He reached out before him, spreading the six fingers of each hand as if to stave off something that was attacking, and a gasp of breath came from his open mouth.

“Wha’ is it?” the child asked, peering up from the daisy chain she had been making on the little expanse of lawn before Balam’s dwelling.

Balam looked at the child with those strange, fathomless eyes, and wondered if she might recognize the fear on his face, the fear that had threatened for just a moment to overwhelm him.

The child smiled at him, chuckling a little in that strange, deep way that human children will. “Uncle Bal-bal?” she asked. “Wha’ is it?”

“The Ontic Library has been breached,” Balam said, his words heavy with meaning, fully aware that the child could never comprehend the gravity of them. “Pack some toys, Quav. We’re going to visit some old friends.”

It had been almost three years since Balam had last spoken with the Cerberus rebels, but the time had come to do so once again.

Distortion Offensive

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Fools are rewarded with nothing but more foolishness, but the wise are rewarded with knowledge.

—Proverbs 14:18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Prologue

The elderly man was solidly built, with a wispy gray beard that sprouted from his chin like the gnarled roots of a potato plant. He stood watching the waves from his hiding place in an alleyway overlooking the beachfront as the setting sun painted the Pacific Ocean in hues of red and pink and orange.

As the waves lapped against the shore, the old man pulled the glass bottle from one of the voluminous pockets of his waterproof coat. Streaks of grime and patches of sweat marred its once-pristine appearance, evidence of his long trek from his prior home in the Canadian wilds. He was there under instruction; his master had sent him to recruit, as he had sent the other graduates from Tenth City.

The sounds of crashing waves in the distance, the old man methodically broke the seal and unscrewed the cap of the bottle of home-brewed gin, then lifted the vessel to his lips. His nose wrinkled as he caught a smell of the clear brew. The fiery stench caught in the back of his nose and throat, not so much a smell as a feeling, a heat.

Closing his eyes, the old man tipped the bottle and felt the cool liquid splash past his teeth, wash against his tongue and the sides of his mouth. After a brief moment, he pulled the bottle away and spit the mouthful of gin out across the stone slabs of the sidewalk. The liquid fizzled there for a moment before running away along the incline of the alleyway and disappearing into the rudimentary opening of the local drainage system, a froth of saliva floating on its clear surface.

The elderly man stuck out his tongue, his eyes still screwed tight as he breathed out through the savage taste that now lined the inside of his mouth and stung at his lips. The raw taste of gin made him cough, and for a few moments he hacked and spluttered. Then his eyes opened and he pulled the capless bottle close once again, drawing it high until he held it over his own head. He looked up, seeing the dwindling sunlight dance across the surface of the bottle, feeling the weight of the liquid as it sloshed inside the clear glass. Then, closing his eyes once more, the old man deliberately tipped the bottle so that its contents poured over his upturned face, washing through his dirt-clotted hair and drenching his old clothes until his coat was sodden with gin.

Reeking of alcohol, the old man stepped out into the street, swaying left and right as though on the deck of a ship in a ferocious storm, and he began to heckle the nearest person, a pretty young woman rushing to the church hall with a sturdy bag over her shoulder, hoping to collect some of the newly arrived rations she had heard about. Frightened, the woman leaped back from the old man as he tottered from the alleyway and shouted nonsensically at her. Her heels clattered on the paving stones as she rushed away, but the old man had already dismissed her, moving on toward the beachfront and the next of his victims.

Prison had always been a breeding ground for recruitment, he knew. He only needed to get himself locked in a cell for utopia to begin. The utopia his master had promised for every man, woman and child on the planet Earth. The utopia he had already embraced.

Chapter 1

Every star was a different color. A thousand stars in the sky—a thousand different colors, no two the same.

It was as if the spectrum had lied to Pam all these years and that only now had she finally been allowed to open her eyes for the first time and truly see the universe around her. She wondered why the spectrum had been hiding all these marvelous hues, just out of sight, pretending to have its familiar selection of just seven bands of color when in actuality its variations were beyond comprehension.

Fifteen years old, Pam sat on the beach at the edge of the fishing ville called Hope, gazing up at the night sky as one thousand beautiful stars twinkled above her in their majestic greens and reds and blues and all those other colors that she didn’t yet have names for. Beside her, Pam’s boyfriend, Tony, was working at a little fire with a length of driftwood he had found washed up a ways along the coast. The driftwood stick, as well as that used for the fire itself, had once been a part of the grand pier that had jutted into the sea here, back before the earthquake had struck and a tidal wave had demolished it.

As Tony poked the fire, Pam turned her attention to the sea where the starlight twinkled across its surface like a flock of playful birds. Even in the inky darkness of night, Pam could see the breakers crashing downward as the ocean sprinted toward the shore, only to pull back at the last second, clawing at the beach with foamy fingers.

She had moved here just a few months ago, had traveled across the Outlands along with her mother and her little sister, in their hurry to escape the dreadful destruction of their home in the towering ville of Beausoleil. An aerial bombing raid had punished Beausoleil, levelling the magnificent ville in the space of a few minutes, killing the sinful and the blameless indiscriminately. Among those casualties was Pam’s father, caught up in the explosion that had felled the towering Administrative Monolith where he worked. His body had never been recovered.

In less than a day, the magnificent ville of Beausoleil had been rendered uninhabitable as thick, inky smoke plumed into the skies above it, visible for miles around like a beacon signaling its fate. At that signal, brigands had rapidly descended upon the remains faster than the Magistrates could repel them. Pam’s mother had not wanted to leave the ville until she found her husband, but once the brigands appeared the whole area had descended into savagery, like something from the history books, from before the Program of Unification had fixed everything in the whole world. When she saw her mom packing the few items that had survived in their shattered apartment, Pam had asked about her dad, saying that they couldn’t just leave him behind.

“This is no place for little girls,” Pam’s mother had said, tears streaming down her face. A woman’s shrill scream came from outside the ruined residential block even as she spoke—a scream that could just as well have come from Pam’s mother’s throat.

Pam had wanted to argue, but her sister, Rebecca, was just eight years old, and she really was a little girl.

And so together the family had exited the lurching remains of their smoldering residential block, avoiding the huge bomb craters as they hurried along the churned-up remnants of the road outside. There was a crowd on the street corner before them where two men argued loudly with a Magistrate dressed in black armor, the top half of his face hidden behind the intimidating helmet he wore. One of the men was shouting something about food, and before Pamela knew it the man threw a punch at the uniformed Mag. The solid blow connected with the official’s jaw with a resounding crack, just below the extent of his protective helmet, and Pam heard herself gasp. She had never seen anyone attack a Magistrate, never in her fifteen years of life within the safe confines of Beausoleil’s high walls.

As Pam watched, the black-garbed Mag staggered, doing a two-step dance to hold himself in place. As he did so, the Mag raised his right arm and the familiar form of his Sin Eater pistol appeared in his hand, propelled automatically from its wrist-mounted holster.

“Keep back!” the Magistrate ordered the crowd as he took a step toward the man who had struck him, his voice firm with anger.

The man who had struck out leered at the Mag, fury in his eyes. “Our families need to eat,” he shouted, closing in on the Mag, his face up close to the Magistrate’s. His colleague, an unshaved, tired-looking man, stepped over to join him. “Outlanders are taking everything, swarming inside the walls like vermin. And you aren’t doing anything.”

“Back!” the Mag ordered again, but the watching crowd was closing in on him now, the sounds of their growing dissatisfaction buzzing around them like a swarm of angry hornets.

Pam’s mom had hissed at her to get a move on. “We can’t stay here,” she urged, pulling at little Rebecca’s hand. She was crying silently, tears streaking her cheeks as if she’d been caught in a cloudburst.

Suddenly there was the sound of a gunshot, and the man who had been arguing with the Magistrate dropped to the ground like a sinking stone, a bloody stain blossoming on his shirt. Pam gasped and she heard her mom say an actual cuss word, which she had never done before, not ever.

“Come on, Pam,” her mother urged, rushing into a lurching alleyway that stood between the wreckage of two buildings, the jagged masonry reaching above like clawed hands.

Pam hurried after her mother and Rebecca, but she looked back for just a moment when she heard more gunfire. Behind her at the street corner, the crowd was rushing at the Magistrate as he shot rounds indiscriminately at them. A red-haired woman fell to the ground, her head erupting with blood as a bullet slammed into her once-beautiful face. Beside the woman, two men, one of them quite elderly, doubled over in pain as 9 mm bullets sprayed them from the nose of the Mag’s Sin Eater. And then, as Pam watched, the Mag disappeared beneath the surging group, the staccato bursts of gunfire muffled by the press of bodies.

“Come on, Pam,” her mother’s voice urged then, and Pam turned back to see her mother calling her from atop a little broken wall. Rebecca was clambering over it at her side, her school satchel hanging down by her hip on its leather strap. “Quickly now.”

Pam had run to catch up with what remained of her family, her shoes slipping a little on the debris that littered the ground. Within half an hour the three of them crept through the shattered ville walls and left Beausoleil forever, never once looking back at the smoking ruins that nestled amid the greenery of old Tennessee.

Tired and disheveled, Pam, her mother and sister had traveled west until they ended up at Hope, along with so many other refugees. Something was happening in their world, something bigger than any of them comprehended. The nine villes, of which Beausoleil was just one, had lost their leaders, the hybrid barons. The demarcation lines of the baronies themselves were blurring as the once-proud villes fell, one by one. The baronies had brought order to the landmass that had once been called the Deathlands and, before that, the United States of America. The gemlike villes had brought security. Now that security was disappearing, and the whole country was drifting back toward a hell state.

Hope was a fishing village on the West Coast, a small, tight-knit community of less than two hundred people. When the baronies had started to fall, a surge of refugees had found their way here, building a shantytown on its outskirts, and bringing with them overcrowding, disease and crime. What had once been an idyllic community had turned into a place where it was every man for himself. That was until the tidal wave had pummelled most of those temporary favela dwellings to the ground and, curiously, from that destruction a strange new sense of community had emerged.

Pam recalled her wonderful apartment in the residential Enclaves of Beausoleil, where life was regimented and she had had to wear a uniform to go to school. By contrast, Hope was dirty and cluttered and her classroom was a converted basement where she wasn’t expected to wear a uniform. Indeed, some of her classmates didn’t even wear shoes, and not through choice, either. But for all its grime and lack of sophistication, Hope was where Pam could sneak off to the beach and watch the waves, and where she and Tony could make out under the wreckage of the pier. After two months, Hope felt like home.

The ocean crashed once more against the shore and, as she chewed, Pam perceived something within those waves, the way the atoms clung together and broke apart like partners at a formal dance. And she saw, just for a moment, the way the whole dancing ocean was dragged to and fro by the pull of its bullying best friend, the moon, watching from above with its crescent sliver of cat’s eye.

