Brigid didn’t let her finish the sentence

Her booted foot kicked high, thumping Skylar hard in the chest, knocking her backward once more until she slammed into the side of the desk. “The curious cat was killed, Skylar,” she said.

“What’s got into you?” Skylar wailed fearfully, struggling to keep her balance as she was forced against the desk.

“Never liked you,” Brigid said again, leaping forward, her hands closing around Skylar’s throat. “Nosy and arrogant because you know how to operate computers. That’s not a talent, Skylar. That’s barely even an ability.”

“P-please,” Skylar croaked as Brigid’s grip tightened around her neck, “Miss Baptiste. I think something is very wrong with you…please try to…”

She could tell that Brigid wasn’t listening, and she struggled vainly to loosen the grip of the taller woman. There was a dark, determined look in Brigid’s narrowed eyes, a horrible joy in the set of her smiling jaw. Skylar thought that she knew what it was—bloodlust.

Janus Trap

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die.

—Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Prologue

In a broken air vent, in a hidden bunker beneath the Caucasus Mountains, a woman dressed in strips of material was waking up.

Almost two days before, when she had awakened to find herself beaten and bloody on the floor of the bunk room, Cloud Singer had immediately engaged the implant at the base of her neck and tried to dreamslice. But, to her horror, nothing had happened, no jump, no transferral, nothing.

She had strained her ears, listening for a trace of the singing bull roarer, its promising salvation, but all had been silent. Then, as she listened, she had heard voices, people in the underground complex, walking along the corridor, and the beam of their flashlight danced in the open doorway.

She had moved quickly, despite the pain from all over her body, clambering into the broken vent on the wall of the bunk room, the one that Kane had shot to pieces. Inside, she had hidden herself from sight while her enemies went about their cleanup operation, sweeping the bunker for stragglers, but failing to find her.

And she had tried, periodically, to dreamslice, to step out of Realworld and into the Dreaming, but nothing had happened.

Tucked there, in the absolute darkness, beside the room full of skeletons, she had slowed her breathing and willed herself into a healing coma, her heart beating at an eighth of its usual pace.

Almost two days later, conscious once more, she found herself alone.

Cloud Singer blinked, bringing her electrochemical polymer lenses to life on the nictitating membranes that slotted over her eyes, granting her night vision in the pitch-dark bunker.

On silent feet, she walked from the bunk room, checking each doorway in turn, confirming her suspicion that she was totally alone in the complex. Alone except for the corpse of Neverwalk, a bloody ruin where his neck had been.

With none of her strike team left, no access to the Dreaming, Cloud Singer was utterly alone.

Alone but alive.

Chapter 1

Several months later

The whole of Cerberus redoubt was in pieces, or so it seemed when Donald Bry walked into the operations room.

Bry’s breath caught in his throat as he saw exposed wiring and circuitry littering the surfaces of the three desks farthest from the door. He held two mugs of freshly brewed coffee, and as he took a step closer, the petite-framed Skylar Hitch popped up from beneath one of the desks, so close that she almost knocked the mugs out of his hands.

Hitch was a timid woman in her twenties who stood a mere five feet tall. Her light coffee-colored skin was smooth and flawless, while her hazel eyes seemed alive with intelligence. This day, she had tied her glossy black hair back in an abbreviated ponytail that brushed against her nape as she turned her head. Like the other personnel in the operations room, Skylar wore a white bodysuit with a vertical zipper. She laughed nervously as she saw Bry standing before her.

“My goodness, I’m sorry, Donald,” she said, looking away from him in discomfort. “I almost knocked you flying.”

Although only a small man himself, Bry doubted whether Skylar Hitch would actually be able to knock him flying, even catching him unawares like that. He was a round-shouldered man with an unruly mop of curly, copper-colored hair. A well-trusted member of the Cerberus team, Bry acted as deputy leader for the facility. He wore his customary expression of consternation as though always unable to find the answer to a pressing problem.

The operations room itself was large and high ceilinged. There were two aisles of computer terminals, and a huge Mercator-relief map stretched the length of the wall over the entry. The map was dotted with lights of different colors that played across it like old-fashioned flight paths.

In the corner of the room where Hitch worked at the dismantled computers, far away from the main door, a small chamber was set inside a larger anteroom, its transparent walls made of smoked armaglass. This was the mat-trans unit and, back when the redoubt had originally been established, it had formed the centerpiece of the whole military-funded operation.

Coffee sloshed about in the mugs Bry held as he gestured to the mess of wiring and circuitry. “What is going on here, Skylar? I left you alone for fifteen minutes…”

“I’ve located our problem.” Skylar smiled. “The motherboards are overheating, and it’s causing the system to crash.”

Bry looked at her, astonished. Though timid and bookish, Hitch was a computer expert who sometimes gave the impression that she actually thought in computer language, she was so in tune with the machinery in the Cerberus redoubt. Over the past week, there had been several instances when the computers in the ops area froze, shut down or provided streams of gobbledygook on their monitors. Bry had genuine concerns that a virus was attacking their computers—a group in Australia had hacked into their system and fed the Cerberus machines false data only a few months ago—but he had been unable to find any obvious coding glitches.

Skylar Hitch was one of a number of IT experts who were on call for such problems, and she and Bry had spent the early morning running a series of system checks trying to diagnose the glitch. He had left her for a quarter of an hour while he used the bathroom and grabbed some strong coffee from the facility canteen, trusting Skylar to continue the diagnosis alone. The last thing he had expected to find on his return was three computers stripped down to their component parts.

“These computers are years old,” Skylar explained. “They’re just wearing out.”

Bry shook his head and sighed. “We’re all wearing out,” he grumbled, finishing his statement with a sip of hot coffee.

Skylar rolled a two-inch-long screwdriver across her fingers, a nervous tic. “I can keep replacing bits piecemeal,” she told Bry, “but ultimately we should probably look at updating or renewing the whole system.”

Bry nodded. “Replace what you can, Skylar,” he told her as he placed the mugs on the desk and offered to give her a hand.

Around them, the morning shift personnel filed in to begin their designated tasks, working the monitoring system and tracking the various field teams, all of them ignoring the disruption going on beside them.

ELSEWHERE IN THE VAST complex, Grant lay in bed in a darkened room, head resting against his upturned hand, admiring the beautiful woman lying next to him. He was a huge, muscular man, and he seemed like a coiled spring even as he lay peacefully watching his sleeping companion. Grant had skin like polished mahogany and his dark hair was cropped close to his scalp. A drooping, gunslinger’s mustache brushed across his upper lip, and the dark shadow of stubble was just starting to appear upon his chin. Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville, whose labyrinthine life’s journey had brought him here to the Cerberus redoubt.

The woman beside Grant seemed tiny in comparison to the ex-Mag, but her slight frame was that of an athlete, her belly flat, tight knots of muscle visible on her arms and legs. Shizuka was a warrior born, but unlike Grant, her skin was a golden color accented with peach and milk, and her closed eyes showed the pleasing almond curve of her Oriental ancestry. She had full, petaled lips beneath a small stub nose, and her fine blue-black hair was cut so that it brushed the tops of her shoulders. Shizuka was a woman of astonishing beauty, and Grant knew that he would never, even for a second, take her for granted.

As he silently watched Shizuka, the woman’s eyes fluttered open. After a moment she turned to face him, a smile on her lips. “What are you doing?” she queried, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“Just thinking about how beautiful you are,” Grant told her.

Shizuka blushed, her smile growing wider. “What are you after, Grant-san?” she asked.

One of Grant’s mighty hands reached forward and, with infinite gentleness, brushed her dark hair from her face. “Nothing you don’t want to give, Shizuka,” he assured her, leaning across the bed to kiss her fully on the mouth.

Shizuka’s golden arms reached around and pulled the huge man closer, kissing him back with the same ferocious passion that she showed for battle.

SEVERAL FLOORS BELOW, in a long room at the end of a corridor that ran the length of the subbasement, two people stood side by side, blasting shot after shot from the guns in their hands as though their very lives depended on it. Four large speakers placed strategically around the room were pumping out loud, guitar-led music, filling the room with the strains of a long-forgotten rock and roll band.

One of the shooters was a muscular man with dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Like Grant, Kane was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville whose life in recent years had been intrinsically tied to the well-being of the Cerberus operation. He was built like a wolf, firm muscles across the upper half of his body, powerful legs holding him in a rock-steady stance as he reeled off a stream of bullets at the multiple targets that hurtled toward him from all sides of the room. He was dressed in casual clothes, a dark T-shirt and combat pants, and his eyes shifted from one target to the next as they appeared at various positions along the length of the firing range. His Sin Eater handgun blasted a continuous stream of 9 mm bullets as each item appeared, each bullet finding its target, not a single shot wasted.

Standing beside him, Kane’s companion was a tall woman with pale skin and dazzling red hair that fell in waves to almost halfway down her spine. The woman wore the standard white jumpsuit of the Cerberus redoubt’s staff, and it hugged her so tightly as to accentuate the curves of her trim, athletic body. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she scanned the room for new targets, the bulky TP-9 pistol held before her in a two-handed grip. Brigid Baptiste was an archivist-turned-warrior who excelled in both disciplines.

There was a clatter off to the left, its sound masked by the loud, pumping music, and a target dropped from the rails that ran the length and breadth of the ceiling. Kane and Brigid shifted their weapons toward the target in unison, their movements liquid smooth. Kane’s favored Sin Eater pistol spit bullets at the silhouette’s chest, scoring a hit dead center of the heart, while Brigid’s TP-9 semiautomatic pistol blasted a bullet through the silhouette’s forehead, leaving a craterlike wound in the upper half of the card target.

With a whir, the devastated target whipped back up into the ceiling while two others dropped from the right-hand side of the room. With an astonishing economy of movement, Kane and Brigid turned and sighted the new targets. As ever, Kane took the one that was farthest from the previous target while Brigid cut the other to pieces with a stream of 9 mm rounds.

Suddenly, a spinning red light flashed overhead, and a honking noise cut into the guitar chords blasting from the speakers. Fifteen minutes had passed; the gruelling training session was over.

Kane stood there, his gun still raised for a few seconds, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he brought his heart rate back to normal. After a moment, he turned to Brigid, openly admiring her as she steadied her own breathing, beads of sweat dripping down her nose, her red hair damp.

“You okay?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the saxophone solo that had interrupted the gritty voice of the singer from the wall speakers.

Brigid nodded, her eyes closed, a tentative smile on her lips. Then she turned to look at Kane, and her smile widened, showing two straight lines of perfect white teeth. “That was intense,” she said, her voice rich and husky. “What the heck setting did you use?”

“I got Hitch to rig up something with a little extra kick just for me and Grant,” Kane explained with a chuckle. “Too much for you, Baptiste?”

The redheaded woman checked the breech and holstered her semiautomatic at her hip before looking Kane directly in the eye. “I’ll let you know when it’s too much,” she told him, a definite challenge in her tone.

