BATTLEFIELD EARTH

Far in the future, mankind endures the relentless onslaught of alien oppressors, an ancient battle whose tide has begun to turn through the efforts of the Cerberus rebels. This remarkable band of warriors fights an elusive enemy, traveling through dangerous portals of time and space, where reality and un-reality collide in stunning, deadly purpose...

LIGHT OF THE DAMNED

The diamond mines of the Congo are ground zero for a calculated new power grab by an ancient Mesopotamian god. Darkened and depraved, Nergal intends to harness the power of light to lock humanity in the blackness of eternal damnation. But Nergal’s ability to blind his opponents is only the beginning. The Cerberus rebels will have to find the human who’s pulling Nergal’s strings...which means venturing into the gaping mouth of hell itself.

Behind Kane, something was stirring

Something large and reeking of amniotic fluid and newness. Something alien.

Kane dragged himself out of the tantalizing promise of unconsciousness. His side hurt, his right arm hurt, his head... He had hit the wall and lay there now, on the floor amid a scattering of fallen drapes and totems and jars, trying to make sense of where he was.

He turned, pain rushing through his neck as he strained his muscles, his breath coming through clenched teeth. An Annunaki stood behind him, large and saurian, larger than any that Kane had ever seen before. He had fought with Enlil and Marduk and others, gone toe-to-toe with Ullikummis, whose surgical enhancements made him a towering pillar among his own kind. But this, an Annunaki of gold and green, was something else. Something huge and muscular, its power barely restrained.

Kane gathered his thoughts, commanding the Sin Eater back into his hand from its hidden sheath. He squeezed the trigger as Anu turned, the light of recognition appearing in the monster’s blood-red eyes.

And in that moment, Kane knew just who he was looking at.

Apocalypse Unseen

James Axler

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

Legend

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

Copyright

Prologue

The Earth’s first monster was called Anu and he arrived from the heavens in a spaceship. Oh, there had been horrifying things before Anu—dinosaurs and giant things that lived in the ocean’s depths and saw in a range beyond the visible spectrum, creatures which one might describe as monstrous. But Anu was a monster inside, where it truly counts.

Anu was a self-styled explorer from an immortal race called the Annunaki, who hailed from the distant planet of Nibiru, many light-years from the planet he dubbed Ki after his sister and consort, the planet which we now call the Earth. Anu was a strange kind of explorer, looking not for new lands or resources but rather for new experiences, ones that might stave off the crushing ennui that threatened to quiet his race forever when time itself had failed. The Annunaki were bored—of life, of experience, of pleasure.

Anu first visited the Earth in a period when the apekin—or humans—were still cowering in the trees from saber-toothed tigers. He landed amid the wild greenery in a starship shaped like a dragon. The starship was called Tiamat, and she was a semisentient device as eternal as any of the Annunaki race. The journey across the gulfs of space had exhausted her, which was reason enough for Anu to step from her loving womb and onto the soil of this new planet; a planet that waited untouched and ignored on one of the pale, squid-like tentacles of a barred spiral galaxy that would one day be known as the Milky Way. Such was the impact that Tiamat’s arrival would make on the locals that, many years later, she would be erroneously considered responsible for the creation of the Milky Way itself.

Anu strode from Tiamat’s bridge and inhaled his first breath of the Earth’s atmosphere, taking in the blue-skied vista spread before him. He was a tall creature, nine feet in height, with scales of gold laced with green like brass touched by verdigris, his thick tail circling behind him for balance as he stepped from the widening aperture on Tiamat’s shell and out onto the boarding ramp that extended from the ship’s nose. He wore an ornate cloak patterned after one of Nibiru’s most prominent flowers, its scarlet weave so dark that it was almost black, a perfect match to his red-black eyes. His neck was thick and corded, the ideal plinth for his long head, whose skull seemed to arch back and outward from a curved face with almost flat features, like a visage reflected on the back of a spoon. At the apex of his head, spiny protrusions emerged from his skull, thick, twisted bone struts running in a spiky array that jutted like the spokes of a wheel. In years to come, Anu would be remembered by the Earthlings for his crown, though it was not decorative but a part of his skeleton.

Anu breathed the air as he stepped from the widening, circular aperture. He knew that it could do him no damage; Tiamat had already tested and confirmed as much before he had taken his first step from her protective shell. To Anu, the air tasted sweet in that way that water from a different source often tastes different.

He took a moment, the grand explorer, the alien, to survey this world he had discovered like a gem amid the night sky of space. According to Tiamat’s sensors, it teemed with life, something that so few worlds did. There were other races, of course—Anu knew as much and had convened with them, as had others of his own race. But, for better or worse, such races were scattered vast distances from each other, as if a law within some grand, hidden design had stated that no two sentient races may coexist within one hundred light-years of one another. Perhaps there was a plan at that, one hidden from all but the most enlightened of the higher beings. Anu had considered this during his long journey to the planet Earth—or Ki, as he was already calling it—but reached no firm conclusions, only more questions.

The Annunaki were eternal beings. And they were something else, too—multidimensional. But it was possible to see the Annunaki through humans’ eyes, and as Anu stepped from Tiamat’s boarding ramp and out onto the green carpeted plains that would one day become Kenya, he was seen by the first man who would ever have a name. The man cowered behind a deciduous bush, where he had been plucking perfectly round, purple berries that he planned to store for eating later, back at his dwelling—which was admittedly little more than an indentation in the ground, but served to keep the wind from touching him at night. The man had stopped plucking berries, his purple-stained fingers poised in midpluck, as the dragon ship landed and the figure emerged. The whole sequence had taken almost ten minutes, from when the man had first noticed Tiamat as she gracefully came to rest, barely making a sound beyond the displacement of the air left in her wake, to now, when the aperture had appeared on the dragon ship’s face and the golden figure of Anu had emerged to stride majestically down the tongue that rolled before him to touch the soil. In all that time, the man—we might call him Adam, although that is not the name which Anu gave him—remained in place, unmoving, perhaps unable to move, as he watched an occurrence play out that was so far beyond his comprehension that he could barely fathom it. It was like hearing something in a foreign language, so impossible was it for Adam to interpret.

As Anu stepped onto the planet, Adam coughed, suddenly choking on his own breath, the taste of berries and stomach acid flooding his throat with a hot surge. He doubled over, taking great racking gasps of air as he tried to clear his throat, pressing his arms against his chest and sides, the berries crushed and forgotten. It was shock, seeing this creature from another world, this...god...?

When Adam finally managed to draw a breath without coughing—still hunched over like the apes his kind still resembled—he stared at the ground between his feet and saw golden, clawed toes. He looked up, turning his head slowly, still feeling that twitch on his insides where the choking cough threatened to restart.

The creature from the stars was standing beside him, legs widespread, cloak fluttering in the light, warm breeze, watching him with eyes as dark as newly spilled blood.

Anu spoke in a voice the like of which had never been heard on this planet. The words were incomprehensible to the apekin, but the sound fascinated him. It was duotonal, like someone humming against a sheet of paper, split and yet conjoined, a sound that was two sounds at once. The voice, like everything else about the Annunaki, was multidimensional.

Adam heard the sound and did the only thing that seemed natural: he fell to his knees, bowing down before Anu, peering up at those eyes like blood.

Anu peered down at the apekin creature inquisitively, pleased with this new aspect of the thing’s nature. “You are not timid, then?” he said. He spoke the words in his own tongue; they left his mouth with a sound like wind through autumn leaves. He reached down then, touching one golden hand to the apekin’s head, pressing it gently against the top of the primitive creature’s skull. Anu placed just a little pressure there, and the apekin bowed his head, until he was staring at the ground between Anu’s feet.

“Better,” Anu declared, a thin smile appearing on his wide mouth.

The apekin remained in that aspect as Anu surveyed the lands around him, taking in the new plants, the trees, the texture of the air. Here was a playground that might stave off the crushing boredom of life eternal, at least for a while. He breathed deeply of the air, consuming it through the flat, flared nostrils that resided on his face like the craters of some unknown moon, as he turned back to regard the apekin bowed low before him. This was something he could use and could get used to. These hairy mammals with their smells and their finite life spans could serve to reignite the pleasure centers of the bored Annunaki.

But when to share his discovery? Anu wondered. Perhaps tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years’ time. For time meant little to a race that knew infinity and resided outside of its wide borders. First he would experiment a little, see what these apekin were capable of, and what they could endure.

“Come, creature,” Anu said, placing a clawed hand under the apekin’s chin until his head tilted to look at his new master. “Creature. Creature. No, you need an identifier, a name by which you may be referred.” Anu was already thinking of the Annunaki’s slave class, the Igigi, none of whom had ever earned a name. They were devoted and simple creatures, superior, Anu suspected, to the apekin prostrating himself before him, but still uncomplicated compared to the Annunaki. It pleased Anu to think that by naming this first man, he might further subjugate the Igigi, reminding them of their status as slaves to the eternal race. And so he spoke a name, one that would survive throughout man’s history. Not Adam, not that—but Cain.

* * *

THE DOME SAT on the shores of Lake Tiamat. It was four hundred yards across and perfectly round as if a giant sphere had been buried in the ground, leaving only its top third visible. The shell of the Dome was colored the silver of clouds, making it almost indistinguishable from the sky into which it towered. Inside, Anu conducted his trials. He was loath to call them experiments; they were really just games that put the local apekin through their paces, testing them to—and beyond—their limits. Anu might be excused the latter—he had no prior knowledge of the apekin, and only by testing them could he hope to determine where their limits were and of what merit such limits were.

The apekin needed sleep and food, far more so than the Annunaki, who could go without such things for months, even years, at a time. The Annunaki lived outside of time, while the apekin were bound to it in such a way that it afflicted them with a disease called aging.

Aging. The Annunaki had bypassed that millennia ago, their bodies immune to the ravages of time, their minds playing host to the memories of all of their race, perfectly held for instantaneous recall. And more, they had invested in the genetic shunt, a download of personality which allowed them to be reborn as they were, over and over, to regenerate their minds into new forms, each genetic template held safe in the wombship, Tiamat.

Anu had spent the past six months on Earth, toying with the apekin and the other creatures who existed on this untouched paradise. He had tested diseases, manipulated DNA, made the apekin serve him, service him and entertain him. He had driven them to madness and to death, called upon them to fight with wild creatures for his pleasure and to fight with one another to the death. He had made mazes and traps to test their intelligence, used mirrors and refraction to throw their senses. Simple tricks all, but tricks that were beyond the apekin’s understanding.

