# Planet Hate

James Axler

Centuries beyond the aftermath of a shattered earth, the aeons-old manipulation of humanity has brought forth a new chrysalis of star-born domination. His name is Ullikummis, exiled scion of an embattled but brilliant and calculating inhuman race.Now, his influence and mind control has spread like a contagion, capturing innocent minds in a flood of cruel, false salvation as his tidal wave of power sweeps across the planet.With their headquarters destroyed and their greatest asset, archivist Brigid Baptiste, lost to the manipulation of the enemy, Kane and the elite Cerberus Rebels are losing the battle–but not yet the war. As Kane succumbs to incapacitating hallucinations, Brigid's dark avatar lays siege to the final piece of her Stone God's plot: a very special child, who is the secret link to a ghastly pantheon of despotic rule.

NEW ORDER

Centuries beyond the aftermath of a shattered earth, the aeons-old manipulation of humanity has brought forth a new chrysalis of star-born domination. His name is Ullikummis, exiled scion of an embattled but brilliant and calculating inhuman race. Now, his influence and mind control has spread like a contagion, capturing innocent minds in a flood of cruel, false salvation as his tidal wave of power sweeps across the planet.

SECRET HISTORY

With their headquarters destroyed and their greatest asset, archivist Brigid Baptiste, lost to the manipulation of the enemy, Kane and the elite Cerberus Rebels are losing the battle—but not yet the war. As Kane succumbs to incapacitating hallucinations, Brigid’s dark avatar lays siege to the final piece of her Stone God’s plot: a very special child, who is the secret link to a ghastly pantheon of despotic rule.

The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old.

Wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large, blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind her, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

It was all so easy.

Outlanders: Planet Hate

James Axler


www.mirabooks.co.uk

Fire will burn itself out if it does not find anything to burn.

—Arab proverb

I have not yet begun to fight!

—John Paul Jones

1747–1792

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Prologue

Altyn Tagh region, Tibet

The redhead came to the farmhouse under the flag of truce. A Caucasian woman riding a powerful steed, she had wrapped her fur cloak tightly around her against the biting winds that cascaded down from the imposing peaks of Altyn Tagh. Svelte and beautiful, the flame-haired woman looked exhausted from her long trek through this, the most desolate part of Tibet.

Kamala watched the redhead’s approach as she worked in her father’s field, repairing the broken stake that held the old scarecrow in place. A willowy girl, barely thirteen summers old, Kamala had met with few strangers from outside the village, just the occasional traveling salesman and the traders on market day or the silent monks from the nearby monastery who merely nodded as they went about their business. Kamala had long dark hair and brown eyes, and her sun-bronzed limbs had become long and gangly following the first flush of puberty, yet the rest of her body bided its time, in no rush to catch up. One day, perhaps, she might be beautiful like her mother, Bayarmaz, but for now she seemed awkward, all flailing limbs and sharp elbows and knees.

Looking up as she bound the jagged struts of wood together, Kamala had noticed the distant rider making her slow approach to their family homestead some five hundred miles north of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. The setting sun stretched the visitor’s shadow far across the golden wheat fields, making of it a sinister, skeletal thing like the scarecrow Kamala toiled with.

She looked to the east, spying the blind eye of the moon as it nudged over the horizon to take up its vigil in the cold evening sky as the sun set in the west. When she looked back, the flame-haired rider was closer and she could make out the glinting metal of her weapons, a gun resting between her legs as the horse jostled slowly along the frost-spattered path, a metal dirk sheathed at her hip. By the time Kamala had finished her repairs, the beautiful woman had dismounted her horse, secured it outside her parents’ simple lodgings and disappeared inside.

Passing the old apple tree, Kamala entered the stone cottage through the back door and walked through the kitchen, stopping to smell the soup that her mother was cooking on the range. She could hear voices: her father’s and the faintly accented voice of the mysterious stranger. They were engaged in an animated discussion about the merits of the divine, and Kamala heard her father proclaiming that religion mattered little to a farmer, so long as he could work an honest day in his fields.

“But you’d be better off, you must be able to see that?” the stranger was saying, an odd edge to her tone, as Kamala slunk into the room. Though the woman spoke the language it was clear that she was unused to the Tibetan tongue, forming the words awkwardly with Western lips.

At over five and a half feet tall, the woman seemed to tower over Kamala’s mother as she stood in the main room of the cottage beside Kamala’s parents, and her height made the familiar room seem as if it was somehow smaller, the ceiling low in her presence as though cowering with fear. The stranger’s hair was like a radiant setting sun around her head, trailing halfway down her back in a cascade of beautiful curls, and her eyes were the emerald color of the sea. The green-eyed woman waited close to the window, pulling back the curtain with grubby fingers as she watched the dirt track leading to the cottage. She wore black armor of a supple leather that clung to her curves. Its blackness made her seem to Kamala’s eyes like some strange insect-turned-man, the perverted result of a sick metamorphosis. She held a glass from the sideboard filled with her father’s best apple brandy, her gloved fingers long and supple around its simple lines. She stepped closer into the room then, taking up residence in father’s favorite chair, her long, black-clad limbs shimmering like something liquid as she seated herself.

Kamala’s mother was meticulously hanging the woman’s cloak, brushing frost out of its pile as the stranger spoke angrily to her father. The dark-haired woman looked fearful, lines of worry creasing her brow as she placed the cape on one of the pegs by the low front door.

Sitting across from the red-haired woman, ousted from his favorite chair, her father looked up as he sipped at the brandy. “My daughter Kamala,” he announced, a proud smile passing across his lips, the lines around his eyes creasing in time with his smile.

Kamala stood in the doorway, huddling into herself as she looked at the beautiful stranger who had appeared in her house.

“A fine-looking girl, sir. You have my congratulations,” the woman stated, holding her glass aloft in tribute before draining it and smacking her lips contentedly. Kamala saw her mother’s eyes flash fearfully toward the stranger.

Before Kamala could speak—as if she had anything worth saying—her mother urged her to check the simmering soup, and the moment had passed. Kamala saw pleading in her mother’s eyes. “Go,” she urged, “to the kitchen.”

Alone in the kitchen, Kamala lifted the lid from the pot and used the nearby ladle to stir its bubbling contents, its meaty aroma filling her nostrils. She could hear her father and the mysterious woman in the next room as they continued to talk about the world that was coming. “Ullikummis brings the love that the world will know,” Kamala heard the woman say in her throaty voice, “and you will either embrace that love or you’ll be swallowed by its embrace.”

She thought on that for a moment as she continued idly stirring the contents of the pot. The Caucasian woman didn’t seem that different from the people of the village. And yet a cloud of anger clung to her, evident in the manner in which she argued with her father, in the way that she seemed on edge. There was a drive inside the woman that made her different from the monks of the nearby monastery, a comprehension of religion that demanded victory rather than understanding, and was scared it might be challenged for something less than absolute. As she thought of the speaker and her intense anger, the conversation from the other room became louder once more, and there came a sudden shattering of glass.

Kamala flinched, turning her head to look through the open kitchen door, but she was unable to see what had happened. Then her mother rushed into the kitchen on hurried legs, the shards of one of Father’s best brandy glasses held in her cupped hands, fear lining her beautiful face. Kamala could see tears forming in her mother’s eyes. “What’s wrong, Mama?” she asked, her voice low.

Her mother shook her head and tossed the broken glass in the bucket by the door. “It’s nothing, Kamala,” she said quietly. “Just…the glass dropped. It’s nothing, baby.”

Kamala smiled, her bright teeth shining in the dwindling sunlight that shone through the kitchen window. “We have other glasses,” the girl told her mother.

The older woman laughed, just for a breath, and then she pulled Kamala close to her, her chin resting atop the girl’s head. “Get out,” Kamala heard her mother whisper. “Get out of here. Run away.”

Kamala felt her mother’s hug tighten, pulling her so close, and she began to ask what she had meant. Just then a voice came from the doorway and Kamala looked up to see the red-haired woman standing there.

“Where the hell’s that glass?” she snarled.

Kamala’s mother let go of her and Kamala saw tears glistening on her cheeks. The older woman apologized as she reached into one of the cupboards and produced another glass. “Please, don’t use language in front of my daughter,” she said quietly, not looking at the woman.

The woman’s arm darted forward in a blur and suddenly she had hold of the older woman’s chin. “I’ll speak however the hell I please in front of your daughter,” she said through gritted teeth. “Do whatever the hell I want. Your world is past. You understand that?”

Kamala felt ashamed as she watched her mother nod, chin painfully held in the woman’s grip. The woman was a cloud of fury, of hate personified. Kamala couldn’t know it, but the woman’s name was hate, too: Brigid Haight. The girl took a step back, away from the scene, and felt the handle of the back door jab into her lower back. “Get out,” her mother had said. She reached behind her, pulling the handle down.

The woman’s voice barked behind Kamala as she turned to exit the house. “Where do you think you’re going, little one?”

Kamala looked back, her delicate hazel eyes piercing the woman’s angry gaze. “Soup won’t be ready for a while,” she said, keeping her voice firm. “I thought maybe I should feed your horse. She looks tired.”

The redhead nodded, letting go of the older woman’s chin as she did so. “You do that,” she agreed slowly, resting her hand beside the blaster that was now holstered at her hip. “But don’t be long,” she added.

Kamala rushed from the house.

Standing under the branches of the apple tree, the girl glanced at the cottage, looked at the ground around her feet, back to the cottage, wondering what to do. There were windfalls here—maybe she could use those to feed the woman’s mount. Or maybe she should run, get help from the nearby monastery. Was that what her mother had meant? She knew all the monks; they would likely be sitting down to their simple repast at this hour as the sun set behind the mountains. They would come if she asked them to, but what would she say? How would she explain it?

She untucked a corner of her shirt from her belted skirt and made a bowl of the material, which she then filled with fallen apples. Then she walked around the stone cottage to the front of the house where the filly had been tethered, all the while listening for raised voices from the house.

“Learn to embrace his love,” she heard the flame-haired woman exclaim loudly, but there was no love left in her voice, only rage and hatred and spite.

Kamala stood feeding the chestnut horse windfalls for almost a minute, a hollow feeling in her stomach, wondering what to do. She had always been a shy girl, but she had never been afraid of people before, not even of strangers. But this woman, with her bubbling resentment held barely in check behind her sea-green eyes, frightened her.

She looked back at the cottage, seeing the woman standing at the window watching her, that cloud of hair like an angry, flaming halo around her face. As she watched, the woman turned away, her lips moving as she spoke to Kamala’s parents. By the time the hateful woman turned back, Kamala was gone.

Kamala could run. Since she was very young, she had outpaced children of her own age, her strides somehow longer, with never a hint of the exhaustion that the other children felt. By the time she was ten years old she could outrun grown men at the nearest village, fit men made strong by working on the unforgiving land of the mountains. Her father had marveled at his daughter’s speed and stamina, and her mother had described it as a special gift—not one that Kamala had chosen but one that had chosen her.