Kane couldn’t help but laugh at her bravado. “You know, you shape up pretty good for a bookworm,” he said, chuckling and reaching for the control panel and powering down the target-practice program as it waited on its standby setting. A moment later, he cut the music and followed his beautiful companion through the exit door and into the changing area.

A quick shower and they would be ready to face the day.

THE ANCIENT MILITARY redoubt that served as the headquarters of the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountain Range in Montana, where it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains. The wilderness surrounding the tri-level concrete structure was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, just a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended several of the Cerberus warriors over the years.

The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. Its official name was Redoubt Bravo, named, like all prewar redoubts, after a letter of the alphabet, as used in standard military radio communications. Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed matter-transfer network. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant rendition of the fabled, two-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the underworld. The artist was long since dead, but his work had inspired the people who had taken over the facility to call it the Cerberus redoubt.

Hidden within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the building, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of data for the Cerberus operatives within. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. The Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole communications satellite.

Despite its location high in the fresh air of the Bitterroot Mountains, the Cerberus facility was a self-contained unit. Its personnel had become accustomed to recirculated, filtered air as provided by vast air-conditioning units that continually churned and cleansed the facility’s air.

The Cerberus operation had been founded and staffed by a cryogenically displaced scientist called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who had dedicated the redoubt to the continued survival and freedom of humanity.

Kane, in his previous life as a Magistrate at Cobaltville, had come upon evidence of a vast conspiracy that threatened the autonomy of humankind. Kane had stumbled on the first clues to the existence of a hidden alien race called the Annunaki who had been dabbling in humankind’s affairs for longer than anyone could comprehend. Appearing as gods to early man, the Annunaki had, from the shadows, guided the course of human history over the subsequent millennia, with an ultimate agenda of utter subjugation. Recently, the Annunaki royal family had revealed themselves on Earth once more, and Kane and his colleagues now found themselves in a deadly war of attrition against this seemingly unstoppable foe.

The Cerberus warriors were one of humanity’s last bastions in the secret battle for the freedom of humankind.

GRANT’S THOUGHTS were suddenly interrupted by the buzzing of the transcomm at the side of his bed. He lay there another moment, just gazing up at the ceiling in the darkness as he felt Shizuka’s lithe body stir beside him. Then, with a reluctant sigh, he leaned over and activated the button to answer the call.

After a moment, a man’s face appeared in the tiny window display beside the little unit, smiling in a friendly manner. The man had dusky skin, an aquiline nose and a refined mouth. Lakesh appeared to be about fifty years of age, his sleek black hair displaying just the first hints of white at the temples and above the ears. In actuality, the expert physicist and cyberneticist was two hundred years older than that, having endured an extended period in suspended animation after the nukecaust in 2001. Until recently, Lakesh had physically appeared to be carrying every last one of his 250 years, until a would-be ally of the Cerberus exiles attempted to court their favor by reversing the aging process and giving the elderly scientist, literally, a new lease on life. However, in the months since that, Lakesh had become increasingly conscious that this miracle may not be all that it seemed, and he wondered whether this bountiful gift had hidden strings attached.

“Yeah, go,” Grant said, looking into the screen where a tiny camera picked up his face and relayed the image to Lakesh up in the operations room.

“Grant,” Lakesh began in his mellifluous voice, “did I wake you?”

Grant shook his head slightly as he felt Shizuka sidle behind him and wrap her arms around his wide chest, pulling herself close to him and nuzzling against his neck. “It’s no problem, Lakesh. What’s going on?”

“We’ve just heard from our contact in Tennessee,” Lakesh explained. “The meeting’s set up and, as we discussed a few days ago, I want you to attend with Kane and Brigid.”

Grant nodded his acceptance. “The old crew back on the clock,” Grant muttered with a reluctant smile. “When do we leave?”

“The meeting’s set for 10:00 a.m., local time,” Lakesh said. “You jump in forty minutes.”

“No problem. I’ll see you there,” he vowed as he hit the button to cut the communication.

Behind him, Shizuka tightened her grip on his chest, grinding her hips against him. “Do you really have to rush off so soon, Grant-san?” she asked.

Grant turned his head to look over his shoulder. “Sorry, darling,” he said, “but it’s a simple pickup. It won’t take more than a few hours.”

Still holding him tightly, Shizuka kissed Grant beneath his ear. “I’ll wait right here,” she whispered.

After a moment, Grant extricated himself from the woman’s grip and made his way to the tiny bathroom cubicle attached to the room. Shizuka watched from the bed as Grant flicked the motion-sensor light switch to the cubicle and began running the water for the little shower stall within. After a moment, Shizuka pulled herself from the bed and, naked, padded silently across the room to join Grant in the shower.

WHEN HE ARRIVED at the operations room thirty-five minutes later, washed and shaved, Grant found the large room a hive of activity. Lakesh had spread a series of papers across his desk that included several maps of the area around the recently destroyed ville of Beausoleil, Tennessee. Beside him, the red-haired Brigid Baptiste was glancing over the papers as Lakesh pointed out specific items of interest. Brigid was dressed in a shadow suit now, a one-piece black body stocking that appeared to be so thin as to be a second skin, and yet the fabric had remarkable properties. The shadow suit worked as a self-contained, self-regulated environment, and the weave was strong enough to deflect a knife blow or other blunt trauma but could not redistribute kinetic shock.

Off to one side of the room, Grant’s longtime partner, Kane, rested against a desk as he spoke with Cerberus physician Reba DeFore. DeFore was a stocky but curvaceous woman with long ash-blond hair that she had tied up in an elaborately braided knot atop her head. Grant couldn’t hear the details of their conversation, but he could see Reba count off items on her fingers. Grant watched as Kane copied her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember each item that she had told him. Like Brigid, Kane was dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits, as was Grant himself. Kane had added a thick belt with a heavy copper buckle to the suit, along with a pair of combat boots, and on the man’s right wrist Grant could see the familiar pressure-sensitive holster containing a Sin Eater handgun.

Grant had added his favored long black duster over his own shadow suit, its dark Kevlar weave reaching past his knees. Like Kane, he wore the familiar weight of the Sin Eater pistol at his right wrist, tucked out of sight, just a little bulge beneath the sleeve. The weapon was a legacy from their days as Magistrates in Cobaltville, a position that Grant had held for almost two decades prior to his exile at the Cerberus redoubt. Kane had been his partner in Cobaltville, and the pair of them had defected together, along with archivist Brigid Baptiste, after stumbling upon the first hints of the Annunaki conspiracy.

Crouched at a desk beside the anteroom that held the mat-trans unit, Donald Bry and one of his technical team, a petite, coffee-skinned woman whom Grant had seen around a few times, were working through a bunch of wiring amid what looked like the remains of a half-dozen computer terminals.

Catching Lakesh’s attention, Grant pointed to the tangle of wiring. “Trouble with the mat-trans?” he asked.

“No, thank goodness,” Lakesh replied. “Just general problems with the old computers. Emphasis on old.”

“Happens to us all,” Grant said amiably as he joined Lakesh and Brigid at their desk to look over the paperwork that had been assembled for the mission.

Ten minutes later, Grant, Brigid and Kane were standing within the mat-trans chamber, ready to blast themselves through the ether in an instantaneous transition from Montana to Tennessee.

Chapter 2

It took the blink of an eye to strip them down to their component atoms and fling the essence of their very beings across the country. And yet, no matter how many times he experienced it, Kane swore that he would never really get used to traveling by mat-trans.

Kane had added a denim jacket, a washed-out black turned gray, over his shadow suit. He stood in the Tennessee mat-trans chamber, its standard tiled floor and ceiling with the familiar, smoked armaglass walls all around. The armaglass here was tinted an odd color, and Kane knew from the color alone that he had not been here before. With the typical paranoia of the prenukecaust military mind, the mat-trans network, now over two hundred years old, used a simple color-coding system to establish location without any explicit indicators.

There were mat-trans units hidden in ancient military bases scattered across the old United States of America, with many others worldwide, including similar units developed by comparable military groups for other nations. The mat-trans units digitized an individual and thrust him or her across quantum space to a chamber at a programmed destination. In the intervening two centuries since their development, the network had remained largely undiscovered, with only a small number of people aware of these hidden gateways scattered across the globe.

Kane and the other Cerberus operatives considered the mat-trans a useful part of their arsenal, although traveling by it was still a disorienting and alien experience to the human body.

As his roiling stomach settled from the instantaneous journey, Kane glanced left and right, checking that his two colleagues had passed through the mat-trans gateway intact.

Grant stood to Kane’s left, his dark skin shining with beads of sweat. While he had grown more used to travel by mat-trans, the man still had a deep-rooted dislike for the transportation method. All muscle, Grant was an ominous presence on any mission.

To Kane’s right stood Brigid Baptiste. Brigid had put a loose-fitting suede jacket over her clinging shadow suit, and the scuffed, shabby-looking jacket gave her ample freedom of movement. Her ankle boots were a matching brown to the jacket, and she wore her compact TP-9 pistol in a low-slung hip holster. A pockmarked leather satchel, also brown, was hanging at her opposite hip, its strap slung across her body, cutting a line between her breasts.

Tensing his wrist tendons, Kane drew the Sin Eater blaster into his hand, the compact weapon opening up to its full size in a half second. Less than fourteen inches in length when fully extended, the 9 mm Sin Eater folded in on itself to be stored in the holster just above Kane’s wrist. The holster reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the weapon would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard—as the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the need for such safety features had been considered redundant; a Magistrate could never be wrong.

Though schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, both Kane and Grant still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a comfortable and familiar wristwatch.

Kane’s partners drew their own weapons as the trio exited the armaglass room and made their way to the corridor at a slow, wary pace. As they entered the corridor, banks of overhead lights stuttered into operation, bathing its walls in their brilliant glow. Although they had traveled here on what was ostensibly a peace mission, they had too much experience to enter any new situation unarmed.

They proceeded through the windowless military bunker at a steady pace. Although the facility was deserted, the lights came on automatically as they found their way along the corridors toward the exit. A bank of powerful generators located in the underground complex had begun channeling power through the redoubt automatically as soon as the old sensor units had detected that the mat-trans had been activated; it was standard protocol for these old military facilities.

Brigid took the lead as they jogged to a staircase and up into the main reception hall of the redoubt. Brigid Baptiste was blessed with an eidetic—or photographic—memory, and she had scrutinized the plans of this facility in preparation for their mat-trans jump here. Now she could recall every detail of its construction from those blueprints merely by calling them to mind.

In less than three minutes, the group stood shoulder to shoulder at a huge door leading to the outside world.

“Everyone ready?” Kane asked, his voice echoing in the empty, gray-walled reception chamber of the redoubt. To one side, a dusty old desk stood behind a pane of armaglass with a grille in its center. A computer sat atop the desk, long since inactive, its monitor stained with the greasy black charring of smoke.