But the apekin were learning; that was something of which they were eminently capable, Anu had concluded. They took observations from the trials, learned lessons, reached conclusions that made them better at surviving without injury. If they could learn, Anu concluded, then they could be taught.

Cain had survived all of the trials. Anu’s first test subject, Cain had proved shrewd and wily, and he had learned quickly how to please his master and never to trust him. Cain was strong, muscular for his species. He could kill a man with his bare hands and utilize simple tools that he fashioned himself—shaped rocks, carved sticks. Cain showed the kind of spirit that Anu associated with the eternal, a spirit that might live beyond his time here on Ki, on Earth. Anu had found one other like him, a female of remarkable intellect for an apekin, and there seemed to be a bond between her and Cain almost from the moment that they met.

Cain was a servant of Anu, which meant he had safety in the Dome, safety from those prowling saber-toothed tigers and their ilk, each one looking for a hot meal that was slow on its feet and wouldn’t fight back. Cain was safe inside, and so he served Anu without complaint. Every morning he would run the circumference of Lake Tiamat, an artificial body of water created from the overspill of Tiamat’s tanks, genetic ooze, waste product expelled after the long journey across the field of stars. The dragon ship resided beside the lake, disgorging her innards in a display of regeneration comparable to anything Annunaki, her fish-scale skin slowly replenishing where it had become blistered by the heat of atmospheric entry.

Cain seemed to have some ragged notion linking survival to physical prowess, and so, Anu guessed, that was why he ran. He tried to teach the female, the one of remarkable intellect, and she watched him run the circuits around the lake with bright eyes of emerald green.

* * *

TIME PASSED AND the trials continued. Until the day that Anu became bored with the Earth and, moreover, bored with the company of grunting apekin with whom he could not hope to do more than play fetch. He wondered about adding a spark to these listless creatures, and consulted with Tiamat’s data banks to design a structure within their DNA that might make them more interesting. He implanted that DNA structure into the ova of the female whom he had observed enjoying the company of many males of her tribe. The twist would make her children more rugged, more hardy, more interesting. It would spread, in time, though that was time Anu no longer wanted to endure on this blue-green marble. His servants, the Igigi, let the female go, scared and confused, to spread Anu’s gift among the apekin. Anu watched her leave, wondering if he might return to Nibiru to tell the others of his discovery here, that they might add texture to the planet and thus make it interesting again.

Anu was not a monster because of his size or his skin or his otherness. He was a monster because of his heartlessness, his callousness. Because of his evil.

Chapter 1

Monsters waited beyond the shadows, monsters of another age.

Located in an underground bunker, the room had no windows and no illumination other than a single flashlight that wove through the darkness in the hands of its lone living occupant. The room was as wide as a football field, and its floor was masked by a deepening pool of stagnant water, the ripples flickering in half-seen crescents as the beam of the flashlight played across them.

Several vehicles protruded from the water like standing stones—a broken-down flatbed truck, a smaller van with its hood open, three jeeps, each in a state of disrepair. And there were other things—crates and boxes stained with mold, human bones that floated in the darkened water, bobbing horrifically into view before sinking down again to be lost in the cloudy swirl. It smelled, too, of damp and rot. It was a place where the things that reach beyond death flourish.

The woman with the flashlight stalked along the edge of the waterlogged room like a jungle cat stalking its prey, one long leg crossing the other as she moved, feet tramping in the shallowest depths of the artificial lake. Each step was accompanied by the splash of water, dark and foul smelling, and each time her black-booted foot touched the floor, the water would swirl over it until it covered her ankles, threatening to rise higher as she hurried on. Moss and pondweed floated across the surface of the water, twirling on the rippling currents caused by each step the woman took.

The woman was called Nathalie. She was in her twenties, six feet tall, slim and dark skinned with dyed feathers hanging from her ears, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. She wore leopard-print shorts and tall black boots that laced corset-like up the back of her calves. She wore a calfskin jacket that wrapped snuggly across her breasts, and there was a knife sheathed at her hip, its blade glinting in the water’s reflection of the flashlight she carried to light her way. The knife was as long as a man’s forearm, broadening along its length to a wide tip. Her hair was a shadowy halo of tight black ringlets that encircled her head.

She passed a femur washed up on the strange shores of the underground garage, stepped over it with only a moment’s pause as she headed for a doorway and into the waiting elevator that was located in the corridor beyond.

Nathalie punched the button for a lower floor and waited as the elevator shuddered and dropped, its lights flickering and dimming as it sucked power from the redoubt’s ancient generator. The elevator worked when little else did, a necessity for the redoubt’s other occupant, who had lost both legs two years before.

A few seconds later the elevator came to a halt and its door drew back with a squeak on unoiled tracks.

Nathalie stepped out into a new corridor, one like any other in the redoubt, gray walled with a stripe of color to indicate level and area. Already she could hear the sounds of the generator that ran incessantly at the far end, not for lighting or heat but for that other purpose—to keep the dead thing from dying.

The corridor was lit by a single candle at the far end, held in the claws of a four-foot-high holder, its silver base emerging from the half inch of water that covered the floor here, just as it did in the motor pool.

Nathalie followed the corridor to its end, and as she approached the room there, she could smell the incense on the air, masking the other scents of damp and sweat and death.

This room was much smaller, barely able to contain the towering metal-walled tank that dominated its space. The sound of the generator was louder in here, too, a great thrumming that seemed to thump through the metal plates of the floor, pounding against the soles of Nathalie’s boots so that it seemed she was shaking, that her heart was racing.

The room was lit—almost reverently—by a dozen candles, each one as tall as a child’s arm and propped inside mismatched containers—jars and cups, here the jaws of a monkey’s skull as if it was smoking a lit cigar. There was no water in this room, though its floor was stained dark where water had seeped in before. A lone figure sat in the center of the room, facing the towering structure that dominated the space. He sat not in a chair but in a wheelchair, his back to Nathalie. This was Papa Hurbon, a corpulent figure with wide shoulders and richly dark skin. His head was shaved and shaped like a bullet, a bucket-wide jaw tapering upward to a point at the top of his skull. Earrings dotted his ears, twin lines of gold studs running up their shell-like curves, tiny figures suspended from the lobes themselves.

Clutching something small and ragged like an old woman’s knitting, Hurbon’s eyes were wide as he looked at the vast generator that was housed in the room. The unit towered over Nathalie, its curved metal sides buckled in places where something hard had struck them, a single porthole of six-inch armaglass located in the lone door that dominated its front. This was a cold-fusion generator, designed in the late twentieth century to create energy through nuclear fusion and used to power this underground redoubt when it had been in the possession of the US Army two hundred years ago. A spectral light ebbed from that single porthole, its luminescence a pale, irradiated blue.

“Nathalie,” Hurbon said without turning.

Nathalie bowed her head in deference to Hurbon, even though he had not turned to see. “My beacon, my guide,” she said, her voice shrill in the enclosed space.

She waited then, as Papa Hurbon, leader of the société, master of the djévo, practitioner of the dark voodun arts of the Bizango Priests, studied the ghostly miasma that swirled and flowed across the glass of the cold-fusion generator. There was a face there, the hint of an eye as hollow as the grave, a smile half formed from mist, strands of hair that swept across cheekbones that never fully formed as they were tossed by the ceaseless winds of the generator. Nathalie had never really understood what the thing in the generator was, only that Papa Hurbon regarded it with unmatched reverence.

“I have been t’inking,” Hurbon began without turning his gaze from the ghost in the window, “about what it is to be immortal. Is it a gift? Or is it a curse?”

Nathalie waited as Hurbon seemed to ponder his own philosophical question. She was not given to philosophy; rather, she was young and the blood still ran hot inside her, driving her to action, not to rumination.

“And so I have thought, back and forth, on this topic,” Hurbon continued after a long pause, “and I have concluded that the key to immortality lies here, in the conquering of death.” He opened his hands, bringing forth the little figure that he clutched there. The figure was a fith-fath, what the ignorant called a voodoo doll, and its twisted rag body depicted a woman’s figure with dark eyes and long, skeletal limbs. “But to conquer death, you see—that is a challenge that few can comprehend. Because to conquer it is to embrace it as my goddess, Ezili Coeur Noir, embraces it.”

He was talking about the figure in the generator, Nathalie knew, a by-product of the Annunaki wombship that had somehow been granted a second life, one fractured into separate bodies, broken away from the wheel of life and death and rebirth. Nathalie did not know the full story, had only pieced together hints of it from what her priest, Hurbon, had told her. When he was a younger man, Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared on the Earth amid the debris of a spaceship that had been destroyed outside of the atmosphere. But, driven mad by the damage that the accident had inflicted upon her body, she had come to the société’s temple in the Louisiana swamps and demanded blood sacrifice. That sacrifice had been wild and desperate and had involved dancing and fornication and, ultimately, the shedding of limbs in her name. Papa Hurbon had lost his legs to his goddess in those crazy days of debauchery, and in return she had brought him a brief taste of paradise as she set about eradicating all life on Earth. Her plan had failed when a group of self-designated protectors of humankind called Cerberus had intervened, petitioning Hurbon’s aid before forcing the broken aspects of Ezili’s body to combine in the heart of the fusion generator. Hurbon had helped, employing his arcane knowledge to draw the fractured aspects of Ezili’s body to one location. And, in so doing, he had gained a hold on Ezili Coeur Noir, weaving her spirit into his fith-fath and so momentarily controlling the uncontrollable. She was unstable even now, locked inside the generator, but at least she was where Hurbon could contain her.

“Death must be bypassed,” Hurbon continued, “and to do that we must first embrace it.”

“Do you...intend to kill yourself, Papa?” Nathalie asked, her tone wary.

Hurbon turned to her at last, a golden canine tooth in his top jaw glinting in the flickering candlelight, dark gaps in his lower jaw where other teeth were missing entirely. “That would be foolish, Nathalie child,” he said with that easy smile of indulgence. “Even if I gained immortality, using the dragon’s teeth, what would that be worth if I lost myself in the process? No, we have tested the teeth in Spain, in Italy, in the Congo—”

Nathalie inclined her head, stopping Hurbon in midspeech. “I am still awaiting the results of the Congo test,” she said.

“Where the locals see Heaven’s Light,” Hurbon muttered to himself, shaking his head sorrowfully. Then he looked up at Nathalie once more, piercing her with his dark-eyed stare. “To keep oneself...well, there are risks, as we have seen. Ereshkigal failed, the body never fully holding. Charun and Vanth failed, their portal collapsing.”