As she ran down the dirt track toward the monastery—a building made of the same gray stone as her father’s house—Kamala heard shouting behind her. She flicked her head back for a moment and saw the red-haired woman come striding out of her cottage. The spite-filled woman was calling to her angrily. Kamala turned her head back into the wind and ran, pumping her arms faster and driving herself toward the lights of the distant monastery that sat lower on the mountain path.

In a moment Kamala was off her father’s land and sprinting onward down the path, hurtling at breakneck speed toward the towering structure of the monastery. The monastery sat close to the farmstead of Tsakhia and his son, Sonam. Sonam was a couple of years older than Kamala, and her father said he was far too pretty to be a boy. Kamala was always shy and awkward around him without quite understanding why, and even now her heart fluttered in her chest as she got closer to the house where he lived, the room where he slept. But as she got closer to the farm she saw the trails of dark smoke billowing into the sky, hidden before by the darkness of the shadows cast by the mountains that overlooked them. Then Kamala saw more smoke, thick and black, spuming from the monastery that nuzzled at the mountain’s edge. The building was simple but beautiful, old beyond measure, its lines rough yet somehow perfect, an expression of simplicity. The nukecaust that had destroyed so much of the Western world had largely ignored Tibet, and life here had continued as it always had, the so-called Fall of Civilization mattering nothing to a people who cared little for technological advance.

Kamala stopped, her feet sliding a moment on the rough, frost-dappled path. The door to the monastery had been nailed closed, and the nails glowed like fireflies as the flames licked the walls within. Someone had set light to the monastery. Not just “someone,” Kamala realized—that woman, the one filled with hate. Who else could it be?

The monks had taken in visitors before, feeding them and sheltering them from the harsh winds and cold nights that swept across the mountains of Altyn Tagh. Kamala had no doubt that they would have welcomed the redheaded stranger, patiently listened to her as she told them of this Ullikummis deity, this promise of a new and better world. Then they would have smiled and shaken their shaven heads, invited her to stay or to leave as her whim chose. And in return the woman had set light to their home, locking them inside as the structure burned.

This close, the stones that made up the monastery radiated a punishing heat, and Kamala could go no closer for fear of having her own flesh blister and spoil like a rotten fruit. Behind the monastery, Tsakhia’s farmhouse was a burned-out ruin, the black smoke billowing from it like a flock of angry crows, dancing in the sky in their sick Terpsichore.

Kamala turned, heart sinking in her chest as she looked back to where her father’s house stood higher along the simple track that led into the range known as Altyn Tagh. Already she could see the dark smoke pluming into the sky, the mark of hate as the woman destroyed those she could not convert to her god.

Kamala knew nothing of the woman or of her history or destiny. All she could do was hide as the redhead preached from her gospel of hate.

Chapter 1

“That’s our point of entry, all right,” Kane mused as he checked the calculations he had scribbled on a small map. The fold-out map looked tired and worn, and so did Kane. He also looked irritated as hell.

Kane was a tall man in his early thirties, well-built with broad shoulders and long, rangy limbs. His dark hair brushed at his collar, tousled atop his head as the wind caught it, and the dark trace of a beard was beginning to show on his square jaw. There was a thin line by Kane’s left eye where something had cut him recently, and he brushed at it in annoyance as the breeze played against it.

“So what do you suggest we do?” asked the woman to Kane’s side. “Run away like scared little girls?” In her mid-twenties, the woman had an olive complexion, with long dark hair that trailed halfway down her back, and a wicked glint in her chocolate-brown eyes. Rosalia had been Kane’s almost-permanent companion over the past few weeks since an altercation up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.

The final member of the group—an imposing man with dark skin, short hair and the grizzled look of a fighter—chuckled at that, turning to the woman. “If you really believe that then you don’t know Kane so well, Rosie,” Grant said, his voice a deep basso rumble. “Me, either,” he added after a moment. “We never ran away from anything.”

Grant had been Kane’s combat partner for longer than either of them cared to admit. A little older than Kane, Grant still deferred to his colleague in moments like this, trusting the other’s uncanny instincts to keep them safe. He brought his hand up, brushing it against the drooping gunslinger’s mustache that he wore over his top lip, feeling the dark growth of stubble that was forming all around it.

Brushing her hair from her face as the wind caught it, Rosalia shot Grant a contemptuous look. “From what I’ve seen so far, all you Magistrates are the same. Big men when you’re safe in your villes with your special armor on and backup just a street away, but you run like schoolgirls when you’re faced with anything you didn’t plan for.”

The three of them were hunkered down at the edge of a ridge overlooking a ramshackle settlement constructed of wood and sun-dried clay bricks, with several struggling fields as its surround. Made up of two dozen buildings, the little run-down town was locked in the gully between two towering cliff faces, their sandy orange sides bright in the midmorning sun. A thin ribbon of river wended its way through the center of the town like a main street, and people could be seen moving along its edges.

The trio on the cliff top wore shadow suits weaved from a high-tech armorlike material that could deflect blunt trauma and act as a self-contained environment, keeping its wearer hot or cool depending on the needs of their surrounds. Over the shadow suits, the three of them were dressed in indistinct clothing that showed the wear from long days on the road. Kane wore a beaten leather jacket in a tan color turned dark with sweat and dirt, Grant a long black duster with a bullet-blunting Kevlar weave in its thread, and Rosalia was wearing a beaten-up denim jacket with loose threads dangling from its cuffs and collar and a light summer skirt that swished just above her shapely ankles, which in turn were encased in black leather boots.

Kane checked the map again, running his hands across the creases to brush away the dusty sand that had blown across it. “Damn ville wasn’t on the map. Must have sprung up in the last eighteen months. But our next closest parallax point is fifty miles eastward,” he explained. “We’re looking at a heck of a trek, and we’d have to find a way across the Rio Grande.”

“The big villes have been vomiting out people for a while now, forcing little shitholes like this to crop up all over,” Rosalia told them both, pushing her dark hair out of her face as the wind snatched at it. “You Magistrate men seldom notice what’s going on in front of your eyes,” she added contemptuously.

Kane shot her a look before turning back to watch the people moving around in the ravine below them. Twenty-four buildings meant maybe seventy people in total, he guessed, could be more as a refugee settlement, but it seemed as if it had taken a while growing up. The structures certainly looked sturdy, perhaps it had been here for years—who could say?

Grant turned his eyes from the settlement below to Kane. “Let’s keep our heads down and act friendly to the locals,” he rumbled, pointing to the little town between the cliffs.

With that, the imposing ex-Mag pushed himself up, snagging the cloth knapsack sitting behind him in the dirt and hooking it over one of his massive shoulders before leading the way down the steep path that led to the gully. The others followed a moment later, but Rosalia stopped at the top of the path for a moment, peering behind her.

“Come on, stupid,” she huffed, irritation in her voice.

From close by, a dog came tromping out from behind a crop of drooping bushes, their leaves wizened from lack of water. The carcass of a cony lay behind the bushes, and the dog had been sniffing at it, wondering if it could still be eaten. The dog was a mongrel with mottled fur and a long snout, and Rosalia suspected that it had more than a hint of coyote in it. Most remarkably, it had the palest eyes that she had ever seen, their irises a creamy washed-out white like mozzarella cheese. She had “owned” the dog for seven months, finding the creature wandering alone out in the Californian desert. In all of that time, the woman had never given the animal a permanent name, hoping to avoid any attachment.

“Stupid mutt,” Rosalia cursed as the dog trotted along at her heels down the dust path. “Always thinking about your stomach.”

A dozen paces ahead, Grant was talking with Kane, polychrome sunglasses protecting their eyes as they walked into the sun, keeping their voices low.

“You look worried, old friend,” Grant observed as Kane fiddled with the Sin Eater pistol he habitually wore at his wrist.

Once the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Even at full extension, this remarkable pistol was less than fourteen inches in length, and it fired 9 mm rounds. The holsters reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard; it had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The absolute nature of this means of potential execution was a throwback to the high regard with which Magistrates were viewed in the villes—their judgment could never be wrong. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days as one in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand.

Grant, too, had one of the remarkable blasters hidden beneath the sleeve of his Kevlar duster, though he carried other weapons, as well, secreted in the lining of the long coat. Primary among these, Grant carried his favored Copperhead close-assault subgun, tucked just out of sight.

Kane shrugged at Grant’s observation as the pair shuffled sideways along a narrow section of the steep pathway. “I just don’t like entering new places these days,” he said. “Seems things are getting more and more hostile.”

Then, as Kane spoke, his booted heel slid on a loose stone and he began to slip toward the edge of the path. “Whoa!”

Grant instantly reached out, grabbing his friend in a firm grip just above his left wrist. “No need to expect trouble,” Grant said as he pulled Kane back onto the path. “And I’ve always got your back if things do turn nasty.”

“Humph,” Kane grumbled. “We used to say the same thing to Baptiste—and look how that worked out.”

“We’ll find her, Kane,” Grant assured his partner. “If she’s out there, we’ll find her.”

Kane nodded. “Damn straight we will.”

Until recently Brigid Baptiste had been the third member of their field team, accompanying Kane and Grant on numerous adventures across the globe and beyond. Baptiste was a gifted archivist with remarkable talents. However, in a recent attack on the Cerberus redoubt—the headquarters from which Kane and his companions had operated—Baptiste had gone MIA. Despite their best efforts, her current whereabouts remained unknown.

The gradient of the path eased for the last thirty yards, and Kane had returned his Sin Eater to its hiding place beneath the right sleeve of his jacket by the time the trio reached its foot. They walked three abreast, with the dog skulking at Rosalia’s side as they made their way along the last part of the dusty roadway that led into the hamlet itself.

A single thoroughfare dominated the village, running parallel to the thin river. People dressed in light clothes were walking along that main street, a few youngsters paddling at the stream’s edge. A bearded man in simple clothes was leading a mule down the street, its back laden with two great baskets full of the leaves of some edible root crop or other. It seemed normal enough.

As they neared the closest of the buildings, the companions could hear the tink-tink-tink of a blacksmith at work. Kane turned and saw an open-fronted shed beside the single-story house. Inside a man worked at shaping a horseshoe that glowed white-hot at the end of his tongs. The man peered up from his work as the companions passed, eyes narrowing as he watched the strangers entering the village.

“By my reckoning,” Kane told his companions, keeping his voice low, “our parallax point should be in the northwest corner of this place.” He pointed. “Over by that storage silo, maybe?”

Parallax points were a crucial part of a system of instantaneous travel that was employed by the Cerberus rebels. The process itself involved a quantum inducer called an interphaser, which could fold space upon itself, granting its user immediate teleportation to another location, either on Earth or beyond. Though portable, the interphaser units could only be engaged in set locations. The units tapped into an ancient web of powerful, naturally occurring lines of energy stretching right across the globe, much like the ley lines of old. On Thunder Isle the Cerberus crew had discovered the Parallax Points program, which encoded all the vortex points. The interphaser relied on this program, and new vortex points were fed into the interphaser’s targeting computer.