Smiling, Pam turned away from the crashing waves and saw Tony jab at the flames with his length of driftwood. Sparks spit from the fire as Tony hooked at the food that he had been cooking there, submerged deep in the popping flames. She and Tony had come across a clutch of little mollusks that had been washed up by the tide as they walked along the beach earlier that evening, and Pam had suggested cooking them here while they watched the sun disappear beneath the swell of the Pacific.

“Go on,” she had said. “It’ll be dead romantic and that.”

Tony pulled a face. He didn’t go much for romance, unless it involved having a fumble under her shirt while no one was looking. “Won’t your mom be worried?” he asked.

“Nah,” Pamela assured him. “There’s never any food at home. She’s probably out partying with someone even now.”

Tony nodded. He liked Pam’s mom; she was all right. But after the tidal wave had hit Hope, the whole ville had been turned upside down and everyone was scrabbling to find enough to feed themselves, even more than they had before. So when Pam said “partying,” Tony knew that she really meant her mom was trading sex for food.

The weird mollusks they found washed ashore had hard shells the color of oil on water, and ranged in size from the very small to ones almost as big as Tony’s clenched fist—the same fist that had knocked out Tim Brin’s front tooth—but they tasted all right once you cooked them for a bit. The flesh was kind of salty, tasting like the ocean, and they could be a bit chewy, but Tony and Pam didn’t mind. It was good to smell them cooking, a brackish, sharp kind of tang drifting within the charcoal smoke of the fire. After they had eaten the first few, they had just become used to the texture and the taste, and it hadn’t really mattered after that.

Using his stick, Tony pulled the last of the dead creatures from the fire, licking his lips as he caught the aroma of the cooking flesh where it lay on the shale before his resting knees. Then he cast the stick aside and, wrapping his hands in the tails of his shirt to protect them, picked up the flame-hot creature and cracked open its now-brittle shell. A hunk of jellylike meat flopped about inside, its color a pink so dull that it looked almost gray, the flesh still bubbling as a smoky white trail plumed from it.

Tony offered the mollusk to his girl. “Last one,” he said. “You want some?”

Pam looked at Tony and smiled. To her eyes, his face seemed so beautiful, his fourteen-year-old skin smooth and taut, the fluffy dusting of his first beard cluttering his jaw. And she saw that the multicolored stars were reflected in his eyes, all those wonderful colors that she had never noticed before. “Half each,” she told him, holding her hand out for the cooked flesh as it was cooled by the sea breeze.

Tony tore the pink-gray meat apart and handed Pam half. As he leaned close, he kissed Pam next to her lips, a slobbering touch that included his tongue licking at the side of her face like a dog. Then, gazing into each other’s eyes, they brought the flesh to their mouths and, giggling, sucked the juices before chewing and swallowing.

The meat left a salty taste on their tongues, as though they were eating the ocean itself. Tony looked at Pam as he felt that delicious flesh slide down his throat, and he saw how she seemed to glow beneath the multifaceted light of the moon. Above, up in the sky, he, too, saw the multicolored display that seemed to emanate from the stars. Like gods, he thought. Gods in the sky.

KANE RUBBED THE BACK of his neck, feeling the tension there subside as he gazed out across the streets of Hope from the summit of the church steps. It was still busy out here despite day having given way to night, and a line of locals shuffled past on the steps as Kane tried to clear his whirring mind.

“Everything okay?” asked a familiar woman’s voice from behind him.

Kane turned to see Brigid Baptiste pushing out of the rotting wooden doors of the old church to join him where he sat on the topmost stone step. Brigid was a beautiful woman, svelte of form with an athlete’s musculature and a ballet dancer’s grace. Her hair was a vibrant red-gold, the color of sunset, and she had painted her full lips to match. Her bright green eyes stared back at Kane from her pale face, like twin emeralds glinting from the snow. Where her full lips spoke of sensuality, Brigid’s high forehead suggested intellect, and in reality she was both of those aspects and many more besides. Brigid had been Kane’s colleague in the Cerberus operation for several years, and though their relationship was strictly platonic, their closeness was often akin to that of siblings. They shared the mystical bond of anam-charas, soul-friends destined to meet over and over through eternal reincarnation stretching along the flowing stream of time itself.

Brigid had dressed in scuffed but durable leathers over her shadow suit. The shadow suit itself was a waferthin bodysuit that was able to deflect knife attacks, offer protection from contaminated environments and also had other remarkable properties including the ability to regulate its wearer’s body temperature.

Kane nodded at Brigid’s question as she took a place beside him on the cool stone step, crouching so that her face was close to his while the refugees shuffled past them in a slow-moving line. The pair had been cooped up in the church for over fourteen hours, working nonstop as they distributed reconstituted rations to the local population. Elsewhere in the sprawling shantytown that surrounded the ville, another field team was distributing medicines where they were most needed. Theirs was a mission of mercy, and something that the Cerberus people seemed to have had very little time for over the recent months thanks to a litany of problems, both within their home base and across the globe.

Kane was a well-built man, with cropped, dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Tall with a lean frame and muscular arms, Kane’s physique was similar to that of a wolf, a machine built for hunting. His temperament was similar to that of a wolf, as well, both pack leader and loner as the situation demanded. Like Brigid, Kane was a member of Cerberus, an operation headquartered in Montana and dedicated to the uncovering of and resistance to a deep-rooted alien conspiracy that had threatened to overpower and subjugate humankind since the dawn of recorded time. That alien threat came from a race called the Annunaki, who had been mistaken for gods from the stars but were in fact a bored alien race who considered humans as nothing more than playthings, idle diversions along the bland, tiresome road of their millennia-long lifespans. Kane had accidentally uncovered inklings of that conspiracy when he had worked as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, learning to his disgust that the system he was tasked to uphold was in fact corrupt to its core. Kane had left Cobaltville, along with Grant, a fellow magistrate, and Brigid, an archivist with remarkable flair and the unusual ability of total memory recall. Together the three of them formed the energetic nucleus around which the sixty-strong facility of so-called Cerberus exiles based their operations.

Like Brigid, Kane had dressed in a shadow suit over which he had worn a tired-looking denim jacket, jeans and boots. Dressed as such, he could pass among Hope’s locals with relative anonymity, although perhaps a perceptive individual might notice the proud way in which he carried himself, a vestige of his Magistrate training.

“Just wondering when it got so dark,” Kane finally said as he gazed out toward the beach, the sound of crashing waves carrying over the hubbub of the crowd. He didn’t really expect an answer.

Brigid scanned the dark sky, spying the pinpricks of light where the stars twinkled between the looming clouds. “It’s never that dark,” she assured Kane. “Not if you know where to look.”

In silence, Kane nodded his agreement as the line of locals continued to snake slowly into the church to collect the handouts the Cerberus team had brought. They were military rations, many of them recovered from certain storage centers and redoubts that Kane had recalled from his time as a Magistrate. The rations had been acquired in a series of perfunctory raids.

“Guess we should be getting back inside,” Kane said, “before Grant thinks we’ve deserted him.”

Brigid’s straight white teeth glinted in the moonlight as she smiled. “Grant knows you’d never do that, Kane. The pair of you are pretty near inseparable.”

“He says that about you and me, you know,” Kane said as he stood.

“No, he says we’re insufferable,” Brigid corrected him, slapping her hand against Kane’s rear to brush off the dust that clung to him from the step.

Kane laughed as he made his way past the milling crowd, through the shadow-filled porch and back into the church hall. Within, the hall was lit with flaming torches held in sconces, and a line of people stood waiting for their turn to receive their allocated rations from the crates that Kane, Grant, Brigid and what passed for the local authorities had off-loaded from the Mantas earlier that day. Other volunteers from the local area helped, ladling bowls of soup and distributing bottles of clean water that had been filtered clear of contaminants by a pump system operating in the back room of the church. The pump continued to chug as volunteers added more water to its intake system.

The people of Hope seemed buoyant despite their current plight, and an all-pervading air of “getting on with it” appeared to be the order of the day.

With over five thousand starving people in the ville, the process of allocation based on need was slow but necessary. Many of the locals had arrived carrying bowls and buckets, sacks and carry-alls to obtain as much as they could for themselves and their struggling, starving families. But the two young men at the front of the line hadn’t brought bowls or bags to transport the ration bars and purified water. Instead, as Kane watched from the far side of the room, a sixth sense triggering in the back of his mind, the two young men produced a pair of snub-nosed handguns and jabbed them in the face of his partner, the ex-Mag called Grant.

Chapter 2

“Gun,” Kane snapped out in a harsh whisper, taking another step into the vast hall with Brigid just a pace behind him.

But before Kane and Brigid could venture farther into the busy church hall, several more people stepped from the ranks of the queuing locals and brought arms out from the hiding places within their dirty-looking clothes. People screamed and shouted, and everyone in the room dropped to the floor in unison as if struck by a massive weight. Kane stepped backward as he dropped, disguising himself within the shadows of the door. When he looked around he saw that Brigid Baptiste was just across from him, similarly lurking in the thick shadows cast by the porch of the antechamber, her body taut like a coiled spring.

“Hand over everything you’ve got left,” the leader shouted as he waved his snub-nosed .38 at Grant’s face, “or you’re going to be breathing out of a third nostril.”

“Oh, no, son,” Grant growled, “you don’t want to be pulling this shit with me.”

Grant was a huge man, with broad shoulders and dark skin. Though heavy, his body was entirely muscle, with not an ounce of fat in evidence. His black hair was cropped very close to his scalp, but he wore a luxurious gunfighter’s mustache. Right now, Grant wore a black undershirt and loose combat pants, while his Kevlar trench coat remained hanging over the back of a chair behind him. For this rare occasion, curse the damn luck, he had left his wrist-mounted Sin Eater automatic pistol in the secure locker of the Manta vehicle parked around the back of the church grounds.

The lead stick-up artist thrust the barrel of his pistol closer to Grant’s face, and he cocked the hammer with a sadistic sneer curling his lip. He was a young man, no older than seventeen by Grant’s estimate, and already he wore a fierce scar down the left side of his face, cutting a white streak through the dark stubble and red acne that covered his jaw. Grant’s dark eyes flicked across the room, noting the man’s accomplices in an instant before turning his attention back to their leader. They were all dressed in muted, unwashed clothes, and none of them looked to be much older than twenty, maybe twenty-five.

“I done fucks like you for just looking at me, man,” the leader announced through gritted teeth. “I’ll do everyone in this room if you fuck with me, you understand?”

Grant fixed his dark eyes on the bandit leader as, somewhere close to the door, a dog barked anxiously. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly, almost conspiratorially, “I understand.” Hands held loosely at his sides, Grant took a step back toward the open crate of rations. “You want me to hand them over one by one, or are you and your boyfriends going to come here and carry a crate out?”

The gunman glared at Grant, irritation on his frantic features as he considered his options. “You. You can carry it,” the man decided.

Grant snorted, his eyes still fixed on the nervous young gunman. “Can’t help you,” he explained. “This is a two-man job, buddy. You want to feel the weight of this bad boy if you don’t believe me.”