“And them with it,” Nathalie interjected.

“The risks of using the dragon’s teeth have been made clear,” Hurbon said, “and can be bypassed with a little patience. There is just one risk left. And to counter that I shall need someone from the société, someone loyal.”

“I know just the person,” Nathalie assured him, thinking of a desperate member of his parish whose loyalty was beyond question.

“Bring them,” Hurbon instructed, “and together we shall spring the trap that brings Cerberus down forever and grants us immortality and eternal reign over this beautiful mud ball we call Earth.”

Chapter 2

Brigid Baptiste awoke with a start.

The sounds of the Cerberus redoubt filtered through the walls and door of her private apartment, faint but offering a reassuring background, reminding her that life goes on. The apartment was located on one of the upper levels, away from the operations rooms, testing labs and other facilities housed within the redoubt, an old military complex that dated back to before the nukecaust and had been retrofitted to accommodate the Cerberus operation.

It was usually quiet here, whatever the time was. The staff at Cerberus worked in shifts, and people respected that someone was always sleeping no matter what hour of the day it was. But the sounds of talking, of laughter, seemed to echo through her door today.

Brigid shifted, turning onto her side and reaching for the lamp. She squinted her eyes as she brushed the lamp’s side, switching it on with her touch. Beside the lamp, the notebook she kept at her bedside had been moved. Brigid had an eidetic memory, one that was photographic, and it remembered details like that. The book had been rotated twenty degrees from where she had left it. Her incredible memory could make her a little precise sometimes in the things she did.

She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties with an athletic body and long locks of red hair that curled past her shoulders to a point midway down her spine. Her eyes were emerald green, bright with a fire of curiosity. Her assessing gaze suggested a voracious intellect, while her full lips promised passion; Brigid was indeed intelligent and passionate and much more besides. An ex-archivist from Cobaltville, she had been expelled from the ville when she had helped uncover a millennia-long conspiracy designed to subjugate humankind. The conspiracy dated all the way back to the presence on Earth of the alien race called the Annunaki, who had posed as gods from the heavens and been worshipped and adored by primitive humans. Their intrigues had become legend, their infighting the basis of many of humanity’s myths—but the Annunaki were all too real. Brigid could assure you of that fact because she had been there when they had returned to the Earth in the care of their dragon-like wombship, Tiamat, and been reborn to subjugate humankind once more. They had failed, not in the least due to the concerted efforts of Brigid and her companions in the Cerberus organization, a military-style group dedicated to the protection of humanity and its freedoms.

Brigid had joined Cerberus after her expulsion from Cobaltville along with two disgraced Magistrates called Kane and Grant, and a feral child called Domi who had been living as a sex slave for a beast called Guana Teague. Their lives had moved on an awfully long way from that early meeting.

Brigid reached for the notepad, saw in that instant that there were words written upon it. She turned the pad slowly, looking at the words. There were two words—“emit part”—written in her hand, albeit shakily. The words were written not on a line but in a circle, like so:

Automatic writing, Brigid realized as she looked at the strange words, presumably written without conscious thought while she was asleep. Well, that was new.

But what did it mean? Obviously, something had disturbed her in the night; something had caused her to write those words on her notebook, an item that often seemed a redundant indulgence when her memory was such a keen tool and yet could sometimes elicit the answer to a nagging problem from the day before. After all, what would a woman with a photographic memory ever need to write down?

She lay in bed, the covers pulled up high to stay warm, holding the pad and gazing at the topmost sheet.

Emit part.

It meant nothing to her. What was the part? What did it emit? It was dream writing, the kind that adheres to the logic of the subconscious, whose meaning is lost when the waking mind takes over.

Brigid held the pad before her, stared at the letters until her eyes lost focus and stared beyond it into the whiteness of the page, turning the letters into a blur. From outside her suite, Brigid heard familiar voices raised in a friendly discussion peppered with joyful laughter, but the sound barely registered on her consciousness.

Eventually, she set down the pad, pushed back the covers and got out of the bed. The new day awaited, whatever it might bring.

Chapter 3

Kane stepped out of a window in quantum space and into a hail of bullets. He stumbled back under the assault, shouting a command to his three partners before they, too, emerged from the interphase gateway that had materialized in thin air behind him amid the ruins of the Turkish fort.

“Abort the mission!” Kane shouted as his partners stepped out of the quantum ether amid a multicolored swirl laced through with lightning forks. Even as he spoke, he felt the passage of a bullet burn like hellfire across his right bicep, channeling a lance of white-hot pain through his arm.

Behind him, the same bullet—or maybe another from the same source, since it was impossible to be certain amid the hail of gunfire—slammed against the shining surface of the interphaser unit in a shriek of rending metal, sending out a shower of sparks and shattered plating in its wake.

Kane saw the quantum window collapse on itself at that moment, two conjoined cones of multicolored light streaked through with witch-fire lightning, disappearing in the space of a heartbeat, even as his partners stepped from their impossible depths.

The quantum gateway had been generated by the interphaser, a highly advanced device that used a hidden web of pathways across the globe and beyond to move people and objects great distances—even as far as other planets in the solar system—in the blink of an eye. Utilizing principles laid out by an ancient star-born race of aliens, the interphaser was a portable teleportation device which tapped into a network of so-called parallax points to deliver its users to their selected destination. Parallax points were widespread but not infinite, and as such their locations enforced their own strict limitation on where a user might travel—as one could only travel to and from a specific, designated parallax point, not create one at will. These parallax points had often become sites of religious and spiritual interest as primitive man sensed the strange forces contained within them. However, while the interphaser gave Kane and his Cerberus teammates an incredible measure of freedom in their travels across the globe, there was one very obvious problem with any teleportation system, one writ large as life before Kane’s eyes as he dived to the ground with the burn of the bullet stinging against his arm: you just never knew what you were materializing into.

“Down!” Kane cried, slamming against the sandy dirt as the roar of gunfire continued all around him, bullets riddling the ground like rain in a monsoon.

Kane and his partners had emerged in the ruins of an ancient fort, roughly sixty miles south of the Mediterranean Sea in the part of the African continent known as Libya. The fort had no doubt been impressive in its heyday, but now it looked like a scattering of sand-colored slabs—some significantly larger than a Deathbird helicopter—sprawled across the sandy scrub of the Bir Hakeim Oasis. The stones reminded Kane of a graveyard, its gravestones created in colossal proportions as if to mark the passing of titans. Appropriate, perhaps, as the place was yet another reminder of how much of history seemed to have been lost with the nukecaust two hundred years before.

There was a wide crack running through the center of the dilapidated compound, twelve feet across at its widest point and deep enough that its sides disappeared into stygian darkness, even under the relentless brilliance of the midafternoon sun. That sun was obscured by dark cloud cover intermingled with the dense smoke of explosions.

There were at least eighty other people here, Kane guessed as he rolled out of the path of another hail of bullets, one hand clapped against the sting of his arm. Two groups—tribes, gangs, armies, call them what you will—using the ruined fort for cover as they traded bullets from automatic weapons, the sound of gunfire like a thunderstorm echoing across the fallen stones and beyond.

The place had been the site of a Turkish fort a long time ago, back when state borders and ethnic groups mattered, before the nuclear holocaust had rewritten everything in the wink of an eye. It was estimated that 90 percent of the world’s human population had died in the scant few moments that had constituted the nuclear war, and even though two hundred years had passed since those retina-searing bombs had dropped, it seemed that humankind was still striving to recover.

One of Kane’s partners—Brigid Baptiste—was shouting to be heard over the roar of the conflict. “The interphaser’s compromised,” she said. “It’s not respond—”

Another roar of gunfire cut across Brigid’s words, a line of dust plumes accompanying each cough as bullets drilled into the ground all around her. Beside her, another woman—older, with a lean frame and short, dark hair that showed a few traces of gray—wove through the barrage, crouched down and closed her eyes, covering her head with her hands. This was Mariah Falk, a geologist for the Cerberus organization who, unlike the others, was inexperienced in combat situations.

“Get your head down!” the fourth member of the team—a gigantic, dark-skinned man called Grant—yelled, scooping Mariah up in one of his mighty arms and part lifting, part throwing her out of the line of fire. As he did so, another swarm of bullets came lunging through the air, drilling into the dirt and rattling against the chrome sides of the interphaser where it waited on the ground. As they struck, Brigid leaped in the opposite direction, diving for cover behind something that looked like a fallen obelisk.

The world seemed to spin around Mariah as Grant released his grip on her. Still moving, she seemed for a moment to dance toward the cover of a fallen stone archway that, even in its ruinous state, still loomed twice the height of Mariah herself. Then she slammed against it, back and shoulders striking it in a solid thump accompanied by a woof of expelled air from her lungs. She wore a camo jacket like the others, pants and hiking boots, and she had a leather satchel hanging behind her, its strap stretching in a diagonal line across her chest and back. Mariah was slight of frame and, though not conventionally pretty, she had an easy smile and a kindly way that put most people at ease. Right now, however, neither her easy smile nor her homespun charm were likely to help save her life. Instead, she took deep breaths and tried to hold down her breakfast as a drumbeat of bullets caromed off the other side of the stone archway she was pressed against. It was cover—scant but holding—and she knew it was the only thing keeping her alive in those frantic, heart-stopping moments. How did the others cope with this as part and parcel of their everyday lives? she wondered.

Grant scrambled out of the path of the bullets, darting past Mariah and ducking down behind the far side of the collapsed archway. “What the hell did we walk into?” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard over the cymbal crash of bullets.

Grant was a tall man with a muscular body and mahogany skin, his head was shaved and he sported a goatee. An ex-Magistrate in his midthirties, Grant was dressed in a camo jacket similar to his partners’, though it did nothing to disguise his hulking proportions, as well as a Kevlar duster. As Grant scrambled out of the line of fire, it was hard to miss the sheer power that was contained within his well-defined muscles—there was not an ounce of fat on his whole body.

“Don’t know,” Kane answered through clenched teeth, still pressing one hand against his arm where the bullet had glanced off his protective shadow suit, his back against a half-collapsed wall a little way from his partner. “Some kind of local trouble by the look of it.”

