The assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently…

The assassin, the ghost lady, scared and fascinated Cloud Singer, but the woman kept herself to herself, letting none of the tribe get close. Finally, crouching on his haunches beside the glowing laptop screen, Rock Streaming gazed at the others, waiting for everyone’s reactions. “Well?” he asked.

“A weapon that exists on a higher plane of consciousness is one that can be activated on a higher plane of consciousness, as well.” The assassin spoke from the shadows of the cave, her soft voice carrying eerily through the enclosed space.

“The assassin is right,” Bad Father said in his rumbling-thunder voice. “With this and the Dreamslicer, we could establish the new baronies and carve the world up for the original tribe.”

“But how would we take it?” Rabbit in the Moon asked.

“By force,” Neverwalk chirped, slapping a fist into his open palm.

Outlanders ® Death Cry
James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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

Even when still, your mind is not still; even when hurried, your mind is not hurried. The mind is not dragged by the body, the body is not dragged by the mind. Pay attention to the mind, not the body. Let there be neither insufficiency nor excess in your mind. Even if superficially weakhearted, be inwardly stronghearted, and do not let others see into your mind.

—Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), The Book of Five Rings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 1

It was snowing in North Dakota, though it wasn’t particularly cold. Wrapped in a light jacket over his shadow suit, Kane hunkered down beneath the snow-laden branches of a fir tree, watching two guards patrol outside the mine entrance. Kane was a tall man, built like a wolf, all muscle piled at the upper half of his body while his arms and legs were long and rangy.

He took shallow breaths, ignoring the fog that formed as he expelled them, trusting the tree cover to hide his breath as well as it hid him. He wasn’t cold. In fact, the jacket was worn more for camouflage and the convenience of extra pockets while on mission. The tight-fitting one-piece shadow suit he wore beneath served as an artificially controlled environment, regulating his body temperature. It also possessed other useful properties, most crucially acting as armor in the event of an attack. Despite this, the suit allowed for remarkable freedom of movement.

Kane turned to look behind him, sensing as much as hearing the approach of his partner. Grant, an ex-Magistrate like Kane, held his massive body low against the fluttering snow as he jogged toward Kane’s hiding place. He was a huge man, all of his bulk muscle without an inch of fat. His skin was like polished ebony, and a drooping gunslinger’s mustache brushed his top lip. Like Kane, Grant wore a white jacket over his shadow suit, camouflaged for the snow-covered landscape, with a white beanie hat pulled low over his head.

They hadn’t expected to need camouflage. When Lakesh had outlined the mission back at the Cerberus redoubt, he had made no mention of other parties being interested in the acquisition. Straight in and out, don’t let the delicate structure collapse on you as you pass through.

The delicate structure in question was a long-buried Air Force base, predating the nukecaust, in a town that had once been called Grand Forks. Close to the old Canadian border, from a time when country borders meant something, rumor had it that the base had been used as a backup data-storage facility. Now all that remained was a pile of rubble that served as firewood for the local roamers. But Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the nominal head of the Cerberus exiles, had recently stumbled upon evidence that suggested some useful data may have been stored at the Grand Forks base, data that might not have survived in other forms. A quick look-see and they’d be out, or so Lakesh had said to Kane’s three-strong survey crew.

Grant’s deep, rumbling voice cut the silence, despite his speaking in a low whisper. “It’s the same all over,” he told Kane. “Guards everywhere. Not many, but plenty enough if they want to make trouble for us.”

Kane continued to watch the pair of guards patrolling the minelike entrance that led into the old underground network of the abandoned Air Force base. “That’s what I suspected,” he answered quietly. “You see any other ways in?”

“Not me,” Grant growled. “Looks like the millennialists have provided the best and only entryway to our buried treasure.”

The millennialists that Grant referred to—or, more properly, members of the Millennial Consortium—were treasure hunters with a solid organizational structure and plenty of backup for their field ops. They dealt in prenukecaust matériel, mostly military ordnance, which they would either sell to the highest bidder or use for their own political ends—quite often both at once. If the millennialists could get someone else to do their dirty work, and pay for the pleasure in the process, so much the better. Kane and Grant had come to blows with the Millennial Consortium a few times, both in America and elsewhere across the globe. Despite claiming noble aims, most who belonged to the Millennial Consortium were opportunistic pirates, bottom-feeders of the worst sort as far as Kane was concerned. Their bold agenda listed a desire to restore civilization to the country, but there was no doubt in Kane’s mind that they’d sell him their own grandmothers.

Three Scorpinauts, the preferred land vehicles of the millennialists, were parked close to the squared-off entrance. The low-slung, boxlike vehicles moved on eight heavily tracked wheels and were sturdily armored. They sported numerous rocket pods and weapons ports, and .50-caliber, swivel-mounted machine guns stuck out from two armatures at the front of the vehicles like a pair of foreclaws. The ten-foot-long snout of a 40 mm cannon protruded from the rear on a huge, swiveling arm, docking in a resting position at the back of the vehicles, resembling a scorpion’s stinger-tipped tail.

Seeing three of them there meant one thing: it was a lightly manned rather than a priority operation.

Kane noticed the misting puff of disturbed snow off to the right, at the edge of his sight, and he turned to see the third member of his crew—Brigid Baptiste—making determined headway through the thick carpet of white as she came to join them. A striking woman, Brigid had hidden her vibrant red-gold hair beneath a white scarf, leaving her pale face clear. Her high forehead pointed to intellect, while her full lips suggested a passionate side to her personality. Wrapped in a white jacket with a sable collar similar to those worn by her colleagues, hair masked and the cold draining the color from her face and lips, Brigid’s bright emerald eyes and thin, ginger eyebrows were a little flash of color in the pale surroundings. She shook her head as she crouched with Kane and Grant beneath the low-hanging branches.

“No good?” Grant asked, his voice low.

“No back door.” Brigid shrugged.

Kane continued to watch the entrance to the underground structure. The roughly built square tunnel was boxed with wooden struts and rusty, paint-flecked metal poles. “Guess we’re going in the front, then,” he told his companions.

“No way, Kane,” Grant spit. “I’ll always back your play, but look at them. Walking in there would be suicide, plain and simple.”

Brigid nodded her agreement. “The entrance is too well guarded, Kane. We can’t just sneak past them. And there are too many to just start blasting people, even if that was a reasonable option.” She narrowed her eyes in frustration. “Face it, the scavengers have won this round. Maybe we’ll be able to buy the tech from them sometime later on.”

The trace of a thin smile crossed Kane’s lips as he turned to look at his partners. “O, ye of little faith,” he chided. “You’re always telling us how we need to use our guns less and diplomacy more, Baptiste.”

“I don’t see what…” Brigid began, but Kane was already unclipping something from the built-in belt of his jacket.

Kane stepped out of the tree cover and walked down the slight slope toward the mine entrance, holding aloft the small gunmetal canister with his thumb pushed tightly against its circular top.

“Everybody relax,” Kane shouted to the confused guards as they raised their rifles toward him. “This here is what’s known as a dead man’s switch. You all know what that means, right?”

The two guards nodded and tentatively lowered their blasters, still clutching them in readiness. Their outfits were patched together, not uniforms as such but uniform in their raggedness. Both had heavy fur hats pulled low to their brows, and their hands were wrapped in dirty gloves or bundled in rags.

“Now, me and my friends here have some business inside,” Kane continued. “We don’t plan to be long and we don’t intend to take much, but if we don’t get our way, then you, me and this whole underground shaft thing you have going on is about to meet the glorious maker and sing hallelujah.”

Brigid looked annoyed as she followed Grant out from beneath the tree. “This is what he calls diplomacy?” she whispered from the side of her mouth as she moved alongside Grant.

One corner of Grant’s wide mouth lifted in the barest hint of amusement. “If I’m not mistaken, he’s threatening them with a flask of water,” he whispered back.

As he spoke, Grant tensed the tendons in his right wrist and his Sin Eater sidearm was thrust into his hand from beneath his right sleeve.

The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them when they had fled from Cobaltville. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand. If the index finger was crooked at the time, the handblaster would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard.

As Mags, Grant and Kane were schooled in the use of numerous different weapons, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements.

Just now, Kane’s own Sin Eater was still sheathed in its wrist holster beneath the white sleeve of his coat. He paced forward, holding the flask aloft and keeping the attention of the two guards as they wondered whether to leave their posts. “I want you all to step away from the entrance there,” Kane advised them, his voice steady.

Grant leveled his Sin Eater meaningfully at the guards, holding it for a second first on the one to the left, then tracking swiftly across and pointing it at the other guard before returning to the first once more. “Guns in the snow, gentlemen,” he warned.

“Maniacs,” Brigid muttered as she stepped over to Kane’s other side and revealed her own pistol—a black TP-9 handgun.

“How many are inside?” Kane asked, addressing the left-hand guard as he placed his rifle flat in the snow.

“Um…” The guard’s eyes lost focus for a moment as he began a quick count in his head.

“Come on, son,” Grant urged, “quickly now.”

“Eight,” the other guard piped up, the unsteady voice of a young man muffled by the scarf he wore over his nose and mouth.

“You got a way to speak to them?” Kane asked. The hand holding the gunmetal canister was stretched out steadily before him, a little above head height.

“Shoutin’,” the young man replied. “Just shoutin’.”

“No radios? No comm devices?” Kane queried.

“Only in the tanks,” the young man explained, looking across to the parked Scorpinauts, “to communicate with home. Nothing for here.”