Irritated, the gunman spit a curse and strode toward the line of tables, stepping onto the nearest desk and clambering over it, his hollow boot heels echoing loudly against the wood like the clip-clopping of a horse. As he did so, Grant seized his opportunity, his leg snapping out and his foot slamming into the front of the table as the gunman climbed onto its surface.

The table’s legs screeched as they dragged across the floor with the impact of Grant’s powerful kick, and the gunman found himself toppling forward, losing his balance as the table disappeared from under him. The young man snapped off a shot at Grant, a bullet blasting toward the huge ex-Mag with a resounding crack, several people screaming in its wake.

Grant felt the bullet cut the air just past his ear, missing him by a quarter of an inch, but he was already rushing forward to meet his assailant. All around the church hall, the gunman’s allies were beginning to react, turning their own weapons on the man who had attacked their leader.

“Bunch of amateurs,” Kane muttered as he and Brigid readied themselves in their hiding place in the shadows of the porch. As the gunmen targeted Grant while he was safely protected behind the tumbling form of their leader, it gave Kane and Brigid ample opportunity to mount a surprise attack from the rear.

Over by the line of tables, Grant pumped his sledgehammer fist into the lead gunman’s thorax, knocking the man back up into the air as he continued to fall, driving the breath painfully from his throat. The gunman toppled sideways, crying out in pain as he slammed against the wooden floor with bone-shaking finality.

A trained ex-Mag like Kane, Grant was working on instinct now, and his leg snapped out once more to kick the snub-nosed .38 out of the gunman’s hand before he could bring it to bear. A stray bullet powered out from the pistol’s barrel as it flew out of the gunman’s hand and across the floor, embedding itself in the side of the water pump, water spraying everywhere.

As the gunman fell, his companions began blasting shots from their own weapons at Grant, peppering the wall behind the ex-Mag with shots as he leaped out of their path and rolled behind one of the tables. From his crouching position behind the scant protection of a desk, Grant extended the outstretched toe of his booted foot, hooking the nearby chair and scooting it across the floor toward him. His long Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.

Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.

Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”

Richie—the gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floor—groaned, his response something less than an actual word.

The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain’t nowhere else for him to go. C’mon.”

The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn’t plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication device that lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”

Kane’s reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant’s skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.

Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.

His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug’s face.

The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.

Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before him at the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.

The heavy pot clanged against the skull of the next stick-up man with a sound like the tolling of a bell. The man fell backward against the floor, his nose caved in and blood pouring down his face. Grant leaped atop his fallen foe, lashing out again with the heavy pot he held in his right hand as bullets slapped against the Kevlar shield he held in his left.

By then, Kane and Brigid had emerged from the shadows. Before the gunmen could react, they joined the fray, felling two of their number in a swift, coordinated attack. Running, Kane drove a ram’s-head fist into the lower back of the nearest gunman before the man even realized he was under attack, forcing the man’s legs to give way so that he fell to the floor in the grip of paralysis—whether temporary or permanent Kane didn’t much care at that instant.

Next to Kane, Brigid dropped low, sweeping her outstretched leg at another gunman, connecting with his knee so hard that it popped the man’s kneecap with an audible tock that sounded like the clucking of a person’s tongue. The man tumbled to the wooden floor, crying out in a mixture of pain and astonishment as he turned to face his beautiful attacker. Brigid didn’t even give the man a second to retaliate. Her flat palm lashed out and bruised his windpipe in a sharp, savage jab. The man’s eyes rolled in his head as he sank into blissful unconsciousness.

As Kane disarmed a third gunman, Grant tossed aside the soup pot and slapped out at his own opponent’s gun, knocking it aside as the bandit reeled off a burst of gunfire that echoed in the enclosed space of the church hall. Then Grant drove a massive fist into the man’s gut, knocking the wind out of him and lifting him off his feet, such was the power of that incredible blow. As the man struggled to recover, coughing and spluttering from the savage punch to his gut, Grant drove his fist downward and into the man’s head, breaking his cheekbone and knocking him across the room. The gunman staggered until he tumbled over a serving table before flopping to the floor behind it.

Grant looked up and saw that Kane had dispatched his own opponent, but the final gunman was lifting his pistol and aiming it at the back of Kane’s head.

“Get down!” Grant shouted to his partner as his left arm whipped out with the Kevlar trench coat once again.

Kane ducked and a bullet blasted overhead. At the same instant, Grant’s coat wrapped around the gunman’s outstretched arm like a rope. As the bullet zipped harmlessly across the room, Grant yanked the coat back with such swiftness that the gunman found his arm dragged backward and his feet pulled from under him. He struggled to keep up with the sudden momentum.

Grant let go of the coat and the gunman staggered onward, hauled past the ex-Mag with the movement of the dragging coat. As he passed, Grant drove his knee into the gunman’s side, knocking him to the floor. As the stick-up man crashed downward, Grant fell upon him, slapping away the hand holding the pistol and driving his other hand down to hit the man’s face with its heel. The gunman was knocked senseless, his head slamming against the wooden floors with a loud, hollow echo.

“Everyone okay?” Grant asked as he pulled himself away from the final stick-up artist.

Around the church hall, the timid locals began to rise once more, smiling tentatively as they saw that Grant, Kane and Brigid had disabled all of their would-be robbers. And, spontaneously, a ripple of applause broke out among the people in that church as they showed their gratitude to their saviors.

However, hidden among the shadows near the church doorway, one woman didn’t applaud. Instead, her tanned face betrayed no emotion as she watched the scene with flashing dark eyes from beneath the hood of her jacket, her faithful dog waiting at her side.

Despite the disguising nature of the loose, ragged clothes she wore, it was clear that she was a tall woman, with a slender build and an economic lightness of movement. Her face was tanned with an olive complexion, with eyes the color of rich chocolate. The woman reached up with the long fingers of her slender hand, brushing a few rogue wisps of her dark hair back under the hood, pulling the front of the hood itself down lower, the better to mask her face.

As the crowd continued to congratulate the three Cerberus warriors, the woman turned and pushed her way past the milling crowd and out of the church hall, the dog obediently trotting along at her heels. The dog was some strange mongrel, with coarse, wiry fur and the look of a coyote about it. Its eyes were exceptionally pale, washed out to a blue so faint as to be almost white.

The woman stopped at the bottom of the stone steps that led to the church hall, gazing back over her shoulder for a moment to ensure that the Cerberus people weren’t following her. But no, they hadn’t spotted her among the crowds, had no reason to suspect she might be here. She had come seeking food, like the other residents of the shattered ville of Hope, but she hadn’t expected to bump into familiar faces like theirs. Her name was Rosalia, and she had met with the Cerberus rebels once before.

Rosalia had been here six weeks ago, when the earthquake had rumbled through the ground and the towering tidal wave had pummeled the beachfront. She had been a bodyguard then, in the employ of a local brigand called Tom Carnack, whose operation stretched into the Californian desert. Her position had put her at odds with the objectives of the Cerberus personnel, and she had clashed with Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with another operative called Domi, whose skin was an eerie white the color of bone.

Carnack had been killed during the encounter with Cerberus, and his operation all but destroyed. Now a few splinter factions of Carnack’s group remained, squabbling among themselves and with no clear leader emerging. And so Rosalia found herself once again out on her own, struggling to survive.

With no employer and no place to call home, Rosalia had found herself back in Hope, accompanied by the strange mongrel dog. What remained of the shanty dwellings had been reduced to a claustrophobic rabbit’s warren, which suited Rosalia fine. She could hide here, another refugee among the population of strangers until she was ready to move on. There was the nunnery, of course, just over the border, where she had been trained. Rosalia knew that she would always be welcome there if nowhere else.

Right now, however, she required rations and clean water, but she felt instinctively that revealing herself to Kane and his team would be foolhardy. Their business had not ended well. Better, then, that they thought her dead and dismissed her from their overly moralistic minds.

Rosalia hurried on, making her way from the church doors before ducking into a side street, the faithful mutt keeping pace with her. Rosalia had found the dog six weeks ago, while she had been wandering the Californian desert following the destruction of Carnack’s base, and the two had become companions on the road. Not given to sentimentality, Rosalia had elected not to give the hound a name, merely calling it “Dog” or “Mutt” or “Belly-on-legs.” The dog didn’t seem to care, happy to have human company, sharing its warmth with Rosalia wherever she slept. The dog itself was a strange, nervous animal, inquisitive but slightly wary around strangers, often hiding behind Rosalia as they walked the streets. That nervousness served her well, for it meant the hound would wake at the slightest noise or movement and would bark at any shadow it didn’t recognize. On more than one occasion, the dog’s sudden barking had woken Rosalia and saved her from being robbed or attacked while she slept in one of the empty, ramshackle buildings that remained dotted around the fishing ville.

Dog whined, and Rosalia peered down at it. Like herself, Dog could feel the gnawing in its belly as hunger threatened to consume it. It wouldn’t do to go hungry simply because of the Cerberus Magistrates and their interruption of her daily routine. If she didn’t eat, she would become weak, and once that happened Rosalia would become a slave to circumstance, or she would never eat again and simply lie down in the street to die as she had seen others do.

There, she said in her mind as she looked back up the street, her predatory instincts rising. Exiting the church, a young couple made their way down the stone steps, going slowly so that their child could keep pace with them. The child was a toddler, and the mother held its hand as it slowly navigated the hard steps to the street. Rosalia’s eyes were on the male’s bag, small but full of rations and two bottles of purified water. The young woman cheered as the child clambered down the final step, and it looked up at her and laughed. They were simple folks, Rosalia recognized, naive and lacking street smarts. Ville folk turned refugee with the destruction of Beausoleil or Snakefishville, most probably. Educated to be idiots.

And if the child starved because of her actions?

Better the child than me, Rosalia reasoned.

Beneath the waxing moon, the couple turned into the side street where Rosalia waited by the wall, hidden in the shadows of the brickwork. She was about to step forward, planning merely to brush past them and take the bag before bolting in the manner of a common street thief, when she saw movement at the far end of the narrow street. Two tough-looking youths had followed the couple and their child, clearly harboring the same idea as Rosalia. She saw the glint of metal catch the moonlight as one of the young men unsheathed a switchblade, and the whisper of a smile crossed her perfect lips. It was a bored smile, the kind that came when one could finally sense a break in the tedium. This would be Rosalia’s break from tedium.

One of the young punks began laughing, a sinister, braying sound that echoed off the walls of the enclosed street. It was meant to terrify, and the young couple walked faster, glancing over their shoulders as they rushed down the street. Then the two punks began to sprint, rushing along the street and surrounding the young couple in an instant, like a pack of wild dogs, howling and laughing as they did so, the animalistic noises echoing off the walls. Two more young thugs had appeared from the far end of the alleyway, and another stepped out of a doorway on the far side from Rosalia’s own hiding place, where he had been waiting just out of sight, a bend in the alley hiding her from him.