Frequently the specific sites of interphase induction had become sacred in the eyes of primitive man. However, over time many of these parallax points had become forgotten or buried beneath the rise and fall of civilizations. As such, they often turned up in the most unlikely of locations.

The Cerberus organization had several of the portable interphase units. When they had evacuated their redoubt headquarters, Kane’s team had taken one of the units for ease of transport while they went undercover. Right now, Grant carried the foot-high unit in its protective case inside the rucksack on his back.

Rosalia’s dog whined plaintively as the companions continued to stride along the dusty street. It was a simple path marked out on the ground by the basic virtue of repeated usage. A woman in her thirties sat in a weather-beaten rocking chair outside the front door to one of the tumbledown shacks, her fingers moving deftly as she knitted a pair of baby booties. Grant acknowledged her with a dip of his head, touching his fingers to his brow for just a second.

“Things don’t feel right here, you guys,” Rosalia said, her voice a whisper.

Kane looked over to her and a lopsided smile touched at his lips. “Weren’t you the one who was complaining about we ex-Magistrates skulking around like frightened schoolgirls?”

In response, Rosalia showed him her teeth in a sarcastic imitation of a grin. “Just an observation, Magistrate Man,” she said, subtly stretching her arms out as if to yawn. “Don’t jump at shadows on my account.” As she did so, she shifted two hidden knives that were located beneath her sleeves.

With the open stream running to the right of them, Kane continued on, making his way toward the crop silo he had pointed out a few moments before. “Keep the interphaser to hand,” he instructed Grant out of the corner of his mouth. “I want to be on our way as soon as.”

They were heading for a meeting high on the Californian coast. A coded message had been piped through to Kane a few hours before from their old Cerberus leader, Lakesh, providing them with coordinates of a meeting point where he hoped to set up a temporary base.

As the three of them rounded the corner of the silo and a simple lean-to building that stood at its side, Kane spotted a small chunk in the sandy dirt at the external edge of the silo itself. It looked like an ancient mile marker, a little hunk of rounded stone sticking up about eighteen inches from the soil. The marker sat in the lee of the lean-to, obscured by the shadow that the tall silo cast.

“Five’ll get you ten that that’s our parallax point,” Kane stated, indicating the marker stone half-buried in the ground.

As Kane spoke, a figure appeared from the far side of the silo fifteen feet away, striding into view before halting, his eyes locked on Kane and his teammates. The man was tall and wore a rough-hewn robe made of a dirty brown material that covered him from neck down to his ankles like a cassock. The robe featured a voluminous hood that the man had pulled up over his head, hiding his features in shadow so that only his eyes glinted in the fierce morning sunlight. His right fist was held loosely clenched at his side, and Kane could tell immediately that the hooded stranger was clutching something within that balled fist. The man’s fustian robe featured a red badge pinned to the left breast, and the insignia flashed as it caught the sun’s rays.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” the robed figure asked, challenge in his tone.

“We’re just passing through, friend,” Kane stated, feeling a disquieting roiling in his stomach.

Beneath the hood, the man closed his eyes for a moment, reaching out with uncanny senses. Kane and his companions watched as the strange figure shook his head infinitesimally as if confused by what he could feel. “Cannot…” the man muttered before opening his eyes once more. “This is a sanctified town, sirs,” the man said in an authoritative tone. “Are you faithful?”

Kane stared at the robed man in disbelief. “I…I…” How could he possibly answer that question?

“I suspected as much,” the robed man stated, his tone rising in fury. “Mr. Kane, is it not?”

Kane became aware that figures were massing behind him. Where moments before they had seemed to be wary of the strangers but simply going about their workaday lives, now the townsfolk appeared to be closing in, subtly blocking the street and hemming the Cerberus teammates in at the alleyway between the silo and the one-story lean-to beside it.

Kane took a steadying breath. “You seem to know me, but I don’t think I caught your name,” he told the robed figure at the farther end of the silo.

The hooded man nodded once in acknowledgment. “I am stone,” he stated.

Kane had heard the phrase before. It was something of a battle chant for an expanding class of warriors who fought in the name of a sinister being called Ullikummis. In speaking the phrase, the hooded figure had not merely confirmed his allegiance, but he had also entered a meditative state whereby his physical attributes would change.

Kane’s eyes darted to the subtle movement as the man unclenched his right fist and a simple cord of leather with a cuplike design at the farthest extension of its loop sagged from his hand.

“And you are an enemy of stone,” the hooded figure said. Even as he spoke, the leather cup whirled around the man’s arm as he launched a cluster of lethal projectiles at Kane and his teammates.

Chapter 2

“Get down!” Kane shouted as he dived out of the path of the hurtling missiles.

A handful of sharpened pebbles had been flung from the simple slingshot that the robed man had hidden in his fist, and the rocks picked up speed as they whipped through the fifteen-foot distance separating the man and Kane’s team. The stones cut through the air and, by the time they reached the space where Kane had been standing, the half dozen pebbles had taken on a lethal velocity similar to bullets fired from a gun. The projectiles had been aimed at Kane’s face, but by then Kane had dropped out of their path, his left palm slapping against the dirt even as he called his Sin Eater pistol to his right hand with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons.

To either side of the dark-haired ex-Mag, Grant and Rosalia also flung themselves out of the path of those vicious rocks, and Grant snarled as one of them clipped against the swishing tail of his Kevlar-lined duster as it leaped high in the air.

Across from Grant, Rosalia kicked out as she ran at the high, curving wall of the silo. Suddenly she was running up the side of the silo, her skirt tearing as she kicked out again and flipped herself high into the air, over the path of the hurtling stones and onto the low roof of the lean-to beside it, her back to the man in the robes. She landed with catlike grace, looking out at the gathering crowd on the main street, two short blades appearing in her hands from their hiding places in the ragged sleeves of her denim jacket.

As Rosalia landed, Kane’s index finger tightened on the Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm bullets cut through the air toward their mysterious attacker. The red badge at the robed man’s breast caught the light once more as the bullets streamed toward him. Kane realized what the badge meant: it was a symbol of authority, a mockery of the Magistrate badge that he and Grant had worn when they were in service.

Kane was moving for cover as he unleashed that flurry of bullets, but he watched as the robed man held up his free hand. The bullets struck against the man’s outstretched arm but incredibly—impossibly—the man let out no sound of pain; he just stood there, jaw set as four bullets cut through the hemp sleeve of his robe and rattled against his flesh. His other arm arced behind him and he launched a second salvo of stones from his slingshot as Kane’s admirable figure disappeared behind the wall of the lean-to.

Kane looked down for a moment as he almost tripped over something. Rosalia’s mongrel was there, lips peeled back in a fearsome snarl as it looked at the approaching crowd of townsfolk. A bearded man wielding a claw hammer was leading the charge at the strangers, drawing the hammer back in a vicious arc. The dog jumped then, jaw snagging around the man’s arm and pulling him to the ground in a cloud of disturbed earth.

Grant meanwhile had spun to his right, slapping his back against the curved wall of the silo as the bullet-like stones cut toward his companions. They had met these hooded figures before, and Grant knew that they could be tenacious opponents. They’d need something with a little more stopping power than the Sin Eater, and Grant had just the thing. While stones clashed against the clay wall of the silo and the sound of Kane’s bullets cut through the air, Grant had reached into his long coat and pulled loose the Copperhead assault subgun from its hiding place strapped to the lining of the coat. The barrel of the subgun was almost two feet long. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. An optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were 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. Besides the Sin Eater, the Copperhead was Grant’s favored field weapon, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create in short measure.

Gun in hand, Grant dodged from cover and unleashed a firestorm of shots at the robed figure at the far end of the alley between the buildings. The hooded figure staggered for a moment under that vicious assault, before finally toppling backward into the silo wall. Grant depressed the trigger again, unleashing a second burst of fire as the robed figure began to pull himself up off the ground.

“Stay the hell down,” Grant said as the Copperhead drilled another burst of lead into the robed assailant.

Just a few feet away, Kane was moving among the mob beside the lean-to when Rosalia’s voice rang out.

“Kane, watch your six!”

Kane dodged and turned even as something whizzed through the air toward his head. The object glowed white and orange as it cut the air, missing Kane’s head by the narrowest of margins. Heart thudding against his rib cage, Kane glanced behind him where the projectile clanged against the wall of the lean-to—it was a horseshoe, red-hot and launched with a flick of the blacksmith’s tongs. The burning-hot horseshoe left a smoking indentation in the wooden wall even as it tumbled to the ground.

Overhead, Rosalia leaped from the roof of the lean-to like some graceful bird of prey, knives slashing the air as she dived at the blacksmith. With a vicious sweep of a blade, Rosalia cut through the man’s throat in an explosion of blood as she barreled into him. The blacksmith let out a howl of pain as he toppled backward under the weight of the hurtling woman, but his scream was cut short as the knife sliced through his vocal cords.

Then the blacksmith slammed against the hard-packed soil of the roadway and Rosalia used her momentum to leap away, bringing her knives up to face their next challenger. Her mongrel hound was already at her side, letting out a savage bark as the townsfolk crowded around them. The townspeople had armed themselves with makeshift weapons, sticks and loose bricks, here a large ax made for chopping logs.

Rosalia smiled. “Come on, then,” she goaded, “let’s see what you’re made of.”

The man with the hammer brushed himself down as he regained his footing, snarling back at the dog that had felled him. Then he was rushing at Rosalia, brandishing the long-handled hammer like a club as he swung it at her head. Her dark eyes fixed on the hammer’s arc, Rosalia ducked, allowing the metal head to whisk through the air just inches above her head. Then her left arm snapped up, forearm meeting forearm and using the hammer wielder’s own momentum to knock him away. The bearded man staggered a little in place, surprised that this slender girl had struck him with such precision. As he did so, Rosalia spun on the spot, bringing her left leg up and around, delivering a beautifully executed roundhouse kick that ended when her foot connected with the man’s face. The bearded hammer man was flipped over by the force of Rosalia’s brutal blow, but she was already leaping away to face the next crowd member who dared attack the Cerberus companions. Rosalia’s confrontation with the hammer wielder had lasted all of three seconds, start to finish.

As Rosalia leaped, Kane rolled forward, Sin Eater raised as he assessed the threat level that the crowd posed. There were perhaps sixteen people here, with more rushing to join them from the buildings all around. These people were in the eerie grip of the false religion, the promised utopia that Ullikummis had drummed into his loyal subjects. It was as if they were brainwashed.