This rang true to Kane and his team. The Millennial Consortium was not renowned for its lavish treatment of staff. Its operations were executed at minimal expense to generate maximum profits.

Kane strode toward the open, box-shaped entrance. Low-ceilinged, the tunnel dipped into a shallow slope, burrowing under the wrecked firewood and open foundations that had once formed buildings above. Kane could see a few paces into the tunnel, after which its contents were lost in darkness.

“Me and my buddies here are going to go in,” Kane explained to the guards as he tried to penetrate the darkness with his gaze. “You’re going to wait here, and you’re not going to do anything stupid. If you are under any illusions about how a dead man’s switch works, and you decide to be a chancer with your popguns, let me assure you that we will all be having the remainder of this discussion in the afterlife. Am I clear?”

The guards both nodded, their eyes wide in fear, but Kane didn’t bother turning to them. He was busy scanning the gloom of the tunnel and listening for any hint of approaching reinforcements.

“Now,” Kane continued as he led the way into the tunnel, “if nobody does anything stupid, nobody will get hurt and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

Grant held back as Brigid followed Kane into the dark tunnel, covering the two guards with his Sin Eater.

“Sit tight, boys,” Grant told them. “We won’t be here long.” With that, Grant ducked his head and jogged the few steps it took for him to catch up to his colleagues.

Brigid looked from Grant to Kane, a sour look on her face. “This is insane, you realize,” she whispered.

Still holding the flask aloft, Kane glanced at her. “We’re in and nobody’s been hurt so far,” he replied in a low voice. “Score one for diplomacy, I think.”

Grant sniggered for a moment at that, before Brigid pierced him with her emerald glare.

“The pair of you seem to have mistaken diplomacy for insanity,” she snarled.

Grant held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, despite the automatic pistol in his right hand. “Whoa there,” he muttered. “This is strictly Kane’s insanity. I just follow the leader.”

Brigid’s green eyes were narrowed slits and she bit back a curse at the huge, dark-skinned man before turning to address Kane once more. “So you plan to bluff your way inside, and then what?”

Even in the semidarkness, a mischievous twinkle seemed to play in Kane’s eyes, just for a second. “I’ll insist they all leave or I’ll set off the bomb.”

“What bomb?” Brigid snapped. “You’re holding a flask.”

“They don’t need to know that,” Kane said.

Grant agreed. “I’d say it’s preferable if they don’t know it,” he muttered.

“Scared by the loco bomber,” Kane continued, “they all wait outside a safe distance and we get the place to ourselves. You find what you need, then we head back to Lakesh and Cerberus.”

Brigid reached a hand up and fidgeted with the white scarf that covered her hair as she let loose a frustrated sigh. “Brilliant. And what, pray tell, is your plan for getting out again? You know, with maybe fifteen armed and now very much antagonized millennialists waiting for us at the end of a bottleneck.”

Kane’s smile was bright in the darkness. “This used to be a military base, right, Baptiste? We’ll use their mat-trans. Simple. And yet, genius.”

The mat-trans chamber was found in many of the prenukecaust military bases, and offered a quick way to move from one to the other by the almost instantaneous transfer of particles. Having been originally constructed as a military installation, the Cerberus redoubt, the headquarters of Kane’s field team, had a mat-trans chamber. However, they had traveled to Grand Forks via two Manta flyers, which acted as both transatmospheric and subspace aircraft. It would be a simple matter, Kane reasoned, to collect the hidden Mantas once the heat had died down.

The Cerberus exiles had a variety of ways to transport people, the Manta aircraft and the mat-trans network were just two. In the past few years they had come to rely increasingly on another form of teleportation called the interphaser, which exploited naturally occurring centers of energy both around the world and on the Moon and other planets. The interphaser was ideal for traveling between known locations but, like the mat-trans, could be dangerous when gating into the unknown. There were other limitations on the interphaser, as well, but for the right mission it was ideal.

Keeping pace with Kane, Brigid eyed him for a few moments before she spoke. “Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”

“Not unless he drinks the bomb by mistake.” Grant grinned.

Kane led the way along the ill-lit tunnel, assuming the role of point man. Taking point was an unconscious habit for Kane, dating back to his days as a Magistrate. He exhibited an uncanny knack for sniffing out danger, a sixth sense in some respect, though it was really an incredible combination of the natural five he possessed, honed to an acute sharpness. Walking point, his eyes darting right and left, his hearing seeking changes in sound at an almost infinitesimal level, Kane felt electric, tuned in to his surroundings at a near Zenlike level. Walking point in the danger zone, Kane felt alive.

They met another pair of guards as they worked their way down the incline into the underground base, and each time they played the same bluff, with Kane insisting that anyone who disagreed with his proposal would end up picking his entrails off the tunnel walls.

By the time they reached the concrete exterior of the base itself, even Brigid was feeling quietly confident.

At the end of the shaft, a huge circular hole had been bored through the thick concrete wall of the old military base, taller than Grant and wide enough for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.

“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.

The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.

“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.

“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”

As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Kane announced as he entered the computer room, his hand holding the gunmetal flask prominently out before him.

Inside it was gloomy, with smoke damage on the walls. Three guards spun to face the intruders, reaching for their sidearms. Two other men were in the room, and they looked up from their work at the stripped-down computer banks.

“I’d like to introduce you to my friend,” Kane said, “the dead man’s switch. Some of you look like scientific types so I’ll put this in terms you’re all familiar with—get out of here or I will blow us all up. Any questions?”

One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”

The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.

Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.

“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”

One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”

Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”

Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.

The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”

Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”

Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.

Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”

“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.

Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”

“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”

“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”

She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.

Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”

Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”

Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”

Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.

“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.

“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.

“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.

Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”

Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”

Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”

O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.

Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.

Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.

If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.

Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.

As he moved forward, holding the Sin Eater before him with his left hand steadying his grip, Grant spotted movement in the dark. Someone was approaching, walking along the corridor toward him. Grant was suddenly very conscious that, despite the poor lighting, he was still dressed in white jacket and hat for the snow. He sank into a crouch, holding the pistol steady as he dropped out of the stranger’s potential eye line.

Silhouetted against the flickering light for an instant was a tall, bulky figure reaching for a rifle that was slung from a shoulder strap across his chest. “Who’s there?” the newcomer asked, his voice deep but cracking with fear. “I can see you’re there.”

A tiny glint of light reflected from the muzzle of the rifle as it swung toward him, and Grant leaped forward, powering himself at the man in a driving rush of coiled muscles. In two steps, Grant was upon the gunman, his arms wide as he gripped the man’s shoulders, toppling the gunman backward onto the hard floor. The long barrel of the gunman’s rifle spit a half-dozen shots as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger, their report loud in the enclosed area of the corridor, but Grant was already inside the firing arc, his heavy body crushing the man beneath it. With a loud crack, the gunman’s head smacked into the floor tiles, splitting one across its center.

Grant pulled back his right hand, ready to shoot the guard with his pistol, but the man was already unconscious. Breathing heavily through his clenched teeth, Grant watched as a trickle of blood seeped across the cracked tile from the back of the gunman’s head. Grant got up and stepped away from the unconscious gunman, holstering his Sin Eater and kicking aside the man’s rifle.

“Mouse, meet cat,” Grant muttered as he turned from the fallen guard and headed back down the corridor to look at the map.

I NSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Brigid’s fingers were frantically racing across the keyboard as a stream of digits raced across the screen.

“I’m into the basic coding,” she told Kane without looking up, “but the whole thing is encrypted. Whatever’s in here is either very important or it’s the diary of a very paranoid teenager.”

Kane looked at her, brushing concrete dust from his short, dark hair. “Thinking of anyone in particular, Baptiste?”

“What?” she asked as her fingers sped across the keys. Then she looked up, seeing the sly grin on her colleague’s face. “Well, don’t look at me. Do you think I ever had time to keep a diary when we were in Cobaltville?”

Kane shrugged, laughing to himself as she went back to work on the computer code. As he did so, they both heard shots coming from a little way down the corridor, and Kane took two swift steps across the room to the closed double doors, the Sin Eater appearing in his hand.

There had been six shots, fired rapidly as if from an automatic. No further noise followed, and Kane risked opening one of the double doors, pushing his back against it as he raised the pistol in his hands.

“Grant?” he called tentatively. “Grant? You okay?”

Grant’s deep, rumbling voice echoed back along the corridor. “Just fine. Rodent problem, but I dealt with it.”

Kane stepped back into the room, his pistol returning to his sleeve as he walked across to stand behind Brigid.

She didn’t look up as she spoke. “I don’t feel safe here, Kane.”

“We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” he told her.

Just then, Grant came running through the double doors, clutching his Sin Eater. “We have got a problem,” he announced, a scowl across his dark brow.

“What now?” Brigid asked in exasperation.

“Unless I am very much mistaken,” Grant told them, “there is no mat-trans in this facility.”

Kane and Brigid looked at Grant, their eyes wide as they took in his statement.

“No back door, people,” Grant reiterated, shaking his head.

Brigid shook her head, as well, as she continued working the keys of the computer terminal. “Worst plan ever,” she growled without looking up at Kane.

Chapter 2

Kane was pacing the computer room like a caged tiger, head low as he tried to think through the situation. He had assumed that this installation would have a mat-trans, but there had been no guarantee of that. “There’s got to be a way out,” he assured the others. “A back door. Something.”

Brigid watched him over the rims of her glasses as she sat at the computer terminal. “This place has been buried for two hundred years, remember?” she told him. “Any back doors that might have existed are long since sealed. Essentially, we’re sitting in an archaeological dig.”

“Then we go out the same way we got here,” Kane decided. “We use the shaft.”