Kane was a tall man in his early thirties with broad shoulders and rangy limbs. His dark hair was cropped short and his eyes were the gray-blue color of steel. An ex-Magistrate like Grant, Kane wore a light jacket—desert camouflage colors—that reached down past his waist and featured a dozen pockets of various sizes, light-colored pants and calf-high boots whose leather had the satisfying creases of shoes that have been worn in. Beneath this, Kane wore another layer of clothes, the black all-in-one body glove known as a shadow suit, and it was this that had deflected the 9 mm bullet that had grazed his arm like an angry wasp when he’d stepped from the interphase window. Constructed from a superstrong nanoweave, the shadow suit was a skintight environmental suit that could regulate the wearer’s body temperature, even in extremes of heat and cold. While it was not bulletproof, the strong weave could repel blunt trauma and deflect small-caliber bullets, minimizing injury. Right now, Kane’s arm burned where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, but its full impact had been reduced thanks to the armor-strong weave of the protective suit.

There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his rangy, loping strides and his personality, for he could be both a loner and pack leader, depending on circumstance. Right now he was here as an operative of Cerberus, the outlawed organization that dealt in the esoteric, with a particular emphasis on protecting humankind from the hidden forces, human and alien, that seemed always arrayed against it. Together with Grant and Brigid, Kane formed one-third of Cerberus Away Team—or CAT—Alpha.

Between Kane and his partners was the interphaser, its square base and pyramidal sides now dotted with the impact of bullets so that it looked as if some carnivorous creature had sunk its teeth into it. Brigid was staring at it from her own hiding place behind a fallen obelisk of stone that lay close to the mighty rent in the ground.

“How do we get out of here now?” Brigid asked, reaching for the weapon holstered at her hip. She was dressed in a similar camouflage outfit to the others. Theirs was a noble pursuit, but sometimes it seemed that walking into a hail of bullets was a too-frequent part of the job. Almost as though to illustrate this, Brigid unholstered the TP-9 semiautomatic that she habitually wore at her hip, unlocked the safety and scanned their surroundings with alert eyes. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol finished in molded matte black with a covered targeting scope across the top. “Well?”

“Don’t ask me,” Kane spit, ducking his head down as another volley of bullets came hurtling past overhead. “I’m fresh out of ideas. Besides, I thought you were the brains of this outfit, Baptiste!”

Brigid glared at him. “Brains, yes. Miracle maker—that’s your department, I believe.”

“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Belief will get you a miracle, all right.” As he spoke, he performed a long-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. The maneuver activated the catch on a holster located on the underside of Kane’s forearm, commanding a retractable blaster to his hand from its hiding place beneath his jacket’s sleeve. Kane’s weapon was a fourteen-inch-long automatic pistol called a Sin Eater, a compact hand blaster able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The weapon was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one, and a Mag’s judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch feels natural on a habitual wearer.

Back pressed tightly to the wall, Kane poked his head above the edge of the sand-colored bricks and scanned the area. There were people moving in all directions, some in groups, some alone, all of them armed. Some were dressed in semi-military uniforms, cobbled-together outfits that created a ragtag kind of uniformity. Others wore civilian clothing that looked like a cross between a long coat and a woman’s nightdress. All of them were scrambling through the ruins and blasting at one another with a wide variety of weapons. Someone must have seen the interphase window open and figured it for a bomb or a rocket launch or something—with the place full of hair-triggered nut balls the way it was, it was little wonder, Kane concluded, that someone had tried to blast the interphaser to smithereens.

Kane continued scanning the area beyond for a few moments, as another rush of bullets came rattling against the far side of his protective wall. Kane spotted a long-barreled machine gun on a tripod mount, hitched above one of the few remaining walls on the second level of the ruined fortress. It was unleashing serious damage on the fighters below in a continuous stream of 24 mm slugs. Four soldiers fell to its assault even as he watched.

Across from him, Grant and Brigid were scanning other sections of the collapsed fort, while Mariah just kept her head down, flinching at each new shout of a gun being blasted, each pee-ow of a bullet’s flight. They had appeared, it seemed, smack-dab in the middle of the ruined fort—which was smack-dab in the middle of what seemed to be a raging war zone.

“Nowhere to run,” Grant concluded, peering left and right, front and back. As he spoke, he pulled a Copperhead assault subgun—almost two feet of thick black pipe with mounted laser scope—from a hidden holster rig under his jacket and was already ducking back behind the cover of a fallen stone archway, scanning for targets.

The Copperhead was a favored field weapon of Grant’s. The grip and trigger were in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the long length of barrel to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant favored the Copperhead for its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.

“We can’t fight them all,” Brigid reasoned, even though she looked set to try.

“I don’t want to fight anyone,” Mariah added, ducking lower as a bullet clipped the archway six inches from her left shoulder.

Kane nodded in resignation. “Libya,” he muttered. “I think I hate the place already and I ain’t been here two minutes.”

Chapter 4

Several hours earlier and a continent away, Mariah Falk had been running an analysis on some data she had received from her earthquake monitoring equipment when her interest was piqued.

A geologist for the Cerberus organization, Mariah was a twenty-first-century émigré who had found herself in the postnukecaust world after being cryogenically frozen, alongside a number of other top scientists and military personnel, on the Manitius Moon Base. The Moon Base had been rediscovered in the twenty-third century by Cerberus explorers, who had revived its residents and given them a new home on Earth in the Cerberus redoubt.

The redoubt was located in one of the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, North America, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog. The shaman had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago, and Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so keep his friends undisturbed.

Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom, like Mariah, had been cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.

Cerberus relied on two dedicated orbiting satellites—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humanity. Gaining access to the satellites had taken countless hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range where they chattered incessantly with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth as well as providing almost instantaneous communication with its agents across the globe, wherever they might be, and it was this stream of data that provided Mariah with cause to investigate further.

Mariah traced the tip of her index finger across her computer screen, which was located in a small, rectangular office with off-white walls and harsh lighting, and set in a large rig that hung from the high ceiling. She was alone, a cup of coffee beside the computer screen.

“A blip,” she muttered to herself, frowning, “a definite blip.”

She cross-referenced the blip with the location coordinates and satellite feed data from Cerberus’s mighty data banks, tapping commands into her computer keyboard. She reached for her cup as the computer whirred, bringing up the data she had requested. It took just a few moments for Mariah to confirm the location of the blip: it was in the North African territory that was still called Libya on her maps.

“Lakesh is going to want to see this,” Mariah muttered, tapping the command key to print off the data. As the printer rumbled to life, Mariah swigged from her cup and grimaced, discovering that her coffee had gone cold. Ghastly. Still, if cold coffee had been the worst of her worries today, she could have rested easy.

* * *

THE CERBERUS OPERATIONS ROOM was abuzz with activity as Mariah brought her findings to the attention of the founder of the organization. It was an environment where many highly educated personnel operated in harmony, plotting out field missions and surveying data. Mariah had not always been confident here, feeling somewhat intimidated by the array of physics and chemistry degrees possessed by the on-call staff. In the past two and half years, however, she had grown in confidence, beginning with a relationship with an oceanographer called Clem Bryant. Clem had encouraged Mariah to be more involved in the fieldwork that was crucial to her discipline, something she had at first shied away from when she had been faced with this dangerous new world. But Clem had been killed during an enemy infiltration of the redoubt base, and he had died protecting Mariah from attackers. She still thought of him often, a year after his death, and she regretted that their relationship had not developed further, that he was no longer with her to help guide her and assist the Cerberus operation.

The ops room was a huge space with a high roof and two aisles of computer terminals, lit indirectly so as not to distract their operators. Carved from the inside of the mountain itself, the ceiling looked like the roof of a cave. Within that space, twenty-four computer desks ran from left to right, facing a giant screen on which specific findings could be highlighted.

A giant Mercator map dominated one wall—it was dated, still showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The map was sprinkled with numerous glowing locator dots, which were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. Those highlighted routes were not flight paths, however, but the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network that the Cerberus redoubt had originally been tasked to monitor over two hundred years ago.

Developed for the US military, the mat-trans network was primarily confined to North America, although a few outposts could be found farther afield at US air bases in Germany, Scotland and other parts of Europe.

A separate chamber leading off from one corner of the operations room, far from the wide entry doors, contained the Cerberus installation’s mat-trans unit along with a small anteroom that could be sealed off if necessary. The chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color.

Lakesh studied Mariah’s findings with an inscrutable gaze. “What am I looking at here, Mariah?” he asked. More formally known as Mohandas Lakesh Singh, he was a man of medium height with dusky skin, vivid blue eyes and black hair threaded with gray who appeared to be in his midfifties. His hair was slicked back from a high forehead, and he had an aquiline nose and refined mouth. A highly skilled cyberneticist and theoretical physicist from the twentieth century, Lakesh had been cryogenically frozen and endured organ transplants to survive well into his two hundred and fiftieth year. He led the Cerberus operation, albeit as more of a manager than an active investigator, guiding its fifty-strong complement of staff in the protection of humankind from threats outside and within. Lakesh wore a white jumpsuit with a blue, diagonal zipper running up its front, as did Mariah and the other people in the room. This outfit was the standard uniform of the base, although some chose to augment the look with their own accoutrements, giving them an air of individuality amid the vast operation.

“I think it’s a sinkhole,” Mariah said a little timidly. “It’s opened up in the Libyan territory, roughly sixty miles south of Tobruk. I found it after we recorded some seismic activity in the area.”

Lakesh nodded, comparing the close-up image to a wider map of the area. “And why do you feel this should concern us?”

“Because there’s a parallax point at that location,” Mariah explained, “or at least very close to it.”

Still holding the printed-out sheet of data, Lakesh stroked his chin sagely. “That is certainly a worry.” Although Cerberus had originally been dedicated to the use of the man-made mat-trans network, in recent years Lakesh had helped construct the interphaser, which tapped into the ancient parallax-points system to enable instantaneous travel across the globe. Changes at the location points were not unheard of, but changes on a geological level could mean something more significant was occurring there. “Could you explain to me what a sinkhole is?” he asked.

Mariah smiled her sweet smile, comfortable at last to be able to discuss something within her specific realm of expertise. “Sinkholes are depressions in the ground caused by a collapse of the surface layer,” she explained. “This can be through human activity—such as mining. Or it may occur through natural changes to the environment, as with suffusion where a buried cave may be revealed due to problems relating to water drainage, for example—the water weakens the rocks over the cave until they collapse, revealing the cave beneath.”

“And how large might such a sinkhole be?” Lakesh asked.

“They have occurred at sizes from a couple of feet to over two thousand feet wide,” Mariah told him, “and with the same depth variables.”