A broad-shouldered man came at Kane from his left, swinging a two-by-four plank from some nearby construction project. Though renowned for his combat sense, Kane almost didn’t see the man approach, ducking only at the very last second as his attacker lunged at him with the length of wood. The board hurtled overhead as Kane snapped off a quick burst from his blaster, sweeping his attacker’s legs out from under him. The man cried out in agony as he crashed into the soil, a bullet shattering his right kneecap. These outlanders were innocents mixed up in a sinister cult created by a being far more powerful than themselves, and Kane would rather not kill them if he didn’t have to.

Then Kane was standing, the black muzzle of the Sin Eater stretched out in front of him like a warning. “I’m asking all of you to back off,” he commanded, “so no one else gets hurt.”

“Enemy of stone,” one of the crowd facing Kane cried in reply. “Enemy Kane!”

That was the second time in less than three minutes that a stranger had called him by name, Kane realized. Whatever was going on with these cultists, they seemed to recognize him.

“When the hell did I become public enemy number one?” Kane muttered under his breath as the foremost members of the crowd rushed at him, their mismatched weapons raised. With a sigh of resignation, Kane began selecting targets and squeezing the trigger of the Sin Eater. Four perfectly placed rounds blew out the kneecaps of the nearest of the approaching crowd before they swarmed on Kane.

TO THE SIDE of the silo, Grant was having his own problems. He hurried along the alleyway between buildings toward the stone marker half buried in the dust. Two feet away, the hooded figure who had attacked them was lying on his back, limbs flailing like a bug where Grant’s shots had taken him down once more. Yet already the man seemed to be recovering. These cultists—“firewalkers” was one term that had been popularized among the Cerberus personnel—could miraculously change the density of their flesh in some way that Grant and his teammates had yet to fully comprehend. The trick required fierce concentration, and all of these firewalkers had to keep their minds still to reach the condition of stonelike flesh. One way to stop them retaining such a degree of meditation had been to use concentrated sound, which irritated the firewalkers so that they could not achieve proper concentration.

Grant shrugged out of his rucksack as he knelt by the stone block poking up out of the ground. Swiftly he undid the straps on the cloth backpack and reached inside, pulling out a metal pyramidal device of roughly one foot in height, its protective cloth sleeve dropping free and wrapping over itself as the wind dragged it a few feet across the ground. Grant ignored it, his attention fixed on the chrome pyramid itself. The metal was scuffed and marred from where it had been hurriedly stored, and Grant brushed dirt from its surface as he flipped down a control panel close to the base of the interphaser unit. Grant watched as the tiny display came to life, a series of lights flickering on in quick succession.

Suddenly, Grant saw movement from the corner of his eye and turned his head in time to see the robed man leap off the ground and spiral toward him like some vicious ballerino. Leaving the interphaser in place by the stone marker, Grant rolled aside, and the robed man’s kicking feet slapped against the ground where Grant’s hand had been just a second before.

From his crouched position on the ground, Grant swung the Copperhead up one-handed, the bullpup design ideal for such a move. But even as he depressed the trigger, his robed assailant shoved the muzzle aside with a violent flick of his wrist. Grant’s shots went wild, slamming against the grain silo and drilling through the brickwork with powdery little orange bursts of dried clay.

Then the robed man’s fist struck Grant across the jaw with the force of a thrown brick, and the huge ex-Magistrate blinked back hot tears as his vision blurred. Blindly, Grant lashed out with his left palm, slapping the robed figure away with a mighty sweep of his limb. Grant felt more than saw the figure fall from him, heard as he struck against something hard with the sound of breaking wood.

Wiping a hand across his eyes, Grant pushed himself to his feet, bringing the Copperhead to bear once more as he searched for his target. Before Grant could react, the robed figure came leaping out of the shadows of the lean-to, barreling into the ex-Mag like a cannonball. The pair of combatants crashed back to the ground once more, and Grant’s breath was driven out of him in a loud gasp. To the side of his head, Grant saw the flickering lights of the interphaser as it tried to lock on to the parallax point. Come on, good buddy, he thought, let’s make us a door out of here, already.

Then the robed figure’s hands clamped around Grant’s throat, exerting tremendous pressure as he attempted to snap the ex-Mag’s neck.

KANE FOUND HIMSELF struggling under the pressure of the mob, a heavy man clinging to his back and weighing him down. It reminded him of the worst moments of the obligatory Pit patrol, back in his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate. Each time he shoved one person aside, another rushed to take his place, kicking and clawing at him—ineffective against his shadow suit but still enough to wear him down so he couldn’t get back to the interphaser. With one determined shove, Kane wrenched the man from his back, tossing him over one shoulder in an urgent flexing of muscles. The heavyset man rolled away across the ground, tumbling over and over until he splashed into the shallow stream.

Before Kane could extricate himself from the angry mob, he felt someone clutch at his Sin Eater, a pair of hands yanking at his right arm. He pulled his hand free, then swung the blaster around to shoot his attacker. Kane’s finger depressed the guardless trigger, but he whipped the pistol aside with just a fraction of an inch to spare. His attacker—attackers, in fact—were two children, a blond-haired boy and his sister, the elder of them perhaps eight years old.

Kane’s bullets went wide, blasting harmlessly into the sky as he cursed under his breath. Bad enough that the adults had become indoctrinated into this cult of stone worship, but Kane wouldn’t forgive himself if he went and shot an indoctrinated child.

With the echo of his wasted shots still fresh in his ears, Kane crashed forward as someone tackled him from behind, sacking him like a quarterback. Again Kane hadn’t noticed the attacker coming at him from his left; he had somehow been blindsided. Kane flailed for several steps before slamming into the ground with bone-shaking force. And suddenly he was breathing nothing but water, the clear stream washing into his mouth and nose. Kane choked as someone slammed him with a savage punch to the back of his head.

Just a few steps away, Rosalia spun on her heel as a young woman came at her, slashing something at her face. It was the same woman whom Grant had noticed on their walk through the village, thirty-something years old with a weather tan to her features. Rosalia dipped out of reach as the woman slashed at her, recognizing the nine-inch knitting needles in the woman’s hands.

Off to Rosalia’s left side, a man was rushing at her with a cosh in his hand, raising it overhead to bring down on her head. There was a blur of motion, and something leaped at the man. When Rosalia looked again she saw her faithful dog had clamped its jaws around the man’s arm, wrenching him around and around as it snarled angrily.

Rosalia ducked again as the woman with the knitting needles whipped one of them at her face. Then Rosalia’s left leg stretched out and whipped back in a blur, catching the other woman’s ankle and tripping her off balance. The woman cried out as she slammed against the ground, but Rosalia was already moving, turning back toward the alleyway beside the silo.

“Come on, you slow poke,” she snapped at her dog as she rushed toward where Grant had set up the interphaser. “¡Vamanos!”

As she ran down the alleyway with her scruffy- looking dog at her heels, Rosalia saw Grant struggling beneath the pressure that the robed figure was exerting on his throat. Grant was urgently raising the Copperhead, but he was unable to bring it around enough.

In a blur of movement Rosalia brought the fingers of her left hand up to her lips and blew, unleashing a piercing whistle that caused her dog to whine even as she drew her right arm behind her in a graceful arc.

The robed figure turned at the noise, and Rosalia saw his lips were pulled back in an animal snarl. The knife shot from Rosalia’s right hand like a dart, cutting through the air and embedding itself beneath the robed figure’s hood. The robed man cried out in a splutter of pain, falling away from Grant as he reached for the thing embedded in his face.

As his assailant’s hood fell back, Grant saw that Rosalia’s knife had pierced his left eyeball, burying its point there to an inch or more of its shining length. “Nice aim,” Grant acknowledged as he rolled out from under the hooded man.

“There’s always a chink in an opponent’s armor,” Rosalia said, “if you know where to look.”

Kane had done something similar to this before, using the piercing noise of a warning alarm to break the concentration of these so-called firewalkers. For a moment, the sound had caused the faux-Magistrate to lose his stonelike powers.

The hooded figure was screaming in agony now, his meditative calm already a distant memory. Grant knew that if these firewalkers lost their concentration, even for just a second, they became vulnerable. With a wrench of his mighty arm muscles, Grant hefted the robed figure aside, plucking him from the ground like a toddler before whirling him around and finally slamming him into the solid wall of the silo before letting go. The figure sagged down the wall, head swaying in semiconsciousness. Grant glanced at the figure for a moment, confirming the thing he already knew: the man had a tiny ridge in the center of his forehead, a puckering of the skin where many religions believed the third eye was located. Beneath that ridge, the ex-Mag knew, lurked a stone, subtly altering the man’s thoughts and granting him his superhuman powers.

“Where’s Kane?” Grant snapped, his eyes scanning the crowd massing at the end of the alleyway. Two sturdy young men rushed down the alley, farming tools raised in their hands like clubs.

“You concentrate on getting our gateway open,” Rosalia instructed, dropping low and felling both of the young farmers with a leg sweep. “We’ll get him.”

With that, Rosalia pointed toward the gap between the buildings, and her mongrel hound scampered ahead to where she indicated. “Get Kane,” she told the dog. “Go find him, boy.” The dog yipped excitedly as it rushed back down the alley.

Though it seemed to spend most of its time in a dreamworld, the dog was able to follow commands without any encouragement. Rosalia suspected that the dog had previously been owned by a now dead dirt farmer out in the Mojave Desert, but beyond that she knew little about it.

As the dog wended through the legs of another of the farmers, Rosalia’s second knife blade glinted and she leaped from the alley with all the fury of a wildcat.

KANE KICKED and struggled as his own opponent shoved his face down into the silt at the bottom of the shallow stream. Though the water barely came over the back of his head, Kane was reminded of that adage that a man could drown in an inch of water—curse it all, if it wasn’t just the kind of random fact that Brigid Baptiste would have spouted by way of reassurance as Kane struggled for his very life. His eyes were wide open and he saw the big bloated bubbles pass by his face as another blurt of breath was forced from his aching lungs. He renewed his struggles, trying desperately to flip his attacker from him as the man held his head under the water with a viselike grip.

As Kane struggled, the Sin Eater in his right hand kicked as a random shot blasted from the barrel. Through wide eyes, Kane watched as the bullet cut through the water beneath the surface of the little stream, burying itself in the far bank with a puff of silty debris. I need air, dammit, and I need it now.

Then the weight on Kane’s back became heavier for a moment, and rather than freeing himself he was forced farther into the water, his chin scratching against the tiny flecks of stone at the bottom of the stream.

But almost as soon as it started, it was over, the weight disappearing as the man above him was wrenched aside. Kane pushed himself up, taking an urgent breath as he broke the surface. An instant later something came splashing into the water beside him, and Kane saw a dull-faced man rolling over in the silt, red trails of blood immediately clouding the water around his throat.

Kane turned and was shocked to find himself face-to-face with Rosalia’s mongrel dog. The mutt had blood on its teeth as it pulled its lips back in a wolfish snarl.

“Good boy,” Kane reassured the dog, realizing it had been his savior.