“We get the shaft, you mean,” Grant rumbled. “You heard what Brigid said when we came in. That route is a bottleneck with fifteen, maybe twenty armed millennialists just waiting to take a pop at us.”

Kane reached for the gunmetal flask that hung from his belt. “So we’ll use the same trick, the dead man’s switch.” He smiled. “They won’t shoot me while I’m holding the dead man’s switch.”

Grant shook his head. “Oh, yes, they will.” Kane shot a questioning look at the huge ex-Magistrate, and Grant began counting off points on the fingers of his free hand. “One, they know exactly where we’re coming from this time. Two, they’ve had time to think about it. Three, they’ve had time to set up sharpshooters.”

“Four,” Brigid chipped in, a sour smile on her face, “they’ll most likely shoot your arm off at the elbow.”

“What makes you so sure?” Kane asked, his tone abrupt as angry frustration bubbled to the surface.

“’Cause that’s what you’d do,” Grant told him, locking his gaze with Kane’s fierce stare.

After a moment, Kane looked away, shaking his head heavily. “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted.

Stepping over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.

Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”

“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”

Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”

Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”

Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”

Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.

“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.

Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.

Grant crouched beneath the computer desk and began unplugging connections, including the jury-rigged power that the millennialists had attached to get it running in the first place. “Insane or not,” he told Brigid, “would you trust your life in anyone else’s hands?”

Brigid didn’t even need to think about it. A dozen images jockeyed for position in her mind’s eye, situations where Kane had covered her back, taken care of her and saved her life. A hundred further instances were rushing through her head as she helped Grant unwire the base of the computer. Photographic memory could be a double-edged sword when you wanted to be mad at someone, she decided.

“Any idea how we’re getting out of here?” she asked as they discarded leads and Grant pulled the blocky computer from the desk.

“None at all,” he told her, smiling broadly, “but I’m not worried. Kane’ll do something. He always does.”

Brigid grabbed the TP-9 pistol from where she had placed it beside her on the desk, and she and Grant walked briskly across the room to the double doors and out into the corridor.

Kane was waiting for them just by the door, the gunmetal flask back in his hand. Grant took one look at the flask and shook his head. “That’ll never work,” he warned his friend as the lights flickered above them.

Kane started off toward the hole in the wall at a fast trot, trusting the others to keep up. “Oh, I’ve added a little something-something this time,” he said, grinning maliciously as he stepped over the unconscious gunman on the floor and headed for the large gap in the wall that led into the boxed tunnel.

Grant was right behind him, hefting the computer under his left arm. The black, metal-covered unit stretched from beneath his armpit right down to the curled tips of his gripping fingers, and he was forced to keep his arm straight to carry it. They had left the monitor and keyboard behind, knowing they could substitute these items when they reached their headquarters at the Cerberus redoubt. “This thing is going to throw my aim off,” Grant advised the others. “I can keep you covered, but I don’t think I can do much pinpoint work.”

“Won’t be necessary,” Kane assured him, still clutching the flask. “Baptiste and I will handle things, won’t we?”

Brigid sight-checked the chamber of her TP-9 before answering. “Can’t wait,” she said grimly.

With that, the three-person reconnaissance team began to jog along the shaft, making good speed without exhausting themselves as they worked their way up the muddy incline.

They didn’t meet anyone along the shaft, but as they turned a slight corner close to the exit, they suddenly found themselves assaulted by a volley of bullets. Kane urged his companions backward, and the Cerberus trio waited just around the corner as a stream of bullets peppered the wall across from them.

“Told you,” Grant said quietly as the stream of bullets slapped the wall.

Taking point, Kane edged forward to the turn in the shaft, answering Grant without looking back. “They’ll get bored in a minute.”

Kane drew his right arm back and stepped two paces forward before tossing the gunmetal flask ahead of him like a baseball pitcher. The flask hurtled through the air toward the entrance to the mine shaft. Still tucked behind the curve in the shaft, Brigid and Grant heard the astonished cries of Millennial Consortium guards as they saw the projectile fly toward them.

Kane ducked behind cover as a stream of steel-jacketed bullets poured into the shaft. “Look away,” he instructed Brigid and Grant. “Close your eyes and look away!”

All three of them turned to face the underground lair that they had just come from. A second later an almighty noise assaulted their ears, and even from behind lidded eyes they could see the bright flash of an explosion.

Moments later, Grant and Brigid were chasing after Kane as he led the way, Sin Eater in hand, up the last part of the shaft and into the open air.

“What the hell did you just do?” Grant asked, incredulous.

Kane snapped off a shot from his pistol, and the bullet swept the legs out from under a millennialist guardsman who was rubbing at his eyes, his own pistol forgotten in his limp hand. “I stuffed the flask with flash-bangs,” Kane explained as he darted out of the entrance and continued running, head low, across the snow-carpeted ground.

Once outside, they could see that the millennialists had arranged themselves in a crescent shape across the open entrance in a determined bid to trap the Cerberus exiles inside the shaft and, presumably, contain the expected explosion when the dead man’s switch was detonated.

Brigid loosed three shots from her TP-9, catching two of the dazzled millennialists in the chest and clipping the gun hand of a third. A few paces ahead of her, Kane was firing 9 mm bursts from his Sin Eater, mostly as warning shots rather than aiming at specific targets. The way he saw it, they were pretty much home free with the opposition blinded by the flash-bangs; it didn’t warrant unnecessary deaths now.

The flash-bang was a little explosive charge that provided exactly what its name implied: a big flash and a loud bang. Kane and Grant carried various different types of the little capsules, some able to generate copious amounts of smoke or a foul stench upon breaking, and they used them for distraction in favor of actually hurting an enemy. The bright glare of the flash-bangs could temporarily blind an unsuspecting opponent and make his or her ears sing, but it wouldn’t leave any permanent damage.

Grant didn’t want to think about how many of the little explosive spheres Kane had packed into the flask, but he could see that it had dazzled the millennialists into submission. “Vintage Kane,” he muttered as he chased across the snow after his colleagues, his rolling gait compensating for the weight of the computer unit.

The snow was falling heavier than when they’d entered the shaft, thick flurries obscuring their sight as they rushed up the low hill and past the fir tree that Kane had used for cover. Kane took point with Brigid and Grant a few paces behind. As they ran, their boots leaving heavy tracks in the deepening snow, they heard the familiar report of a gunshot, and a bullet zinged past Grant’s ear.

“What the—” Grant yelled as he spun back to look over his shoulder.

The gunman he had encountered inside the underground lair had awakened and was running after them out of the square shaft entrance. Grant threw himself at the ground, using his right shoulder to cushion his fall as he saw the gunman sight and fire again.

A spray of bullets zipped past over Grant’s head as he sank into the soft snow, still clutching the computer base unit to his side. “A little help here, guys?” Grant called as he clambered up the hill amid a further hail of bullets.

Kane and Brigid stopped running, spinning on their heels and sighting the gunman outside the boxy entrance. Their guns blazed in unison as bullets flew over their heads, and suddenly the gunman’s head snapped back in a spray of crimson.

Kane leaned forward to give Grant a hand up. As he pulled the big man back to his feet, a movement caught Kane’s eye. He looked up, over Grant’s head, and spotted the large black object moving between the ridges of snow like a prowling panther. It was a Scorpinaut, one of the tanklike vehicles that the Millennial Consortium employed for field operations, and it was heading their way.

“Troops,” Kane began, “we’ve got bigger problems.” He pointed a little to the left of the minelike entrance, and Grant and Brigid looked where he indicated. Suddenly, the dark shape came into view between two mounds of snow, weaving around a copse as it headed up the slope toward them.

“Must have been looking the other way when you set off the flash-bangs,” Grant speculated. “Got any ideas?”

Kane’s mind raced as he calculated the various factors that were now in play. “The Mantas are about a click away. We could get there in under five minutes without that computer slowing you down.”

Brigid gasped and looked at Kane with pleading eyes. “No, we can’t leave it behind after everything we just went through to get it.”

“Nobody’s leaving anything behind, Baptiste,” Kane told her. “Just need to find a way to give Grant a head start. You guys go on, and I’ll catch you up as soon as I’m able.”

Just then, the amplified voice of a well-spoken woman split the air, and they realized that it was coming from a speaker unit set on the hull of the Scorpinaut. “Attention, runners,” the woman’s voice said, “you have stolen properties that belong to the Millennial Consortium by right of salvage. Please cease and desist your current actions and return the property immediately, or we will be forced to reclaim by any means necessary. We urge you to swiftly comply.”

Grant started trekking up the slope, shifting the computer beneath his arm as he did so, struggling to secure a firmer grip.

Brigid turned to join Grant, the TP-9 still in her hand, then she stopped and turned back to their team leader. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

Kane shook his head, watching the Scorpinaut navigate up the slope. “Play chicken with five tons of heavily armed wag, by the look of it,” he told her, shrugging out of the white jacket he had worn for camouflage. Then he was off, a dark shadow against the white snow, running back down the slope toward the approaching Scorpinaut, the Sin Eater held in his upraised hand.

Kane half ran, half jumped down the snow-covered incline, his legs and arms pumping as he made his way toward a group of low trees off to the right of the approaching vehicle. He saw the foreclaws of the unit whirr in readiness, and then they were spitting fire in his direction as a stream of bullets began cutting through the air. Kane leaped and weaved, always moving, giving the crewof the Scorpinaut the least possible chance of getting a bead on him.

Bullets clipped the ground at his feet, ricocheting off trees and rocks all around him, cutting lethal tracks through the snow as they sought their target.