“Got something we want, Mr. Man,” one of the punks announced, pointing to the modest bag of rations he had acquired from the church.

“Keep away,” the man spit, reaching for his woman’s elbow and urging her onward.

The five-strong gang paced around the young couple, hemming them in and laughing among themselves. Another knife appeared in one punk’s hand, and Rosalia noted how weedy he looked, the arm that held the knife little more than skin pulled over bone.

“We went to eat, but they didn’t feed us enough,” the leering leader of the punks explained, his tone mocking. “We want more.”

Ironically, Rosalia could well believe that. These punks looked emaciated, wasting away like the fishing town around them.

The man stopped, standing protectively before his partner and child even as the group continued to circle them. “Get away,” he instructed. “We need to eat, too.”

“No, Mr. Man,” the lead punk said. “Not you.”

Rosalia stepped forward then, while the eyes of the teenage gang members were fixed on the man and his wife, intimidating them with the threat of casual violence. With two long-legged strides, she was next to the nearest punk, and without warning her hand jabbed out and drove into the soft, fleshy part beneath his rib cage. He yelped and fell to the ground, his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in his open mouth. Though he didn’t know it yet, his kidney had ruptured under the impact, and internal bleeding would fill and devour him in the next two hours.

As one, the group of would-be robbers turned to see the hooded woman in their presence.

“Who th—!”

Rosalia didn’t give the little punk enough time to even finish his sentence. Already her right leg was swinging high off the ground to kick the gang member in the face, and his nose exploded in a hideous burst of scarlet.

As the punk fell backward, Rosalia dropped and lashed out behind her as another of the gang slashed at her with his knife. The blade whizzed over her head, and Rosalia continued backward, driving the sharp corner of her crooked elbow into the young hoodlum’s groin. The punk screamed out as white-hot pain speared through his genitals, and Rosalia heard something soft squelch beneath the impact of her savage blow. The knife-wielder toppled forward, his cry of pain echoing in the enclosed space of the narrow street, and Rosalia snatched the blade from his hand as she flipped him over her back and into the next gang member, who was running toward her.

The running gang member collided with his flailing comrade, and both of them crashed to the street with finality.

Still low on the ground, Rosalia turned to see the final would-be robber grab the woman’s hair and drag the knife he held across her exposed throat, just short of cutting her but still close enough to make her cry out. Behind her, Rosalia’s dog barked once, but she dismissed him from her mind, her hands a practiced blur of movement. An instant later, the stolen knife left her hand and sailed through the air, connecting in less than a second with the final gang member’s right eye, plunging deep into the eye socket. The punk screamed as he staggered backward, the hostage he had been holding forgotten.

“You fucking bitch, you blinded me,” the punk cried as he staggered back against the wall behind him. The knife was embedded in his eye, viscous liquid oozing down his cheek.

“No, I haven’t,” Rosalia told him calmly as she stood up and approached her struggling foe. “Not yet.” With that, she pulled her own eight-inch blade from its hiding place in her voluminous sleeve, and thrust it into the worthless punk’s remaining eye socket, ramming it so hard that she heard the bone crack.

As the frightened young couple ran down the street away from the scene of carnage, their child wailing in terror, Rosalia checked the pockets of her fallen foes. Riffling through their possessions, she snagged a half-dozen ration bars and two bottles of water. Not much, but enough for her and the mutt. The dog whined hopefully as it saw its mistress break the foil of a ration bar, snapping the end off. Rosalia handed the mongrel the broken end of the ration bar, telling it to make the food last, even though she knew it wouldn’t understand or heed her advice.

As the gang lay there, groaning and struggling to recover from the woman’s deadly attack, Rosalia and the dog exited the street and disappeared into the night.

Life in Hope could be hard. Only the strongest would survive.

Chapter 3

The Cerberus trio had spent the night in the spare rooms of the church warden, an aging man whose name was Vernor, but they awoke early and made their way out to the beach at Brigid’s insistence.

“We spend half our lives cooped up inside a mountain,” Brigid had insisted, referring to the hidden Cerberus redoubt in Montana where the team was based, “and the other half fighting for our lives. Let’s go take a look at the ocean and remind ourselves what it is we’re fighting for.”

Grant agreed and, albeit with a reluctant grunt, Kane ultimately agreed, too. He’d much sooner spend another hour in bed, catching up on some much-needed rest, but he knew there was no reasoning with the red-haired archivist when she got like this.

When the three of them reached the beachfront, Brigid rushed off toward the rolling waves while Grant hung back to talk with Kane.

“Everything okay?” Grant asked, his voice a low rumble like distant thunder.

“What, with me?” Kane replied. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

“You just seem—” Grant shrugged “—I dunno, like you’d sooner be somewhere else.”

Kane looked at Grant, fixing his trusty partner in his steely stare. “No, this is… Well, it’s nice,” Kane said, sweeping his hands before him to take in the vista of the sandy beach and the churning turquoise waves of the Pacific as a quintet of seagulls swooped across its surface, squawking to one another. “Just makes a weird change from the usual.”

“Beating the crap out of Annunaki stone gods and their screwed-up minions, you mean?” Grant asked lightly, the humor clear from his tone.

Kane laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” With that, he and Grant joined Brigid at the ocean’s edge, where she had removed her boots to wade in the spume-dappled water.

Though meant in jest, Kane knew that Grant’s statement had an air of truth to it. Just ten days before, Kane and Grant had found themselves battling with a stone-like being called Ullikummis, who had returned from the stars after almost five thousand years in exile from his Annunaki brethren. The Annunaki had been a constant thorn in the side of the Cerberus warriors since their earliest days as a team. Once mistaken for space gods, the Annunaki were lizardlike, alien visitors who assumed different aspects in their ultimate quest to subjugate and subvert humankind, denying it from reaching its full potential. Primary among those so-called gods was the ruthless Enlil, whose subtle planning and mastery of deception made him a formidable foe.

Ullikummis was, in fact, Enlil’s son, his lizardlike body genetically altered to serve a specific purpose—to be his father’s personal assassin. But approximately five thousand years ago, something had gone wrong in Ullikummis’s assassination attempt on a god called Teshub, and Enlil had disowned his scion, exiling him to space, imprisoned within an asteroid.

Less than a month ago, Ullikummis reappeared when his rock prison crash-landed in the Canadian heartland, and the stone-clad Annunaki prince had soon indoctrinated a small group of loyal followers from the local populace. Three Cerberus operatives had been among those would-be followers, including Brigid Baptiste herself, who had found the stone lord’s Svengali-like instruction almost impossible to resist. Accompanied by their colleague Domi, Kane and Grant had led an assault on Ullikummis’s stone base, freeing Brigid and the others and destroying the eerie headquarters that Ullikummis had created from the rocks and named Tenth City. Ullikummis himself had been pushed into a superhot oven by Kane, where his rock body had been blasted with jets of fire until it was reduced to ash.

“Come on, guys,” Brigid called, her cheery voice intruding on Kane’s somber thoughts.

Kane looked up and saw Brigid wading in the shallow waves of the ocean, her pant legs rolled up to just below her knees.

“It’s lovely and cool,” Brigid told them.

Grant had located a large, flat rock, which he used as a seat while he removed his own boots and carefully folded his trench coat. “My feet have been in boots so long I think they’re getting engaged,” Grant rumbled as he wiggled his dark-skinned toes.

Kane snorted at his partner’s remark, wondering for a moment how long it had been since he had last been dressed for anything other than action. His gaze swept out across the rolling ocean, watching the early-morning sunlight play on its ever-changing surface as it rushed to meet with the shore. Even this early, Kane could see several small fishing boats making their way out into open ocean. Then he turned, taking in the beach and the little fishing ville that had been built along its edge, the clutch of little two-and three-story buildings that sat as a solid reminder of man’s tenacity to survive. Down there, a little way along the beach, a few struts of rotting wood marked where the fishing pier had once stood, jutting into the ocean. Kane had been on that pier when it had collapsed, battling with a beautiful, sword-wielding dancing girl called Rosalia. As Kane smiled, recalling the antagonistic nature of the dancing girl, his eyes focused on two figures crouching in the shadows of the broken pier. Definitely human, neither figure was moving.

While Grant and Brigid kicked at the water with their bare feet, Kane padded silently across the sand, taking to a light jog as he made his way toward the pier and the figures underneath. Kane noticed the remnants of a little camp fire as he approached the pier, a clutch of broken shells—two dozen in all—littered all around it. He could see now that the figures at the pier were quite young, still teenagers, a boy and a girl.

“You okay?” Kane called as he slowed his pace to a trot.

Neither teen acknowledged him; neither even looked up at the sound of his voice. They were sitting on the sand, very still, the girl’s legs stretched before her while the boy had pulled his knees up and had his arms wrapped around them as though to stave off the cold.

“Hey?” Kane tried again. “You guys need some help?”

An alarm was going off in the back of Kane’s mind, an old instinct from his days as a Magistrate, recognizing danger before he had consciously acknowledged it. There was something wrong with the teenagers, something eerie and out of place. They were just sitting there unmoving, like statues.

When he reached the wrecked underside of the pier, Kane crouched beneath the low-hanging crossbeams and made his way to the two figures waiting there. They were too still, and Kane unconsciously checked for the weight of the Sin Eater handgun that was strapped to his right arm, its wrist holster hidden beneath the sleeve of his denim jacket.

“You kids all right?” Kane prompted again, slowing and looking around the shadow-thick area of the pier as he warily approached the young couple.

The girl had dirty-blond hair that almost matched the wet sand of the beach, and she was dressed in a T-shirt and cutoffs that showed off her girlish figure. The boy had dyed his short hair the color of plum, and wore a ring through one nostril that glinted in the early-morning sunlight over the fluffy beginnings of an adolescent’s beard. Like the girl, he was dressed in cutoffs, though his shirt was long-sleeved where hers stopped just past her bony shoulders.

For a moment Kane took them to be dead, but then he saw the slight rise and fall of the girl’s chest. She was still breathing at least, and Kane scrambled over to her, grasping her by her shoulders and shaking her.

“Wake up,” Kane urged. “Come on, now.” In his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate, Kane had seen people in various states of semiconsciousness and delirium, and he knew the first thing he had to do was try to rouse the suspect. He slapped lightly at the boy’s face to try to pull him out of whatever trance he had fallen into. “Hey, hey—snap out of it.”

Brigid and Grant had left the sea and traipsed over the beach to join Kane at the little shelter beneath the ruined pier.

“What’s going on?” Grant asked as he ducked his huge frame to peer beneath the wooden crossbeams.

Kane glanced up at his colleagues, seeing that Grant wore his coat and boots once more, while Brigid Baptiste remained barefoot, carrying her own boots in one hand by their wide openings.

“I thought they were dead, but they’re not,” Kane explained briefly. “But I can’t seem to wake them up.”

Brigid made her way beneath the jagged crossbeams and knelt beside Kane, while Grant stood at the opening.