Brigid nodded while Grant just put a finger to his nose in silent acknowledgment of Kane’s question. Brigid typed the code into the old push-button pad to unlock the door. They heard the magnetic lock click, and Grant, having holstered his Sin Eater, worked the large lever on the front of the huge door to move the heavy slab of metal on its ancient rollers. The door creaked a little, juddering on the tracks after so many years locked in one position. But with a little effort, Grant got it moving enough that a three-foot-wide gap appeared at the far right side.

Kane stepped forward, gun held in the ready position, his old point-man sense alert as he peered through the gap and into the Tennessee morning sunshine. “Welcome to Beausoleil, people,” he announced. “Let’s try to keep things friendly out there.” With that, Kane edged sideways and made his way out of the redoubt and up the dirt bank that he found immediately outside.

They had journeyed to Tennessee at the request of Reba DeFore on what could loosely be described as a mercy mission. During her recent inventory, Reba had noticed that supplies of their standard immunization boosters were falling low. With the devastating radiation storms that had accompanied the nukecaust, the whole landscape had become a near-lethal hot zone. Even now, more than two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, there were still dangerous pollutants in the air and pockets of radiation scattered across the globe. While the atmosphere was far cleaner than it had been, the use of immunization boosters remained standard procedure for anyone involved in fieldwork.

Many of the medications in use by Cerberus had actually been produced in the villes of the nine barons who had ruled over America until very recently. Black marketers with connections to the villes remained a convenient source of immunization boosters when necessity demanded it.

A few months earlier, the barony of Beausoleil in the Tennessee River Valley had fallen in a devastating air attack orchestrated by Lilitu, a would-be goddess whose ambition was matched only by her unquenchable blood thirst. Beausoleil had been razed, leaving a vast number of refugees and a blossoming secondary market in salvage. Just a few weeks earlier, Kane, Grant and Brigid had been involved in tracking genetic material that had been stolen from its ashes and had fallen into the hands of a criminal gang on the Pacific coast.

Now, once more, the three Cerberus warriors found themselves tracking down material taken from the devastated ville, only this time it promised to be a far simpler mission—or so the Cerberus desk jockeys would have them believe.

Brigid glanced up at the sun and checked her wrist chron before pointing to her right up the bank of the muddy slope. There were shallow puddles all around, and the air smelled fresh and crisp. It had been raining here less than an hour before, she concluded.

“Ohio’s people said she’d meet us about two klicks to the north,” Brigid explained as she strode up the muddy incline and made her way toward a rusty chain-link iron fence that surrounded the redoubt’s hidden entrance.

“Lead on, Baptiste,” Kane muttered as he watched the beautiful woman duck through a gap in the fence and make her way across the puddle-dotted fields beyond.

Kane and Grant followed, their boots sinking into the sodden ground as they trekked toward the fence.

Grant pulled at the gap in the fence, lifting the chain link a little to provide Kane with more clearance. “She knows what she’s doing,” he reminded his friend.

“I know,” Kane allowed. “I just don’t like dealing with these bandit types. It never ends well.”

Grant agreed as he pulled himself through the gap in the fence after Kane. They found themselves on a grassy hill that sloped gently toward the distant Tennessee River.

“Way I see it, what it really comes down to is you can’t trust anyone,” Grant said. “First rule of survival.”

Kane glanced at him, the trace of a sarcastic smile crossing his lips. “You’re still thinking like a Magistrate.” He laughed.

“It’s kept me alive so far,” Grant retorted.

Kane snorted. “That and having me at your back.”

Grant shook his head in mock disbelief as the pair of ex-Mags made their way across the soft, muddy ground after the svelte figure of Brigid Baptiste.

OHIO BLUE WAS a tall, slender woman in her midthirties with thick, long blond hair that was styled to fall over her right eye. She wore a shimmering sapphire dress that reached almost to her ankles, with an enticing slit revealing almost the entire length of her left leg. She sat, legs crossed, on a crimson-cushioned recliner set in the middle of a vast boathouse located on the banks of the Tennessee, in an area that had once been called Knoxville. Surrounding Ohio Blue and the recliner were approximately fifty large crates and twenty well-armed guards.

The boathouse was solid on three sides, while the fourth was open to the mighty river itself. There was a sunken area in the large structure where boats could be docked, with the dark river waters lapping against the sides with a constant swishing that echoed throughout the vast, high-ceilinged building.

With a graceful shrug, Ohio swept her luxuriant hair over her shoulders and stood up, offering her hand to Brigid. The hand was sheathed in a silk glove that stretched all the way past the elbow in a shade of blue that precisely matched the color of her shimmering dress. “You must be Miss Baptist,” Blue said, her voice wonderfully musical.

“Baptiste,” Brigid corrected as she clutched the woman’s gloved hand and briefly shook it.

Kane and Grant stood a few paces behind Brigid, flanking her with arms crossed, their Sin Eaters hidden once more in their wrist holsters. Ohio Blue swept her hand casually toward them, a smile playing across lips that were painted an ice blue to match the highlights of her sapphire dress as it caught the light with the movements of her curvaceous figure. “A pair of handsome things,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Companions or employees?”

“A little of both.” Brigid smiled. The art of the deal was in making the other party comfortable, and Brigid knew that she had better make this black marketer happy. If Reba DeFore’s estimates were correct, the Cerberus personnel would be needing these shots before the month was out.

Kane and Grant took up positions to the sides of the open area of the boathouse as Ohio Blue sat back down on her crimson-cushioned recliner. The blond-haired woman patted the cushion with her hand, encouraging Brigid to join her. “Let’s talk business, Miss Baptiste,” she drawled. “I understand that you’re in the market for some pharmaceuticals.”

“That’s right,” Brigid replied, resting herself at the edge of the couch beside the stunning woman. “I’m looking for some specific jabs, the kind of stuff they were producing in Beausoleil before the…” She trailed off, her hands open to indicate that she didn’t have the words to describe it.

“A terrible thing,” Ohio agreed. “Truly, truly terrible. My brother died in the attack.”

“I’m sorry,” Brigid lamented.

“No matter,” the slender blonde continued. “Many a good business opportunity has come out of that disaster, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

As Baptiste continued to talk with the trader, Kane and Grant warily scanned the vast room. The place smelled damp. There was green mold scabbing over the walls and the wooden floor planks, and the lighting was inadequate for such a large room. There were several broken windows high in the walls of the building, and the whole place felt cold and dank. Guards patrolled all around, armed with subguns, heavy rifles and pistols. When he looked up, Kane spotted half a dozen more guards walking across the tops of the highest crates, and two more just standing up there, their blasters trained on the negotiating parties below. He turned to Grant, caught the man’s eye and mouthed the words, “We are very outnumbered.”

In response, Grant just nodded and beamed a bright smile. Kane knew what that meant—they were here now, and there wasn’t a lot they could do about it.

The discussions seemed to be going well between Ohio Blue and Brigid Baptiste, until Brigid opened up her satchel and showed the trader its contents.

“What is this?” Ohio said, clearly affronted. “Some kind of joke?”

“Fifty gold coins,” Brigid stated, trying to remain calm. “Exactly as requested in your communiqué.”

Blue held one of the ancient coins before her visible blue eye and, for a moment, Brigid half expected her to bite down on it like an olden-day pirate testing if a gold piece was genuine.

“We’ve traveled quite some distance to obtain this merchandise,” Brigid prompted.

Blue looked at the gold coin for another half minute before finally flipping it back into Brigid’s satchel. “I need more,” she said.

Brigid was incredulous. “You’re upping the price?” she said. “But all I brought was fifty pieces.”

“Seventy,” Ohio declared, her lone blue eye staring at Brigid.

Brigid sighed, considering her options quickly. “What if I take less?” she suggested. “What does fifty get me?”

Ohio Blue smiled tightly. “Nothing. Deal’s off.”

“Wait,” Brigid instructed. “I can get seventy. I just don’t have it here.”

A wicked smile crossed Ohio’s thin blue lips. “Perhaps,” she said, gazing openly at Grant, “we can work out a trade?”

Brigid followed the woman’s eye line, watching Grant as the huge ex-Mag stood with his broad back to them, checking their surroundings. “What kind of trade?” she asked, her tone dubious.

“One can always use more…employees,” Ohio said, her tone dripping with meaning.

“Grant’s not for sale,” Brigid stated firmly.

Ohio Blue’s gloved hands turned inward, held open before her as though such a suggestion were beneath her. “I’m not talking about a sale, Miss Baptiste,” she said. “I’m not a barbarian. A simple trade is all. Your impressive friend there for the items you wish to acquire.”

Brigid appeared to be giving the matter some serious consideration before she finally shook her head, her red tresses flowing back and forth with the movement. “I’m afraid I can’t let Grant go right now,” she explained sadly.

“In which case,” Ohio told her, standing up from the couch, “you’ll be leaving empty-handed.”

After a moment, Brigid stood, too, and turned to offer the woman her hand once more. “It was nice meeting you, Miss Blue,” she said, a tight, businesslike smile on her face. “Seventy coins. My people will be in touch to organize another meeting.”

Blue nodded her agreement, and Brigid walked back through the makeshift alleyways of stacked crates with Kane and Grant falling into step behind her. The coins in the satchel chinked as it slapped against Brigid’s leg with the roll of her hips.

“A swing and a miss,” Grant muttered. “I could have stayed in bed.”

Brigid turned to look at him, a mischievous smile on her lips. “You almost ended up in someone else’s,” she said quietly as they neared the door. Just then, Kane flinched, an almost unconscious movement, and his arms swept forward in a blur, shoving Brigid to the floor and pulling Grant down to join them. “Down!” he shouted, but the word was obscured by the explosive sounds of gunfire coming from behind them.

“What the hell!” Grant snarled, scrambling to cover between the crates in a rapid crouch walk.

Kane rolled beside him, while Brigid ducked behind the stacked crates across from them, pulling the TP-9 from its holster. Kane and Grant powered the Sin Eaters into their hands as they backed up against the tall stacks of crates.

“This is crazy,” Brigid hissed across the gap between them in a harsh whisper. “They had us outnumbered, could have killed us at any time. Why now?”

There were more gunshots, and a hailstorm of bullets drilled against the crates beside them. When the shooting stopped, Kane flicked his head out into the space between the crates, taking in the scene in a fraction of a second before ducking back behind cover as more bullets whizzed past.

“It’s not us they’re after,” Kane told Brigid as he returned to cover. “I think someone’s come to speak to your new friend.”

“With bullets,” Grant added, shaking his head. “Nice.”

Chapter 3

At the back of the cave, the assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently as Decimal River’s fingers played across the laptop’s glowing keyboard. At the other side of the low-ceilinged cave, Cloud Singer’s eyes flicked to the ghost woman, still wary of her despite all that had happened in the month since she had found her way back to the Original Tribe.