Still running, Kane held the Sin Eater across his body and reeled off a quick burst of gunfire. The 9 mm bullets zipped through the air in the direction of the Scorpinaut before slapping harmlessly on the armor plate at the front of the vehicle in a shower of sparks. Kane kept running to his right, checking over his left shoulder to make sure the vehicle was still following. Wearing the black shadow suit, he wouldn’t be hard to spot, and having taken a few shots at the Scorpinaut, he figured the crew would be just about mad enough to forget about his colleagues until they had finished with him.

Over to the right, at roughly the same height on the snowy bank as he now found himself, Kane saw a pair of trees. Their trunks were thin and their branches loaded with snow like cotton wool. Head down, he forced himself to run faster, kicking his legs high to get clear of the snow that threatened to pull him over or slow him. He aimed his body toward the trees, a plan forming in his mind.

At that moment, a loud crack split the air and a 40 mm shell hurtled over Kane’s head, slamming into the snow-bank twenty feet above him and exploding with an almighty crash. Kane felt the shock wave of the explosion as it slammed into the right side of his abdomen, and dislodged snow tumbled past him as it slid down the slope.

Kane looked back over his left shoulder and saw that the Scorpinaut crew had brought the tail cannon into the fray. The flexible cannon arm was doubled back to shoot over the main body of the vehicle, launching its massive shells in his direction. While the crew could not get the swivel arm low enough to hit its target, if enough snow was dislodged or one of those trees cut down so that it knocked Kane off his feet, then he was done for. He whipped his head back and pushed his body harder, limbs pumping, determined to keep ahead of the approaching vehicle.

Bullets riddled the ground as the Scorpinaut’s foreclaws spit lead at the running figure. Kane skipped to one side, his breath coming heavily now, the cold air burning his nostrils and throat. He was almost at the trees, and the Scorpinaut was just behind him. In fact, it was so close that suddenly he found himself inside the foreclaws’ arc of fire and he realized, horrified, that the millennialists would be just as happy to mow him down.

The snowfall was turning into a blizzard now, everything becoming white on white, so heavy that Kane could barely see two body lengths ahead as he ran. He glanced behind him once more, the dark shadow of the approaching Scorpinaut an ominous presence just a few feet away, its grinding engine loud in his ears. He heard the drums of the machine guns in the foreclaws spin as they reloaded and prepared to shoot once again, and he looked ahead once again to see the two thin trees just feet away. As the machine guns began blasting, Kane threw himself forward, diving between the tree trunks and hurtling face-first into the cushion of the thick snow, bullets racing overhead. There was a sudden, resounding crash, and Kane felt the jarring impact as the Scorpinaut slammed into the thin tree trunks in its way. They were thin but Kane had judged that they had to be hardy, growing there in the harsh wilds of North Dakota.

Still lying on the ground, Kane looked behind him and saw that the Scorpinaut was tangled between the sturdy trunks, its foreclaws still spitting leaden death into the air. It had become wedged at an angle, its claws tilted and pointing into the sky at thirty degrees; good now only for shooting birds, there was no way that the crew would be able to target anything on ground level. Kane heard the angry spluttering of shifting gears as the driver attempted to reverse or move forward, desperately trying to disentangle the vehicle from the trap he had driven into at full speed.

Kane smiled, his breath clouding before him as he watched the millennialists struggling to free their vehicle. Then he pulled himself up, brushing snow from his shadow suit and rolling his shoulders to loosen them after the hard landing. Kane holstered his Sin Eater and made his way back up the hill at a fast jog and continued in the direction of the Mantas.

The snowstorm was so heavy that Kane almost ran straight past where the Mantas were stowed close to a clump of trees. Kane had assumed he would recognize the formation of the trees, but by the time he got there they had been covered with thick snow, blending into the white landscape.

As he jogged by, Kane spied a flash of sunset-red and recognized it for Brigid Baptiste’s brightly colored hair. She was brushing snow from her hair and face when he approached, the white scarf now draped loosely over her shoulders.

“What kept you?” she asked, favoring Kane with a knowing smile.

“A little—” Kane thought for a moment “—horticulturalism.”

Brigid tilted her head querulously. “Were you picking flowers again?”

“More…rearranging trees,” Kane replied evasively, displaying a knowing smile of his own.

Grant appeared from inside one of the Manta craft as he slid down the subtle curve of its bronze-hued wing. Two of the strange aircraft were parked in the clearing by the trees. They had the general shape and configuration of seagoing manta rays. Flattened wedges with graceful wings curved out from their bodies to a span of twenty yards, with a body length of close to fifteen yards and a slight elongated hump in the center as the only evidence of the cockpit location. Curious geometric designs covered almost the entire exterior surface of each craft, with elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols all over. The Mantas were propelled by two different kinds of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes.

“Computer’s all packed,” Grant told both of them. “You about ready to move out?”

Kane looked at the heavy snow falling all about them. “I think we’ve pretty much outstayed our welcome,” he decided. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to navigate in this horrendous weather by sight alone, but the remarkable transatmospheric vehicles had a dizzying array of onboard sensors that would alert them to any danger long before they eyeballed it.

Brigid leaped into the Manta behind Kane, in the same spot that Grant had secured the computer in his own vehicle. Then, moving together, the two craft took to the skies and blasted away from Grand Forks, heading back to the Cerberus redoubt far to the west.

Chapter 3

When a weary-looking Kane, Grant and Brigid entered the ops center of the Cerberus redoubt, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh rose from his swivel chair and rushed across the large room to greet them enthusiastically. Called Lakesh by those who knew him, the doctor appeared to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age. He was a distinguished man who held himself upright, with an aquiline nose and refined mouth, dusky skin and sleek black hair showing the first hints of white at the temples. However, Lakesh was older than he appeared—much older. He had been a physicist and cyberneticist for the U.S. military before the nukecaust back in 2001, and had spent much of his life in cryogenic suspension.

The ops room was large with a vast Mercator relief map of the world spanning one wall, forming a panorama over the wide door through which the field team entered. The map included more than a hundred tiny lights, each illustrating a point where a known, operational mat-trans unit was located. A plethora of colored lines linked them in a representation of the Cerberus network, the central concern of the redoubt when it had been built over two hundred years before. Strictly speaking, Cerberus was a nickname for the headquarters.

Like all of the military redoubts, this one had been named for a phonetic letter of the alphabet, as used in radio communications. Somewhere in the long-forgotten computer logs and paper files stored deep within the three-story complex, Cerberus was still Redoubt Bravo, a facility dedicated to monitoring the use of the miraculous mat-trans network. But lost somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant illustration of a vicious two-headed hound guarding the doors to the redoubt, like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld. The soldier was long since forgotten, but his bold version of the hellhound lived on as a lucky charm and a mascot to the sixty-plus residents of the complex.

The redoubt was located high in the Bitterroot Range in Montana, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, with their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for Lakesh and his team. Maintaining and expanding access to the satellites had taken long hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the base. Now, Lakesh and his team could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. Despite delays associated with satellite communication, this arrangement allowed access to data surveying the surface of the planet, as well as the ability to communicate with field teams.

The high-ceilinged ops room was indirectly lit to better allow the computer operators to see their screens without suffering glare or obtrusive reflections. Two aisles of computer terminals stretched across the room, although a number of these currently stood unused. The control center was the brain of the redoubt, and Lakesh ensured that it was continuously manned. Right now, there were eight other people sitting at workstations dotted around the room, a mixture of long-term Cerberus staffers and several from the more recent influx of personnel that the base had acquired from a cryogenic-stasis squad found in the Manitius Moon Base.

“It is good to see you in such rude health,” Lakesh announced as he greeted his friends. Almost immediately, his eyes zeroed in on the black, metal-encased unit that Grant carried beneath one arm, and a confused frown furrowed his brow. “Over the comm, you said you were bringing the important files you had located.”

Weary, his muscles aching from his frantic dash across the freezing snow not an hour earlier, Kane’s explanation came out as an emotionless growl. “And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

Grant walked over to a free workstation and flipped the computer base from under his arm as though it didn’t have any weight to it at all. Gently he placed the computer on the desk and gestured to it theatrically. “One computer full of important files.”

Lakesh leaned forward, one hand reaching up to rest under his chin. Then he tilted his head, looking at the scarred computer from several angles before finally muttering, “Highly irregular.” He turned back to his trusted field team, noticing for the first time how exhausted the three of them appeared. “This is highly irregular,” Lakesh said again, more loudly this time as he addressed his colleagues, “but doubtless it is of incalculable value.” There was the trace of a lilting Indian accent to Lakesh’s speech, adding an almost musical tone to his words.

Brigid nodded. “Oh, it is,” she assured him. “I skimmed over the bulk of the files before we left the Grand Forks base. I can’t tell you what’s on there, but it’s encrypted to an almost implausible degree. It’s got to be some important material.”

Lakesh smiled, admiring the battered processor once more. “It certainly sounds promising,” he agreed. “Perhaps all of you would care to take a few hours for yourselves while I make a start on accessing these files.”

Grant didn’t need telling twice; he was already through the door and into the corridor without so much as a goodbye. Kane offered a halfhearted wave as he dashed out of the room after his partner, while Brigid Baptiste remained behind.

“What do you think it contains?” Brigid asked. “And more importantly, do you really think we can still access it? I told Kane that this was an insane way of looking at the files, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Oftentimes there is an admirable directness to Kane’s actions, I find,” Lakesh told her as he reached across the desk and pulled out several cables from the powered-down computer terminal located there.