Water streamed down the ex-Magistrate’s face and he brushed his hair back in irritation. His face felt cold from his brief dip in the water, the bone chilled at his left cheek, and he winced as the sensation bit against his eyetooth.

Behind the hound, more of the villagers were waiting, warily watching as Kane pulled himself out of the crystal-clear water of the stream that ran through their ramshackle hamlet, their eyes fixed on him, pure hatred burning in their glare. These people had been converted, a whole community pledging allegiance to Ullikummis, even the children. Some had marks on their wrists where the obedience stones had been inserted beneath their flesh, forcing them to submit to the faux god’s will, but not all of them. Perhaps—Kane realized with indignation—some had chosen this religion.

Kane’s eyes darted across the crowd as, from somewhere among them, spoken words drifted to his ears. “I am stone,” a woman said.

“I am stone.” This time it was a man’s voice.

Then an elderly man stepped forward, shuffling his feet like a clockwork thing. “I am stone,” he said proudly, his watery blue eyes meeting with Kane’s in grim determination.

Then Kane was running at the crowd, the dog issuing a low growl from deep in its throat as it rushed ahead of him on its four shaggy legs.

Kane shunted the old man aside, ducked a driving fist from a younger-looking man, before kicking his leg out and knocking that man in the gut with such force that he doubled over and rolled to the ground in pain.

Concentrating on the battle, Kane was only peripherally aware of what Rosalia’s dog was doing. The mongrel moved with such speed that, for a few moments, that ragged-looking mutt seemed more like something ethereal, a ghost-thing not fully of this world. The dog leaped at the massing crowd, batting people to the ground with its weight. It barked once, and for just a second it seemed that the hound expanded, became somehow more in front of the startled eyes of the crowd, like a swelling cloud of steam.

KNEELING AT THE EDGE of the silo, Grant played his fingers across the control console of the interphaser, inputting the coordinates that Lakesh had forwarded. A few paces away, Rosalia drove the sharp point of her stiletto blade into the gut of another would-be attacker, snarling as the blade pierced his clothes and flesh. At least this one had not assumed the properties of stone. That seemed to be a quality reserved only for the hooded figures that she had met over the past two months.

“Come on, Grant,” Rosalia urged, flipping the bloody farmer’s body to the ground. “Hurry it up.”

“It’ll be ready in a moment,” Grant said without looking up. “Just finding a suitable destination…”

“Screw that.” Rosalia glared at Grant. “Just get us out of here already.”

Grant’s thumb brushed the final key in the sequence he had been programming into the unit, and the interphaser seemed to move without truly moving, as if in the grip of an earth tremor. “Gateway’s opening now,” Grant said calmly, a grin appearing beneath the drooping crescent of his gunslinger’s mustache.

Beside Grant, the pyramid shape of the interphaser remained static yet the world seemed to swirl around it as a lotus blossom of inky rainbow light surged forth, twin cones of color bursting from above and below. Lightning played without those impossible cones of light like witch fire, tendrils sparking like clawing fingers reaching out from the mists.

At the entryway of the alley beside the silo, Rosalia put her finger and thumb to her lips and let out another piercing whistle. Her dog cocked its head at the call, and the ghostly apparition that it seemed to have become evaporated as if it had never been, and it was just a scruffy-looking mongrel once more. Perhaps that strange ghostlike form had never really existed at all; perhaps it had just been a trick of the light.

“Come on, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia hollered, “our ride’s here.”

Kane’s fist snapped out as he punched another of the villagers on the jaw. The woman’s head snapped back with an audible crack as something broke in her neck. Then he was leaping up into the air, booted feet kicking out to connect with the chest of a man wielding a pitchfork. The man toppled back into the dirt, and finally Kane could see a clear path to where Rosalia, her dog and Grant were waiting. Behind the beautiful Mexican woman, Kane saw that familiar blossom of colors as the interphaser carved a door in the quantum ether, opening an impossible corridor through space.

Kane’s empty left hand lashed out, slapping into the head of another grizzled local and casting the man aside in a tumble of flailing limbs. Then Kane was clear, ducking beneath a swinging length of hose pipe as he made for the alleyway.

Up ahead, Rosalia walked gradually backward, making her way to where Grant was waiting by the functioning interphaser.

“Damn unfriendly locals,” she said with irritation.

Grant shook his head. “Whole bunch of them are stoned,” he told her. “This Ullikummis thing is way, way out of control.”

“You two always attract this much trouble?” Rosalia asked as a breathless Kane appeared at the end of the alleyway, blasting shots from his Sin Eater behind him to force the angry locals to retain their distance.

“Kane has a knack for it,” Grant admitted, with a hint of reluctance in his tone. “Still, it does kinda look like we’ve been promoted to the New World Order’s most wanted list.”

“Let’s move,” Kane said breathlessly as he hurried down the short length of alleyway toward the burgeoning lotus blossom of light. A moment later he had leaped into the upward-facing cone of light, with Grant, Rosalia and Rosalia’s dog stepping to follow him.

An instant later the twin cones of light collapsed and the triangular interphaser unit disappeared along with Kane and his companions. The angry locals were left scratching their heads as they found themselves alone in the alleyway, finding no trace of the targets of their hostility other than the fallen forms of the hooded figure and three farmhands. It was as if Kane’s team had never existed.

Chapter 3

Snakefishville smelled of flowers. Their heady, luscious scents swirled through the air like urgent whispers in a hospital ward.

“Name and purpose of visit?” the Magistrate on the south gate asked, sounding bored. He wore a hooded robe of coarse material with a simple belt around his waist from which a small bag hung, bulging but no larger than a man’s fist. A small red-shield insignia, the familiar symbol of Magistrate office, shone at his left breast as it reflected the morning sunlight.

A petite woman stood in front of him, head down in supplication. She had white hair and a chalk-white face, and she wore a loose summer dress whose hem shimmered just above her bone-pale ankles. “Mitra,” the chalk-white woman said, “here to give thanks to our lord and master, as is his holy right.” Her name was not Mitra, and while she planned to visit the newly built cathedral in the center of the ville, she had no intention of giving thanks, holy right or not.

The Magistrate nodded, barely glancing at the woman who had called herself Mitra. He gave a brief, formal smile as he ushered her through the wide gate and into the vast compound that made up the walled ville. The south gate was wide enough to accommodate three or four of the Magistrates’ tanklike Sandcat vehicles driving side by side, a huge opening in the high-walled city of the ville. The white-skinned woman was just the latest of a whole crowd of refugees who had been made to wait at the gate while the Mags processed them. She’d waited two full hours in the warming June sun, beads of sweat forming at the back of her neck where her pixie-short hair brushed at its nape, but curiously she had not seen a single person rejected from entering the ville.

Within, garlands of flowers had been strung across the high walls and on the facades of the towering buildings that lined the ville’s central thoroughfare, their pink-and-white petals fluttering in the warm summer breeze. The woman who had given her name as Mitra peered at them as she strode through the main gates and entered the busy street, letting the bustling crowd flow around her as she admired the pleasant juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial. Behind her, the two Magistrates continued their work at the surveillance booth by the gate, wearing fustian robes over the black armor of their office, smiling as they welcomed newcomers to the ville on this day of worship. Buzzing honeybees flitted from flower to flower along the decorative garlands, delving lustily at their sweet contents before moving on in their restless dance through the warm air. There were other people on the street, dressed in light summer clothes, hurrying to and fro just like the bees, their clothing bright and clean in the midmorning sunlight.

The white-faced woman stood still for a moment, feeling out of place as she watched the people hurrying by all around her, each with a purpose, a destination. Her name was Domi and she didn’t belong here.

The last time Domi had been in Snakefishville—the last time it had been called Snakefishville—it had all been very different. As one of nine magnificent walled cities dotted across North America, Snakefishville had lost its ruler when the hybrid barons had evolved into the Annunaki Roverlords two years ago. Baron Snakefish himself had transformed into cruel Lord Utu. Without the baron’s influence, the ville had fallen into confusion and, most recently, it had been all but destroyed by a subterrene, an underground engineering device that replicated the effects of an earthquake and sent the towers of Snakefish crashing down into a crater. When Domi had last visited here four months ago, what little remained of the ville itself looked like something from a nightmare. All that had remained of its once-majestic buildings were a few rotten struts clawing the skies at awful angles, and the wrecked streets were filled with the decaying bodies of the dead.

Yet now, just a few months on, the ville was miraculously reinvigorated. And not just reinvigorated, Domi reminded herself—renamed. Like all things Annunaki, Snakefishville had been reborn, this time as Luilekkerville where freedom was everything and its citizenry considered themselves carefree.

Domi didn’t like it. When things changed rapidly like this it was seldom for the better, she knew. The guards on the gate were all too friendly, far too welcoming for Magistrates, and Domi could tell with a glance that neither was combat-ready.

Luilekkerville’s buildings were universally lower than those of Snakefishville, and the towering Administrative Monolith that had dominated the center had been replaced by a two-story cathedral. But the cathedral’s tower strove higher, reaching up over the new-built city, a circular stained-glass window dominating its front like some all-seeing eye, its panes made up of reds and oranges and purples, just like the old disk on the Administrative Monoliths.

Different but the same, then, still following the old street map that had been created during the Program of Unification, the same regimented plan on which each of the nine villes had been based. A child of the Outlands, Domi had never felt comfortable caged inside the high walls of the villes. They did something to people, she felt sure, muddled their senses and made them susceptible and docile—gave them “tanglebrain,” as she called it. Recently, her friends in Cerberus had begun to suspect that there was more to the ville blueprints than met the eye, that the symmetrical design of the cities—with their towering structures that peaked at the center—created some kind of sigil, a magical symbol that could genuinely affect a person’s thinking. Cerberus archivist Brigid Baptiste had told Domi that such symbols were commonplace back before the nukecaust, that an ancient political organization called the Nazi Party had used one as a rallying point to recruit their members, a symbol called the swastika.

Domi shivered for a moment despite the warmth of the sun, recalling that excited look in Brigid’s eye as she explained this over dinner back in the Cerberus redoubt. Domi had been sitting at the edge of the cafeteria table, while Kane, Grant and Lakesh had all been discussing the implications of what Brigid’s discovery might mean in the seats beside her. Domi missed Brigid; she had been her friend, and Domi found friends hard to come by. But Brigid had disappeared during a raid on the Cerberus redoubt, and now she was numbered among the missing while the mountain headquarters itself had been abandoned until it could be rebuilt and made secure.

Domi peered around, watching the smiling faces of the passersby as they made their way to their destinations. Everyone was dressed in light clothes, simple but elegant, the women in long skirts or summer dresses, the men in loose cotton shirts and slacks and shorts. Many of the men wore flowers in their shirt pockets, and some of the younger women had flowers in their hair, here and there in a complete ring like a fairy’s crown.