“So this thing in Libya,” Lakesh mused, raising his eyebrows in surprise, “might be two thousand feet deep?”

“The data shows it’s significant,” Mariah said, “which is to say it’s deep, but we’d need to put someone on the ground to measure that with any level of accuracy.”

Lakesh nodded thoughtfully. “The parallax points frequently occur at sites of specific religious significance,” he said, “but they have become so because of their earlier purpose as sites used in alien transportation. If a sinkhole has opened a path into one of those sites, then...” He trailed off, but his meaning was clear enough.

“Precisely,” Mariah agreed.

Lakesh turned to a man stationed at a nearby desk who was currently poring through screen after screen of computer language, checking each line for a bug in the program. The man had ginger hair that was wild and tangled in front, where he kept unconsciously running his fingers through it, and he wore a permanent expression of worry on his face. This was Donald Bry, computer expert and Lakesh’s right-hand man.

“Donald,” Lakesh began, “how soon can we scramble CAT Alpha for a recon mission?”

“CAT Alpha,” Bry repeated, looking away in recollection. “They’re all on-site right now, Dr. Singh. Brigid’s fully recovered from her ankle injury, so they should be able to depart inside of ninety minutes.”

“Call them,” Lakesh said. “I’m going to plot out alternative parallax points in case our preferred destination has—” He stopped, unsure what to say.

“Sunk?” Mariah offered.

“Yes, sunk,” Lakesh agreed with a smile. “That’s very good, Mariah. A sense of humor; I like that. Sunk.”

Mariah followed Lakesh to the mat-trans chamber located in one corner of the room, from which he could activate the interphaser and do a run-through of the parallax points.

* * *

KANE HAD BEEN PRACTICING in the Cerberus firing range when the call came through. The range was located in a subbasement, close to the armory, which stocked multiple units of almost every firearm available, from single-shot .22-caliber Derringer pistols to surface-to-air Dragon Launchers capable of taking an aircraft out of the sky. He had a Colt Officer’s ACP in his right hand, a compact and lightweight automatic pistol with an aluminum frame, which still handled large-caliber bullets granting it respectable capability for its size. It was a good weapon to use for practice, even though it was not one that Kane would choose for the field.

Before him, three drop-down targets came into view, paper sheets, each showing a life-size, faceless silhouette like a shadow, each silhouette containing a diagram of circles showing particular vulnerable points, head, heart and so on. The targets appeared at random, between sixty and one hundred feet from where Kane was standing at one end of the firing range, and they cycled toward him on an automated track located on a rig above the firing field. Music was playing from large speakers rigged high against the walls, the booming bass and heavy guitars muffling the loud reports of the Colt as it spit bullets from its muzzle.

Kane stroked the trigger as the next set of targets appeared, moving his perfectly straight arm in a swift arc to deliver two bullets to each target as they were winched along their tracks toward him. As the targets trundled closer, wounds now showing in their heads and hearts, Kane worked the ammunition release on the Colt. In an instant he had loaded a fresh clip and switched the Colt into his left hand, before bringing that arm up and sending another rapid arc of bullets into the looming targets, the closest of which was now thirty feet from him.

Kane relaxed as the second clip clicked on empty, watching as the paper targets completed their wobbling path toward the near end of the range. He smiled as he saw the results of his efforts—he had hit all twelve times, scoring the center ring of the target with ten of the twelve shots. His right hand was dominant and so he had little doubt that he could hit the targets with that—he had been trained as a Magistrate since birth, combination law enforcer and soldier whose sole purpose was to efficiently operate the weapons he was assigned—and to be a weapon himself. But his left was also strong, not quite as fast, nor as accurate, but enough that he could take out a target at forty feet without going wide.

Kane removed the target sheets from their fastenings and tossed them behind him, adding them to the piled-high trash can that was located beneath one of the roaring speakers. Then he flipped a switch located at the side of his booth which sent the command to restart the session, providing clean new targets with which to hone his prowess. When it came to using guns, there was no such thing as too accurate, Kane knew.

As the first of the new targets dropped down, a device called a Commtact came to life inside Kane’s skull, sending a radio communication message directly into his inner ear. “Kane, this is Donald,” the voice in Kane’s head said, drowning out the prerecorded wail of guitars. “Do you think you can prep for a recon mission setting off in the next ninety minutes?”

“Roger that,” Kane acknowledged, squeezing the Colt’s trigger and sending bullet after bullet into the silhouetted skull of his would-be opponent. The Commtact was a remarkable communications device that Kane and his fellow Cerberus field operatives relied upon for global communications. The Commtact was a small, radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin. The subdermal devices were top-of-the-line communications units, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus rebels. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as offering radio communications, the Commtacts could function as translation devices, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the user’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. This functionality also meant that the Commtacts could pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user, which meant that it was unnecessary to speak aloud to utilize the communication function. Broadcasts from the unit were relayed through the Keyhole communications satellite to anywhere in the world.

Thanks to the nature of the vibration system used by the Commtact, if a user went completely deaf they would still, in theory, be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

“Where to?” Kane asked as he finished the clip.

“Mat-trans chamber for departure to Libya,” Donald confirmed before signing off.

“Great,” Kane said, delivering the last bullet of his clip into the silhouetted head of one of the targets.

* * *

CAT ALPHA ASSEMBLED fifty minutes later in the Cerberus operations room. Kane was joined by his two partners, Grant and Brigid. All three were being outfitted for the operation while Lakesh and Mariah outlined her discovery and what they would be looking for.

“Big hole in the ground,” Kane said, nodding. “I think we’re capable of spotting that. Y’know, if we look real hard.”

Lakesh ignored the man’s sarcasm. “If this sinkhole has disrupted the parallax point, then your arrival may not be possible,” he said. “I suggest you travel prepared.”

Grant shrugged, broad shoulders shifting like an avalanche. “We always travel prepared, Lakesh,” he said. “Just part o’ the job.”

“It may be that the floor has dropped out from under the parallax point itself,” Mariah outlined, “or that the materialization point is surrounded by damaged terrain such that we are unable to investigate further.”

Kane raised an eyebrow. “We, Mariah?”

“Ms. Falk will be joining you, friend Kane,” Lakesh confirmed. “I want an expert on-site in case we only get one chance to look at what’s happened.”

Kane considered bemoaning having to chaperone a civilian, but he said nothing out loud. He liked Mariah; she was trustworthy and dependable, the kind of operative who formed the backbone of the Cerberus team. Instead he said, “We might be better looking on our own for a first visit.”

“As I say, Kane, I want Mariah with you in case this is your only visit,” Lakesh said. “If there’s any sign of danger, I am certain that you will handle it and get her, and your team, out of there.”

Kane nodded. “Yeah.” It was all part of the mission.

Grant checked his Copperhead assault rifle, securing the ammo clip before slipping it into the holster rig under his jacket. “Are you bringing a gun, Mariah?” he asked, his voice a deep rumble like distant thunder.

Falk shook her head.

“Then stay behind us.”

Together, Kane, Grant, Brigid and Mariah entered the mat-trans chamber, outfitted in camo suits to better blend with the terrain they were about to leap into. The interphaser was waiting in the center of the chamber, already powered up and ready to start the jump. Lakesh spoke from the doorway as the field team made their way into the chamber.

“I’ve taken the liberty of tapping several nearby parallax points in case your destination proves disagreeable,” he explained. “They are highlighted on the screen—you just need to select one of these alternates as required and the interphaser will begin its jump cycle.”

“Thanks, Lakesh,” Brigid said, running her eyes across the narrow horizontal strip of screen that was located at the base of the pyramidal unit. “Do you know what we’re jumping into?” she asked.

“The area’s called the Bir Hakeim Oasis,” Lakesh said. “It’s in a desert and was once the site of a strategic stronghold for the Turkish military, and it was the location of a bloody battle during World War II.”

“And what’s there now?” Kane asked.

Lakesh smiled. “You can tell me that, friend Kane, in about two minutes.”

With that, Lakesh left the chamber and Brigid activated the interphaser. A swirling tempest of color blossomed from the interphaser, forming two cones of light with the mat-trans chamber, one above the deck and the other, somehow, beneath it. A moment later, Kane led the way into those impossible depths, stepping into the quantum window and onward to a ruined fort in the Libyan desert.

Chapter 5

Kane ducked back behind the pillar, pressing himself and Mariah against it as another jarring scatter of bullets rattled against its edge.

“You okay?” he asked, watching the scene playing out all around them.

“Fine,” Mariah said, her voice high and breathless. “What about you? That bullet—”

“Shadow suit,” Kane said by way of explanation.

Although she didn’t consider herself a field agent, Mariah knew what Kane meant. While Kane might be sporting a bruise for the next few days where the bullet had struck against his arm in a hammer blow, it was a preferable alternative to what would have happened had he not been wearing the miraculous armor weave.

Kane remained tense, watching as the two armies—if indeed it was only two, it was hard to tell—exchanged fire, striking down unfortunate soldiers in sudden spills of red blood. It looked a lot like chaos, but then, in Kane’s experience, when it came down to it most ground wars did. “They’re not moving in unison,” he muttered, making a conscious effort to focus on a specific group—platoon or squadron, maybe?—who were all dressed in similar dirty white robes.

“What?” Mariah asked, confused and feeling woefully out of her depth.

Kane ignored her query, instead engaging his Commtact and hailing his partners, who had taken cover less than twenty feet away. “They’re not moving in unison, have you noticed?” he asked.

Brigid’s voice came back first, the confusion evident. She was crouched on her haunches beside a mangled column of stonework whose top had been sheared through as if bitten away by some gigantic monster, trying to piece the broken interphaser unit back together. “They’re not what?” she asked.

“Moving,” Kane said, “in unison. They’re shooting and they’re kind of moving forward in one direction, but there’s no strategy between the players.”

“Inexperienced, maybe?” Grant asked, chipping in on their shared frequency. He was standing close to Brigid’s hiding place, his shoulder pressed to another of the mangled stone columns, using a scope to watch the turret gun that had been set up on the upper level of the aged fort.

“Inexperienced could be it,” Kane agreed doubtfully, “but usually that brings out two styles of fighting—the gung ho who gets shot the moment he breaks cover and—”

Boom!

A shell struck near the cluster of ruined pillars, kicking up dirt and curtailing Kane’s speech for a moment.

“And?” Brigid prompted, glancing up from her work on the busted interphaser to make sure Kane was okay.