The woman, the assassin whose warrior name was Broken Ghost, had such an air of stillness about her, of utter calm despite the tenseness of the situation, that it made Cloud Singer uncomfortable. The woman’s flesh seemed almost washed-out compared to the café-au-lait complexions of the other members of the tribe. Her braided black hair and dark eyes gave Broken Ghost a striking appearance unlike anyone else in the tribe. She had painted her face with subtle blends, adding the illusion of shadow, intensifying her cheekbones, making her sharp-angled face appear almost skeletal, and she had weaved bits of glass and small, sharp chips of rock into her thick hair. She wore a loose undershirt that left her lean arms bare, their tight, corded muscles visible. Her skirt was really just two strips of material—one in front and one in back—that dangled to her knees and left her firm legs unencumbered.

Cloud Singer looked down at her own body, perversely unable to stop comparing herself to the magnificent warrior. By contrast, Cloud Singer was just a girl. Sixteen years old, with all the energy and suppleness that that granted, but none of the raw power of the formidable woman at the back of the cave. She wore her warrior’s garb, as she had done ever since returning home to the outback: a tight strip of material stretched across her small breasts like a bandage, with more strips across her groin and legs, wrapped around her arms and encasing her scarred knuckles. Once upon a time, those strips of material had been the pure white of the clouds for whom she sang. After the massacre in Georgia, of which she was the only survivor, the strips had been washed with the blood of a squealing boar while Cloud Singer slit its neck, squeezing its life out of it, until the material was dyed red. After that, despite protests from the elders of the tribe, Cloud Singer had refused to remove her warrior clothes, to the point of even bathing in them in the underground pool that the tribe used. Only alone, in her few moments of absolute solitude, had she stripped out of the strange uniform, and then only to be naked. Until the mission was complete, she would never wear anything other than her warrior’s garb. She had promised that much to Neverwalk as he lay there, head lolled at that dreadful angle, the dried blood splashed all about him in the underground bunker in the Caucasus Mountains.

“They’ve used their slicer,” Decimal River stated, his head turning right then left as he addressed the two women on opposite sides of the cave. He was a young man, just a few years older than Cloud Singer, and his left arm was decorated with tattoos of circuitry. He wore baggy shorts and a loose shirt, open to the waist. The shirt was dark with sweat, and clung to his dark skin where its folds touched him. His hair was braided, like Broken Ghost’s, and his face showed a nasty scar from a burn across the left cheek, stopping just shy of his eye.

“Not slicer,” Broken Ghost corrected, her voice low, eyes closed in meditation. “Mat-trans. They call it a mat-trans.”

Decimal River pulled up a window of scrolling information on the laptop’s screen, flicking his hand before the motion sensor to run quickly through the pages of information displayed there. “Fifty-seven minutes ago,” he continued, “they activated the mat-trans, crossing from their home in the Montana mountains to…here.” He pointed to a paper map that was stretched across the wall of the cave. The map showed North America, and a red cross marked the Bitterroot Mountains. His finger tapped at an area close to the bottom right, but it meant nothing to Cloud Singer.

Broken Ghost took a single pace forward, and she seemed suddenly much more imposing as Decimal River looked up at her from his seated position. “Prime the trap,” she said, her words the barest whisper as they left her mouth.

Cloud Singer smiled. Soon the Original Tribe would get its due. Soon they would have their revenge on Cerberus and its accursed leader. And then Lakesh would die.

“IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME with these bottom-feeders,” Kane growled as he mentally assessed the immediate area around the crates where the three Cerberus warriors had taken cover. The exit door was ten paces ahead of them, and there was certainly enough cover to escape the boathouse if they wanted to.

“What do you see out there, Kane?” Grant asked.

Another hail of bullets hammered into the crates beside them, splintering the wood and kicking up puffs of sawdust, and they heard the sounds of guards running all about them between the stacked crates.

“People in diving suits,” Kane said. “Frogmen armed to the teeth. They were rushing in from the open dock.”

Grant nodded toward the door to the boathouse. “You want to get out of here?”

Kane thought for a moment, glancing across at Brigid for confirmation. “Nah,” he decided. “Let’s go make friends, cause mayhem.” With that, Kane stood, reached up and pulled himself up the stack of crates beside him, clambering to the top in a series of quick, economical movements.

Raising the Sin Eater before him, Grant hunkered down and stalked off into the shadows, his black duster helping him blend into the darkness. Brigid took a different route toward the opposite side of the boathouse, weaving through the crates at a fast trot as bullets zipped all around, the TP-9 held high. As she ran, she rooted around in her satchel with her free hand, producing three small metallic spheres, like ball bearings, from its hidden depths.

As Kane pulled himself to the top of the stacked crates, he saw one of Ohio Blue’s men up there stagger backward toward him, an oozing red stain across his chest where he had been riddled with bullets from below. The man cried as he misstepped, falling from the high stack and plummeting past Kane to the solid floor almost fifteen feet below. Across from him, on a nearby tower of crates, another guard was falling over his own feet, a gout of red gushing from a large wound in what was left of his skull. Whoever the newcomers were, they were well-trained, Kane realized—it took some nice pinpoint work to take out the high guards so quickly.

He pulled himself over the lip of the crates and, keeping his body low, stalked across the towers as flashes of gunfire continued to light the floor below. The body of another security guard lay sprawled on his back close to the far side of the crate tower, a single red-rimmed wound between his staring eyes. In an automatic gesture, Kane’s left hand reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes as he passed.

Kane dropped, lying flat on his stomach, and crawled the last few yards to the edge of the tall tower. His head popped forward, and he peeked over the side as the gunfire continued below him. It looked as though a miniature war had erupted down there. In heavy helmets and diving gear, a dozen men were working as a team, using long-nosed pistols to take out Ohio Blue’s guards as they approached the beautiful trader where she cowered behind her crimson recliner, bullets flying all around.

As Kane watched, the tall blond trader reached beneath the bullet-riddled recliner and produced a long-barreled revolver from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the couch. It was a Ruger Security Six, a silver six-shooter with enough stopping power to drill through a wag door. Blue hadn’t been cowering, Kane realized; she was using the recliner as cover while she armed herself.

In a flash, Ohio Blue raised the Ruger, steadying the butt with her free hand, and blasted a shot at the lead frogman. The bullet took him full in the chest and the masked man staggered for a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the frogman shook his head and continued walking toward Ohio Blue, almost as though nothing had happened.

Ohio’s guards were also having little success, and Kane now saw why. The divers were wearing bulletproof vests over their diving suits.

Ohio Blue continued firing at the lead frogman, her shots going wild as she started to panic. A moment later, the six-shooter was out of bullets, but it took several pulls of the trigger before the beautiful woman realized. She tossed aside the useless weapon and ducked behind her crimson recliner as bullets zipped all around her.

“We want her alive,” one of the frogmen reminded his team as the group got closer.

On the crates above, Kane sighted down the length of his Sin Eater, slowing his breathing and focusing on the rearmost man in scuba gear. After a moment, Kane’s finger stroked the trigger, unleashing a short burst. The 9 mm bullets raced to their target, hitting the diver’s faceplate and shattering the strengthened plastic mask in an explosion of hard splinters.

Kane watched as the man ducked and clawed at the mask, his companions turning to look at him. From up there, Kane couldn’t hear the man’s howls over the sounds of gunfire, but he assured himself that his victim was cursing their unseen attacker even now. A grim smile crossed Kane’s lips at the thought, and he pulled himself back from the edge of the crates, rolled to one side and made his way to a new location as a hail of bullets slapped against the edge of the uppermost crate.

On ground level between the towers of crates, Grant rushed back toward Ohio Blue, his dark eyes assessing the squad of men in scuba gear. Even as he watched, the rearmost man took Kane’s bullet to his face and dropped to his knees, clawing at the shattered remains of his faceplate.

Placing his back flush to the crates, Grant scanned the area until he spotted Ohio Blue crouching behind her recliner, muzzle-flashes reflected in the sapphire blue of her dress. She was too far away and too out in the open for him to reach safely; he would need a distraction.

“Kane, Brigid,” Grant whispered as he activated his Commtact, a top-of-the-line communication device that had been recovered from Redoubt Yankee years before. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtact didn’t need sound to be activated; it could pick up and interpret subvocalized speech if necessary, making it an ideal device for sneak work. Permanent usage of the Commtact involved a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably squeamish about, and so their use remained at field-test stage for now. However, the communication device was considered an essential tool for Kane and other field teams.

“The trader’s in trouble,” Grant explained. “I can’t reach her. Any ideas?”

“Be careful,” Kane instructed over the linked transmission. “They’re wearing some kind of armor that deflects bullets.”

Brigid’s voice came over Grant’s auditory receiver after a moment. “I’m just getting in position now,” she said. “Going to give our guests a little light show.”

Grant knew what that meant, and he pulled a pair of sunglasses from the inside pocket of his coat as Brigid spoke, following up by inserting tiny earplugs into his ears.

“Count us in, Baptiste,” Kane said in a low voice over the Commtact as he got into place above them.

Brigid Baptiste was hunkered down in the shadows of the towering crates, close to one of the high walls of the boathouse. She had placed a pair of dark lenses over her own eyes and wore earplugs to muffle sound, just as Grant did. Her head was steady as she watched the group of frogmen swarming around the main area of the building, shooting the few remaining guards as they approached the recliner where Ohio Blue cowered. Swiftly, Brigid assessed the floorboards between her and her target—they were rough in places, and a little warped here and there with damp, but they were basically flat and smooth enough for her purpose.

She drew her arm back, rolling the three silver spheres in her hand for a moment, assessing their weight as she gave one last look at the scene. Then, her arm arced forward, low to the floor, and she released the three globes as her arm continued its fluid sweep ahead. Released, the tiny silver spheres rolled along the floorboards, bumping across the rough chinks in the wood as they rushed toward the recliner.

As the spheres rolled steadily across the floor, Brigid engaged her Commtact once again. “Three, two, one,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes and turning her head away from what she knew was about to happen.

For a moment, nothing did. The three spheres rolled to the open area beside the recliner, their momentum dwindling. Two of the intruders in scuba gear had spotted them, and one shouted a query as he stepped ahead and placed his foot in the path of the first sphere. “What the fu—”

His words were lost in the explosion of sound and light that followed as the flash-bangs detonated.

Atop the crate tower, Kane surged forward, his Sin Eater held low. Even through the polymer lenses of his darkened glasses, the dazzling explosive burned into his retinas, and he blinked the pattern away as he leaped from the high crate and out into the open.

A moment later, Kane dropped into the open area of the boathouse, the Sin Eater blasting a lethal arc of 9 mm steel before him. He landed amid the frogmen with a heavy thump of boot soles against wooden floorboards, then swiftly recovered into a fighter’s crouch as he began targeting the men in scuba gear. The sound of the Sin Eater seemed dulled by the ringing in his ears that the flash-bang had wrought, but his earplugs had helped protect him from the worst of it.