As the crowd flowed all around her like the current of a stream, Domi halted, closing her eyes and taking in the sweet scents of the flowers. Flowers decorated so much of the ville: flowering creepers wound up the ornate streetlights that lined the main street; flowers peeked from their perches in the hanging baskets that decorated the lights; flowers grew from pots lining the center of the road.

Domi relied upon her other senses as much as her eyes, and she allowed her mind to go blank in that moment, letting her impressions take over. Domi was a unique figure among the hurrying populace of Luilekkerville. Her skin and hair were the chalk-white of an albino, the hair trimmed short in a pixie-ish cut that highlighted the sharp planes of her cheekbones. She was a petite woman, barely five feet in height with bird-thin arms and legs. The floaty sundress she wore was colored burnt umber, sleeveless with its hem brushing the tops of her white ankles above bare feet, the small swell of her breasts pushing at its simple bodice. A matching ribbon of material had been wound around Domi’s left wrist, its lengths dangling down as she swung her arms. Although small, Domi was wiry, her body muscular beneath the unrestrictive flow of the material. She had secreted her favored weapon beneath the masking lines of the dress, a hunting knife in a sheath just above her left ankle. The blade was well hidden from a casual search, but she had been surprised that the Magistrates hadn’t even frisked her. With hindsight she wondered if she might have sneaked a blaster in Luilekkerville, too, but that had seemed too much risk for what should be a simple surveillance mission. She was out in the field alone here, and the last thing she wanted to do was to attract any extra attention that her ghoulish appearance didn’t already demand.

Domi breathed deeply for a moment, scenting the air and listening to the contented buzzing of insects amid the fluttering petals. The whole settlement had been rebuilt, constructed from the ashes of Snakefishville at a furious rate. Even now, behind the buzz of the honeybees and the chattering of conversation, Domi could hear hammering and sawing as construction workers continued to build the towering edifices that would dominate the skyline of Luilekkerville out here close to the Pacific coastline.

With its fresh air and happy population, the change in the ville seemed almost a bewitchment.

As Domi stood there, one of the passersby stopped in front of her. When Domi lifted her eyelids, two scarlet orbs reappeared like glistening rubies in her elfin face as she turned her attention to the stranger. The stranger was a beautiful woman of indeterminate middle years, a golden tan to her skin and smile lines around her eyes with a long lustrous mane of blond framing her pretty face. A small wicker basket depended from its hard straps under the woman’s right arm, its open bowl filled with freshly picked flowers. Domi watched in surprise as the woman reached into the basket and handed her a flower, its trimmed stem just an inch or so in length.

“For you,” the woman said, smiling brightly as she offered Domi the flower.

Domi reached out and plucked the flower from the woman’s hands, nodding in gratitude. “Thank you,” she said, surprise clear in her tone.

“Our love is solid as rock,” the woman recited with a warm smile before stepping past Domi and moving on down the street.

It was not often that a stranger approached Domi in such joyous circumstances. She had grown up a wild child of the Outlands and she was used to being singled out as a freak thanks to the albinism that distinguished her from the people around her. As Domi watched, the blonde woman continued along the street, handing out more flowers to the people crowding there, offering her chanted words before moving on to the next.

Domi peered at the flower, sniffing at its rich scent for a moment as she twisted its stem around and around between her fingers, making it spin. There was something going on here, just beneath the surface—an all-pervading attitude that seemed to have affected the populace of the born-again ville. The nine villes had always acted as a sort of safe haven, a shelter from the ravages that man had brought upon himself with the advent of the nukecaust and the Deathlands era that followed. They had grown up as a part of the Program of Unification, and had brought a much-needed regimentation to the lives of their residents. In total, forty-five thousand people had been spread equally across nine walled cities, and they had lived a harmonious existence. Yet the happiness on show here, the undercurrent of joy, was something Domi had never seen before. It was a happiness that transcended logic, a primitive happiness at simply being alive. It was sinister somehow, as if a mass brainwashing had taken place.

Domi stepped out of the way as three gallivanting children came hurrying past, laughing as they threw a weighted cloth bag back and forth among themselves. The oldest of them was perhaps nine years old, and she wore a daisy chain in her flowing black hair, in unconscious imitation of many of the adults who wandered along the street.

Domi watched as the children hurried on, wrapped up in their game of mutie-in-the-middle. Then she turned her attention back to the other people on the street, looking for patterns of behavior. The vast majority seemed to be heading in the direction of the center of town, and Domi scanned the broad street ahead until her eyes met with the cathedral that towered above everything. Its red window seemed to glow like the evening sun, a single bloodshot eye observing the populace of the ville. Even as she watched, Domi became aware of the tolling as a bell was struck, and then it came again after a few seconds’ pause, and again.

As the bell tolled, the citizenry of Luilekkerville seemed to turn as one, making their way more determinedly down the street toward the looming cathedral in the town center. Casting the flower aside in a waste receptacle at the side of the road, Domi joined the crowd, keeping her head down in that most simplistic of disguises—hiding in plain sight—as she made her way toward the cathedral.

Up close, the cathedral looked rough, its walls hewn from hard rock of a miserable brown-gray mix. Shingles covered its facade in a swirling pattern, as if washed up by crashing waves on a beach. The basso bell continued tolling from within, its single note calling the locals to worship, and Domi walked with them, furtively looking around. The locals seemed happy enough, laughing and jolly as they continued their friendly conversations. There were adults and children, old folks who needed sticks to help them walk just shuffling to the open doors of the cathedral that waited in the center of the ville. Some of the children ran or skipped along, and several of the adults skipped, too, one young couple laughing as they skipped hand in hand through the wide archway into the structure of the building. Other than the central tower, the cathedral was just two stories high, and the archway dominated its frontage, almost two stories at its apex and wide enough to drive a Sandcat assault vehicle through without touching the sides. There were no doors, Domi noted—the doorway remained open day and night, allowing free passage for those seeking entry. Perhaps that was a throwback to the days when this settlement had been Snakefishville, as the Program of Unification allowed for no locks on doors, no privacy for the individual, for privacy showed a lack of trust in one’s fellow man and lack of trust had been the overriding rationale of the Deathlands, that terrible time that had preceded this.

With one last glance behind her, Domi padded beneath the towering archway and into the body of the cathedral itself, the distinct aroma of flowers coming to her nostrils even as she stepped beneath the arch. It was darker inside, away from the morning sun, and it took a few seconds for Domi’s eyes to adjust, a blur of green sparking momentarily in front of her retinas. The sunlight drew a deliberate pattern inside the church itself, the archway of the open door cast in an elongated line across the floor, stretching two-thirds of the length of the main aisle leading to an altar that Domi estimated had been placed close to the center of the building. Some trick of the light turned that bright pattern into the roughly hewn form of a man, and Domi checked behind her once more to confirm that the arch was still an arch; it was. She realized there must be subtleties to the carved structure to generate this illusion, the towering stone man was drawn by the brightness of the sun across the floor like some giant carrying the worshippers on his broad back. She knew what it was, of course—it represented Ullikummis.

Domi made her way into the main chapel, its walls stretching two stories up to the high rafters of the building, creating a generous feeling of space. As outside, the interior walls were carved of rough rock, and they had an unfinished feel to them, their surfaces pitted and mottled like sand. The floor was flat like slate, and Domi winced as her bare feet padded from the warmth of the sun through the arch to the icy coolness where the floor had remained in shadow all morning. She peered down, seeing patterns painted on the floor, dappled in whisker-thin lines of red as if veins or arteries.

The sound of the clanging bell was loud within the cathedral, its droning note echoing from the hard surfaces of the walls and floor. Behind the altar, Domi saw a towering structure made of glass, hexagonal with a diameter of twelve feet or so, stretching up into the highest reaches of this tower that dominated Luilekkerville’s skyline. The glass tower looked like something medical and it contained the chiming bell, its heavy cone swaying back and forth like a lily in the wind, its petals just beginning to open for the spring. High up in the bell tower, the single circle of stained glass glowed a fearsome red where the sun struck it, turning the sides of hexagonal glass red where the panes met, like lines of blood dripping down from the heavens—the blood of the gods.

The wide aisle stretched up toward the central altar, abutted by two broad columns of chairs, simple things carved of wood. The people of Luilekkerville were filing into these, the chairs filling up like a theatrical audience. As they sat, Domi saw other aisles leading up to the altar from all sides, ten spokes converging on it with lines of chairs dividing them, each one containing the same sunlit illusion of the fallen man-god for the communion to walk upon. She estimated that the cathedral could seat eight hundred or more at any one time, and it seemed to be almost full even now. Domi slowed for a moment, eyes roving over the crowd, halting here and there as she spotted that familiar shade of vibrant red hair she was hoping for. A woman sat just a few rows away, her back to Domi, a cascade of red-gold curls tumbling freely down her back. Domi watched for a moment as the woman sat there, then saw her turn to talk to a child tugging at her arm, revealing the hard planes of her face more clearly to Domi. For a moment Domi’s breath caught—but no, it wasn’t who she had hoped, not Brigid Baptiste, just a stranger with hair the color of the setting sun.

Her long skirt brushing at her ankles, Domi took an aisle seat two-thirds from the back. She pulled her legs in to allow others to shuffle past, take the empty seats in the row—she was an interloper here and she wanted to keep a clear path for herself to the exit. Instinctively, Domi’s hand reached forward, brushing at her skirt for just a moment, feeling the blade sheathed just above her left ankle.

Domi sat and watched, listening to the loud chimes of the single bell as it swung to and fro. High in the rafters, Domi saw more garlands of flowers had been stretched, lining the walls and twirling like creeping vines down the rough stone pillars that held the structure up. It was strangely simple, beautiful in a naive way. It reminded her of some of the more simplistic outlander rituals she had witnessed.

The cathedral was abuzz with voices, no one person’s standing out but all of them together generating a low blanket of muffled words that seem to fill the theater with a sense of camaraderie, of joy. It was a celebration, an expression of the love of life by the living. Domi sat dour-faced, letting the noise wash over her.

A couple of rows ahead of Domi, a fresh-faced couple laughed, their hands intertwining as they gazed into one another’s eyes. The lad was perhaps nineteen or twenty, a thin blond beard barely tracing over his chin, while his girl looked a little younger, a circlet of flowers weaved in her lustrous black hair, shining pips of metal hanging from her earlobes. Their faces came close, noses brushing for a moment, and they laughed once more before kissing. Domi looked away, only to spy more couples—young and old—in similar joyful states.

At the meeting point of the aisles, just in front of the glass tube that held the swinging bell, a figure in a hooded robe strode to the altar area, rising up a small flight of steps to stand before the congregation. His hood was up over his features, his robe a creamy white with red braiding like lines of trickling blood.

In silence, the hooded figure on the podium held up his right hand, spreading the fingers like rays from a stylized sun, and the bell ringer stopped pulling the bell rope, ceasing its chiming with a final tuneless clang. For a moment the hall was still, the congregation falling silent in anticipation. Domi waited, wondering what would happen next. Nervously, she glanced over her shoulder, confirming that the arched doorway was still open, that she could escape if she needed to.