“And the coward,” Kane averred, “who hangs back and lets the others get shot. But I’m not really seeing those patterns, are you?”

“Uh-uh,” Grant confirmed after a few seconds’ observation of the running battle. “You might be onto something.” He brought the scope away from his eye, glancing across at Kane. “I don’t think the tripod cannon’s choosing targets. Its operators are firing wild.”

Kane nodded, considering what Grant had said. It wasn’t unusual for rookies to get behind a big cannon like that and shoot wild, figuring that something with such destructive power would just seek out and obliterate any target. But it was a fool’s game operating it like that—you went through ammo much quicker than you went through targets, and could often be caught with your metaphorical pants down when an armed enemy came close. Which wasn’t to underestimate the sheer destructive power of the cannon itself—CAT Alpha would do well to take it out of action if they wanted to survive the mess they had walked into.

“Think you can take out the cannon?” Kane asked Grant over the Commtact.

Grant smiled. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, edging out from behind the protective pillar.

“I’ll cover you,” Kane promised, stroking the Sin Eater pistol already clutched in his hand, “and keep an eye on the girls here.”

Sharing the Commtact frequency, Brigid glared at Kane with an annoyed “Hey!” before turning her attention back to her work.

* * *

GRANT WOVE OUT INTO the melee, ducking his head and scrambling as bullets zipped through the air less than a dozen feet away. His shadow suit and Kevlar coat would give him some protection, but it didn’t pay to get slack in a battle zone like this.

Grant ran, muscles moving with the fluidity of a jungle cat, hurrying across the sand-covered ground in short, fast bursts, using every hunk of broken stone and every fallen body as cover while he constantly updated his best route to the tripod cannon. The cannon was located on a second-story balustrade, its two young operators feeding a belt of bullets into its side as they swung the nose back and forth on its counterweights. Grant estimated that the cannon spit its 24 mm slugs at a rate of three or four per second, kicking up dirt and striking down the occasional solider too dumb or rattled to get out of its path in time. The army was moving away from the fort, so targets were becoming more spread out.

Grant crouched behind a truncated pillar resting on its side in pieces, searching the second story for a way up. The level was broken haphazardly, great chunks of the walkway missing. Can’t have made it easy to get that beast up there, Grant thought dourly.

A flight of steps caught his attention, winding up behind a masking wall and leading to the upper level of the ancient fort. It was open ground between Grant and the steps, just twenty feet but more than enough to take a bullet and end it all.

Grant glanced around, scouring the combat zone as a group of bloodstained soldiers came rushing past in a flurry of bullets. As Grant watched, one of the soldiers—little more than a kid, skinny and narrow shouldered, wearing camos stained with sweat and dirt—took a bullet to the back from the tripod cannon and went down on his knees, his face slamming into the dirt a moment later. His colleagues shouted something incomprehensible, shooting back at the cannon and all around them in a wild assault before vacating the area.

Suddenly, the cannon stopped firing, and the whole scene was beset with an eerie moment of calm amid the carnage. Grant took that moment to run, ducking low and keeping his head down, closing the twenty-foot gap between his hiding place and the stairwell that led to the second story.

* * *

FROM HIS OWN hiding place, Kane watched Grant make a run for it in the momentary quiet between cannon blasts. Come on, Grant, he mouthed, his eyes scouring the terrain all around his partner for any signs of a hidden ambush.

For a moment it looked as though Grant’s path would remain clear. Then, with no warning, a figure emerged from the shadows of a toppled pillar, holding an AK-47 rifle with a wide bandage wrapped low over his forehead. He had Grant in his sights, Kane could tell. Kane gently let out the breath he was holding, squeezing the trigger of his Sin Eater on the exhale.

* * *

GRANT WAS ALMOST at the stairwell entry when the soldier came bungling out from the shadow of a pillar. The man looked unsteady on his feet, and he was dressed in dirty fatigues with the brutal tool of an AK-47 clutched in his hands. There was something else, too, that Grant registered in the first instant he saw the man—he was wearing a white bandage across the top of his head, and the bandage came down to the level of his nostrils, entirely covering his eyes.

“What th—?” Grant asked even as the stranger turned his AK-47 on him.

Before he could fire, however, the bandaged soldier dropped to the ground, the distinctive recoil of a Sin Eater being discharged echoing amid the chaos of battle, a bloom of ghastly red materializing on the man’s fatigues where they covered his chest.

Kane!

Grant kept running. He would thank his partner later; right now he needed to get himself behind that wall and up those stairs to knock out the cannon that had already recommenced its incessant song of destruction from above him.

An instant later Grant was past the stone arch of the doorway and scrambling, blaster in hand, up the steep steps that led to the fort’s second level.

The archway was made from sand-colored stone, as were the steps. As Grant stepped into the shadows, he felt the heat of the burning sun on his face drop away, a relief of sudden coolness from the shade. In that instant, however, he was momentarily blind, his vision flickering in extremes of green as it tried to adjust after the brilliance of the direct sunlight. He took a moment, just a moment, to blink back his sun blindness, taking a pace forward onto the first stone step. The staircase curved around, winding up on itself as it ascended to the second story.

Two more steps and his vision was still restricted by the aftereffects of the sun...and Grant was in the sights of an attacker. He felt the movement of the breeze as the man stepped forward, lunging downward with the long blade of the knife he held, driving it toward Grant’s face.

Grant reared back, sweeping his left arm up to knock the blade aside by instinct alone. He still couldn’t see, not fully, his eyes rendering the figure attacking him from the shadows as a kind of dark blur of limbs and torso.

The man—and it was a man—spit something in a tongue Grant didn’t recognize. His Commtact tried to translate, came up with a phrase that was doubtless a curse, but sounded somehow ludicrous to his ears.

“Goat of a mother!”

But with the insult came something else—a gunshot, loud in the confines of the stone stairwell, the blast accompanied by the acrid smell of cordite. Something raced past Grant in that instant, and he heard the wall behind him give up a chunk of rock with a sound like walking on gravel.

Grant did not hesitate. Even through the retreating green mire of his eyesight, he brought his Sin Eater to bear, blasting his opponent in the left kneecap, hobbling the guy in an instant.

Grant’s attacker cried out in sudden shock and pain, stumbling forward, losing his balance on the steps above Grant. His blaster—a handheld pistol of unknown manufacture—spit again, sending a 9 mm slug at Grant in a roar of explosive propellant. The bullet struck Grant in the same instant, slamming high on his left biceps before reeling away with the impact. Grant grunted, stumbling against the wall to his right. It had been a glancing blow, clipping him below the shoulder with a lot of force but no penetration—his double layer of Kevlar and shadow suit had ensured that. But it still stung like something out of a blacksmith’s forge.

Grant raised his pistol and blasted again, sending a second shot into his opponent—now visible as the green wash across his vision retreated to a handful of spots when he blinked. The man was unshaved with an unruly mop of dark, curly hair held in place with a olive-green cap. His uniform—if you could call it that—was too tight across the chest and too large in the pants, and it looked as if it had been sewn together from scraps, albeit in a way that made for effective camouflage.

Grant stepped aside as his attacker sunk down the steps, blood seeping from his open mouth. Dead.

* * *

KANE MEANWHILE HAD his own problems. Two ragtag-looking soldiers came hurrying into the partially hidden area where he was hiding out with Mariah and Brigid, their backs to the Cerberus team. The two looked like brothers. Both were young men with dark hair and beards and scuffed uniforms that had seen better days. They each carried an AK-47 automatic rifle smeared with the pale dust of the whipped-up sand.

Kane subvocalized a warning to Brigid where she knelt working on the broken interphaser. Thanks to its remarkable mechanics, the Commtact could pick up such a gesture and amplify it for Brigid’s ear canal, turning Kane’s subvocalized “company” into a whisper.

By the time Brigid looked up, Kane had stepped silently forward, bringing the nose of his Sin Eater up until it was pressed against the side of the head of the closest soldier.

“One wrong move and I blow your brain all over your companion—capisce?”

Whether the foreign soldier did or did not “capisce”—and chances were he hadn’t comprehended a word Kane had just said—he certainly understood what a blaster pressed against his face meant. Kane smiled as the man lowered his own gun, saying something in his own tongue that the Commtact automatically translated as “No, no, not shoot.”

But even as the soldier spoke, his companion spun, alerted by his partner, raising his automatic rifle and squeezing the trigger in a heartbeat.

Kane saw the move coming, that fabled point-man sense of his kicking in like clairvoyance, leaping aside as the trigger clicked and a stream of 9 mm slugs spit in his direction, cutting down the other hapless soldier before the man could even acknowledge what was happening.

Kane dived to one side. This was not the first time his point-man sense had saved his life. He had been renowned for it, all the way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate many years before. It seemed to be an almost uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened, alerting Kane to the threat with just enough time to avoid it. There was nothing uncanny about it, however; it was merely the combination of his standard five senses, honed to an incredible degree, making him utterly aware of his surroundings. A change in wind, the noise of a scuffing boot—a hundred telltale clues gave Kane the advantage in combat, an advantage that could be the difference between life and death.

Kane hit the ground with a whuff of expelled breath, rolling his body even as a stream of 9 mm slugs chased after him across the dirt, always just a handful of inches behind him. As he rolled, Kane brought up the Sin Eater, nudging the trigger and sending his own triple burst of bullets at his attacker.

The first soldier had sunk to his knees as Kane’s bullets struck his companion, a choking noise coming from his throat. His trigger-happy companion dropped in a swirl of unguided limbs, the AK-47 swiveling up into the sky and sending off another half dozen shots before it finally quieted. Then the man lay on his back in the dirt, absolutely still, blood blooming on his chest, the automatic pointed upward like a grave marker.

“Poor sap,” Kane growled as he picked himself up and brushed dirt from his clothes. “Shouldn’t mess with an ex-Mag.”

Across from the dead soldiers, Mariah Falk was cowering beside the pillar, her face pale with exhaustion. “You—you killed them,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged with a solemn nod. But experience nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that something wasn’t right here. The excitable soldier who had shot at him and his partner didn’t seem to have much in the way of aim. Kane had leaped aside and stayed out of the path of his bullets as much by the man’s inability as his own improbable luck. Furthermore, he had shot his own colleague, which could be put down to inexperience or panic, but it still reeked of something closer to stupidity—and Kane didn’t have these two pegged as stupid, just unfortunate enough to find a fully trained hard-contact Magistrate had materialized from a wormhole in space in the spot where they hoped to hide from the battle. No, there was something else to these soldiers and their recklessness, something he wasn’t seeing yet. And, whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

Chapter 6

Grant raced up the last of the stone steps, the sound of his footsteps masked by the cacophony of the tripod cannon as it continued its deadly opera.