“I’ll go back into town and see if I can get some medical help,” Grant announced. “Stay in touch,” he added, tapping the side of his face with his finger before turning to make his way up the beach. He meant by Commtact, and didn’t need to spell that fact out to his colleagues.

“What’s happened to them?” Brigid asked as she shook the girl gently, trying to rouse her while Kane focused his attention on the boy.

“No idea,” Kane admitted. “Flesh is cold so I’d guess they’ve been out here all night, but this is more than simply the effects of exposure.”

“I concur,” Brigid agreed as the blond-haired girl finally started to groan as if waking from a deep slumber.

“Wh—” the girl groaned. “What is…it?”

“It’s okay,” Brigid told her in a sympathetic voice. “You’re okay, you’re safe.”

The teen boy was waking up, too, and Kane reassured him in a sharp, professional tone as he held his head steady and stared into his eyes. The pupils were normal and reactive, and there was no trace of blood in the whites.

“What happened to you guys?” Kane asked, turning his attention from one to the other.

The girl was staring at Brigid, her eyes wide. Slowly, she reached up and grabbed a lock of Brigid’s vibrant hair. “It’s so colorful,” she muttered. “Does it hurt?”

“My hair?” Brigid asked, perplexed. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s hair, just like yours.”

The girl shook her head, smiling with disbelief. “There are things in your hair,” she said, “hidden in the angles. They live in the shadows, making the tangles their home. The tangles of your hair turn back on themselves, creating non-space, like a tesseract. That’s where the things live. That’s where you hide your memories.”

Brigid looked at the young woman, a disconcerting sense of fear gripping her. At first she had thought that the girl had seen lice there, but that wasn’t what she was describing at all. A tesseract was a dimensional anomaly, a place that appeared bigger on the inside than it did from without. An advanced mathematical concept, a tesseract was something that a girl of that age wouldn’t normally be speaking of, Brigid reasoned. And yet, the way she had used the term, it was as though she could see it as she looked into Brigid’s glossy mane of sunset-colored hair. To see the impossible.

“My name’s Brigid,” the woman offered, trying to remain calm despite the strange turn in the conversation. “What’s yours?”

The teenager looked at Brigid, her blue eyes fixed on the older woman’s curls as she ran them through her fingers once more. “Pam,” she said. “I’m Pam. Your hair hides lots of secrets, Brigid. I wish mine could do that.”

Beside Pam, the other teen had started muttering, too, and Kane helped him to his feet and led him out of the dark shelter of the pier with Brigid bringing the girl along shortly after. “Watch your head,” Kane instructed as he ducked into the sunlight. “Let’s walk it off together, okay?”

Kane walked the youth in a little circuit across the beach, instructing him to take deep breaths and get himself together. As they walked, Kane’s Commtact came to life and Grant advised that he had found the local doctor and would be along shortly.

A couple of minutes later, having quizzed the teenagers some more and assured themselves that the two were all right—physically, at least—Kane took Brigid to one side and asked what she made of them.

“They’re whacked out on something,” Brigid concluded. “The girl’s seeing visions wherever she looks. She told me the sea was being dragged to and fro by the moon.”

Kane grimaced. “That’s kind of true, I guess. You know, with tides and so on.”

To Brigid, it sounded as if Kane was trying to convince himself. “Teenage girls don’t say things like that, Kane,” she told him. “She was talking about a tesseract being hidden within the angles of my hair. A place where I kept my memories.”

“They’ve been smoking something, all right,” Kane growled, looking around the campfire for evidence of cigarette butts or drug-taking equipment. There was nothing there; all he could see were the shells of smoke-damaged shellfish, cracked and empty.

“Or perhaps eating it,” Brigid realized as she crouched by the empty mollusk shells to put her boots back on. “I think they had a little snack out here, Kane—look.”

Kane cocked an eyebrow as he picked up and examined one of the empty shells between thumb and forefinger. “Breakfast?” he suggested.

“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.

“What are they?” Kane asked.

Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.

“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.

When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.

“No ideas?” he asked.

“It’s from the same genetic strain as mollusks and crustaceans,” Brigid assured him, “but I can’t place the type. Not off the top of my head, anyway.”

“And that’s a lot of head,” Kane mumbled.

As they spoke, Grant returned, accompanied by the church warden and a local medical practitioner called Mallory Price. Price was a tall, gangly woman with a gaunt face and thin blond hair, and she looked very much as if she had just been woken up.

“What do we have?” Mallory asked as she approached the two teenagers, glancing over at Kane and Brigid. Her voice was husky, as if she had spent a lifetime shouting or smoking. Kane couldn’t tell which.

“I found them in a trancelike state under the pier,” Kane explained as he joined the medical woman. “They just didn’t seem to want to wake up.”

“The girl said some stuff,” Brigid added as she walked over to join them, her boots back on her feet once more. “Unusual things, not what you’d expect from a teen.”

Price checked the two teenagers briefly, but other than their general disorientation, she could find nothing ostensibly wrong with them. “They’re both suffering a little bit from exposure,” she told Kane and the others, “but they’re young. They’ll be fine.”

“What about their altered state of mind when he found them?” Kane asked.

The woman shrugged. “Teenagers being teenagers,” she said. “Who knows what they’re getting hooped up on. You probably did the same when you were their age.”

Overhearing this, Grant laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Kane,” he muttered.

Kane opened his fist and showed the mollusk shell to Mallory. “Have you seen one of these before, Doc?” he asked, letting her handle the little shell.

The medical woman turned it over in her hands. “What is that?” she queried. “Some kind of snail?”

The church warden, an older man called Vernor, with thinning hair that was turning gray at the temples, had made his way over by then, and he sucked at his teeth as he peered at the shell in Mallory’s hands. “Could be a crab, maybe?” he suggested.

“Could be a lot of things, Vern,” Kane agreed.

The old church warden looked up at Kane with an expression of concern. “Seen a few of these things wash up just lately. You think this has something to do with how these kids are acting, Kane?”

“Let’s get these kids inside and see whether we can make any sense out of all of this,” Kane suggested noncommittally.

“I KNOW.”

The words came as a whisper from the thin gray lips of a creature called Balam. He was fifteen hundred years old and he had been born as the last of the Archons, a race that confirmed a pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan millennia before.

He was a small figure, humanoid in appearance but with long, thin arms and a wide, bulbous head that narrowed to a pointed chin. Entirely hairless, Balam’s skin was a pink so washed out as to appear gray. Within his strangely expressive face, Balam had two wide, upslanting eyes, as black as bottomless pools, their edges tapering to points. His tiny mouth resided below two small, flat nostrils that served as his nose.

He reached out before him, spreading the six fingers of each hand as if to stave off something that was attacking, and a gasp of breath came from his open mouth.

There was a child playing in the underground garden that spread before him. She was human in appearance and perhaps three years old, wearing a one-piece suit in a dark indigo blue that seemed to match the simple garment that Balam himself wore. The child turned at Balam’s words, her pretty, snow-blond hair swishing behind her in simple ponytail, her large, blue eyes wide with curiosity.

“Wha’ is it?” the child asked, peering up from the daisy chain she had been making on the little expanse of lawn before Balam’s dwelling.

Balam looked at the child with those strange, fathomless eyes and wondered if she might recognize the fear on his face, the fear that had threatened for just a moment to overwhelm him.

The child smiled at him, chuckling a little in that strange, deep way that human children will. “Uncle Bal-bal?” she asked. “Wha’ is it?”

“The Ontic Library has been breached,” Balam said, his words heavy with meaning, fully aware that the child could never comprehend the gravity of them. “Pack some toys, Quav. We’re going to visit some old friends.”

With that, Balam ushered the child—known as Little Quav after her late mother—back into their dwelling in the underground city of Agartha and prepared her for the interphase trip that would take them halfway around the world. It had been almost three years since Balam had last spoken with the Cerberus rebels, but the time had come to do so once again.

Chapter 4

The Cerberus warriors made their way back to the church hall, along with Vernor and the two teenagers, while Mallory returned to her surgery. The kid with the dyed hair—Tony—was getting edgy, and he started to ask some awkward questions. He’d been in trouble before, Kane realized, recognizing the signs, and he wondered if the youth might bolt before they could question him more fully about his altered state of mind.

Noticing the teen’s discomfort, Grant took the lead. “Hey, Tony,” he said, “you want to see something cool?”

Tony looked at the towering ex-Mag, visibly swallowing. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” Grant said reassuringly as they approached the stone steps that led into the church building. “Come on, we’ll catch up with these guys in a minute.” With that, Grant led the way off to the side of the two-story building with Tony tentatively following.

By contrast, the girl—Pam—seemed to have automatically slid into an air of unquestioning trust of the adults who were trying to help her. Kane reasoned that she had most likely grown up in a walled barony and was thereby indoctrinated to trust Magistrates and similar authority figures. Once again, Kane was struck by the difference between ville folk and outlanders.

Walking ahead, Grant didn’t bother to look back to check on his charge, thereby demonstrating his trust in the teen boy. They walked around the side of the church building, along a wide service road that led to a side gate that opened on an open-air storage area. Grant pointed to the gate. “Take a look inside,” he encouraged. “It won’t bite.”

Warily the plum-haired teenager worked the catch of the wooden gate, keeping one eye on Grant as the towering ex-Mag watched. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“Take a look, son,” Grant said, a smile on his lips.

Grant recognized the anticipation on Tony’s face, both excited and fearful, wondering if a trick was being played on him. When the boy didn’t open the gate, Grant reached over and pushed it gently until it swung open on a creaking hinge.

“Whoa!” Tony uttered, unable to contain his excitement. “Is that real? What are they?”

Two bronze-hued aircraft waited in the rough scrubland of the church hall garden. They were huge vehicles, with a wingspan of twenty yards, and a body length of almost fifteen feet. The beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming burned-gold finish. They had the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays, flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies, and an elongated hump in the center of the craft providing the only evidence of a cockpit. Finished in a copper, metallic hue, the surfaces of each craft were decorated with curious geometric designs, elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire body of the aircraft. These were the Mantas, transatmospheric craft used by the Cerberus team for long-range missions. They were alien craft, discovered by Grant and Kane during one of their exploratory missions to the Manitius Moon base. While the adaptable vehicles were mostly used for long-haul and stealth missions, Kane, Grant and Brigid had employed them on this occasion as robust workhorses, able to convey the heavy crates of rations in collapsible storage units that had been attached to their undercarriages for transportation to Hope.

Grant chuckled as he answered Tony’s question. “They’re real, all right,” he assured him. “Me and my buddies flew here in them.”

Tony turned to Grant, his eyes wider than ever. “You flew them? Are you some kind of spaceman or something?”

Grant placed a friendly hand on the teenager’s shoulder and guided him closer to the Mantas as the early-morning sun played off their metallic shells. “No, we’re just like you, kid,” he said.