The flash-bang was a miniature explosive device, designed purely to shock and startle an opponent. The explosive was all sound and light, but the charge itself was so tiny as to be worthless as a demolition device. The flash-bang was standard equipment for Kane and his team, who often saw a benefit to using nonlethal force to restrain or completely halt an enemy.

The divers were all pulling at their masks in their sudden blindness, and several fired shots at random as they struggled to recover. To one side of the recliner, Ohio Blue was sitting on her backside, an enticing sweep of bare leg visible where her dress had fallen about her. Her blue-gloved hand was held over her eyes and her shoulders heaved as though she was crying.

Off to Kane’s left, Brigid was securing the area, her TP-9 raised as she checked every nook and cranny before moving closer to the main action. A few of Ohio’s guards were still alive, but they seemed to be wounded almost to a man. Tough to stand toe to toe with an enemy who could shrug off bullets, Kane realized.

Like a charging rhino, Grant joined Kane from his hiding place among the crates, fists swinging at the closest two frogmen as they staggered about blindly. His blows connected with solid finality, and the two men fell to the floor.

Kane turned to Grant and nodded his approval. “Not exactly subtle,” he shouted to be heard over the earplugs he assumed that the other man still wore.

Pulling the handblaster from another frogman and throwing it aside, Grant lifted the man off his feet and tossed him against the nearest stack of crates with bone-jarring force. “Their vests shrug off bullets, right?” Grant explained. “What was I supposed to do?”

Kane aimed a stream of bullets at another frogman’s head, blasting his faceplate to splinters. “Aim for the head?” he suggested.

Grant’s leg kicked out, slamming into the gut of a blinded diver, knocking him backward with a shriek. “Sure. Now you tell me.”

Brigid joined them then, looking around as Kane and Grant made short work of the final few intruders. She crouched beside Ohio Blue, placing a steadying arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Can you hear me?” she shouted, close to the woman’s left ear.

Ohio nodded, looking in the direction of Brigid’s voice with vacant, bloodshot eyes.

“We’re getting out of here,” Brigid explained as she helped the trader to her feet.

There was a noise from the far end of the boathouse, and all three Cerberus warriors spun to see the front of the building—the wall where the exit door was located—cave in as a heavily armored vehicle crashed through it.

As the dust began to clear, the vehicle stood revealed. It was a square block on caterpillar tracks. Four abbreviated arms stretched out to either side of the vehicle, two on each side in a stack array, each containing three large missiles along its length. The muzzle of a gun stood out low in the rounded nose of the vehicle, swiveling left to right as it searched for a target.

Men swarmed in through the hole in the wall that had been created by the tank, armed with rifles, pistols and shotguns blasting the few remaining guards who were hidden among the crates.

“We’re going to need another exit,” Grant growled as he powered the Sin Eater back into his grip and, in unison with Kane, started taking shots at the approaching gunmen. The shots hit their targets but did nothing more than make the approaching gunmen slow for a moment. Like the frogmen, this team was wearing protective armor.

“Baptiste,” Kane shouted over the furious sounds of gunfire all around, “you studied the maps—any ideas?”

Brigid looked around the boathouse, and her eyes stopped as she came to the sunken area that dominated its center. Letting go of the stunned trader at her side, Brigid dashed across to the safety rail that surrounded it and peered into the lower area. There, bobbing in the choppy waters of the Tennessee River, was a long powerboat, painted blue and shaped like a dart. Perfect.

Brigid turned back to Kane and Grant, calling them over. “Come quick and bring Ms. Blue,” she instructed.

Bullets thudded all about them as Grant, Kane and Ohio Blue made their way toward the area where Brigid waited. Kane kicked over the recliner as he passed, using it for a shield while they retreated from the approaching gunmen.

At the far end of the boathouse, Kane could see the odd-looking tank trundling slowly forward, knocking against one of the towers of crates before shunting it aside.

“Oh, this had better be good,” Kane muttered.

When Kane turned he saw that Ohio Blue was at Brigid’s side, trotting down the short staircase that led to the sunken dock. Grant waited at the head of the stairs, blasting at targets with his Sin Eater, providing what cover he could for Kane.

“Keep moving,” Kane told him as he passed.

Grant drilled a line of bullets into the edge of the lowest crate in a nearby stack. Under the relentless attack, the crate began to sag, its structural integrity ruined, and then the whole tower swayed for a few seconds before it slowly toppled to the floor of the vast boathouse, blocking the way for the approaching gunmen.

The two ex-Mags turned and rushed down the staircase, one after another, their heads kept low as bullets whizzed all about them. Ahead of them, Brigid stood beside Ohio Blue in the dart-shaped boat, swiftly assessing the vessel’s dashboard controls.

Grant stepped into the boat with Kane just behind him. A moment later, the boat roared away, engine howling as Brigid powered it out of the boathouse across the undulating waves. A wall of water cascaded around them as the boat turned sharply and arrowed down the choppy waters of the Tennessee. Behind them, gunmen in the boathouse were blasting shot after shot at the rapidly disappearing boat, but they were already out of range.

As Brigid manned the wheel, Ohio Blue rubbed at her face and looked at the three Cerberus teammates. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said breathlessly.

“Who were they?” Grant asked.

Ohio Blue shrugged her pale shoulders. “Competition?” she suggested, a note of query in her tone.

“See,” Kane told her angrily, “this is what you get when you jack up the price at the last minute.”

In reply, Ohio Blue just gave him a cold smile as the boat carved a path through the waves away from the boathouse. “I guess my brother’s not quite as dead as I thought,” she muttered to herself.

At the wheel, Brigid glanced across to the passengers before addressing the black marketer. “Do you have somewhere else we can go?”

Ohio Blue laughed, pushing her blond hair—now damp from the spray of the river—back over her shoulders. “That place was an empty shell, just for show,” she said. “Do you think I’m foolish enough to invite interested parties to my stock?”

Kane’s jaw was set firm as he looked at the woman. “I figure you just lost maybe twenty men back there,” he said.

“Men can be replaced,” she told him. “They were slow and stupid, so they died.”

Kane’s finger snapped up, jabbing toward Ohio’s face in accusation. “You very nearly died, too, sister,” he snapped.

“Ah, but you saved me, O handsome prince.” Blue sighed. Her visible eyelid fluttered as though swooning, and she clutched her hands together before her breasts. She was mocking Kane and he knew it.

Brigid powered down the engine and the boat slowed to a crawl as she steered it toward the muddy bank. They were over a klick away from the boathouse already, and no one was chasing them as far as Brigid could tell—they didn’t need to keep running. When Kane looked at her quizzically, she nodded toward the verdant slopes in the distance: the redoubt was nearby, its mat-trans unit their quickest way home.

Brigid spoke briefly to the trader before exiting the boat, with Grant leading the way. Kane was the last to leave, his senses on high alert once more in case they ran into further trouble on their way back.

“Well, it’s been a blast,” Kane told Ohio as he stepped up onto the edge of the boat, “but this is our stop.”

“Ohh,” Ohio drawled. “Leaving so soon? How will I ever take care of myself, O handsome prince?”

“You’ll manage,” Kane growled. “And I’m not your handsome prince.”

A wide smile crossed Ohio Blue’s cerulean lips then, that playful fire back in her visible blue eye. “But what else would I call you?” she challenged. “I never did learn your name.”

“Kane,” he told her as he stepped from the boat.

Ohio Blue reached out and pulled him back by the arm. Then she inclined her head, her mouth close to Kane’s ear, and whispered, “I owe you, Kane. Tell Ms. Baptiste that she will get her meds, and at the original price.”

Kane’s steely blue-gray eyes looked at her and a lopsided grin crossed his mouth for a moment. “That’s a very noble gesture,” he acknowledged.

Ohio Blue looked at him through the drooping curtain of her damp blond bangs. “I remember who my friends are, Kane,” she told him, squeezing his arm tightly for just a moment before letting him go.

In a few moments, Kane joined Grant and Brigid on the banks of the Tennessee as Ohio Blue powered the boat away. When he told them that they were getting the booster shots after all, Grant laughed.

“You do have a way with the ladies,” Grant said, slapping his friend on the back.

Kane wasn’t so sure. Friends like Ohio Blue almost always turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

SHIZUKA SAT CROSS-LEGGED upon the ground on the empty plateau outside the entrance to the Cerberus redoubt. She had dressed in casual clothes, a loose-fitting cotton blouse in a pink so pale as to be almost white, black trousers and flat, open sandals. She sat there, breathing deeply as the midmorning sun played across the exposed skin of her arms, her throat and face, letting her mind fall silent with stillness.

Shizuka had brought two items with her that seemed, because she was dressed so casually, very much out of place: a katana blade, twenty-five inches of sharpened steel, held within a dark scabbard beautifully decorated with gold filigree, and a small wooden casket, just six inches by three, like a musical box. The sword and box rested on an open blanket that she had laid out on the dusty ground before sitting on it.

She had been thinking of Grant, that aching need to be in his company, to share nothing more important than the simplest of moments. But between his commitments to Cerberus and hers to the Tigers of Heaven at New Edo, the couple never quite seemed to have enough time together. Indeed, some of their most significant shared moments had been during the heat of raging battle. This day, for the first time in months, it seemed, Shizuka finally had a free day, the demands of her role as leader of the Tigers of Heaven quiet for once. And, with typical bad timing, Grant was required on a mission halfway across the country.

What had he said? A simple pickup, won’t take long. Her breath slow and calm, Shizuka reached forward and flipped open the brass catch on the little wooden box. She would wait for Grant, so that they might yet spend the afternoon together, with no distractions but for each other.

Shizuka’s delicate hands pushed open the lid and reached inside the box. Its contents had been placed carefully inside specific compartments, a masterpiece of simple design and economic use of space. There were sheets of thin rice paper, a soft square of cotton, a lightly chalked powder ball and a small bottle of oil. Along the front of the compartmentalized box rested a tiny brass hammer, held separate from the other items in the cleaning kit.

Shizuka reached forward, taking the sheathed katana from where it lay on the blanket. Gripping the hilt of the sword with her right hand, she pulled at the scabbard with her left, drawing the blade into the open where its polished steel surface reflected the rays of the sun. The graceful movement was automatic, an unconscious thing for her, practiced so many times as to be a part of her muscle memory, the weight of the sword like just another segment of her body. She looked at the blade for a moment, her eyes scanning its length, observing the grain of the steel, checking for flaws. Then, careful to hold the sharp edge of the blade away from her, Shizuka took a single sheet of the crackling, wafer-thin rice paper and began to slowly stroke the blade with it.

This was a necessary process, a chore that every samurai going back to the days of feudal Japan had performed to ensure that his katana—often referred to as the soul of the samurai—remained strong and clean, free from defects that might hinder a warrior in battle. But it was also a ritual, one that served to fill and calm Shizuka’s mind as she awaited her lover’s return.