Brigid smiled. For all of the apparent friction between herself and Kane, they were a good fit when push came to shove. Grant had reminded her earlier of the number of times that Kane had stepped in and put himself at risk to protect her and ensure that she reached her objective. She had done the same for him, of course—they were partners in peril. But there was more to it than that, a mystical bond that the two of them didn’t speak of often. They were anam-charas, soul friends, bonded throughout history to accompany each other as they faced whatever destiny threw at them.

Brigid unzipped her sable-collared jacket and pulled out the spectacles she had tucked safely in the inside pocket during the rushed exit from the underground base in North Dakota. “What can I do to help?” she asked, reaching past Lakesh to unplug the keyboard from the unused computer terminal.

He turned to watch her as she began searching for the right port at the back of the black box to insert the keyboard jack. He admired her utter focus and unwavering determination, feeling at that moment that he could watch her work forever. He stopped himself, blinking and remembering the task at hand. “Why don’t you take a few minutes to wash up and get yourself a change of clothes, Brigid?” he told her. “I can handle this and I’m sure that the joint expertise in this room can likely pull me free if I get tangled in any loose wires.”

Smiling, Lakesh gestured the breadth of the room, and Brigid looked up. Among the operatives at the terminals in the vast control center she could see Brewster Philboyd, an inspired astrophysicist of some renown, Dr. Mariah Falk, a caring woman and expert in the field of geology, and Donald Bry, the communications specialist who had helped get the satellites online. Lakesh was right. Between them, she realized, these people could probably fashion a working computer from scratch given enough pieces.

Brigid glanced at her reflection in the glass screen of the dead computer monitor before her, seeing her disheveled hair where it had been freed from the scarf, the mud-spattered white coat and scarf she still wore about her shoulders, and she realized that Lakesh had nothing but her own health at heart. “Yes, siree, I’ll take that advice,” she said breezily, plucking the glasses from her nose and turning to the exit doors of the ops center. “But you promise you’ll call me the second you find anything, okay?” she called back as she stepped toward the door.

K ANE HURRIED TO CATCH UP with Grant as he left the ops center. The redoubt’s main corridor was a twenty-foot-wide tunnel carved through the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high roof.

“What’s the hurry, hero?” Kane asked, keeping his tone light despite the creeping exhaustion he felt washing over him now that he was out of the field. “You hardly said a word on the flight back here—something on your mind?”

Grant held up his left arm, fist clenched and his wrist chron close to Kane’s face. “I promised I’d cook for Shizuka tonight,” he grumbled, “and didn’t expect to be out in the field most of the afternoon.”

Tilting his head, Kane looked at the wrist chron and noted that it was almost six o’clock. “So?” he asked. “Cooking is just cooking, it won’t take that long.”

“Sure.” Grant nodded. “Cooking will take no time at all. It’s not the cooking that I’m worrying about.” He brushed a hand over his chops and beneath his chin, feeling the first, spiky itch of forming stubble as it met with his fingers. “Shower, shave, clean clothes—gotta look my best.”

Before he could stop himself, Kane blurted out a loud guffaw. “Man, when did you two become such an old married couple? Listen to you!”

“Old married nothing,” Grant replied. “What are we doing all this for, Kane—what are we fighting this crazy-ass war for—if not for people like Shizuka?” He held Kane’s gaze for a moment before turning and heading to his private quarters.

Kane remained standing in the corridor, stunned and feeling suddenly very alone. The war. Sometimes he forgot about the war. When he was in point-man mode, when it was all instinct, all action and do-or-die, he just went with the flow, didn’t think too much about where it was all leading. But Grant was right. They were in the middle of a war, a war that had raged on the planet Earth for more than five thousand years.

An alien race called the Annunaki had arrived on Earth in an effort to prevent their own stagnation. They had toyed with the primitive creatures that they had found there, shaping them to their own ends, for their own amusements. And when the toys had begun to lose their luster, the Annunaki had unleashed a great flood to wash away the remnants of this childlike race called humanity and begin anew. New forms of terrestrial subjugation emerged, and humankind was once again exploited by the alien master race.

Nobody really knew how long the Annunaki had shaped world events, and no one really understood why an all-powerful race would take so much time over what were, to them, little more than insects. And yet, the Annunaki had set events in motion to build up the Earth only to have the great civilizations destroy each other in another cataclysm, this time seemingly of their own making. Where water had failed the first time, fire took its place.

The planned nuclear holocaust had served a simple purpose, akin to leaving a field fallow so that the crops could be better harvested in the next cycle. The small percentage of the population that survived that fateful day in 2001 reverted to a state of savagery that ensured only the very strongest survived.

Two hundred years after that first nuclear strike, the Annunaki had reappeared as the overlords, reborn in new bodies formed from the chrysalis state of a mysterious ruling elite called the barons. As far as Kane could understand it, the whole trick had been pulled through a computer download; an organic computer on a starship called Tiamat found orbiting Earth, utilizing vastly superior technology to regenerate the godlike Annunaki pantheon. But for all intents and purposes, it was just another file download, a saved memory opened and accessed once more.

And working with Brigid and Lakesh had taught Kane that one file download meant that you could do another. And another and another and another. Tiamat had taken a crippling hit during a recent squabble between different factions of the alien Annunaki, and their tight grip on the affairs of Earth seemed to be relenting, but Kane suspected—as did all of the Cerberus exiles—that the chances were good that a backup file of Annunaki personalities was just waiting to be downloaded. The threat had abated temporarily, but the war was far from over.

Grant was right. He had Shizuka, the beautiful leader of a society of samurai warriors called the Tigers of Heaven who inhabited Thunder Isle in the Pacific. She was a noble warrior, every bit as brave and formidable as Grant.

And who did Kane have? Who was his fight for?

“The hell with it,” the ex-Mag muttered, turning toward his own quarters to take a hot shower to loosen the kinks in his muscles. He didn’t need to hang a face or a name on the person he was saving. He was there to save humanity, there to save himself and others like him. It wasn’t a war; it was basic survival.

A S L AKESH ATTACHED a new keyboard to the recovered computer in the ops center, communications expert Donald Bry, sitting several seats across from him, thought he saw a quick flash of code whip across the monitor at his workstation.

A round-shouldered man of small stature, Bry wore a constant expression of consternation, no matter his mood, beneath the curly mop of unruly, copper-colored hair. Bry was a long-serving and trusted member of the Cerberus crew, acting as Lakesh’s lieutenant and apprentice in all things technological.

Bry leaned forward in his seat, peering at his computer monitor, waiting for whatever it was to reappear. His monitor was linked to the Keyhole communications satellite, allowing Cerberus to remain in touch with field operatives and to pass information to them as required.

As he watched the surveillance image with thermal overlay taking up the main window on-screen, he urged whatever it was that had flashed up to reappear. When nothing happened, he began typing frantically at the keyboard, then slid his chair a few feet along the desk to review the past forty seconds at a separate monitor to his left.

Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. No code. No flash. Nothing.

Turning back to the live feed, Donald Bry leaned forward once again and ran his index finger across the lower right-hand side of the screen, where he had thought he had seen the code flash for a fraction of a second.

Farrell leaned over from a nearby desk, a quizzical look on his face. “Everything okay, Donald?” he asked.

Bry looked up, feeling awkward and suddenly stupid. “I thought I saw something for a moment,” he told the other operator, “but it was nothing. Just tired, I guess. Been looking at the old boob tube too long.”

Bry accepted when Farrell offered to cover communications monitoring for a while, and he got up to stretch his muscles and get out of the room for a few minutes, assuring his colleague he would be back shortly.

As Bry passed him, Lakesh was hooking a new monitor to the recovered computer. “Be sure you save some of the action for me,” Bry instructed Lakesh with forced geniality before exiting the ops center into the vanadium-steel corridor.

Outside the quiet hum of the operations center, Bry stood and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?” he asked himself quietly, trying to remember. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had flashed across the screen so quickly that it had to have been there for no more than a nanosecond, utterly subliminal. If it had been anything at all, he reminded himself.

Chapter 4

On the plateau outside the heavy accordion-style doors to the Cerberus redoubt, two figures were sparring. A rough circle had been etched in the dirt around them, stretching to a diameter of roughly twenty feet. The early-morning sun was rising over the mountain, casting long shadows across the ground as the two combatants paced the edge of the marked area as they prepared to battle.

The two figures could not have been more different.

To one side of the circle stood Grant, the dark-skinned, heavily muscled ex-Mag dressed in loose-fitting combat trousers and a dark-colored vest. His outfit was finished by a pair of scuffed, black leather boots, a souvenir of his Magistrate days.

Across the circle, her bare feet crossing each other as she walked around the edge of the temporary arena, her eyes never leaving those of her opponent, was Domi. Lithe and thin, Domi was an albino, her skin chalk-white and her short-cropped hair the cream color of bone. She wore an olive-drab ensemble made up of an abbreviated halter top that barely covered her tiny, pert breasts and a pair of shorts, rolled up high in the leg. The most startling aspect of Domi’s appearance, however, were her ruby-red eyes. The young woman weighed little more than a third of her opponent, yet showed no fear as she prepared to do combat with the bigger man.

“First outside the circle, toss or misstep,” she told him, “either counts as a loss.”

“I know the rules, Domi.” Grant smiled tightly. “Give it your best shot so I can toss your sorry ass out of here and get to the cafeteria in time to catch the decent breakfast chef.”