Tony ran a hand along the wing of the nearest vehicle, touching the swirling patterns that had been engraved within its surface. “They’re beautiful,” he said.

He had come down from his high, Grant realized, just an excitable kid once more.

“Do you think you could ever fly one?” Grant asked.

Tony beamed. “I’d love to. How fast do they go?”

“Real fast,” Grant assured him. “You could cover the whole of this ville in five seconds.”

Tony was amazed. His was a world of poverty and survival; he had almost no inkling that such wondrous technology existed. While he looked at the engines at the back of the Manta craft, Grant brought up the subject of the mollusks and learned that the youth had found them on the beach while he was down there with his girlfriend. They were both hungry, it seemed, so they had decided to try eating them. They tasted lousy raw, so Tony had cooked them, starting a fire like his father had showed him. That kind of stood to reason, Grant thought, and he quietly admired the kid’s adventurousness.

A few minutes later, Grant and the fourteen-year-old entered the church hall to join the others as they, too, discussed the mysterious mollusks.

Inside, Kane and Brigid had separately established that Pam had cooked and eaten the strange mollusks with Tony.

“We found them along the beach, near the old pier,” she explained.

“Were they alive?” Brigid asked.

Pam shrugged. “I don’t think so. They didn’t try to get away or nothing.”

“So they probably washed up on the tide,” Kane concluded.

Vernor concurred. “I saw a few things like that lying on the beach when I walked Betsy the other day.” Betsy was his dog, an old mutt who spent most of her day sleeping in her basket passing gas.

“Recently?” Kane asked.

“Must have been—” Vernor thought back “—the day before yesterday. Didn’t really pay them much attention, and Betsy—well, she doesn’t let stuff like that worry her no more.” That was an understatement, Kane knew. Betsy didn’t let anything bother her anymore; she seemed to be content just counting the days until she finally croaked.

Kane turned his attention back to the teenager, running through a logical series of questions as his analytical Magistrate training had taught. “Were there a lot of them?” he asked. “How many?”

Pam thought for a few seconds, her eyes looking up as she tried to remember. “We ate…maybe fifteen. Some were dead small, though.”

“That’s all right,” Brigid assured her. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Just tell us.”

Pam nodded. “My mom will be getting worried. I should be at home.”

Kane’s eyes met with Grant where he had entered the hall with the other teen, and the huge ex-Mag nodded infinitesimally.

“You two head home, then,” Kane instructed the kids, “but I want you to report to Doc Price here if you get any stomach problems, okay? We’re not sure what’s in those things you ate, and I wouldn’t recommend that you eat them again.”

“Are we going to die?” Pam asked, her voice taking on a whining quality.

“No,” Brigid assured her, shaking her head firmly. “You just might have an upset tummy for a little while. You’ve both been rather silly eating these things. They could have been poisonous.”

Apologetically, the two teenagers gathered themselves up and, hand-in-hand, made their way through the shadowy porch and off down the street.

Brigid laughed as she watched them go. “Young love.”

Kane sighed, shaking his head in despair. “Let’s get back to the problem at hand, Baptiste,” he growled. “The flesh of these mollusks has some kind of psychotropic property when eaten.”

“That’s not that unusual,” Brigid told him. “It may not even be particularly dangerous.”

Kane offered a self-deprecating smile. “Trust me, Baptiste—it’s always dangerous. Whatever it is.”

Grant chuckled. “You’re getting to be a real cynic in your old age, Kane.”

“This area is overpopulated and hungry,” Kane stated. “If these things start washing up on shore in greater numbers, we may very well see a spate of drug-related problems arise as more and more people start hallucinating after eating them. We have a rare opportunity to nip this problem in the bud. So, I want to know what they are where they’re coming from.”

Grant and Brigid nodded. “Agreed.”

Church warden Vernor proposed to spread Kane’s warning to the local fishermen, and he went off to make a start with Betsy in tow.

“Sea creatures often swap shells,” Brigid pointed out, “but if we can catch a complete one we could take it back to Cerberus and show it to Clem.”

Kane looked mystified for a moment. “Clem?” he asked. “The cook?”

Brigid smiled. “Chef. And Clem Bryant is a brilliant oceanographer, dear,” she teased.

“He cooks a mean toasted sandwich,” Grant added. “I know that much.”

“Not helping,” Brigid chastised him.

Kane shrugged. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s go take a look along the beach and see if we can find us a little something to show to Clem.”

“Heh. Maybe he’ll cook it for us.” Grant chuckled.

Brigid glared at him. “Still not helping.”

The trio made its way out of the church and down the steps, heading toward the beach with jocularity despite their concerns.

“So,” Kane asked, “how did Clem end up chefing for the tired, hungry masses of Cerberus?”

Brigid looked exasperated. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Kane gave her his most innocent look. “Well, I just assumed you knew everything, Baptiste.”

“You know what happens when you assume?” Brigid challenged.

“No, what?” Kane challenged back.

“I kick you in the nuts, smart guy.”

“Yeah, that sounds familiar,” Kane agreed.

AT THE CERBERUS REDOUBT located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, adventuring geologist Mariah Falk sat alone at her private desk in the laboratory, watching as the results of a spectrographic test appeared on her computer screen. Beside the desk, a single crutch rested, propped up against its side. Mariah had been testing the same batch of rocks ever since she had got back from the escapade in Canada that had seen her, along with Brigid Baptiste and another Cerberus man called Edwards, caught up in a deadly ordeal that sucked the very will from the Cerberus teammates. During that ordeal, Mariah had almost killed herself in supplication to the stone being known as Ullikummis.

Mariah was a slender woman in her forties, her dark hair cut short and showing traces of white throughout. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an ingratiating smile and a fiercely inquisitive nature that made her a fascinating and engaging companion. She had recently been spending more of her time in the company of Cerberus oceanographer-turned-chef Clem Bryant, and their attraction to each other was clearly mutual. Both Mariah and Clem hailed from the last days of the twentieth century, where they had been part of a military program that saw them cryogenically frozen until the nuclear hostilities were concluded.

Mariah grimaced as she checked the spectrographic results for a second time. Despite every incredible thing she had seen in Canada just three days before, there was nothing on these charts to indicate that there was anything out of the ordinary about the rocks she had brought back. Frustrated, Mariah sighed and wondered at what else she could do.

As she sat there thinking, Lakesh stepped through the doorway and greeted her. The nominal head of the Cerberus organization, he was a tall man who appeared to be in his midfifties, with refined features and an aquiline nose. Known to his friends as Lakesh, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh was in fact a 250-year-old man who had been involved with the Cerberus redoubt back before the nuclear conflict had all but destroyed civilization. Though ancient, Lakesh had had a degree of his youth restored by Enlil in his guise of Sam the Imperator. Over recent months, Lakesh had begun to suspect that that blessing had in fact been a curse, for he was worried that he would begin to age once more, and at a far more rapid pace than was normal.

The slim doctor made his way over to where Mariah sat and lowered himself so that he was at the same eye level as her. “How are things going here, Mariah?”

Mariah sighed once more and showed him the results of her analysis. “Not good,” she admitted. “There’s nothing untoward about the rocks I brought back with me.”

Lakesh offered a friendly smile. “This must be a new definition of the term ‘not good.’ Would you care to explain?”

“The asteroid that we believe held Ullikummis is nothing more than metamorphic rock. Its original source was probably igneous and originated right here on Earth,” Mariah explained. “Both spectral and carbon analysis place the rock at over six thousand years old, but it’s difficult to be more specific without an idea of where it came from. This rock type is so common it would be impossible to be that specific,” Mariah added.

“An educated guess…” Lakesh encouraged.

Mariah shrugged. “A tropical climate, possibly Africa or the Middle East. I honestly don’t know. There are also traces of radiation, but it’s at a very low level and that’s as likely from its travel through space.”

“I see,” Lakesh mused. “And the other material?”

Mariah picked up a slate-gray chunk of rock. “It’s just schist,” she explained. “You’ll find it all over Canada. It’s a good building material, but it has no special properties whatsoever.”

“You sound disappointed,” Lakesh observed as he lifted himself up and gave Mariah’s results the once-over.

“I saw this stuff move,” Mariah reminded him, “like it was alive. That monster—Ullikummis—built a wall with it, and not with his hands. A rock wall grew out of the soil, and it then proceeded to follow his commands, moving as he willed it. It was alive, I’d swear it.”

“It was granted life,” Lakesh corrected pensively. “Instructed to act as it did.”

Mariah looked at him with wide blue eyes. “Is there a difference?”

Lakesh took the chunk of gray rock in one hand and meaneuvered it across the desk, using its sharp edges like feet. “Consider a puppeteer,” he suggested, “bringing his creations to life. Are they alive or is their life merely illusory?”

Mariah smiled. “I take your point.” She was about to say something else when the public-address system burst to life, and Donald Bry’s voice came over the speakers, calling Lakesh back to the ops center. Lakesh initiated the comm unit on Mariah’s desk and asked Donald what the situation was.

“We have a visitor,” Bry explained, his voice sounding as urgent as ever. “One you’ll want to meet. I think you should come right away.”

Lakesh excused himself, and Mariah watched the elderly cyberneticist leave the laboratory and hurry off down the corridor. Alone once more, she looked around her, wondering whether she’d been wasting her time these past few days trying to find something that wasn’t there. As Lakesh had said, maybe the rocks were just puppets, and Ullikummis their puppeteer.

Something dawned on her then, and she struggled to suppress the shudder that ran up her spine. She had seen the great stone form of Ullikummis pushed into a viciously hot furnace and suffer the fate that he had intended for her and others who had failed in his harsh training regime. His body had been reduced to ash in a half minute, superheated until it was incinerated to nothingness. But his body was stone. And if his body was stone, a thing that he controlled and shaped with such ease, might it not also be possible that he had replaced himself with a double as he stepped into those flames? Could it be that he had pulled a switch and cheated death?

“I’ve been sniffing test tubes too long,” Mariah muttered, shaking her head. It was time to take a walk and get a cup of coffee. Maybe she could get one in the cafeteria and find out what Clem was up to.

Slowly, Mariah Falk reached across the desk for the crutch that rested against it. Then she eased herself up and, using the crutch to support her left leg, slowly hop-walked to the door and out toward the cafeteria. Mariah had taken a bullet to her left calf during the final assault on Ullikummis, and the pain still sang through her leg with every movement, despite the painkillers she had been prescribed.

“That bullet saved your life,” she reminded herself as she struggled along the windowless corridor of the redoubt toward the elevator that would take her up to the facility’s cafeteria. “Brave heart, girlfriend. They say you’re not a real Cerberus operative until you’ve taken a bullet.”