As Shizuka sat there, the rice paper now discarded, tapping the length of the finely honed blade with the powder ball, she became aware that someone had approached and was standing behind her. She tilted the sword just slightly, looking in its reflective surface between the dustings of chalk, to see who it was who had come upon her with such stealth.

“Domi,” she said calmly, a pleasant smile lifting her lips for a moment before she moved the sword back and continued tapping chalk along its length.

“Hi, Shizuka,” Domi said breezily as she walked across the plateau to stand before the sitting woman. Shizuka thought that she could detect just the tiniest hint of disappointment in Domi’s tone, where she had perhaps hoped to sneak up on the warrior woman unawares.

Domi cut a figure like no other. She was barely five feet tall, with a tiny, waiflike frame. An albino, Domi’s skin was as white as the chalk that Shizuka used to dust her blade. Her hair was also white, with the slightest variation in color, like paper turned to ash, and cut short in a pixie style that framed her face. It was within that face that Domi’s most unearthly feature resided, however—her eyes, which were an angry, vibrant scarlet, like pools of blood, and seemed to burn into the soul of whomever she looked at.

Domi had appeared from the undergrowth around the plateau, dressed in a pair of denim shorts cut high to the leg, and a drab green abbreviated halter top that barely covered her small, pert breasts. Her skin and bare feet showed a few marks, where dirt had brushed against them, and Shizuka saw the bow and quiver of arrows strapped to Domi’s back. The young woman had been out hunting, not for any real reason beyond the pleasure of the early-morning solitude and the thrill of the chase. Domi was a true child of the Outlands, often distinctly out of place around others—particularly the scientific types who dominated the Cerberus facility—and a born survivor. Like Kane, Grant and Brigid, Domi had joined the Cerberus operation via a disrupted life in Cobaltville, in her case, as a sex slave to the repulsive Guana Teague. Since then, she had become a highly valued member of the Cerberus crew.

“What you doing?” Domi asked, gesturing to the blanket spread across the ground. “Picnic?”

Shizuka smiled, shaking her head imperceptibly. “Only as food for the soul,” she said, running another sheet of rice paper along the length of her katana to brush away the powder.

As Domi stood watching her, Shizuka reached for the bottle of oil and dribbled a few spots along the blade. Then she tilted the katana so that the oil ran along its length. With her free hand, Shizuka took the cotton square from the wooden box and began to clean the blade in a long, sweeping stroke along its length, following the lines of the grain of the steel.

“You want maybe some food for the stomach, too?” Domi asked. “’Cause I’m heading inside and I wouldn’t outright object to company.”

Shizuka waved her blade before her, feeling its familiar weight in her hand as it swept through the air. Looking up at Domi, she smiled. “That would be nice,” she said, sheathing the katana and placing the contents back in the little wooden box.

THE THREE CERBERUS rebels made their way across the grassy swells back to the hidden redoubt. As they walked, the rain started once more, a cold, lancing drizzle on their faces that dimpled the surfaces of the puddles and turned the ground to slippery mud beneath their feet.

Making certain that they were not being observed or followed, Kane led the way through the gap in the chain-link iron fence and stood there for a moment, waiting as the others stepped through and followed. According to his wrist chron it was almost 1:30 p.m., local time; the back-and-forth of their little escapade had made it a three-hour-plus effort. Still, with the instantaneous transportation of the mat-trans, they would be back at Cerberus in a few minutes—plenty of time to catch the lunch shift at the canteen and grab themselves a proper meal.

Grant yanked back the heavy door just a little—he had left it slightly open when they had passed through earlier—and rainwater had already pooled across the flat concrete flooring that stretched out into the lobby of the abandoned underground bunker.

“Do you have afternoon plans, Grant?” Brigid asked as he held the door for her.

He shrugged. “Shizuka,” he said, the hint of a smile on his lips.

Brigid winced at that, feeling that she had somehow invaded her friend’s privacy without meaning to.

Once Grant had closed and sealed the main door, they trekked through the silent corridors of the redoubt and found themselves back at the mat-trans room just three minutes after they had entered the complex. Kane checked the room briefly as they entered, assuring himself that no one had been there in their absence.

HALFWAY AROUND the world, in a cave that was hidden from the late-afternoon sun, Decimal River watched a blinking light flashing on his laptop screen. “They’re inside,” he announced, his eyes never leaving the screen.

“Activate the trap,” Broken Ghost said, her voice a whisper just behind the man’s tattooed shoulder.

Across from the ash-skinned assassin, Cloud Singer, the bloodred strips of cloth that she wore blending with the russet walls and dark shadows of the cave, felt a tiny shiver run up and down her spine in anticipation. To her irritation, the shiver reminded her of how it felt back when she could activate the implant, back when the dreamslicer still took the Original Tribe into the Dreaming World, before the Cerberus people had blocked their access with the master weapon, the Death Cry. Cloud Singer held her breath as she watched Decimal River’s nimble fingers race across the keyboard of his portable computer.

Decimal River watched the numbers on his screen race toward zero as the mat-trans unit was activated in Tennessee.

“They’ve primed it,” he said in a hushed voice. “Just a few seconds longer.”

Beside him, her head jutting forward as she watched the countdown, Broken Ghost remained utterly expressionless. Her voice betrayed no emotion when the readout went to zero and she finally spoke.

“Close the trap.”

Chapter 4

“And could there be any particular significance to the name that you chose for the operation, Magistrate?” a man’s voice, clear and sympathetic, was speaking close to his ear.

Kane opened his eyes and looked around carefully. He was stretched out on a leather couch in a small office, the walls of which were painted a reassuring, rich butterscotch. He turned, looking at the man who sat in a chair beside his head, peering over his regulation glasses at Kane, a notepad resting on his crossed legs.

“I’m sorry?” Kane asked, confused.

Beside him, the man thumbed back two sheets of his notepad, and Kane saw the tiny scrawl that covered each page. “Cerberus, you called it, the hound of Hades,” the psychiatrist said, tapping the top of his pen against the notebook. “Do you think that has any particular significance?”

Magistrate Kane shook his head. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “What were we talking about?”

The psychiatrist offered a sympathetic smile. “Are you still perhaps confused after the gas attack? Magistrate Salvo told me that you were lucky to get out alive.”

Kane closed his eyes, letting the words wash over him as he tried to remember. It had been a regular PPP—Pedestrian Pit Patrol—down in the Tartarus Pits, which sat at the very bottom of Cobaltville, surrounding the Administrative Monolith. He and his partner, Grant, had been accompanying some newbie, couldn’t remember the name, checking ID chips and generally making their presence known, when someone had launched a burning bottle of something flammable—a molly—in their direction. It had been a long time since the Pit dwellers had openly attacked Magistrates like that, and the newbie had asked why they had targeted them today.

“We’re Mags,” Kane had said, the regulation helmet sitting low over his face, masking his features and adding to his stern appearance. “That’s reason enough.”

There had been explosions and blasterfire, and a smoking canister had almost exploded in his face. After that it was all lost; he couldn’t remember anything.

“How’s the newbie?” Kane asked, recalling the rookie’s name at last. “McKinnon?”

The psychiatrist looked at him, his expression the well-rehearsed mask of sympathy that every psychiatrist on Cappa Level had been trained to employ in such situations. “I’m afraid Magistrate McKinnon died,” he said, holding Kane’s gaze.

As he lay back on the couch, Kane’s eyes wandered around the room once more. Despite the relative safety of the surroundings, his point-man sense was alert. He felt as if he was being watched, and not just by the psychiatrist who sat patiently beside him. There, in the far corner of the ceiling, a little black blister, no bigger than his hand, contained a surveillance camera. You were never truly alone in Cobaltville, he remembered.

“What about my partner?” he asked, still looking at the surveillance blister. “What about Grant?”

“He was still in surgery when you came in here,” the shrink said. “Would you like me to go check?”

Something was wrong, Kane knew. Some instinct deep inside him felt unsettled. Maybe the gas attack had affected him, just as the psychiatrist had said. And what was this Cerberus that the man had been speaking about? The name seemed familiar and, even as he thought of it, an image flashed in his mind: a woman’s face, her porcelain skin beautiful and clear, her hair a flowing tumble of red curls, her glowing eyes like twin emeralds reflecting flame.

“That’s okay,” Kane said, pushing himself up from the couch and smoothing back his dark hair, gathering his thoughts.

Beside him, the shrink checked his wrist chron. “We still have almost twenty minutes before the session is over, Magistrate Kane,” he announced as Kane stood.

Kane looked at him, standing in the dark T-shirt and combat pants of an off-duty Mag, the muscles of his tanned arms flexing as feeling returned to them. He felt as though he had been sleeping and was only now awakening. “I think I’m going to skip out of this one,” he explained. “You’ve been a great help. I’m better now.”

The psychiatrist looked about to complain, but Kane stared through him before placing the dark-lensed glasses over his eyes, becoming an emotionless Magistrate once more. The whole culture of the Magistrate system was built upon intimidation; everything they did, the way they dressed, the way that they carried themselves—even when off duty—was designed to instill fear in the people around them. They were the last bastions of order in a world that had tipped close to utter chaos, and their authority was absolute, their judgment incontestable.

The psychiatrist stood up, and Kane could see the little beads of sweat forming on his brow as he peered into Kane’s dark lenses. “Well, I wouldn’t wish to waste any of your precious time, Magistrate,” he said in a shaky voice, visibly cowering before the larger man.

“No,” Kane agreed, shucking into his regulation black, ankle-length, Kevlar-weave overcoat, the familiar red shield of office attached to the lapel, “I’m sure you wouldn’t. Good day to you, psychiatrist.”

“G-good day to you,” the shrink said, rushing in front of Kane to open the door to the office and let him out.

Kane walked along one of the corridors of Cappa Level. Above him, the grand structure of the Administrative Monolith towered high into the sky, brushing the clouds that languished across the Colorado plains. Off to the west, the sun was sinking, a rich orange ball as late afternoon turned to evening.

He thought back to the discussion he had been having with the shrink minutes before. “Cerberus, the hound of Hades,” he muttered. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Before he had time to consider it further, Magistrate Kane found himself standing outside his apartment in the Residential Enclaves, and the aching in his limbs and gnawing at his stomach told him that he needed to get home, prepare some food and get a proper night’s rest. He would check on Grant tomorrow; right now he was dead on his feet.

A SUDDEN JOLT OF PAIN and Grant was awake.

He tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t open. He felt so lethargic and yet strangely he was utterly awake.

And the pain. The crazy pain.

It was so intense, so absolute, that it threatened to overwhelm him, consume him. He clenched his fists, holding on to his tenuous grip on wakefulness. Did his fists really clench? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t be sure. No matter now, what really counted was the pain. All that counted was the pain.