Domi’s pale lips parted in a frightening, feral smile. “In your dreams, Grant.” She laughed. “I’m saving my best shot for someone good. ”

With that, Grant loosed a cry of offended rage and charged toward her, his boots kicking up dirt as he closed the space between them. Domi watched calmly, balancing lightly on the balls of her feet as this relentless juggernaut of a man hurtled toward her, his head down like a charging rhinoceros.

She timed the leap perfectly, her hand whipping out to scuff momentarily across Grant’s left shoulder where he held it low to the ground. Suddenly she was flipping into the air, her feet at the highest apex as she pivoted off the ex-Mag’s body. As silent and graceful as a ballerina, Domi landed behind Grant, pulling her body into itself.

With Domi out of his way, Grant saw the edge of the circle in the dirt just three steps ahead of him and he rolled his body and slapped his right hand hard on the ground to bring himself to a bone-jarring halt. He slipped for a moment, his hand drifting perilously close to the circle’s edge, and managed to stop just short of the line.

As Grant righted himself, lifting his huge frame from where he had slid, he heard Domi bark out a single laugh. “Ha! You’re getting sloppy, old Mag man,” she told him.

Crouched low to the ground, Grant turned to look at the thin-framed young woman, his lips curling back in a snarl. She was clearly enjoying this rare chance to show off to one of her peers, but Grant was beginning to wonder how he had been talked into this morning sparring match.

Domi, like Grant, Kane and Brigid, had once been a denizen of Cobaltville, though her position as sex slave had been far less salubrious than that of the Magistrates and the librarian. But circumstance had thrown them all together, a little unit that made up the solid core of the Cerberus exiles together with Lakesh as their mission controller. These days, Domi was sleeping with mission control, but that was a different story altogether.

As a child of the Outlands, she was naturally a loner, used to relying on her own wits and often abrupt around others, making them feel uncomfortable. But now and then she missed true company, that inherent human need for social contact, and Grant and Kane had always shown nothing but respect for her despite her background.

Grant looked to where Domi stood in the center of the circle and he noticed Kane was now standing a little way back from the circle’s edge, over by the large doors to the redoubt. His eyes flicked to Domi once more, just standing there, waiting for his attack. Fine, he decided, you want an attack? You’ll get one.

Grant was a massive engine of muscle as he drove forward, swinging punches left and right as he closed in on Domi. She weaved back, ducking low, and swung her right leg out in a sweeping arc, attempting to trip the bigger man. The front of her calf slapped into the top of Grant’s heavy boot and just stopped, like hitting a solid metal bar.

Domi yelped in surprise, pulling her leg back and rolling her body out of the way of Grant’s pile-driver punches. Suddenly she was standing again, a blur of motion as she darted her outstretched hands at him, holding them flat, like blades.

Grant put up a rock-solid arm to halt her attack, blocking each blow between wrist and elbow as her hands flitted toward his face. He sensed the opening in her attack before he saw it, an old Magistrate instinct, and his right leg kicked out as he pivoted at the torso, dropping low to ensure that his foot made solid contact.

Grant’s kick slammed Domi just beside the breastbone, and she staggered backward, the wind knocked out of her. She looked down as she drew a calming breath, and saw that she was just one footstep away from the edge of the circle that she had marked out before Grant arrived.

“Not laughing so much now, huh?” Grant goaded as he centered himself and walked warily toward her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling, “I’m still laughing on the inside.”

Grant stopped in his tracks, just outside of the range where Domi might reach him, and a wide smile broke out on his face. “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

Domi thought for a moment and shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seemed the thing to say.”

Kane’s voice drifted over to them from the doors to the redoubt. “Blah-blah-blah,” he said, heckling. “Are you kids going to talk or are you going to fight? I came here to see blood, people,” he added, ensuring that they knew he was kidding by his tone.

Grant gave him a sneer before turning back to his tiny opponent. “You want to finish this?”

She nodded. “Ready when you are.”

Kane had stepped over to the edge of the circle, a little behind where Domi was trapped. He punched a fist into his hand and began counting them in. “This is it, people,” he announced, “Beauty versus the Beast. My money’s on Beauty there, but don’t take offense—I’ve known him a lot longer than I have you, Domi.”

“Har-har,” she responded, not looking back, taking a step closer to Grant. In a flash, Domi had spun her body, swinging first her left leg and then her right in Grant’s direction, repeating the action as he skipped back to avoid her kicks. Grant slapped her legs away from his face as he continued backward.

Grant timed Domi’s movements in his head, and suddenly his arm shot out and he grabbed her right ankle as it swung toward his face. Not expecting the move, Domi overbalanced and tumbled to the hard-packed ground, her momentum pulling Grant over with her.

Together, the pair of fighters slammed into the dirt, with Grant spinning to avoid crushing Domi’s birdlike frame beneath his massive build.

“You okay?” he asked her after a moment, letting go of her ankle.

Lying prone on the ground, Domi peered over her shoulder down the length of her body at Grant’s concerned expression. His vest was darker now, she saw, where sweat had pooled between his pectoral muscles. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she told him. “Thanks.”

Grant eased himself off the ground and stood over her, offering her one of his huge hands to help her up.

“Aren’t you going to finish me off?” she asked, confused.

Grant shook his head, pointing to the ground at his feet. “I stepped outside the circle when I rolled.”

Domi took his hand, a sour expression crossing her features. “Yeah, but you did that to avoid hurting me.”

Grant shrugged. “Still counts,” he assured her. “Besides, breakfast is becoming a nagging priority just now. Tough to fight on an empty stomach.”

Domi brushed herself down and watched Grant return to the redoubt and disappear into the darkness of the tunnel mouth. After a few moments, she turned to Kane, still standing at the side of the circle. “Did you want to see me?” she asked him.

Kane shook his head. “Nah, I just came out here to get some peace and quiet. Didn’t realize that fight club was in session this morning.”

Domi smiled shyly, the barest hint of color rouging her pure white cheeks. “You wanna fight?” she asked Kane after a moment.

Kane looked out over the plateau, watching as wispy cotton-candy clouds drifted slowly over the distant sky, before he reached for the top of his shirt and began unbuttoning it. “What the hell, why not,” he told her, tossing his shirt to one side. “But no pulling hair, okay?”

“I won’t if you won’t,” Domi promised him as she walked across to the far side of the dirt circle.

As he stepped into the circle and dropped his body into a fighter’s stance, Kane felt the nagging doubts of the past few days ebb away. It felt good to be alive.

B RIGID WAS BESIDE Lakesh in the ops center while Brewster Philboyd sat before them, tapping at the keyboard Lakesh had attached to the recovered computer. They had spent three days trying to decode the encrypted information, and every false lead had sapped just a little of their enthusiasm for the task.

The question remained: what was stored on the hard drive and would it be worth this effort? Lakesh had one answer, and Brigid consoled herself that his was the wisest way to look at the problem. “It doesn’t matter what’s in the files,” he had assured her. “This is a scientific investigation to find out the truth—that there is something in the files.” In their ceaseless quest to find out what that something was, Brigid wasn’t entirely sure that any of them had gotten enough sleep.

An astrophysicist, Brewster Philboyd was in his midforties and wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks. His pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline, and his lanky six-foot frame towered above many of the other scientists in the redoubt. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other exiles from Manitius more than a year before, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t a fighter, but Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when a scientific or engineering problem crossed his path. He had stepped in to help with the Grand Forks database when he overheard the exasperated cries coming from Brigid and Lakesh on the second day of attempting to probe its files.

“This stuff was really important two hundred years ago,” Brigid said, “but for pity’s sake, couldn’t they have put a time-sensitive release on the damn coding?”

“There’s every possibility that it’s just as important today,” Lakesh said, chastising her lightly before turning back to the streams of code that whizzed across the screen, seeming to blur into one continuous, green glowing mass after three solid days of watching them flash before his eyes.

“Well,” Philboyd chipped in, “we know that the code is alphanumeric and that it uses uniform block placement to disguise any natural patterns that might be there. Maybe if we drop some of the letters and transpose others…”

“And stand on our heads and rub our stomachs,” Brigid added.

Philboyd scratched at his head absently. “That might help, too,” he admitted.

Lakesh took them both in with a kindly look. “We’ll break it, my friends,” he assured them calmly. “Just let’s all take things logically, one step at a time.

“And the first step,” he added firmly, standing up and feeling the twinge in his joints where he had been hunched over the computer terminal too long, “is to make everyone a cup of tea so we can all retain our sense of focus.”

A few minutes later, as the three of them sat nursing mugs of tea, Cerberus’s resident communications expert, Donald Bry, left his post as the day shift began and came across the room to join them.

“I’ve worked up a quick program that you can use to reverse selected batches of the coded sequence,” he explained, brandishing a shiny CD with the words Reverse decoder scrawled across it in permanent marker.

Lakesh reached across and took the CD, thanking Bry as he did so. “We’ve thought of reversing every other sequence, but it didn’t generate any definite patterns,” he told the communications man, “but this will open up more options, I’m certain.”

Bry nodded. “All we can do is try, right?” he told them, trying to buoy their spirits.

Her hands clasped around the warm mug of tea, Brigid nodded. “Thanks, Donald,” she said, feeling the cold ache of tiredness creeping over her and clutching the mug tighter to stave it off.

Lakesh stepped across to a free terminal and began running Bry’s program from the CD, while Brewster Philboyd transferred a copy of the recovered hard drive across for him to work with.

Bry stood behind Lakesh as he began typing instructions out at the keyboard. “Maybe if you reversed every third or fourth or, I dunno, tenth part of the string,” Bry suggested.

