“On your knees, outlander bitch!” the man shouted.

He reached for the back of her neck.

Without otherwise moving, Brigid lashed her right hand up, caught the man by the thumb and secured a kote gaeshi wristlock. Twisting sharply, she took a swift step back and kicked the man behind his left knee. He dropped her guns to the floor.

His leg buckled and he went down awkwardly, catching himself by his right hand. Gritting her teeth, Brigid locked the man’s wrist under her left arm and heaved up on it, hoping to dislocate it at the shoulder. He cried out in pain.

Captain Saragayn lifted his right hand, the fingers sparkling with jeweled rings. “Our guest does not understand either our language or our etiquette.”

In Magindano, Brigid said, “I understand the one and have no tolerance for the other.”

Warlord of the Pit

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

—Revelation 9:1–2

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

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Prologue

As the naked girl waded out of the water like a pearly-skinned Aphrodite, water cascaded from her limbs, the bright sunlight sparkling in the droplets.

For a disoriented instant, Brewster Philboyd felt suspended in the kind of delectable daydream an over-hormoned teenage boy would concoct—standing on a beach as a beautiful nude girl waded through the shallows toward him.

As the girl stepped gracefully through the breakers toward Philboyd, she pushed a diving mask up onto her forehead. She wore a delicate silver chain around her neck, and a tiny jeweled pendant in the shape of a jagat, the Hindu symbol of love, nestled between her small, taut breasts. Other than the nine-inch knife scabbarded to the calf of her right leg, Domi wore only the pendant.

As she walked onto the beach, she stared at Philboyd with challenging ruby eyes. “What are you lookin’ at?”

Philboyd shook himself and hastily stepped away from the shoreline before the waves soaked his shoes. “Sorry, I was just lost in thought.”

Striding past him, Domi stripped off the diving mask and walked toward her clothes, draped over a large round boulder. “’Long as that’s all you get lost in, Brewster.”

Philboyd felt his face heat up, but he wasn’t sure if it was due to embarrassment or the unremitting California sun, blazing down on the stretch of beach that bordered the barony once called Snakefish.

Gulls wheeled on the thermal currents created by the juncture of the beach and the thundering sea. They soared gracefully through the smoky spume raised by the nearby breakers. There was very little to see except sand, rocks and the long line of combers smashing against seaweed-draped boulders.

The slow tide made gurgling sounds around the base of the rocks. Despite Domi’s harsh words, the young albino woman wasn’t really hostile, but Philboyd never enjoyed being alone in her company. She had the forthright manner characteristic of other outlanders he had met, but he knew from experience she could be deadly dangerous.

Although she was beautiful despite all the scars marring the pearly perfection of her skin, Domi exuded an aggressive, almost angry energy, so Philboyd pretended not to watch as she got dressed. Her compact body was a smooth symmetrical flow of curving lines with small porcelain breasts rising to sharp points and a hard-muscled stomach. With the droplets of water glittering on her arms and legs, her pale skin looked almost luminous.

As she tugged a black T-shirt over her short-cropped white hair, Domi said in her clipped voice, “Time to get back the ville. Nothin’ out there I saw that could cause earth tremors or the sea quakes they told us about.”

Philboyd nodded distractedly, glancing out at the whitecaps. “Gedrick claimed most of the tidal disturbances were along this stretch.”

Domi pulled on a pair of high-cut khaki shorts. “Didn’t see anything. I dived five times.”

Born a half-feral child of the Outlands, Domi was blessed with many attributes of those reared in the wilderness, including a natural swimming ability, as well as an exceptional lung capacity.

Reaching into a pocket, Domi withdrew a small rectangle of pressed plastic and metal. Flipping open the cover with a thumb, she punched in a code on the small keypad. “Edwards, you there?”

After a couple of seconds, a deep male voice responded, “Go ahead.”

“Me and Brewster are done out here. We’re on our way back the ville. We didn’t find anything. What about you and Mariah?”