He waited a moment at the topmost step, crouching down and peering warily around the edge of the arched wall where it ended. There was a sort of balcony beyond, wide as a Sandcat wag and made of solid stone. There were cracks in the stone, ancient gouges where rocks had been forced together and held in place by tension. There were two operators working the turret, with a third man visible beside them. The third figure had been hidden before by his low-angled view of the balcony, but now Grant could see him and fingered him for a guard or sentry of some kind because of a stub-nosed pistol resting between his hands. The man was sitting on a box of ammunition and surrounded by almost a dozen more.

“Where do these psychos get all their ammo from?” Grant muttered to himself with a disbelieving shake of his head.

Grant brought his Sin Eater around the arch, edging it silently along the wall until the sentry was in his sights.

Pop!

The sentry keeled over as the bullet drilled through his hand, slumping forward where he sat as his right hand was reduced to a bloody smear.

Even as the man slumped forward, Grant stepped out from his hiding place, shooting again. His next bullet ripped through the arm of one of the two gunners, striking the man with such force that he went careening from his position and danced himself straight over the edge of the parapet.

The second gunner said something that Grant’s Commtact translated as “Who’s there?”

“Hands in the air where I can see them!” Grant snarled in a voice like rumbling thunder, raising the Sin Eater so that the man could see he was in the center of its sights.

Only, the man couldn’t see it, Grant realized. He was blind.

* * *

“HOW’S THAT INTERPHASER coming along, Baptiste?” Kane asked, nervously pacing back and forth as he watched the battlefield. Grant had disappeared from view up the stairwell and the general hubbub that they had walked into seemed to have moved on, for it was now playing out fifty yards away from the ruined barracks itself.

“I can’t work miracles, Kane,” Brigid told him, irritated. “Just let me work.”

“I don’t like being somewhere without a way out,” Kane growled.

“That explains your inability to hold down a relationship, then,” Brigid snapped back at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brigid glared at Kane for a few seconds, an unspoken challenge flickering between them. They were anam-charas, these two, soul friends whose relationship reached back through the folds of time, beyond their current bodies. Kane would always be watching over Brigid and she over him, the two souls entwined in a dance that stretched beyond the lines of eternity.

Mariah saw the look Brigid shot Kane from her hiding place, wondered what was going on between the two of them.

“What?” Kane asked Brigid. “You getting broody all of a sudden?”

“No,” Brigid told him. “Just wondering why we keep fighting these abominable wars for humanity when our whole lives are geared to nothing but the fight. I’ve lost everyone I cared about—Daryl, others. And look at us—we’re meant to be anam-charas, soul friends, but sole friends is about the sum of that. I just wonder how we can keep fighting for humanity when we’re so out of touch with what humanity really is.”

Kane began to respond when Grant’s voice came over the Commtact frequency, interrupting the discussion. “You wanna know why the cannon team are firing blind?” he asked. “Because they are blind!”

Automatically, Kane looked across to where the cannon was located, realizing that its seemingly incessant sputter had finally halted. “Say again?”

* * *

GRANT WAS STANDING beside the tripod cannon, holding its operator’s arm behind his back with such force that the man was bent over until he almost kissed the deck.

“I said they’re blind,” Grant elaborated. “Both operators, I think, plus their guards.”

Grant’s captive squirmed in his arms, spitting saliva on the floor as he issued a cruel curse on Grant and his family. The man’s eyes were unfocused, darting wildly in their sockets.

“The Commtact’s not doing a great job with their language,” Grant continued. “Whatever it is they’re speaking seems to be a combination of Bantu, French, slang and some local patois it can’t decipher. But from what I can tell, they’re either blind or only partially sighted.”

“And they’re operating big guns,” Kane responded, with a clear edge to his voice.

“Maybe by luck,” Grant said.

* * *

BRIGID SPOKE UP without taking her eyes from the repair work she was doing on the interphaser. “Shoot off enough bullets and you’re bound to get a few lucky shots, right?”

Kane shook his head, not disagreeing but just trying to piece everything together. The two soldiers he had dealt with had seemed—well, not real aware of their surroundings, that was for sure. Could they be blind, too?

Kane scanned the area beyond the little enclave, counting the trickle of soldiers still bumbling about amid the fortress ruin. At first glance they seemed normal enough, the usual fretful stalking of people on the edge of stress. But look again, and Kane thought he detected more of an aimlessness to their progress, as though they perhaps couldn’t see where it was they were headed, were just drawn to the noise of battle.

Kane scampered forward, reached for one of the two soldiers he had dealt swift justice to mere moments earlier. They looked normal, and even their eyes looked normal. How do you know a man’s blind?

“Baptiste, protect the civilian,” Kane instructed, referring to Mariah.

Before Brigid could so much as look up, Kane was off, hurrying into the wreck of the fortress, head down and blaster in his hand.

“Dammit, Kane, do you always have to be so blasted impetuous?” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. Then she called over to Mariah, working the catch on her hip holster where she housed her TP-9 semiautomatic.

“Mariah, you know how to use a gun, right?”

Falk looked uncertain, her eyes fixed on the pistol in Brigid’s hand. “Um...kind of.”

Brigid handed the geologist the gun. “Point and shoot,” she summarized. “Anyone gets too close that you don’t like the look of, just blast them. Not Kane, though. He can be annoying sometimes, but he’ll only get more annoying if you put a hole in him.”

Then Brigid turned her attention back to the interphaser, hoping to be able to trigger a pathway out of this mess. Lakesh had programmed in a half dozen escape vectors if she could just get the wretched thing functioning.

* * *

KANE SCRAMBLED, GLANCING up at the mounted cannon and seeing Grant’s shaved head peeking up over the angle of the deck.

Five ramshackle soldiers were trekking over the ground, finding their way past the wreckage that littered the terrain. Kane dodged past them, spotting a straggler who had opted to stick to the shadows that ran alongside the walls. The young man’s rifle rocked in one hand as he felt his way along the wall with the other.

“Kane, that you down there?” Grant’s voice came over the Commtact.

“Gonna try something,” Kane explained without slowing his pace. “Cover me, okay?”

Kane reached the lone figure in a few loping strides, coming around and behind him to reduce the chances of the guy shooting him. The man was young and dressed in a loose, dirt-smeared top which billowed as the wind caught it. The AK-47 rifle in his hands was scuffed with dirt.

Sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket, Kane sprinted at the man before dropping low so that he connected with him in a long slide across the loose, dry sand. Kane’s legs caught the soldier’s, tripping him so that he caromed headfirst off the wall that he had been feeling his way along.

The soldier grunted sharply as he struck the wall.

Kane was on top of him in a flash, grabbing the barrel of the AK-47 and angling it away from him even as he pressed his weight onto the man’s torso.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” the man spat in a foreign tongue, the real-time translation coming to Kane almost instantly. It sounded like French.

Kane shoved his free hand against the man’s jaw, pressing his hand across his opponent’s mouth. “Keep quiet and I’ll let you live,” he snarled, hoping the man knew enough English to follow his gist.

The man struggled beneath Kane, trying to bring the rifle into play. It was a poor weapon for such close combat, its 16-inch barrel too long and too unwieldy for close quarters. Kane fixed his grip on it and yanked hard, whipping it out of his opponent’s hand. He slung it to the side behind him, just far enough out of the man’s reach that he couldn’t grab it.

“Quiet,” Kane warned the man, checking around for possible attackers. No one was approaching—the group of soldiers Kane had spotted was close to the edge of the fort now, where the walls had tumbled away.

Kane looked back at the man beneath him, watching his eyes. They were hazel and they seemed normal enough, a little wide in panic maybe but otherwise normal. The man struggled, and Kane pressed his hand harder against his mouth in an effort to hold his head still.

Kane brought his right hand around, clenched it and extended just his index finger. He waved the index finger before the man’s eyes, running it swiftly to the left, then to the right across the man’s field of vision. The eyes did not follow Kane’s finger—not proof positive, but enough to make Kane suspect that Grant’s weren’t the only soldiers who had lost their sight.

“Can you see?” Kane snapped, using his Commtact’s translation mode to convert the words into stuttering French.

The man’s eyes remained wide and he refused to answer Kane’s question.

“You want me to kill you right here?” Kane snarled at the young soldier. “Answer the damn question. Can you see? Are you blind?”

“I can see,” the man replied in French with an edge to his voice that Kane noticed even if the translation program of the Commtact failed to pick up on it. “I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.”

Chapter 7

“Blind men fighting a war,” Kane scoffed. “What part of that even makes sense?”

The battle had moved on. Now Kane, still standing over the soldier he had disarmed some minutes earlier, had been joined by Brigid—still tinkering with the interphaser as she tried to piece its internal mechanism back together—Mariah and Grant. Grant had brought the remaining gunner with him, held in his strong grip in such a way that he was forced to walk pigeon-toed as he was partly shoved and partly dragged across the stone-strewn battlefield.

“It doesn’t,” Grant confirmed, screwing up his face.

“Maybe it does,” Brigid said from where she sat in the shade with the ruined interphaser spread before her. “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask about their blindness, but concern ourselves instead with what they do see, or think they’re seeing.”

The others looked at her, bemused. Brigid had always been “the smart one” of the CAT Alpha field team, and sometimes her leaps of logic took a little bit of explaining before everyone caught up on the same page.

“You said that fish-face here said something about seeing the face of god,” Brigid reminded Kane as she worked a screw back in place on the interphaser with her thumbnail. It slipped. The chassis was cracked above and below its resting place where a bullet had struck.

“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged, “but I figure that’s—y’know—metaphorical. Religious zealot hokum.”

Grant nodded. “We’ve see a lot of religious zealots in our time.”

“And a lot of hokum,” Brigid accepted. “But what if what he said was meant literally? That he’s really seeing the face of god. Or, at least, something he thinks is a god.” She looked up at Kane and the others for approval. “You follow?”

Mariah Falk nodded. “But which god?” she asked. Though a geologist rather than a field agent, even she had met her share of beings who considered themselves gods during her time with Cerberus. One such being, the monstrous Ullikummis, had compelled her to commit fiery suicide, and she had only been stopped when one of her colleagues had shot her in the knee, preventing her from throwing herself into a crematorium oven.