The cathedral remained silent for almost a minute, the robed figure at the altar standing there with his hand still held high, the red-filtered sunlight playing through his outstretched fingers. The congregation began shuffling just a little, a few of the children becoming restless as they waited for what was to come next. Domi watched, eyes narrowed as she traced the red lines that played across the hooded figure’s cassock like bloody veins.

Finally the robed figure spoke, his voice loud in the echoing chamber of the cathedral. “Friends,” he began, bringing both hands up to his head and pushing back the white hood of his robe. Beneath, he was middle-aged, a square face, clean-shaven with the hint of a tan on his balding pate, a ruddy redness to his cheeks. “Utopia is here, opening before you like a flower in the springtime, paradise on Earth.”

Domi turned her head a moment, saw the beatific smiling faces of the crowd to either side of her. The members of this congregation were pleased; they felt safe with these words.

“And what has brought about this utopia?” the man in the white robes asked rhetorically. “Not a baron, that’s for sure. We need no barons here, now that we have god. But what is god? you may ask.”

The priest left the question hanging in the air for a few seconds, and Domi heard the mumblings of several people around her as they whispered the familiar answer, speaking it quietly to themselves.

“God is love,” the white-robed priest announced, spinning around at the altar and sweeping his arms through the air to encompass every person in the vast audience. “This is god, this thing you feel here, among your fellow men and women.”

“And children!” a voice shouted from over to Domi’s right, and several of the audience members laughed with embarrassment. It was a child’s voice, a little girl, excited and restless at the communion.

“Indeed.” The priest smiled. “Children, too. We mustn’t forget them.” He turned, waving to the part of the audience where the girl’s voice had emanated from before turning back to address everyone. “I don’t think she’s going to let me forget them anytime soon,” he said with the faux secrecy of a true showman.

Some of the audience laughed at this, several applauding just for a moment.

Up on the podium, the white-robed figure was turning once again, raising his arms to indicate the rough-hewn walls of the cathedral. “God promised to bring heaven to Earth, and so he has. You are safe, well fed, you are loved. He demands nothing in return, your strength is his strength.

“Our love is rock, and a rock never breaks.”

Domi felt her breath catch in her throat. The rock god was the thing that had almost destroyed Cerberus, had killed her teammates and left Brigid Baptiste among the missing, possibly dead. His name was Ullikummis and his influence now stretched to whole villes, reshaping them to worship him. And such was his power, Domi realized, that now his people need not even speak his name. He was rock, and rock was love. Domi felt the cobra-creeping fear in her belly as she looked once more at the joyful faces of the congregation all around her. Ullikummis was in their hearts now, his bloody form of salvation sweeping them up like the tide.

For just a moment a breeze blew in from the open door behind Domi, and it seemed Arctic-cold despite the warmth of the June morning. Domi sank into her seat, listening to more of the preachings of this priest of the New Order.

Chapter 4

There came a warm sensation in Kane’s eye and his vision blurred for a scant second. When it cleared, a monstrous child-thing was standing in front of him, his lizard-slit eyes staring into his own. Kane recoiled and tried to pull himself away, but the thing with lizard eyes continued to stare, holding his gaze.

Kane studied him.

His flesh was dark and calloused, hardened like something hewn from stone. He stood as if uncomfortable, limbs held awkwardly, the shoulders hunched as though his back was in pain. He wasn’t standing in front of him, Kane realized with a start—he was standing in a tall square frame of glass, a mirror. The mirror was set into a wall carved of stone, the glass turning dark and smoky at its edges, a decorative affectation to the design. The wall itself was of a bright stone the color of sand, and a crimson band had been painted through it like the bloody slash of a knife. The wall radiated heat as fierce sunlight played across its surface. They were indoors, but it was still bright, with square, open windows lining the wall opposite the mirror.

Where am I? Kane wondered.

The statuelike figure in the mirror smiled, a frightful rending of the rock that clad his face, his primitive features turning him into something even more hideous. It took a moment for Kane to recognize it, or at least he thought that he did. Though a child, the creature was tall—towering even—yet he still carried himself with the awkwardness of a child getting used to the changing shapes of his forming body. The tall child turned from the mirror, trudging down a flight of steps and into the darkness. It was cooler here, as they went underground, away from the sun. Kane seemed to be seeing all of this, yet he was traveling with the monstrous child, as if he was a part of him, as if the thing in the mirror was him. It was like a dream, a vivid story that Kane was being swept up by.

The child walked and Kane remained with him, feeling the weight of his stone cladding, the hideous aches that fought for attention in his muscles. He felt stretched, pulled almost to breaking point, his muscles screaming as if shot through with influenza.

His feet—which is to say, the child’s feet—clomped heavily on the brick floor, stone on stone as he descended the steps. Strange noises flittered to his ears from the foot of the stairs, and Kane marveled as they entered a vast laboratory set in the windowless room there. Clay containers hissed and burbled, naked flames playing on their bottoms and sides. The flames were mostly blue or orange, but Kane noticed that two of them were a fearsome green and a disarming lilac, neither color natural. A plain wooden bench waited in the center of the room, a high side table next to it like a bedside cabinet. A network of glass tubes ran along one wall, multicolored liquids turning to gas or being refined into solid lumps of crystal at various apertures along its glistening, sleek lines. A figure stood there amid the bubbling tubes, his back to the child, his green scaled flesh the color of jade. Kane looked at the figure with fascination—it was an Annunaki, the enemies of mankind. Kane tried to leap, to attack this hated enemy, but he was unable to move, still watching events as though watching a stage play.

Without warning, the scaled figure turned and Kane saw a strange apparatus masked the top half of his lizardlike face. The apparatus was made of circles of glass, lenses on metal arms that could be brought in front of his eyes to magnify his vision, one in front of another. The lens arrangement stood out almost six inches from the Annunaki creature’s face, and some of the metal arms remained in the upright position, the lenses not in use by its wearer. Behind the magnifying lenses, the creature’s eyes were as green as his skin with twin vertical slits down their centers in the bottomless black of the grave. The monster admired the stone child who was Kane for a moment, gazing up and down as though admiring his handiwork.

“You’re looking tall,” the creature with the magnifying lenses stated. Kane got the indefinable impression that this Annunaki saw him not as a living creature but as simply a slab of meat on which to experiment, a chef meeting a farm animal.

After a brief exchange, the child lay on the wooden bench, a slab of meat on the butcher’s block, and Kane seemed to be lying there with him, two as one. Then the Annunaki with the strange eyewear checked at some solution that was bubbling close to Kane’s ears, and he heard the hiss of steam as some superheated liquid expanded and tried to escape its container.

“Calm yourself, child,” the jade-scaled Annunaki instructed, his tone soothing. “I can hear your breathing from all the way over here.”

“I’m sorry, Lord Ningishzidda,” the child said, bringing his breathing down to a more normal level.

Kane waited, helpless as if strapped to the bench where the child remained free. Then the Annunaki, the one that the child had called Lord Ningishzidda, strode over to the bench, wielding a syringe tipped with a vicious-looking needle. Within the syringe, an orange concoction bubbled and steamed like lava, a trail of hot mist whispering at its edges.

“You must keep your eyes open, mighty prince,” Lord Ningishzidda explained. “There is no other way.”

Then the green-scaled Annunaki came at Kane with the syringe, watching with sick delight as he drove its needle deep into Kane’s left eye. It felt like liquid fire being pumped into his eye, burning all sense and reason away. Kane cried out, loosing a scream that seemed to echo beyond the walls of the underground chamber itself, shattering them as he watched. Colors swirled there for a moment.

Around him, the multicolored lotus blossom of the interphaser was fading, lightning strikes firing across its depths like electricity-firing neurons.

Shunted two hundred miles through quantum space by the interphaser, the three companions emerged on a tranquil, grassy plain beneath a cloudless azure sky. Kane staggered forward, clutching a hand to his face where his left eye continued to burn. The eye was watering and he could feel warm tears burning at the dam of his tear duct, swelling as they clamored to burst free. He rubbed at his eye with the ball of his hand, wiping at the tears as he stumbled blindly forward, two steps, three, before tumbling to the ground, the bright green grass rushing up to meet him with its fresh-cut smell so strong that Kane could taste it.

“You okay, man?” Grant’s voice came as if from far away. Beneath that sound, threatening to obscure it, a dog barked repeatedly—Rosalia’s mutt, excited at the instantaneous transition through space-time. And beneath that, distant like a shushing hush in a library, the waves of the sea crashed against some nearby shore.

“Kane?” Grant asked again, reaching for his partner where he lay facedown on the grass.

Kane rolled over at his partner’s gentle shove, and Grant saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. “You okay, buddy?” Grant asked.

Kane’s eyes flickered and he nodded, his head feeling suddenly sore as he moved it. “Jump dream,” he explained.

The human body had not been designed for the instantaneous transportation of the teleport, and one side effect was the so-called jump dream that threatened a user’s sanity. Mostly associated with the mat trans, a man-made teleportation system that the Cerberus team had employed on numerous occasions, jump dreams were accompanied by nausea and a sense of disturbed reality. However, the interphaser units had rarely generated such jump dreams, and Grant was surprised to hear his friend refer to such a thing after so long.

“You need some time?” he asked, concerned.

Kane brushed at his face, swiping at the tears. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.” His face looked red and his left eyelid was puffy, the eye itself bloodshot. “I’ll be fine,” he repeated as Grant looked at him.

Turning then, Kane led the way up a subtle incline that led to a one-story building set amid the quiet grounds. His companions followed, Rosalia’s dog scurrying ahead excitedly to scope out this new place. Off to their left was a simple wooden fence, a long strip of two horizontal boards attached to wide-spaced posts like a farmyard gate. Behind the fence, a sheer drop fell away, ending in the pebble-dappled shore of a tiny beach.

“Looks like a nice spot,” Rosalia observed as she peered over the cliff side. “Quiet.”

“Work on your tan later,” Kane growled as he marched onward. “We have us a meeting to attend.”

He was angry, he knew—not with Rosalia but with himself. Whatever that vision had been, that “jump dream,” as he had called it, it had left some mark inside him, an indelible burning behind his eye. He blinked, forcing back the salty tears that welled there once again at the memory.

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES after dawn in Tibet and the watery yellow-white orb of the sun was just starting to nudge itself over the towering mountains that dominated the landscape. The woman with the fire-red hair pulled her cloak around her as she ascended the rise that led to the cave opening, striding the final few miles of the snow-dusted mountain path, her horse abandoned with exhaustion. It was cold out here in this mountainous range where Tibet bordered China, bitingly so. In fact it was cold enough to freeze the flesh of the woman’s steed almost three hours before. She hadn’t cared—the armor-like properties of her shadow suit kept her warm, regulating her body temperature beneath the scarred black leather of the supple armor she wore like a second skin. The cloak that she wore was made of animal fur, a dead thing cinched around her throat, encasing her with its ghosts. Hung inside the cloak, a bag slapped against her hip, a large leather satchel containing something heavy. It had been better when the satchel had been contained in her horse’s saddlebag where it couldn’t irritate her, but it mattered little.

