uncomprehending stare. She smiled at Domi in amusement, inclined her head in a nod and gestured with her autorifle toward Grant.

“He’s all yours, sweetheart!” she called.

Then she turned and merged into the bustling crowd.

Breathing hard, Domi reached Grant, drawing her knife. He turned his head toward her and demanded, “What kind of rescue plan is this—to parboil my ass?”

As the edge of the blade sliced through the ropes encircling his right wrist, she answered, “The Kane kind.”

Grant gusted out a weary sigh. “Why did I even have to ask.”

Domi couldn’t help but grin as she cut the big man free. Although he looked bruised and battered, the fact that he could complain and criticize meant he wasn’t hurt too severely.

As Grant pushed himself off the hood of the Cadillac and stood massaging his wrists, Brigid Baptiste pounded up, holding her TP-9 in a two-fisted grip. Her green eyes glinted, bright with worry.

“Are you all right?” she asked, looking Grant up and down and wincing slightly at the abrasions and contusions on his face. “Do you need medical treatment?”

He shook his head. “Later, maybe.”

Brigid turned toward Domi. “We lost contact with you and almost scrubbed the op.”

Gingerly, the girl touched the Commtact behind her ear and when she withdrew her hand, her fingertips glistened with wet crimson. “Took a wallop there,” she said with a wry smile. “Mashed it up pretty good but probably kept me from a broken head.”

She glanced toward the nearby buildings rising from the skyline. “Where’s Kane and everybody else at?”

“I just spoke to him,” Brigid said. “He, Edwards and Brady are on their way to us. Once we rendezvous, let’s get to the jump chamber and gate back to Cerberus.”

She paused and smiled without humor. “I’ve pretty much had my fill of New York, New York.”

Grant matched her humorless smile. “Yeah, it’s a hell of a town. But we can’t leave it right now.”

A voice from behind them asked, “Why the hell not?”

They turned as Kane jogged up. His dark hair was white with plaster dust, his face and clothes coated with a pale film. With every footfall, little clouds of dust puffed up around him.

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