He calmed his mind, remembering the techniques they had taught him years before in Magistrate training. A Magistrate is never ruffled, never swayed by emotion.

The pain was in his right leg. High in the leg. A line of pain across the top of the leg, close to his groin.

And the left? The left leg? What did that feel? Was he trapped under something? He felt as though he may have blacked out and had lost his immediate short-term memories. Even in not remembering how this came about, he still recognized the symptom, the feeling of bewilderment.

The pain continued, a blazing sensation that felt so strong across the top of his right leg.

Pain equaled danger, which meant that Grant needed to be awake, needed to find out what the pain was, what was going on. To escape perhaps? To save himself? Perhaps even to save others.

He struggled once more to turn his head and open his eyes. I’m awake, he told himself, but I can’t wake up.

It seemed impossible, but suddenly the pain became worse, went beyond absolute into a whole new level of agony that Grant had never even imagined existed. He felt the muscles of his mouth strain, stretching open, trying to scream, yet no sound would emerge.

And suddenly his eyes were open, assaulted by lights so bright that it stung to look. His vision blurred immediately, salty tears streaming across his eyes, rolling down his cheeks. He struggled, blinking the tears away where he couldn’t move his hands to reach them, and he saw properly for the first time where he was.

Safe.

That was Grant’s first thought when he realized where he lay. He was on his back, bright lights around him, people bustling about in the familiar, starched uniforms of the Cobaltville medical hub. Behind the lights it was hard to see. Everything was lost in comparative darkness, but he could smell the disinfectant, the antibacterial wash. He counted six—no, seven—people in the room with him, reduced to silhouettes by the overhead rig of fierce lights. As Grant watched, he began to discern their features, his eyes getting used to the bright halogen lighting. They were looking at him intensely, with concern and furrowed brows and much muttered, hasty discussion that he couldn’t seem to make out. They were looking at him intensely, but not at his face. They were staring at his legs.

Grant tried to look down the length of his body, to see what had transfixed them, but he found that he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his body react.

The pain in his right leg burned and ached, but he could not see why, could not see what was going on.

Suddenly, one of the doctors, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and vibrant blue eyes, wearing a cotton mask over the bottom half of his features, leaped back from where he stood at the foot of the gurney, and Grant watched as a fountain of blood flew up and splashed over the doctor and the other people there.

The bald surgeon bit out a curse, and Grant saw something glinting in his hand, a whirring blade of some kind, attached to a wire that led to a socket in a portable machine.

Please, Grant thought, please let me know what is going on. And, once again, the salty tears blurred his vision until all he knew were the frantic voices and the sounds of the machines beeping steadily in the far distance.

“Doctor?” It was a woman’s voice, softly spoken yet urgent. “Doctor, look. I think he’s awake. The Magistrate is awake.”

“In the name of the baron,” said a man’s voice, fearful but with anger bubbling beneath the surface, “where the hell is that anesthesiologist? He shouldn’t be awake for this. Put him out, Elaine.”

Tears swam across his vision, and Grant saw the blur of a woman dressed in white rushing closer to his face, the sound of her heels clattering on the hard tiled floor. She was reaching toward him, her hand a pinkish, blurred rectangle that smelled of antibacterial wash.

Suddenly something hard was pushed against Grant’s face, wrapping itself around his mouth and nose, coiling and shaping itself as though it were alive. And the woman, the nurse, was pushing her hand against his forehead, holding him in place as though he could move.

“Upping feed level to 3.8,” she said.

The sensation of pain in his leg was abating and, for just a second, the thick tears seemed to clear. Grant saw the nurse close to him, leaning over the gurney, her white uniform starched with perfectly creased lines down its edges. The uniform was unflattering, but Grant could see that she was a curvaceous woman, the tunic straining against the swell of her breasts. Above that, russet hair, her head turned away as she spoke to the chief surgeon, counting down in her clear voice, her frank concern clear in her tone.

She turned back then, looking at Grant, her hand still pushing at his forehead to hold him down. His eyes seemed to see only her smile for a moment, white and dazzling beneath the lights, with large, straight teeth; a photogenic smile. The canine teeth at the edges of her burned-umber lips were just visible as she spoke, her tone a soothing purr but the words lost.

Grant’s vision swam and he looked at the nurse’s face, trying to make sense of it. Two dark, watery eyes looking back at him, set deep in her face. Her beautiful, flawless teeth showing in her sweeping jaw, following the curvature of the long muzzle that poked toward him, the pink-and-black nose twitching slightly amid the rusty brown fur.

Grant realized then that the nurse was some kind of animal, a dog. A German shepherd or maybe a timber wolf.

And as he looked up, gazed across the room, the surgeons and the other nurses and personnel in the room all appeared the same. Dogs. He was being operated on by dogs.

BRIGID BAPTISTE’S EYES opened and she looked at the computer screen before her through the small, square-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. The glasses were a symbol of office, marking her as a Cobaltville archivist, but were also a medical necessity. Years of computer work had left her slightly shortsighted. Her eyelids felt heavy, and the information on the glowing screen seemed unfamiliar. Her vivid emerald eyes scanned the glowing screen for a few seconds—it showed an archival report on an island in the Pacific that had been used for bomb testing back in the 1900s.

Strange, she thought, glancing surreptitiously around her, seeing the familiar forms of her colleagues as they worked at their own terminals, running through and amending the documents from the old days, the days before skydark. Everything seemed normal, and yet there was something that Brigid felt in the back of her mind, and the feeling had begun when she looked at the document on her screen.

I blinked, she thought, going through her preceding actions, and when I looked at the screen again it was like seeing it for the first time.

Perhaps there was something in the document? Perhaps she had seen something, or noticed something, or perhaps something had changed even as she was looking at it, almost subliminal and yet different.

“Refresh,” Brigid ordered into her mike pickup. A wipe panned down her terminal screen at the instruction, refreshing the information as though she was loading the file from scratch.

Nothing. No differences. Brigid’s eidetic memory would alert her instantly if something had changed.

“Go back,” she instructed into the pickup.

The screen blinked and refreshed as it went back to the previous document, exactly the same as the item that she had been looking at.

“Go back,” she said again, her voice soft, eyes flicking around the room for a moment to check that she wasn’t drawing any attention.

Before her, the screen blinked and refreshed once more, taking her back to a previous document. It appeared to be a schematic of an underground military facility—a redoubt—and Brigid’s brain automatically decoded the cryptic coordinates as she read them from the top right corner of her screen. The Tennessee River Valley, she realized, close to the barony of Beausoleil.

She had seen this before, she told herself, reassured. She had to have looked at the Pacific island stuff and just not taken it in. Mind wandering or maybe just tired. Yes, Brigid realized even as the word came to mind. Tired—that was it.

She sat there for a moment, looking at the schematic on the screen. “Revert,” she instructed, and the computer returned to her most recent file, the military report on the Pacific bomb tests. She looked at the report for a moment and a smile crossed her lips. There was a satellite picture of the island under discussion, and from this angle it looked sort of like an animal. Four legs, a body, a head with open mouth. No, not a head. Two heads. She giggled as she thought of the words “two heads are better than one.”

Must be tired, she realized. I’m seeing things. She removed her spectacles and glanced around the library room, but no one seemed to have noticed her giggle. Her section leader was across the far side of the room, leaning over Meredith Burrt’s desk, running through a file with the short, blond-haired woman.

Placing her glasses on the desk before her, Brigid raised her hand and waited for the section leader to come over and relieve her of her post. She needed to rest; maybe she was even coming down with something. She couldn’t recall the last time that she had felt so tired.

KANE OPENED the door to his apartment. It was unlocked, a carryover from the Program of Unification, when the Council of Front Royal had decreed that privacy bred conspiracy and, hence, deviant thinking.

He pushed his way into his compact two-room apartment, taking in its familiar walls and familiar smells. The whole place seemed faceless, with barely any sign of individuality or anything that could really be considered decoration. A single shelf against one wall of the main room included three books, one of them his precious, hidebound copy of The Law. Like all Mags, Kane could access all rules, amendments and subsections of the Cobaltville penal code merely by engaging the computer system, but there was something reassuring about having a genuine physical copy of the codes to refer to in his quiet moments. Three tall windows shed light onto the shelf and the wall to which it was attached, and Kane glanced through the panes for a moment, taking in the familiar lights glittering on the Administrative Monolith, which loomed over the ville.

Exhausted, he slumped down on the sagging cushions of his old couch, pondering what to eat. It was strange, he thought, to feel so tired after waking from a dream.

Chapter 5

Trent, a sallow-faced Cerberus tech with tired eyes and a messy mop of dark hair, checked the diagnostics as the mat-trans unit powered up. They were expecting Kane, Brigid and Grant to emerge momentarily, but the redoubt had received unexpected guests in the past.

Lakesh leaned over Brewster Philboyd’s desk as the tall man went back to monitoring communications frequencies for the various Cerberus field teams. “I feel increasingly uncomfortable with this part of the operation,” the elderly scientist admitted. “One never quite knows what may jump through the gateway.”

Philboyd’s lanky six-foot frame seemed to be hunched over the communications terminal as he nodded his agreement. “Hopefully they won’t bring back any monsters this time around,” Philboyd said. In his midforties, Philboyd wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks, with pale blond hair swept back from a receding hairline. He had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles over a year before, and his dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had proved invaluable. Although he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering quandary.

Mist began to fill the armaglass cubicle that housed the mat-trans itself, and the howling noise grew louder as the emitter array powered up. The vanadium-steel bulkhead that sealed the ops center off from the rest of the redoubt slid into place. When the mist cleared and the howling subsided, Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant stood revealed, none the worse for wear, and a collective sigh of relief went out from the Cerberus operations team.

“…where someone doesn’t start shooting at us?” Grant was asking as he stepped out into the anteroom.

Kane smiled and shook his head. “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?”

Grant glared at his partner. “Not if it’s going to depress me,” he growled.

Brigid stepped forward, the leather satchel slapping against her thigh as she strode through the anteroom. A moment later, the three-person field team stepped out into the ops room.

“My dears,” Lakesh said as he approached them, “how did it go?”

“You mean initially or overall?” Kane asked as he shrugged out of his faded denim jacket and stretched his tense muscles.

“A summary will suffice,” Lakesh said hopefully.

Pushing Kane gently aside, Brigid stepped ahead of the others and addressed Lakesh, giving the distinct impression that Kane’s response had struck her as juvenile and unnecessary. “It all went fine,” she explained, shirking off the leather satchel and placing it to one side. “We’ll need to speak with the trader again, but everything’s in place.”

“Yeah.” Grant laughed, slapping Kane on the back. “Thanks to Romeo here.”

Lakesh glanced across to Kane, who was looking just a little self-conscious as he busied himself with removing his wrist holster. “Would you care to explain, my friend?”