Lakesh’s brilliant mind was already several steps ahead. “I’m adding something to your program,” he told Bry. “A little randomizer so that we can test different parts of the coding in different ways. That should save us quite some time, assuming this provides a key to open the files.”

Still sitting beside Philboyd, Brigid felt Lakesh’s words wash over her as her eyelids began to get heavier. The steady rhythm of clicking computer keys had an oddly calming effect as she closed her eyes and began thinking, for no particular reason, about a game she used to play in her childhood that involved chasing boys to kiss them, much to their disgust. Eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular, Brigid smiled at the memory.

T HE CAVE WAS ALMOST entirely dark, the only light source coming from the faint glow of a computer screen. Five men had come there to confer, away from prying eyes.

“Somebody has tapped into the Keyhole orbital comsat,” Rock Streaming explained to the others as they stood together in a tight circle. Rock Streaming was a tall man in his early twenties, with long black hair tied in a ponytail and light brown skin the color of milky coffee. He had a wide forehead and a wide, flat nose beneath dark, intelligent eyes. He wore boots and combat pants with a long, tan-colored duster worn open across his bare chest. Tribal tattoos could be seen beneath it, dotted across his wide chest, swirls and black flames surrounded by curlicues.

The other men in the cave bore the signs of similar ethnicity, with café-au-lait skin, dark hair and flat noses, and the younger ones had harsh, bold tattoos striping the sectors of bare skin that they displayed.

One of the older men nodded sagely. His face displayed a tangled beard, as dark as his messy hair, and he was dressed in a simple loincloth, leaving the rest of him, including his feet, bare. A strange-looking cuplike object was tucked into his waistband, connected to a long section of twine. “Have you secured the feed?” he asked, his voice a low mutter.

Rock Streaming nodded, flexing his fingers for a moment like a prestidigitator warming up for his act. “They don’t know we’re there, Good Father, I guarantee it.”

The older man nodded once more, his eyes distant as he considered the implications of the young man’s statement. “Where is the link?” he asked after a moment. “Where is it that you are monitoring?”

The long tails of the duster coat whipped behind him as Rock Streaming strode across the cavern to the quietly humming laptop. He crouched, displaying uncanny balance as he dropped to rest on pointed toes, and tapped at the keyboard for several seconds. “The old United States,” he replied as a satellite image appeared to one side of the main display on the terminal. As Rock Streaming worked the keys, labels flashed up on-screen, identifying different parts of the image. “A place called Bitterroot in the area known as Montana by the old mapmakers.”

Another of the men spoke then, addressing his question to Rock Streaming. Like Good Father, this man was older than the other three, with a clumpy beard and flecks of gray appearing in his tangled hair. He wore a waistcoat over his chest and rounded belly, with grubby shorts, and had also left his feet bare. His gray eyes held a quality of tremendous age that seemed somehow out of place in a human being. “And you are sure that they have no inkling that you are monitoring them?” he asked, his voice the low rumble of a distant storm. “You are sure? ” he emphasized.

Rock Streaming nodded, looking up from his crouching position before the glowing laptop screen. “These Americans have no idea that I’m watching them, Bad Father,” he said with certainty.

One of the tattooed young men spoke up, his tone respectful to the older tribesmen but still proud of his contemporary. “They say that to be hacked by Rock Streaming is to be caressed by a secret lover, Bad Father,” he assured the old man in the vest. “The system cries out for more but refuses to speak of the tryst to its operators.”

Bad Father nodded, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “Let me know of any developments,” he instructed Rock Streaming. Then he turned away in unison with Good Father, and the pair headed toward the tunnel that led out of the cave.

Still crouching at the glowing laptop monitor, Rock Streaming turned to his two remaining colleagues and nodded once in silent acknowledgment. In the linear, subjective world, the time was coming.

Chapter 5

The breakthrough finally came two days later, when geologist Mariah Falk recognized a sequence of digits tucked away in the streams of coded information as an old-fashioned grid reference. As soon as she pointed it out, Lakesh slapped his forehead for being so stupid as to not notice it before.

“But where is this coordinate referencing?” he asked her as they sat together in the cafeteria that sometimes doubled as a meeting hall for the Cerberus personnel.

Brigid sat with them, prodding a fork through a yellow swirl of scrambled eggs on her plate. “Let me see,” she suggested, looking at the deciphered location code on Lakesh’s printout.

Mariah, a large woman who, while not especially attractive, had an ingratiating smile and an amazingly resilient personality, closed her eyes tightly as she tried to work out the reference numbers. Her arms moved before her, gesturing up and to her right for a few moments before she opened her eyes and spoke. “Northwest Russia somewhere, I think. I’d need to see a map to get you any closer than that, though,” she admitted.

“Great,” Brigid muttered disconsolately, “more snow.”

Lakesh was already standing, and he took in a hearty breath as he looked at his companions. “If Mariah is right, we can use this system to decrypt the contents of the computer and find out what it is we’ve been looking at for the past five days.”

It took another half day to write the decryption software and run the program through the files they had found, and even then parts of it appeared to be horribly vague or incomplete. But it turned out that Mariah’s observation was a Rosetta stone, giving them the key. After a few tweaks, a refined version of the decryption was applied and a wealth of military reports opened up to Lakesh and his team.

A lot of the files were nothing more than personnel records and requisition forms, but several items held interest. Brigid took it upon herself to investigate one sequence further, putting in long hours to piece together all of its scattered parts.

Lakesh called Kane, Grant and Brigid together for an informal meeting in the empty cafeteria the next evening, and he sat beside Brigid, facing the two ex-Mags. Brigid had worked throughout the past thirty hours, transcribing important details from the files and piecing the information together with her own formidable knowledge. What she had come up with had been quite astonishing, Lakesh agreed, assuming that it was accurate.

“The main files on the recovered computer dealt with information from one of the U.S. spy networks,” Lakesh explained as Grant poured everyone water from a large jug in the center of the table. “From what we can divine, this network was a crucial player in the days leading up to the Cold War, when the U.S. was focused on the growing threat of Russian military might. They kept files on a variety of military projects that were being researched behind the iron curtain, some of more questionable value than others.”

“Watching folks through gaps in the drapes.” Kane smiled. “Nice work if you can get it.”

“Now, the vast majority of this information is bitty and of very limited use over two hundred years after it was amassed,” Lakesh continued, “but we’ve found one item of exceptional interest. Brigid has been concentrating on going through and deciphering all of its related notes.”

Lakesh turned to Brigid and she picked up the explanation after stifling a tired yawn. “According to the U.S. report, it seems that the Russians had developed a project dubbed Chernobog. Chernobog is the name of a Slavic god known as ‘the bringer of calamities.’”

“Sounds like a honey,” Grant chirped.

“Now, the mythology behind the name isn’t important,” Brigid continued, “but the threat that it implies may very well be. From what the intelligence network could piece together, Project Chernobog was set up as a subsection of the Cheka Agency. The Cheka was the government division that ultimately became the KGB, a lethal secret police force at the beck and call of, at the point of its inception, Lenin. In 1920, with the First World War just behind them and growing alarm at the potentially disruptive influence of outside forces on their then nascent communism, the Russian Communist Party set things in motion to create a weapon so powerful that it could eradicate all forms of life from a specified area.” She drew a long breath before continuing. “Furthermore, this weapon was apparently proposed as a fail-safe not for the ‘evil’ outside forces of America and Western Europe, but for something conceived as a far more insidious and dangerous threat—the Archons.” She stopped, her emerald eyes skewering each of the three people sitting at the table. “Aliens,” she said finally.

“Kind of stands to reason,” Kane admitted after a moment’s thought. “Our boys are spying on them and they’re spying on us. They see the U.S. government getting pally with the Roswell day-trippers and they start to think, ‘Hey, maybe we need one of those ultimate-weapon-type things just in case.’”

“The Roswell visitation was in 1947,” Brigid told Kane, “over twenty years after Project Chernobog was initiated.”

“Well,” Kane responded, “the point is there has been a lot of alien activity over the years, and we’ve seen more than our share of evidence the visitors had their fingers in the U.S. government pie for a long time. If I was building up a society that stood opposed to that government, I’d make damn sure I could take out their benevolent, technologically advanced friends.”

Brigid nodded, conceding his point. “Now, and I must emphasize this, what we’re looking at here are spy reports. Which is to say, the veracity of this information is suspect, and it is almost certain that all of the facts are not present. Furthermore, given the general climate of the espionage divisions on both sides, it’s a given that any report will put the worst possible spin on a situation concerning the enemy.”

Grant poured himself another glass of water and gestured the jug around to see if anyone else wanted more. “So lay it on the line for us, Brigid,” he said. “What are we actually looking at?”

“At face value?” she asked, and Grant and Kane encouraged her to continue. “There’s a redoubt tucked away in Georgia, Russia, that’s the storage facility for a weapon so powerful that it could destroy the Annunaki once and for all.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from all parties around the table at that point, and everyone looked relieved, then increasingly uncomfortable.

“So,” Kane suggested, drawing a route with his finger over the shiny plastic table, “let’s say we mosey on over to Georgia and pick up this Chernobog device—”

Brigid stopped him. “The division is called Chernobog, a kind of statement of intent when they set it up, I guess. The weapon…Well, the best translation I can come up with is ‘the Call of Death. Death Cry.’”

Kane nodded. “So, we get ourselves this Death Cry and then what? The Annunaki have been a thorn in our sides for a long time, using it against them would send a message and potentially…potentially what?” he asked.

“Kill every last one of them,” Lakesh said solemnly.