“Negative,” Edwards said. “No signs of seismic activity that she could find.”

“Gotcha. Stand by.”

Folding the cover back over the comm unit, Domi cast a glance over her shoulder at Philboyd. “You ready?”

“As I ever will be,” he replied. “I guess it’s nice we got a free California beach vacation out of this, but I don’t think Snakefish is in danger of falling into the Pacific anytime soon.”

Domi put on a pair of sunglasses and said only, “Me neither.”

The lanky astrophysicist fell into step beside her. He stood a little over six feet tall, and in his beige T-shirt and baggy shorts, he appeared to be all protruding elbows, kneecaps and knuckles. Beneath his long-billed cap, his thinning blond hair was swept straight back, which made his high forehead seem very high indeed. He wore a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses.

Philboyd, like all of the scientists who had arrived in the Cerberus redoubt from the Manitius Moon colony, was a “freezie,” postnuke slang for someone who had been placed in cryogenic stasis following the nuclear holocaust two centuries earlier.

Wistfully, he said, “This is the first time I’ve been to California. It’s nothing like the tourist brochures.” He paused and added with a wry grin, “Pismo has changed a little since the days of the Surf City.”

Domi eyed him quizzically. She padded barefoot across the hot sand. She almost never wore shoes. The soles of her feet bore calluses half an inch thick. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

Philboyd shrugged. “I don’t know, either. I’m just trying to make conversation.”

Actually, Philboyd did know, that when the nukes flew and the mushroom clouds scorched their way into the heavens, the San Andreas Fault had given one great final heave and thousands of square miles of California coast dropped into the Pacific. For the past two centuries, the ocean had lapped less than thirty miles from the foothills of the Sierras.

Philboyd knew little about the ville of Snakefish beyond the fact it was the only barony built on the sea and at one time had a small fleet of warships. The walls of the fortress city loomed fifty feet high and at each intersecting corner protruded a Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower. Inside the walls stretched the complex of spired Enclaves. Each of the four towers was joined to the others by pedestrian bridges.

Before the baronial system had fallen, the people who worked for the ville administrators enjoyed lavish apartments, all the bounty of those favored by Baron Snakefish.

Far below the Enclaves spread the streets of the Tartarus Pits. This sector of Snakefish had served as a seething melting pot, where outlanders and slaggers lived. The lanes and footpaths swarmed with cheap labor, and the random movement between the Enclaves and Pits was tightly controlled—only a Pit dweller with a legitimate work order could even approach the cellar of an Enclave tower. The population of the Pits was as strictly and even more ruthlessly controlled than the traffic. The barons had decreed that the villes could support no more than five thousand residents, and the number of Pit dwellers could not exceed one thousand.

Seen from above, the Enclave towers formed a latticework of intersected circles, all connected to the center of the circle, from which rose the Administrative Monolith. The massive round column of white rock-crete jutted three hundred feet into the sky. Light poured out of the slit-shaped windows on each level.

Every level of the tower was designed to fulfill a specific capacity: E Level was a general construction and manufacturing facility, D Level was devoted to the preservation, preparation and distribution of food, and C Level held the Magistrate Division. On B Level was the Historical Archives, a combination of library, museum and computer center. The level was stocked with almost five hundred thousand books, discovered and restored over the past ninety years, not to mention an incredibly varied array of predark artifacts. The top level, or A Level, was reserved for the work of the administrators.

Domi and Philboyd crossed the plank bridge stretching over a canal and walked up the road to the open gates of Snakefish. Although there were no longer guard bunkers outfitted with remote-controlled GEC miniguns, the massive, pyramid-shaped dragon’s-teeth obstacles made of reinforced concrete still lined both sides of the road. Five feet high, each one weighed in the vicinity of one thousand pounds and was designed to break the tracks or axles of any assault vehicle trying to gain unauthorized entry.