The wind blew around the woman as she clambered along the rough path, her booted heels breaking the night frost that covered it before sinking into the layer of snow that dwelled beneath like a bloated egg white. Her name was Brigid Haight and she had made this approach before, several years ago when she had been a member of the Cerberus team. That had been before Ullikummis had remade her, showing her the true path and filling her head with a secret knowledge that had always seemed just out of reach before.

Back then she had been known as Brigid Baptiste, an archivist from Cobaltville who had formed one-third of the seemingly inseparable trinity that lay at the heart of Cerberus. Where Kane had brought his integrity and Grant his strength, Brigid had brought knowledge. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Brigid had the ability to recall information to the smallest detail with photographic accuracy. She had traveled the globe under the aegis of Cerberus, expanding her experiences and her knowledge and challenging her archivist’s mind with the most complex of conundrums. Alongside Kane and Grant, Brigid Baptiste had learned of the secret history of the Earth, uncovered a conspiracy that stretched back millennia and placed the star-born Annunaki at the top of the evolutionary tree. In those days Brigid had thought that humankind should rebel against this notion, that Cerberus was engaged in a noble fight to turn these alien usurpers away and free humanity from the shackles of their subjugation. She had been naive.

Ullikummis had changed all that, his words bending her prodigious mind, letting it achieve its full potential for the first time. Now she stood reborn, and had chosen the new name of Haight. The role of the Annunaki was deeper than she had ever suspected, their tentacles reaching out beyond this simple plane of existence. The things she had seen as Brigid Baptiste had been nothing more than performances on a stage, but Brigid had been too ignorant to think to look past the curtain, beguiled to think that the play was real without ever considering the activity backstage that created the illusion in front of her eyes. Ullikummis had changed that.

Brigid Haight took a deep breath of the icy air as if challenging it to harm her, to make itself felt. Ignorantly, the air remained cold, caring nothing for the affairs of man or Annunaki.

She had come here before in search of a mythical city called Agartha. Buddhist and Taoist legends had spoken of this city, a secret enclave beneath a mountain range on the China-Tibet border from which strange gray people emerged to influence human affairs. In actuality, the city had once housed a race of aliens called the First Folk, among whom a long-lived creature called Balam had been witness to many of the most pivotal points of human history. Balam had befriended the Cerberus team, welcoming them into his underground city that stood all but deserted hundreds of years on from the days when those initial legends had first sprung up. Balam remained in the city even now, living there with his foster daughter, the hybrid spawn known as Little Quav.

It was Little Quav that brought Brigid to Agartha on this occasion under the instructions of her master, the fallen god Ullikummis. The half-human girl child was actually an Annunaki in chrysalis state. The members of the Annunaki royal family had been reborn in hybrid form on Earth, their tweaked DNA hiding their true nature until a catalyst download was applied by their mother ship, Tiamat. The two-and-a-half-year-old child known as Little Quav housed inside her the genetic sequence of the goddess Ninlil, child bride of Enlil and mother to Ullikummis. When the Annunaki, those terrible children of the serpent, had re-emerged on planet Earth, Lord Enlil, the most fearsome of their number, had sought out Little Quav to complete their ghastly pantheon. The Cerberus warriors had protected the child until an agreement could be reached that placed her in the custody of Balam until such time as she came of age. It had been a tentative solution at best, and Balam had been forced to return to hiding with the child so that she would come under no further scrutiny. Ullikummis was determined to bring his mother back to his side in his war against his father—the full nature of his scheme, however, remained unknown. While Ullikummis could not enter the secret city of Agartha without alerting the child’s watchdog, Balam’s longtime ally Brigid should be able to without raising any undue curiosity.

For a moment Brigid stopped, searching the shadow-painted mountains as they towered above her. There was an access point near here, she recalled, a physical entryway that led into the ground itself. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she peered into the darkness, scouring the base of the mountains until she found the place she sought. It was lodged within her eidetic memory, the location still vibrant despite the rudimentary change in the mountains’ snowy covering.

There was something else in her memory, too, appearing for just a fraction of a second as she delved for the hidden location in her mind’s eye—a series of golden circles disappearing into the blue, regular highlights of red and green dotted all around the pattern like a Julia set.

Then, her red-gold hair billowing around her like a lion’s mane, Brigid made her way to a familiar indentation in the snow-covered foothills, her emerald eyes seeking the opening that was hidden in the shade. Her boots slipped for a moment on the shifting snow, and then Brigid had located the path, clambering down to a clump of rocks that waited like sentries, timeless and eternal.

A few months ago the Ontic Library had gifted Brigid knowledge she had never accessed before, and it had opened her mind to new pathways into Agartha, places that had been hidden before. Standing at the hard rock wall, Brigid twisted her leather-sheathed body, and somehow an opening appeared in the wall where there had been none just a moment before. It was not a mechanical thing, nor a supernatural one; it was simply a way of looking for things that Ullikummis had taught her, a way to comprehend the world as the Annunaki did, no longer constrained by just three dimensions.

Brigid stepped into the open mouth of the cave, and found herself in a tunnel, barely five feet in width with a low ceiling, its black basalt walls faintly lit by a ghostly blue luminescence. There was the distinct metronome sound of dripping as snowmelt plip-plopped down into a puddle that pooled along the floor of the tunnel. The puddle itself was so cool that, in turn, the water would freeze again, creating a glistening silvery sheen on its surface like some slug’s midnight trail.

Brigid moved down into the tunnel, descending as it clawed a pathway beneath the surface of the Earth. As she went farther, the rough-walled tunnel opened up and the ceiling became higher overhead, the blue luminescence becoming fainter through its distance from her. Brigid closed her eyes, recalling the map of the area in her prodigious mind’s eye. As she did so, she thought she heard something—a voice—and she stilled her thoughts, filtering through the noises around her, the dripping echoes, until she could be sure. It was a child’s voice, joyful, laughing, awake with the crack of dawn and hungry to live and to play and to experience.

Brigid opened her eyes and moved on down the incline, making her way toward the far exit of the tunnel. After a while, the tunnel widened even more, and then instead of a tunnel it was a chamber in its own right, a vast room whose shape was like a funnel with the narrow tunnel as its spout. High above, stalactites reached down from the ceiling like grasping talons, many of them wider than a man’s body. The child’s laughter was louder now, like a musical instrument being playfully plucked and strum.

It took almost four minutes to stride across the vast cavern before Brigid reached a staircase hewn directly into the rock. The staircase was narrow and without sides, and went down another fifteen feet into a far larger cavern. More of that ghostly blue luminescence spilled from the high, arched roof, tiled here in square light panels like a child’s jigsaw of the sky, with some pieces still waiting to be placed. Beneath, a grand settlement stretched off through the enormous cavern, its squat, windowless buildings carved of the same black basalt as the cavern itself, radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a central tower—yet again, the towering-center-and-lower-surrounds pattern that had repeated itself throughout history. The outskirts of the settlement sloped gently upward to meet with the stone stairwell that Brigid was descending.

The city was eerily quiet, not a single sign of movement across its vast entirety. Then, as Brigid reached the bottom of the staircase, a small figure came charging through the street in front of her, appearing from behind one of the black stone buildings, her short legs pumping as she hurried to greet the stranger. The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old, wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind the little girl, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

It was all so easy.

Chapter 5

“Just when you think it’s done it starts again,” Grant growled as he took a seat in Shizuka’s winter retreat. He was a large man, so large in fact that he made the seat he sat in look comical, like something out of a cartoon. Dressed in a skintight shadow suit, Grant was a well-built man with broad shoulders and skin like polished ebony. He still wore his long duster over the shadow suit, black Kevlar that looked like leather, and his dark eyes betrayed his exhaustion. His jaw was dark with the start of a beard beneath the drooping lines of his mustache, his hair close-cropped to his skull. “Damn snake-faces keep popping up every time we try to move.”

Shizuka looked at him, gracing him with the slightest of smiles as the other people in the room made themselves comfortable. They had had all of two minutes to get reacquainted once Grant and his team had arrived via the quantum window opened by the interphaser, and the hulking ex-Mag made little secret of his irritation. There were seven other people in the room besides Grant and Shizuka, including four guards standing equidistant from each other in the corners of the large reception room.

Located on a remote part of the coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the building was of classic Japanese design, reaching two stories aboveground with a pleasing curve to the roof like a folded ribbon. A simple wooden balcony surrounded the winter retreat, and several more guards from Shizuka’s loyal Tigers of Heaven patrolled along the balcony, keeping watch for any approach.

“Tiger Isle has had a few castaways turn up on her shores over the past three weeks,” Shizuka explained, referring to the Pacific island home of her Tigers of Heaven. “Missionaries, they initially claimed to be lost, the victims of shipwrecks and the like. We offered them hospitality, but each one eventually revealed himself to harbor a hidden agenda to convert my people.”

Shizuka was a beautiful woman, petite of frame—seemingly more so when sitting in front of Grant across the low table that rested in the precise center of the room. Dressed in a simple silk kimono, its wide sleeves swinging several inches below her wrists as she gestured, Shizuka had flawless golden skin accented with peach and milk. She had full-petaled lips beneath a stub nose and her dark eyes showed the delicate almond lilt of her Asian ancestry. Despite her small stature, Shizuka was a fearsome warrior, a full-blooded samurai who ruled her people with firmness tempered with mercy. She was also Grant’s lover.

“One of these missionaries tried to push a stone into the face of my majordomo,” she continued in her trilling, singsong voice. “It was most strange.”

“They worship a rock creature,” Kane stated by way of explanation, his voice betraying his irritation. “Big fucker name of Ullikummis, yet another member of the endless Annunaki royal family.”

Shizuka nodded once in acknowledgment. Like Grant, Kane wore a shadow suit, which he had chosen to augment with a battered old leather jacket of a worn brown color, its slick surface scuffed and bearing a patch across one elbow. The jacket was still dusted with the soil of the little village between the cliffs where he and his companions had been ambushed by the worshippers of Ullikummis. He also wore his favored black boots—also scuffed—one of the last survivors of his Magistrate days, and dark pants held up by a belt with a large buckle of dull, gunmetal finish.

Kane stood by one of the windows, his broad shoulders leaning back against the frame, his legs crossed at the ankles. Over six feet tall, Kane looked imposing when he stood to his full height, his steel-gray eyes boring into you like a laser beam beneath his dark brows. With his long and rangy arms and legs, there was something of the wolf to Kane’s physical appearance. There was something of the wolf in his nature, too, both a natural pack leader and a loner as the need arose.