“Assuming the information is correct and that the weapon was ever actually constructed,” Brigid added. “This is information from the people watchers, remember?”

Kane looked at Grant and, after a moment, both men smiled gravely.

“This is too good an opportunity to pass up,” Kane stated firmly.

“Seconded,” Grant added.

Lakesh and Brigid were nodding, too. “That’s what we thought when we first deciphered the report,” Lakesh admitted. “But there is another question.”

“Yeah,” Kane said, “and we all know what it is. Even if we obtain this Death Cry, do we dare pull the trigger?”

Grant rubbed his jowls thoughtfully, brushing down the edges of his mustache. “The Annunaki have pushed humanity around for at least five millennia,” he told everyone. “If there’s the slightest chance of getting rid of their lizard faces once and for all, we have to take it.”

“Yeah,” Kane agreed, “that’s pretty much the way I see it, too.”

Brigid looked at the notepad that rested before her, its pages full of notations in her tidy, precise hand, before looking back at Kane and Grant. “If only we’d had this thing when they first revealed themselves,” she said quietly.

Kane reached across the table and placed his hand over hers, looking her in the eye. “Yeah,” he said quietly, the single word holding the weight of meaning that all four adventurers felt at that moment, survivors in a seemingly unending battle against an almighty evil.

Grant clapped his hands loudly, breaking the somber mood with his wide smile. “Well, kids,” he announced, “looks like we’re going to Georgia for the holidays!”

T HE FIRST RAYS of sunlight streamed over the horizon, turning the bronze-hued metal hulls of the twin Manta aircraft into twinkling, golden stars as they cut through the skies over the Pacific.

Kane and Grant took piloting duties in their respective vehicles, and once again Brigid took the passenger seat behind Kane. He sat before her, wearing a helmet that enclosed his whole head, forged from the same strange, bronze-hued metal as the Mantas themselves. Within the helmet, a heads-up display fed Kane vast streams of detailed information concerning wind speed, air pressure and a dozen other factors that might affect the pilot’s decisions. But for the purposes of this trip, dusting the clouds as they flew west, the Mantas would pretty much fly themselves. Which suited Kane and Grant just fine, well acquainted as they were with the concept of point and shoot from their previous lives as Magistrates.

The Cerberus field teams had been to Russia before, had encountered their local equivalent known as District Twelve. But for the purposes of this mission, Lakesh had agreed that keeping a low profile was for the best. If this Death Cry superweapon turned out to be a dud, bogus surveillance information or a theoretical project that never got off the drawing board, Kane’s team could potentially look very foolish to their Russian contemporaries. And, by contrast, if this Death Cry really did exist, there was no question that District Twelve would stake a claim on it, despite the actual discovery work being the province of the Cerberus people.

“We’ll take the Mantas in low,” Kane had proposed before they set off, “fly in via China and sweep up toward the location so we don’t spend too much time in Russian airspace. Chances are good they won’t spot us, and they’d expect us to come at them via the Atlantic route anyhow.”

Now, having passed his eyes across the various readouts to make sure that things remained steady, Kane tilted his head back and spoke with Brigid. “Any idea what this place is like?” he asked.

Brigid had been checking through the notes she had made the day before, refamiliarizing herself with everything she had uncovered. She glanced up at Kane, at the strange bronze helmet propped atop his neck, and watched as rain-heavy black clouds zipped past through the exterior view port. “The coordinates place the redoubt in the Caucasus Mountains, about seventy clicks from the Black Sea,” she replied. “A temperate area, the closest big settlement on the old maps would be Pyatigorsk, but satellite pictures show that’s long since gone.”

“Huh,” Kane grunted. “Probably bombed back to the Stone Age like most everything else during the nukecaust.”

“The state of Georgia was about as far west as you could go in the old Soviet Union,” Brigid continued. “It was actually one of the last states to be incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, remaining a semi-independent satellite district for the first twenty years of rule by the Communist Party.”

“That’s pretty strange,” Kane said thoughtfully. “Constructing a doomsday device outside your borders.”

Brigid shook her head, even though she knew that Kane couldn’t turn to see her while he wore the bulky helmet. “Not that unusual really,” she explained. “There are political benefits to keeping the really nasty stuff out of your own country, especially in a climate of worldwide hostility. The U.S.A. and other countries used similar tactics, storing nuclear missiles and the like in territories that were sympathetic to their political ideology rather than inside their own borders. Makes it less easy to get caught, and if you do, your government can simply deny all knowledge.”

“Ah,” Kane responded. “You’re talking that diplomacy speak again, Baptiste.”

Kane scanned the heads-up displays for half a minute before continuing. “It’s funny,” he told his flight companion, “I never gave much thought to the location of the Cerberus redoubt up to now. It’s kind of interesting that the military brass stuck the crucial development arm of their mat-trans system close to the border between the U.S. and Canada. Guess they didn’t want it too close to Washington, just in case something went askew.”

“Yup,” Brigid agreed, “there was certainly a time when the mat-trans was new—and potentially unstable—technology. Lakesh could tell you more about how things were in those days.”

“I’m sure he could.” Kane nodded. “So right now we’ve left one out-of-the-way mountain installation to go visit another.”

“That’s about the size of it,” she confirmed. “You were hoping for something else?”

Kane sighed. “Just once,” he told her, “I’d like to get a nice mission in the sun somewhere. You know, grab a few rays, maybe a spot of surfing, some fishing, build a sand castle.”

“The last time we tried that, I wound up a hostage for pirates in the Florida Keys,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but at least you got to work on your tan,” Kane grumbled.

At that moment, the Commtact units that were attached behind the ears of Kane and Brigid clicked and Grant’s voice could be distinctly heard by both as though he were there in the cockpit with them. The Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been found in Redoubt Yankee years before. They 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. Theoretically, a deaf wearer would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact.

“Just coming up on the East China Sea now,” Grant said. “We’re at about the halfway point.”

“Let’s just fly steady,” Kane responded, “keep it nice and smooth.”

“That’s a roger,” Grant acknowledged before signing out.

The Mantas dipped below the clouds for a moment, and Brigid took in a sharp intake of breath as she saw the huge landmass that encompassed Asia and Europe stretching out before them. They were on their way.

Chapter 6

It was a little after midday local time when they arrived in Georgia. Kane and Grant took several passes over the mountainous area in the Mantas over a period of fourteen minutes. The Mantas split formation and separately took several swift runs across the Caucasus Mountains, surveying the general territory and ensuring nothing untoward was waiting close by to surprise them.

While they didn’t expect to run into any particular problems, Brigid reminded them that the local authorities might not take too kindly to their rummaging through their military sites for plunder.

“We’re not plundering,” Kane grunted, “just…finding.”

“How do you figure that?” Brigid asked as their Manta cut through the air for another pass at the location in question.

“You can only plunder stuff if it belongs to someone else,” Kane told her through the bulbous flight helmet. “Way I see it, anyone with any real claim to this Death Cry device is long since in the grave. No one’s seen fit to go look for it for two hundred years, right?”

Brigid shook her head, even though she knew that Kane could not see her. “Well, we don’t know that,” she admitted, “but it’s a pretty out-of-the-way location and redoubts tend to be well protected against casual intruders, so there’s every chance—”

“You see?” Kane cut her off, triumph in his tone. “Like I said—just finding.”

Brigid chose to defer to Kane’s judgment for now, but she knew that if District Twelve or another Russian agency got wind of their presence there, there would be a lot of explaining to do.

Once Grant had made his sixth pass, this time beneath the cloud cover and at what amounted to a slow crawl for his Manta craft, he confirmed that the area was definitely uninhabited.

“Think we can go in?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his own Manta hidden in a high bank of wispy, white clouds.

Grant’s even tone came back to Kane after a moment. “Now’s as good a time as any.”

The Cerberus field team had located evidence of a military installation nestled between two of the snowcapped mountain peaks and decided that this was likely the installation that they sought. A tiny concrete building, perfectly square and little more impressive than a tool shed, stood guard at the end of a small paved road. From the air, the short road curled around into the shape of a hangman’s noose, a turning circle for vehicles. The rusting remains of a military transport lurched to one side of the road, its canvas roof cover long since lost. Other than the black strip, there seemed little to distinguish the area from anywhere else in the mountain range, but Brigid confirmed that this area tallied with the coordinates listed in the decrypted surveillance files.

Kane deployed the Manta’s various scanning capabilities, but the data that came back was inconclusive. “Could be there’s an underground bunker there,” he told Brigid, “but it sure ain’t anything special.” He ticked off the basic scanning checklist for her. “No reactors, no indication of any power source, no personnel showing on thermal—no one alive, at least. No significant metallic content, nothing out of the ordinary for the mountain range in general.

“I’m no expert,” he continued, “but I think the best we’re going to find is an air-raid shelter.”

“How big?” Brigid wondered.

She heard Kane suck air through his teeth in thought. “That,” he told her, “is something that would require landing and maybe getting the shovels out.”

Shortly thereafter, Grant brought his Manta in for a fast vertical landing, bringing the craft down swiftly and smoothly to park beside the short strip of blacktop. Kane followed two minutes after, descending rapidly from high cloud cover once he was certain that no one was coming to investigate Grant’s appearance.

Grant waited across from the landing area that he and Kane had chosen, crouched within a small patch of scrub grass, clutching a Copperhead close-assault subgun, scanning the area with alert eyes and ears. The Copperhead subgun was almost two feet in length but looked like a toy in Grant’s huge hands. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed, and an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Sin Eater, the Copperhead was Grant’s favored field weapon, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create in short measure.

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