Brigid smiled grimly. “That, Mariah, is a very insightful question.”

“Insights can wait till we’re somewhere secure,” Kane reminded everyone, his eyes fixed on the distant battle still under way just past the borders of the ruined fort. “Baptiste, have you got anywhere with getting the interphaser running?”

“I’ve made progress,” Brigid told him, “but it’s not responding to my commands yet. I need—”

“Sure,” Kane said with a wave of his hand, cutting her off. “Then let’s keep moving forward, locate the quake source we came here to check, and try to stay out of trouble.”

Grant laughed at that. “Staying out of trouble? You get bumped on the head or something, buddy?”

“I said try,” Kane clarified as he removed the ammo clip from his captive’s AK-47 and secreted it in a pocket, along with the other ammunition he had found on the man. “No one’s expecting the impossible.”

* * *

“HE SAID THAT he saw the face of god before everything,” Kane recalled as the four Cerberus warriors trekked away from the tumbledown fort, away from the ongoing skirmish between the mysterious factions of blind men.

They were following the path laid out by the crack in the earth, tracking along it as it widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed, searching for the source. Right now, the gap was still five feet across, and it was deep enough that you could not see down to its floor.

“He told me it lit every step he took,” Kane continued, “showing him the path of salvation. Like I say, normal religious fanaticism.”

“But if he meant it literally,” Brigid reasoned, “then here is a man who is seeing an entirely different view of reality. The way he described it, as lighting his path, it might be like neon arrows showing him where to move and what to do. I’m speculating, of course, but we’ve both seen different views on reality, Kane. You know that.”

He did. Kane had been drawn into a war with the Annunaki, which had seen him tap into their holistic view of the universe. He had fought in the bordering dimensions of string theory, which his brain had interpreted in the wildest ways, trying to provide input he could comprehend. It had barely worked; only Kane’s innate practicality had kept him grounded during—and after—the experience.

Brigid, too, had touched on different ways to view this fragile thing we call reality. She had been mindwiped by the Annunaki prince Ullikummis, and had her thinking rewired into the Annunaki way of seeing the world for a short period of time. She had become a different person then, just to process the new perspective she had been given on the world, and had taken the name of Brigid Haight. That new comprehension had allowed her to shift time itself, stepping outside of its confines long enough to undo the birth of a goddess. It had been traumatic, and Brigid loathed thinking back to those days, had done all she could to mentally distance herself from that dark other her.

“Men fighting wars in a reality that only they can see,” Kane mused. “That’s...not an easy thing to process.”

“I agree,” Brigid said. “Reality is a lot more fragile than most of us realize.” As she spoke, her mind went back to another occasion, when CAT Alpha had stumbled upon an ancient device designed to bring about a new genesis. Kane had died during that mission, truly died, but Brigid had stepped inside the machine and reworked things, forcing reality to reknit. In doing so, she had brought Kane back from the dead, though she had never told him.

Mariah was walking beside Grant a few paces behind Brigid and Kane, struggling a little to keep up the pace that they were setting. They were soldiers while she was primarily a desk worker—gunfights and traipsing across battlefields were significantly outside Mariah’s comfort zone.

“There’s a lot of trekking around in what you guys do, huh?” she said, doing her best to ignore the feeling of damp sweat in her hair.

“Seems that way sometimes,” Grant agreed. Despite his recent exertion in curtailing the tripod cannon’s assault while wearing a long duster made of Kevlar, he seemed to be barely breaking a sweat. The shadow suit he wore beneath his clothes was regulating his body temperature, keeping him cool in spite of the fierce sunshine.

“So, what’s the formula you guys use in determining whether to use the interphaser or the Mantas to travel somewhere?” Mariah asked.

Grant looked at her and smiled. “No formula,” he said. “If there’s a parallax point or an old mat-trans unit, then we use that, unless we figure we might need to switch locations and stay on the move—in which case, we bring the Mantas out of the hangar.” The Mantas he referred to were superfast aircraft of alien design, ones which he, Kane and a few other members of Cerberus were adept in piloting.

Ahead of them, the bleak landscape stretched on and on, parched dirt dotted with stones like the debris from a mine, just a few leafless bushes here and there, rooted to the ground like the skeletal nests of birds. The terrain rose gradually, the crack in the ground widening and narrowing uncertainly but never closing to less than a four-foot gap.

The Cerberus team followed the line drawn by the crack in the earth, making their way up the gentle slope. The slope was made up of loose stones of all sizes and shapes, and as they went farther they found it became harder to keep one’s balance on the loose ground. Mariah especially needed help to keep moving forward, and Grant put an arm behind her back to prevent her from slipping. Brigid had put away the interphaser by this point, replacing it in its padded carry case, which could be strapped to her back. The unit still wasn’t operational; the bullet had evidently sheared through something important.

As they climbed higher, some of the loose rocks were dropping into the jagged rent that they were following. Once one started to fall, the rocks cascaded like a waterfall. For a frightening moment, Mariah slipped and fell toward the brink where those rocks had disappeared. Grant grabbed her in an instant, held her tightly by the arm as she dropped to one knee and continued to slide toward the rent in the earth.

“Hang on,” Grant told her with all the authority of the Magistrate he had once been.

“I’m—” Mariah began, breathlessly. “Can’t...” Her kneeling leg slipped out from under her as a landslide of stones began to disappear into the four-foot-wide opening of the chasm.

Grant tensed his muscles, spreading his legs wider to anchor himself in place. Kane and Brigid hurried back to join him, themselves slipping dangerously on the relentless stream of rocks that were now cascading into the pit.

Grant began to slip, his feet sliding along with the loose stones as Mariah’s weight threatened to drag them both into the chasm. Mariah herself was thrashing about, trying to keep from sliding into the darkness, her feet so close to the edge.

“Stop struggling,” Kane advised as he scrambled across the moving river of stones, struggling to get purchase. “Baptiste, hold on to me!”

“Hold on to you?” Brigid asked, confused.

“Yeah, I’m going to try to grab Mariah,” Kane said, reaching forward.

Brigid swiveled behind Kane, placing her arms around his midriff and locking her hands together.

Kane reached his hand out for Mariah, speaking through gritted teeth as he grabbed her flailing left arm. “Grant, you okay back there, bud?”

Grant was on his backside, still holding on to Mariah’s right arm as he struggled to stay in place. His grip had slipped down her sweat-slicked forearm, however, and it was now cinched painfully around her wrist. Mariah felt as though her hand was being wrenched off.

“Grant?” Kane pressed.

“Just grab her, Kane,” Grant told him. “Don’t worry about me.”

With Brigid providing counterbalance, Kane leaned in and reached his other arm around Mariah’s shoulders, still clinging to her left arm with his right hand. He pulled her to him in what seemed almost a consoling hug, drawing her face toward his left shoulder and chest. Mariah flailed, still fighting the stream of loose shale that threatened to throw her into the pit, and then she had an arm around Kane. Grant let go, anchoring himself in place as the stream of rocks beneath him rushed onward like an avalanche, accompanied by a susurration of noise as they disappeared into the chasm. In a moment he had stopped moving, though the rocks continued to drop.

“No one move,” Kane instructed. “Everyone just stay still, let the rocks settle.”

Brigid clutched Kane around his waist while Mariah clung on to him like a drowning woman clinging to debris from a shipwreck.

“You’re okay,” Kane told her, gently. “You’re not going to fall.”

Around them, the rocks settled finally as the last few fell into the darkness. The ground, such as it was, felt stable again.

Brigid let go of Kane and he let go of Mariah, while Grant pushed himself cautiously back to a standing position beside them.

“Now, let’s just proceed with caution, okay?” Kane said. “No sudden moves.”

Following his own advice, Kane took wary steps up the slope, testing the ground with his toe before he proceeded, guiding the group in a path that took them a little farther away from the dangerous chasm they were tracking.

The slope continued to rise, taking the group forty or fifty feet above the tallest part of the distant fort where they had materialized. Throughout the climb, they saw no one else, though the sounds of gunfire continued to echo from the distance where two armies—one made up of blind men—fought their lunatic war.

The Cerberus group reached the summit of the gentle slope unexpectedly. Unexpected, that is, because they had not foreseen that there would be an almost sheer drop on the other side. From above, it looked like a sinkhole, a perfectly circular maw in the earth, its sides so steep that they were almost vertical. A few scaffolds were dotted here and there with ladders leading down into the hole itself. There were figures wandering among the scaffolding, and they could see two simple, boxy buildings at different levels where the people here might take shelter. The nearest ladder down was sixty feet away, a quarter turn around the circular hole.

“What the hell?” Grant muttered, gazing over the edge.

Kane looked at his partners, his eyebrows raised. “Watch that first step, huh?” he said.

“It’s a mine,” Mariah stated, looking at the formations all around them. They now saw that the slope of rock that they had climbed was waste that had been removed from the ground to create the mine shaft. The shaft itself was a perfectly vertical drop into the ground.

“Not natural, then?” Kane checked.

“No, not natural.”

Brigid turned to Mariah, quizzical. “Could this be the cause of the quake?”

Mariah shrugged. “Possibly,” she admitted. “I guess it depends on what they’re using to bore into the earth.”

Kane eyed the figures on the scaffold, trying to detect a pattern that might indicate whether they were sentries. “Guess we’re going to have to take a look-see at what’s inside,” Kane told the others, reloading his Sin Eater.

“I think I miss my workstation,” Mariah muttered as she followed the Cerberus field team around the lip of the mine.

Chapter 8

The blind soldier’s words buzzed around Kane’s thoughts as he and Grant led the way toward the mine, creeping down the only ladder that emerged on the lip of the shaft, moving swiftly, hand over hand. Kane had come up with the plan hurriedly and on the fly—standard operating procedure for Cerberus field missions, it seemed. As the most combat savvy, he and Grant would clear the path of any resistance—not that there would necessarily be any; it was just better in Kane’s opinion to expect the worst than to be caught with your pants down. Kane’s opinion of people in general was low, since he had seen too much both as a Magistrate and as a freedom fighter.

They reached the first level swiftly. The level was made of planks lined up beside one another like floorboards—a scaffold structure held them roughly horizontal, actually at a twelve-degree slope heading down toward the mine. There was no one on this level, and a dozen strides took Kane and Grant to the next ladder, running down the sheer surface of bored rock.

Kane led the way once more, hurrying down the ladder to the level below, those eerie words of the soldier still playing on his mind.

I can see. I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.

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