Kane looked away from Lakesh, glancing around the ops room for a few moments before he replied in a mutter, “Nothing to explain. Just the usual story of bullets, women and, well, mostly bullets.”

Lakesh laughed at that, watching as Kane continued to scan the room. It was strange, but just for a moment, Lakesh saw a side of Kane that he had only really noticed on the few occasions when he had accompanied the ex-Mag on a field mission. If he didn’t know better he would swear that Kane was checking out the room, searching for enemies with that old “point-man sense,” as he called it.

“I’m glad you’re all okay,” Lakesh concluded, “and that we’ve made a new friend.”

“‘Friend’ may be overstating the case a little, Lakesh,” Kane said, “but it is what it is.”

With that, the three warriors marched through the ops room and out into the corridor.

Working at the desks closest to the mat-trans unit, Skylar Hitch tapped Donald Bry lightly on the arm and indicated Kane and his colleagues. “What’s eating them?” she asked in a whisper.

Bry shook his head. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

“They just seemed a little, I dunno, pissy?” Skylar suggested, keeping her voice low.

After a moment’s thought, Bry shrugged. “No one likes traveling by the mat-trans,” he reminded her.

Skylar sat there for a half minute, lost in thought as she looked at the door on the far side of the room.

“Are you okay, Skylar?” Bry asked when he noticed that she had ceased working at the motherboard before her.

“Hmm?” Skylar said, turning to look at him, her eyes coming back into focus. “It’s nothing.” She sighed, rolling her dark eyes and returning to the job at hand.

KANE CHECKED his wrist chron as the three of them strode, shoulder to shoulder, down the wide corridor that stretched the length of the Cerberus redoubt. “It’s 12:34 local time,” Kane told his colleagues, his jacket and holstered Sin Eater slung over one shoulder.

“One, two, three, four,” Brigid stated, smiling as she broke down the time into separate numbers. “That’s lunchtime.”

“Then we should eat,” Grant stated practically.

They slowed, purposefully looking around the twenty-foot-wide corridor as they realized that they were its sole occupants. The vast corridor was carved directly into the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high stone roof. The air never really seemed to heat up here, and it often felt more like working in a mine shaft than being inside a high-tech military facility.

Brigid stopped walking, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she brought to mind the floor plan of the redoubt. After a moment, her emerald eyes reappeared and she pointed to a doorway a few paces behind them. “This way,” she said. “Stairwell B.”

Kane nodded. “Lead the way, Baptiste,” he encouraged as the redhead pulled at the door handle.

The door didn’t move and Brigid turned and smiled with embarrassment. Then she pushed the door to open it and the three of them walked through.

THE CANTEEN WAS BUSY when Kane, Brigid and Grant entered the room. The lunchtime rush had begun, and the cooks and serving staff were busy trying to keep the lines moving as almost forty people waited to be served, trays in hand. Several friendly faces turned to acknowledge the three newcomers as they entered the room and Kane nodded back—albeit self-consciously—in return.

At the far side of the room, Domi sat with Shizuka, the lone occupants of a long table. The remnants of a late breakfast remained on the table between them. Domi rested back in her seat, keeping her back to the wall while Shizuka faced her, bemoaning some of the more mundane political aspects of her leadership of the Tigers of Heaven.

“Sometimes,” Shizuka was saying, her eyes on the water jug that stood a few seats along from her in the middle of the table, “I wonder that there might be more to life than politics and war. And by more, quite naturally, I truly mean less.”

Domi nodded, enjoying the company of the fascinating warrior woman whose background was so unlike her own. The two hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but they had a healthy respect for each other. Domi certainly felt more comfortable around Shizuka than she did around many of the big brains who resided at Cerberus on a permanent basis.

As Shizuka took a sip of her green tea, Domi noticed the new arrivals and waved them over. “I think lover boy’s returned,” she told Shizuka with a meaningful wink as Kane, Grant and Brigid spotted her and approached the table.

Shizuka’s eyes flicked delicately to the silvered surface of the water jug that sat just beyond her grip once more, then she smiled indulgently at the albino woman. “You’re slowing down, Domi,” she said. “I saw them enter almost a minute ago. Everything after that was just distraction.”

Domi shook her head, a cardsharp solidly outplayed. Shizuka’s eyes went back to the water jug as she watched the three figures approach, and unconsciously her left hand reached beneath the table to where her katana rested in its scabbard.

“Hey, guys,” Domi said, gesturing to the empty, molded seats of the table. “How did everything go?”

Kane looked at the albino woman for a long moment, blue-gray eyes like steel lingering over her small frame before affixing on the quiver of arrows that she had propped against the wall behind her. “It went fine, Domi,” he stated. “Planning a hunt?”

Domi looked confused for a second, before she saw where the ex-Mag was looking and realized what he meant. “Ha, no—just doing a little exploring this morning,” she explained. “Haven’t had the time to put things back.”

Kane nodded, then he glanced back to Brigid and Grant before he sat down. In that moment, it seemed, a significant look passed between the three, and Domi wondered if they were mocking her. “You could join me sometime,” she said defensively, though she didn’t relish the thought of company on her morning jaunts.

Grant took the seat to the left of Shizuka, and a broad smile played across his face as he watched her sip from the teacup. “Miss me?” he asked as she placed the cup delicately back on its saucer.

“An infinitesimal amount, perhaps,” Shizuka allowed, turning to look at him. After a second, a smile broke across her face and her hand reached out to entwine with his beneath the table.

Kane took the seat on the other side of Shizuka. Brigid walked around the table and took the seat opposite Kane, leaning back and surveying the other denizens of the cafeteria.

“Aren’t you guys eating?” Domi asked, looking from Kane to Brigid. Neither of them responded, and she snapped her fingers to get their attention. They both looked at her, their expressions inscrutable. “What’s up with you? Hey, you’re not doing that anam-chara thing again, are you?”

Brigid tilted her head indulgently as she looked at the albino woman. “Anam-chara?” she asked. Then, after a long blink, she continued, looking significantly at Kane. “The bond of the soul friends. No, Domi. Why do you ask?”

“Because the last time we were all together like this,” Domi began, “you were all—” she waved her hands around “—wooo-ooo! Soul-friend magic shit.”

Kane smiled. “We’ll try not to do that,” he assured her before pushing back from the table and standing. “I’m going to grab a tray and see what’s cooking,” he announced.

Excusing herself, Brigid followed him to the rear of the queue.

Shizuka leaned close to Grant and asked in a soft voice, “Are you not going to acquire something to eat, Grant-san?”

“In a minute,” he told her, still clutching her hand beneath the table.

“Keep your energy up,” she whispered, a tantalizing twinkle in her eye.

“Careful, Shizuka,” Grant whispered back. “That’s a threat I may just hold you to.”

BACK IN THE OPERATIONS room, Lakesh was placing Brigid’s discarded satchel of gold coins back in a secure cupboard, having removed the hidden stash of flash-bangs and other minor weapons and sent them on to the armory for secure storage.

“You’re pleased to have them back on-site, aren’t you?” Donald Bry said, calling across from the desk where he worked with Skylar.

Locking the cupboard, Lakesh turned and smiled. “Somehow, Donald, the three of them seem to complete Cerberus. The place always feels a little empty in their absence, present company notwithstanding, of course.”

Sitting beside Donald, a soldering iron in her hand, Skylar Hitch tsked.

“Something bothering you, Skylar?” Bry asked.

“Just thinking,” she said as she replaced a burned-out chip on the motherboard, “how you can get too attached to people sometimes.”

Lakesh joined the two of them, wheeling over a chair. “Now, then, what is that supposed to mean?” he asked, concern in his voice.

Skylar looked up at him for a few seconds before averting her gaze and turning back to her soldering. “Nothing, Dr. Singh,” she said quietly.

Lakesh and Donald shared a look; neither of them was quite sure what was going on with the normally quiet Miss Hitch.

IN A DARK CAVE many thousands of miles away, Decimal River was checking the results on his laptop’s screen for a fifth time. Finally satisfied, he shifted his body, turning away from the screen so that he could see both Cloud Singer and Broken Ghost where they stood across from each other within the small cave. “Infiltration complete,” he told them proudly. “They’re inside Cerberus.”

Cloud Singer felt a flush of warmth over her body at the thought. “What now?” she asked, looking at Decimal River.

In response, the young man simply inclined his head toward Broken Ghost, waiting for her to answer Cloud Singer’s question. “We wait,” Broken Ghost told them, “showing great patience always.”

“Always,” Cloud Singer repeated, despite feeling the intense need for action. She yearned to find Kane and the others and make them hurt for all they had done. But, she wondered, just where are they now?

Chapter 6

The side lighting of the room was dimmed, and Kane lay snoozing on the sagging couch in his two-room apartment. A plate rested on the low table before him, a half-eaten meal left to stew in its own juices. Beside it, catching the lights from the nearby residential towers through the window, brown drapes pulled back, a half-drained glass of milk, the bone-white liquid clinging to its interior sides as it was slowly dragged back down the glass by gravity.

Kane lay in a peaceful, dreamless sleep, head back, mouth open, and a quiet snoring came with his deep breaths. For the first time in a very, very long time, Kane was at peace.

“THE QUICK BROWN FOX never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Brigid Baptiste smiled as her fingers raced across the computer’s keys and these words formed on the display before her. The phrase contained every letter of the alphabet, an old typist’s mnemonic to ensure that all the keys could be reached and were operational.

“The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Never.

The computer and keyboard sat on a little desk that was hidden in a converted wardrobe within Brigid’s tiny apartment. Strictly speaking, she should not own a computer. Despite her high ranking as a Cobaltville archivist, Brigid was not legally allowed ownership of a personal computer of any form—the designated work databases should be enough for her, where her data queries could be monitored and questioned at any time.

Her computer at the Historical Division was newer than this one, using voice-recognition commands in place of this clumsy, old-fashioned keyboard with its “quick brown fox.” The keyboard felt old and slow by comparison, unable to keep up with the speed of Brigid’s thoughts. Still, it did the job.

She had found the computer, a cast-off DDC model, in the trash close to her one-person apartment. It had seemed to be serendipity, a stroke of luck, but she suspected it had been planted for her to find by her friends in the Preservationists, an underground movement dedicated to retaining the complete records of the world as it was before 2001. Brigid’s job, as an archivist, was to smooth the rougher edges of history to ensure that it was palatable with the enlightened baronial world view. Which was to say, hide the truth.

They could ask Brigid to smooth and hide all they liked, but her eidetic memory ensured that a perfect, untouched copy of it remained in her mind’s eye. She spent long evenings at the DDC’s keyboard, re-creating this information into computer files once more before leaving it at a specified drop-off point for the Preservationists to collect.

Sometimes she wondered if the Preservationists really existed. Sometimes she woke in a cold sweat, convinced that she had been snared in a web of deceit and the Preservationists were a simple fallacy that the emotionless Magistrates had created to prove her guilt.

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