THE CERBERUS REDOUBT, originally a military facility, 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, 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. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base. Less than a month ago, both satellites had been damaged in a freak meteor shower, and the people of the Cerberus operation suddenly found themselves cut off from the outside world and feeling very vulnerable. Thankfully the satellites had been repaired so that Lakesh and his team could draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat once again. But the fraught period of blackout had served to remind the Cerberus team how much they had come to rely on technology. Delays associated with satellite communication notwithstanding, their arrangement gave the people of Cerberus a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the planet, as well as the ability to communicate with field teams, such as Kane’s team in Hope, in near real time.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was almost unheard-of for strangers to come to the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt either by Sandcat personnel carrier or the miraculous Manta craft that Kane and his field team currently employed, or via the teleportational mat-trans system housed within the redoubt itself.

The mat-trans had been developed toward the end of the twentieth century as a means to transport military personnel and equipment across the vast United States of America. Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans worked through the principle of a sender and a receiver unit, utilizing point-to-point transfer of matter through teleportation. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units.

More recently, the Cerberus personnel had discovered an alien designed system that functioned along similar principles, but relied on a naturally occurring network of energy centers called parallax points. These parallax points existed across the globe and beyond, and could be exploited by use of a device called an interphaser, which was portable enough to be carried by one person in an attaché-style case. The interphaser was limited in other ways, not the least of which was the location of the parallax points, but proved a more flexible system to operate, bypassing the fixed location limitations of the mat-trans network, and no longer limiting the team to primarily U.S.-based locales.

The Cerberus base itself had served as the original center of the U.S. military mat-trans network, and its operations room was geared to monitoring its use. A vast Mercator relief map stretched across one wall above the double doors, covered in lights and lines that indicated the pathways and usage flow of the mat-trans system in the manner of a flight path map.

Two aisles of computers dominated the room, each one dedicated to the monitoring of the mat-trans and the feed data from the satellites.

In the far corner of the huge ops room was an antechamber that housed a smaller cubicle, its walls finished in a toughened, smoky brown armaglass. This was the mat-trans gateway itself, fully operational and able to fling an individual’s atoms across the quantum ether in a fraction of a second.

As Lakesh entered the ops room, he could tell that the mat-trans had been functioning very recently, could smell the smoke it had emitted that was now dissipating in the air around him and could hear the air conditioners working overtime to clear it. Along with a handful of other operatives, Donald Bry crowded around the entrance to the mat-trans unit where two figures had emerged. Both figures were quite short, one no more than two feet tall. Like the other personnel in the redoubt, Donald was dressed in an all-in-one white jump suit with a blue, vertical zipper at its center. He had a mop of copper-colored curls, and his face showed its usual expression of consternation, switching to momentary relief when he saw Lakesh stride across the room toward him.

“Who do we have here, Donald?” Lakesh asked, his firm voice carrying loudly across the hushed room.

While two armed guards held the newcomer in their sights, Donald stepped aside and Lakesh saw the familiar face clearly for the first time. It was Balam of the First Folk, and he was accompanied by a human child with white-blond hair whom Lakesh assumed immediately to be Quavell’s daughter. Ordering the guards to stand down, Lakesh approached the curious-looking pair.

“Welcome to our home, Balam,” Lakesh said, stretching his hand out to greet the familiar alien.

Balam nodded his bulbous, pink-gray head once in acknowledgment. “Salutations, Dr. Singh. It’s been a long time.”

“Indeed it has,” Lakesh agreed as he brushed his hand over Little Quav’s hair, making her giggle with glee.

“I am afraid,” Balam began with gravity, “that the nature of my visit is not a social one.”

Chapter 5

Kane’s field team returned to Cerberus in the early afternoon, using their Manta craft to travel cross-country and back to the hidden mountain base. They carried with them a small clutch of the strange mollusks that they had found washed up along the Hope beachfront. They had found a half dozen in all, each a different size but with the basic sluglike body inside a whirling, oily-rainbow-colored shell. Each one was dead when they found it, but neither Kane, Brigid nor Grant could locate any live examples in their brief jaunt along the coast. All three had tried digging into the sand in a few spots, both wet and dry, in case the unusual mollusks were burying themselves, but they failed to find any further examples. It seemed that the creatures really were just washing in on the tide, a whole host of dead animals from who knew where.

Travel by Manta was swift and almost silent as the slope-winged vehicles powered through the skies. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them to operate both in atmosphere and beyond it as subspace vehicles.

When Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived back at the Cerberus hangar bay, they were instructed to meet with Lakesh immediately in one of the secure interrogation rooms located in the subbasement.

“Do we have time to wash up?” Kane asked.

“And maybe get a consult on these?” Brigid added, brandishing a small clear plastic pouch full of the recovered shellfish.

The guard on duty shrugged, urging them to meet with Lakesh immediately. “Those were my orders, guys,” he explained. “Lakesh seemed pretty serious about it.”

Grant shot Kane a look as the trio exited the hangar area and headed to the internal stairwell. “‘Serious’ doesn’t sound good,” he muttered.

Kane offered a lopsided grin to his partner as he brushed dark hair from his face. “Maybe he’s throwing us a surprise party,” he proposed.

“You don’t believe that, do you?” Grant questioned, chuckling a little despite himself.

In response, Kane held up his hands innocently as he started to make his way down the echoing staircase.

Taking the bag from Brigid, Grant told them he would go find their resident oceanographer while the pair of them placated Lakesh. “I’d sooner get these checked out as quickly as possible,” he explained.

At the bottom of the stairs, the subbasement featured one long corridor painted a dull shade of off-white, with stairwells at both ends and a goods elevator located centrally along one wall. The corridor stretched almost the complete length of the Cerberus redoubt, a vast distance in all, and there were numerous rooms located to the left and right, among them a firing range, vast storage lockers and several interrogation and incarceration rooms. At the far end of the corridor, a set of double doors led into the recycling area, where food and other trash were deposited so that the facility could remain fully self-sufficient in case of an extended siege.

Kane pulled open the heavy fire door at the base of the stairs and led the way down the corridor, still light on his feet despite the extended period he had spent cooped up in the cockpit of the Manta. Brigid followed, gazing left and right in an effort to locate the room where Lakesh was working. Roughly one-third of the way down the long corridor, two armed guards stood to attention as they saw two members of the fabled Cerberus field crew enter.

“Dr. Singh has requested—” one of them began when he saw Kane and Brigid, but Kane brushed the remark away.

“We’ve heard this tune already, second verse same as the first,” Kane assured him. “Just tell us which door.”

The guard led the way to an interrogation room located close to the goods lift on the left-hand wall. “In there,” he explained.

There was a wide pane of reinforced one-way glass along the wall, and Kane peered through it, looking at the occupants of the bland, simple room. There was a standard table, bolted to the floor as a security measure, along with a smattering of chairs, some of them stacked at the side of the room farthest from the table. A large cork notice board occupied one wall, with a similar, smaller board decorating the wall opposite the one-way glass.

Inside, Kane could see Lakesh and Donald Bry sitting on one side of the desk, addressing questions to their visitor. A little way across the room, much to Kane’s surprise, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was jiggling a little girl on her knee as she proceeded to give her a health checkup. The girl had feathery white-blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and wide, expressive blue eyes. As Kane watched, DeFore, whose ash-blond hair had been tied up in an elaborate braid that left corkscrew-like strands dangling beside her ears, tickled the little girl’s tummy to make her laugh before peering into her mouth with the tiny light of her handheld otoscope.

Kane turned his attention back to the weird humanoid figure that sat at the far side of the desk with Lakesh and Donald, recognizing it instantly. “Looks like Balam’s come to pay us a visit,” he growled as his beautiful colleague joined him.

“And is that Little Quav?” Brigid asked, tapping at the glass to indicate the blond-haired child who sat on Reba’s lap. Brigid was clearly delighted to see the girl. “She’s grown so.”

Kane reached for the door, turning the handle. “Why don’t we go say hello?”

With that, the tall ex-Mag pushed open the door and made his way inside, like a jungle cat stalking warily into a cage.

“Balam, pal o’ mine,” Kane spit through clenched teeth, his eyes focused on the weird, alien form at the desk, “it’s been a long time.”

“Not too long I hope, Kane,” Balam chirped, his doleful eyes gazing at the new entrants as they filed into the room.

“It could never be too long,” Kane growled sarcastically.

Lakesh and Donald turned from the desk, and Lakesh gave Kane a warning look. “Now, Kane, let’s show some hospitality toward our honored visitors.”

“Hospitality,” Kane repeated, speaking the word as if it were something jagged that had just cut his tongue. “Right.”

Feeling the tension in the room, Brigid stepped forward and diffused it with her bright, sincere smile. “How have you been, Balam? How’s Little Quav?”

“I have been keeping myself to myself,” the gray-skinned alien replied simply in his softly spoken manner. “Quav seems to have settled into life in Agartha well. We have found some places where she may delight in play.”

Brigid laughed when she heard that, turning her attention from the strange, alienlike humanoid at the far end of the room to the playful child on Reba’s lap. “Listen to you, you old softie,” Brigid said. “I never pictured you for the doting parent type.” This was not entirely true, of course, for Brigid knew that Balam had at least two sons who had been raised in the underground city of Agartha. Still, it did genuinely amuse her to hear Balam speak with such a gentle tone of real emotion.

“Children change us,” Balam admitted, his sinewy, six-fingered hands weaving through the air in a nervous tic. “They have the ability to show our true faces, no matter how we try to hide them.”

Resting against the wall, Kane remained tense. His steely gaze had not left Balam since he had entered the room. “So, what?” he challenged. “This a social visit?”

Balam shook his huge, bulbous head ever so slightly, and his lips mouthed the word no so quietly that Kane wasn’t sure that the visitor had actually spoken at all. “It saddens me to have to come to you at this time, but I have been made aware of a situation that requires urgent attention.”

Brigid Baptiste pulled up a free chair to join Balam at the desk, while Kane took several steps closer until he loomed over them all, his shadow dark on the alien’s domelike pate.

“What sort of a situation?” Brigid probed gently.

Balam raised his head slightly, and Brigid could not be sure if his fathomless eyes were staring at her or through her. “Many millennia ago, the Annunaki established a store that would house all of their knowledge,” he explained. “This storehouse was called the Ontic Library, for it contained all of the caveats that defined the real from the imagined or the spiritually malleable.”

Brigid nodded, aware of the philosophical resonance of the term ontic.

“Over the past few days I have felt things in my head,” Balam continued, clearly referring to his telepathic nature, “that make me suspect that the library has been breached and may, in fact, be being broken apart.”

Kane shrugged, clearly unimpressed. “So it’s a library,” he said. “Big deal.”

Balam turned to face Kane, staring at him with those strangely expressive black eyes, but he took a long, calming breath before he actually spoke. “This is not a library as you understand the term,” he explained. “This is a storehouse for the very rules governing this reality. Should it be broken apart, destroyed, there is a significant risk that ‘the real’—that is, your world—will cease to hold integrity.”

“So, the world is under threat?” Kane asked, incredulous.

“More,” Balam stated, “the very rules that underpin the world are threatened. The Ontic Library is a store of knowledge so powerful that it holds the structure of ‘the real’ in place. Without it, your world, your universe may very well cease to hold together.”

Kane looked uncomfortable at the thought, and his brow furrowed with irritation. “Why would they do that? Why create something that could destroy everything around you?”

“Is your knowledge of human history so poor?” Balam challenged in his soft-spoken manner. “Or have you conveniently forgotten the bloodshed caused by humankind barely two centuries ago at the push of a single button?”

“But a library,” Kane said, still trying to comprehend the concept. “Why would they—?”

“The Annunaki are multidimensional beings, Kane,” Balam stated. “Do you concern yourself that food may spoil in your larder, or that a pot might overboil while inside your oven? Everything has a risk, even the retention of knowledge.”

Kane nodded, still feeling uncomfortable at the notion he had just been presented with.

Sitting at the desk, Brigid leaned forward to regain Balam’s attention. “So, where is this Ontic Library located?”

“Beneath the ocean you call the Pacific,” Balam stated emotionlessly, “off the coast of the barony of Snakefishville.”

“Hope,” Brigid breathed, a horrible realization knotting the pit of her stomach.

“Had to fucking be,” Kane growled, clearly irritated that he hadn’t realized it before now.

BACK IN THE FISHING VILLE of Hope, a separate Cerberus field team agents had been operating out of the shantytown area that surrounded the main ville. Like Kane’s group, this team was also a three-person operation, but they had journeyed to the overwhelmed ville using an interphaser unit and had traveled the remaining distance on foot, carrying much-needed medical supplies to the area. Right now, the three operatives were handing out antibiotics to a youthful family that was suffering a bout of skin rashes due to the poor sanitation of the area.

Domi looked at the eldest of the six children in the covered shack where her team had set up base. The child was a dark-haired boy of perhaps four years old, and Domi recognized the fear in the child’s eyes. He was afraid of her because she looked different, Domi knew, but she wasn’t here to make friends. Instead, she ignored him, turning her attention to the busy dirt street that ran between the slanting temporary dwellings while her colleagues, Edwards and Johnson, doled out the relevant medical supplies.

Domi was a small-framed woman, standing barely five feet tall, with the slender build of an adolescent girl. Her skin was a vivid white the color of chalk, and was complemented by similarly colored hair, cut short in a pixie style. She wore a simple outfit that left much of her unusual skin on display, cutoff denim shorts that sat low to her belly and finished high on the hip, and an abbreviated crop top in a dull tan color that clung tightly to her small, pert breasts. Contrary to her usual style, she had elected to wear shoes while round the refugee camp, a pair of muddy pumps with a gripping, cushioned sole; she would prefer to go barefoot given the choice.

Domi was a child of the Outlands, having grown up far from the protective walls of Cobaltville, where she had ended up prior to joining the Cerberus team. As such, her outlook was quite different—and often less diplomatic—than that held by her colleagues. A fearsome six-inch knife was strapped to her ankle, and she wore a Detonics Combat Master handgun in a leather holster slung low on her bare, chalk-white hip. Overall, Domi looked like a human figure that had been carved from bone. But it was her fiercely darting eyes that added to the feeling of otherness in the people who saw her. In stark contrast to her pure white flesh, Domi’s eyes were a deep scarlet color, like two glistening pools of blood.

Right now, Domi’s bloodred eyes were scanning the street, watching the many figures trotting along it with their meager belongings, their buckets and bowls of water, moth-eaten blankets and clothes. Mangy dogs and flea-bitten cats stepped out of the way to avoid the humans as they went about their business, and the street itself stank of human waste. Domi wrinkled her nose at the stench, all the more repulsed for her senses were unusually perceptive. Where Edwards and Johnson had become used to the unpleasant reek of Hope, Domi remained disgusted and a little nauseous despite being there for over a day.

A group of people was making its way down the street, six in all. Dressed in rags like the others around them, they seemed somehow different to Domi, giving her the impression that they were much more organized. She watched them for a moment, realizing that despite their ragged appearances, they were walking in perfect time, like soldiers at a parade. Not soldiers, she realized—birds. They moved like flocks of birds on the wing, turning as one.

Domi watched as the six people strode past, their faces masked behind the hoods of their dirt-caked cloaks. Weird, she thought.

From behind her, back in the shack where her colleagues were distributing medicines, Domi heard Edwards growl. She turned just in time to see the tall, muscular man lunge up from where he sat, knocking a vial of medicine from the table in his haste. An ex-Magistrate, Edwards was a powerfully built man, dressed in his preferred garb of combat fatigues with shirt open to show the drab-olive undershirt that clung to his chiseled pectorals. Edwards’s hair was shaved very close to his scalp, and the start of a beard was forming on his chin now in what seemed an almost comical imitation. His right ear was misshapen where it had been clipped by a bullet during an escapade on Thunder Isle.

Sitting beside Edwards, Henny Johnson gazed up at him with openmouthed surprise as he lunged up from the table. A little taller with a little more flesh on her bones than Domi, Henrietta Johnson wore her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below the lobes of her ears. She was a freezie from the twentieth century, one of a number of U.S. military personnel who had been cryogenically frozen and placed in the Manitius Moon base before the nukecaust had hit. Awoken two hundred years later, Henny was one of over three dozen freezies who made up the bulk of the personnel at the Cerberus redoubt. Her field of expertise was artillery, but she had a solid working knowledge of medicine so she had taken point on this mission. If they came across anything serious, Henny was instructed to seek local help or to converse with physician Reba DeFore back at Cerberus headquarters.

“Everything okay, gunsmith cat?” Henny asked, fixing Edwards with a stern look as the people who had come for their help scampered out of his way as if avoiding a rampaging bull.

Edwards looked puzzled for a moment, rubbing at his forehead as though in pain. “What?” he asked, his voice strangely distant as if he were just now waking up.

Henny calmed the other people in the open shack with a few hushed words and a gesture before rising to consult with Edwards. “You just freaked out a little there, cowpoke,” she said in a low voice.

Edwards wiped his fingers against the ridge of his brow, playing them along the bridge of his nose so hard that Henny saw white streaks of pressure appear there before fading once more into his natural skin color. “My head’s killing me,” Edwards growled. “Came on all of a sudden, a real pounding bastard of a thing.”

“Do you ever suffer from migraines?” Henny queried.

“Me? No.” Edwards shook his head. “Probably just tired, being cooped up in here for a day treating the locals in their filth. Reminds me of the Tartarus Pits back…” Edwards stopped. He was about to say “home” but realized he hadn’t been a Magistrate for a long time now, and the Tartarus Pits were a thing of a past best forgotten.

Domi watched from her position by the door, checking the street again to see if any more locals were waiting for their services. The strange group of six was gone, departed amid the labyrinthine alleyways that made up the shantytown. In fact, the streets seemed suddenly clear, a much-appreciated lull in the stream of locals needing help. “Why don’t you go for a walk?” she suggested to Edwards. “Clear your head. Me and the Hen can man the fort for a while.”

Edwards nodded lethargically, his head still sore, before brushing past Domi and off into the street of dust. “Thanks, doll, you’re an angel.”

Domi shook her head. “Don’t ever call me that,” she told him with semiseriousness, recalling a rather unpleasant incident in Russia where she really had been mistaken for an angel.

As Edwards ambled off down the street, Henny arched one blond eyebrow as Domi came over to join her. “‘The Hen’?” she asked.

Domi shrugged. “Rule of the Outlands. Adapt and survive.”

GRANT FOUND CLEM BRYANT in the Cerberus cafeteria. The chef was busily deep-frying some chicken in batter, while other personnel rushed back and forth, dressed in white with their hair held back in nets.

“Looks fattening,” Grant observed as he approached Clem at the deep-fat fryer.

Clem glanced at him and smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes. “But fattening is tasty,” he said, “and we all deserve a treat once in a while.” Clem was a tall man in his late thirties, with dark hair that swept back from his high forehead, and a trim goatee beard on his chin. An oceanographer by education, Clem was one of the Manitius Moon base freezies who had awoken to a world two hundred years after he had been placed in cryogenic stasis. With little need for his skills in a mountain redoubt, Clem had turned his attention to the culinary arts and found himself quite skillful at cooking, soon taking a permanent position with the facility’s cafeteria staff. Besides being an oceanographer and a chef, Clem was a quiet but personable individual, who enjoyed his own company and revelled in the completion of a puzzle, be it filling in a Sudoku number grid or finding a challenging cryptic crossword among the vast archives of the Cerberus facility. In short, Clem was an obsessive thinker whose mind regularly deconstructed problems to view them from an alternate perspective. “So, how may I help you, Grant?” he asked in his treacle-rich voice.

Grant held up the clear plastic bag he carried. “I want you to take a look at these,” he explained, unzipping the top of the bag.

Grant held open the mouth of the bag and Clem peered inside, seeing the mollusks resting there in their glistening shells. “Would you like me to cook them?” he queried.

“No.” Grant laughed. “I want you to identify them. You’re the ocean guy, right?”

Bryant nodded before reaching for the handle of his fryer and shaking the sizzling contents. “Oh, yes, I’m the ocean guy,” he agreed. “Why don’t you find yourself a table while I finish up here, and I’ll join you outside in five minutes.”

“I’ll go snag a coffee,” Grant said and he made his way from the kitchen area with the little bag clutched in his grip.

A few minutes later, sans hairnet, Clem walked over to the plastic-covered table where Grant was blowing on a steaming cup of java.

The cafeteria was a large room filled with long, fold-down tables that stretched to seat a dozen people on each side. The tables were covered in a wipe-dry plastic coating. The walls were painted in warm colors, and a line of horizontal, slit windows ran close to the ceiling along the length of the wall farthest from the double door entrance. Because of the size of the room and the amount of available seating, it occasionally doubled for a conference area when something important needed to be announced to all staff, since it lacked the austerity of a more formal venue, which was something Lakesh preferred to avoid. Right now, however, the cafeteria was almost entirely deserted, with just a few personnel sitting finishing a late lunch or enjoying a relaxing drink while they took a well-earned break from their shift. As ever, the room had that scent of all cafeterias the world over, the indefinable musk of warm foods served at strange hours for hungry personnel.

“Well, then,” Clem began in his warm, friendly voice as he took the seat opposite Grant, “let’s take a look at what you have there, shall we?”

Grant tipped the bag upside down and carefully laid the six dead crustaceans on the table between them.

Clem reached for the largest of them, then retracted his hand, clearly thinking better of it. “Are they dead?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Grant assured him. “We couldn’t find any live ones. Believe me, we looked.”

Fascinated, Clem took the largest of the mollusks—roughly circular and about seven inches in diameter—and held it up to his eyes, turning it over and over in the light. “Where did they come from?” he asked, still gazing at the coruscating patterns on the strange creature’s oil-like shell. The light seemed to waver across its surface, as if seen through a heat haze, and Clem was already speculating that it in fact had a double shell, the dark one below the clear surface shell that created the slightly disarming optical effect.

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