The two people smelled the interior of the ville long before they passed through the open gates. Vendors had already opened up food stalls, and the primary items seemed to be dried fish.

Charcoal cookfires made the air smell a bit less fishy, but under the thick scents floated the pungency of poor sanitation and the accumulated stink of hundreds of people. They seemed to be of every shape, size and color, sporting all kinds of garb.

The mixture of building styles was as much of a polyglot as the population. There were old structures dating back to well before skydark, when Snakefish had been an oil refinery, and newer ones that were throwbacks to earlier styles as well as laminated plastic domes and great, squatting stone masses with no discernible architectural design to them at all.

If Domi’s and Philboyd’s presence caused a stir among the population of Snakefish, they did not detect it. The two people tramped the thronging streets, past shops, past taverns and even open-air dentists’ offices without drawing more than a curious glance. Philboyd reflected that by now, word had spread about the arrival of emissaries from Cerberus.

He spied Mariah Falk and Edwards standing near a vendor’s tent specializing in small household items. The two people were engaged in earnest conversation with Gedrick, the ville administrator.

Mariah caught sight of him and Domi and gestured toward them. Although Dr. Mariah Falk wasn’t particularly beautiful or particularly young, she was attractive. Her short chestnut-brown hair was threaded with gray at the temples. Deep laugh lines creased the corners of her eyes and curved out from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth.

A geologist by trade and training, Mariah was another Manitius Moon base émigrée and she was dressed much like him in shorts and a T-shirt. A leather satchel hung from her left shoulder.

Edwards was only a couple of inches taller than Brewster Philboyd but considerably broader of build with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. The big shaved-headed man wore a drab-olive T-shirt, green-striped camo pants and high-laced jump boots.

Gedrick was a man of medium height with brown skin. Despite the fact his complexion was completely different from Edwards and his chin framed by a goatee, he exuded a similar attitude of watchfulness.

Gedrick, like Edwards, was a former Magistrate. Although neither man wore a uniform, their right biceps were emblazoned with tattoos that depicted stylized, balanced scales of justice superimposed over nine-spoked wheels. The tattoos symbolized the Magistrate oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine baronies.

Philboyd always felt uneasy in the presence of Magistrates, even those whom he considered friends like Kane and Grant.

Gedrick cast a glance toward the bespectacled astrophysicist and the petite albino woman when they joined their colleagues from Cerberus. For an instant, distaste flickered in Gedrick’s eyes when his gaze passed over Domi.

“So you didn’t find anything, either?” Gedrick demanded, his voice an aggressive rasp, as if steel wool lined his throat.

Domi shook her head. “Nothing that would give me the idea that this piece of California is unstable. I did some diving out where the tidal disturbances were reported. It seemed ordinary enough.”

Mariah Falk declared curtly, “I don’t know if that means anything. There are two varieties of tidal stressing that can generate earthquakes—diurnal and biweekly tides. The diurnal correlations would arise from more earthquakes only during the hours when the tidal stress is pushing in an encouraging direction, and biweekly effects are based on quakes when the sinusoidal stressing oscillations are the greatest.”

“Be that as it may,” Gedrick said, “we’ve been experiencing ground tremors every other day for the past two weeks. Each time they increase in duration and strength.”

“We’re aware of that,” Edwards said. “But—”

“I know you’re aware of it,” Gedrick broke in impatiently. “That’s why we called upon Cerberus, since you’re supposed to have all these fabulous predark specialists on hand. I’m also aware that two other villes have been destroyed by earthquakes in the past four months.”

“Mandeville and Palladiumville, yeah,” Philboyd said. “The only common factor is that, like Snakefish, they have become free villes—open to all, run like democracies—with the help of Cerberus advisers.”

Gedrick scowled at the taller man resentfully. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if we just lock the place down and make it like the old days, our ville will stay standing.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to go those lengths,” Mariah said.

“Why not?” Gedrick barked. “We’re having the tremors, and you claim there’s no reason for them.”

Mariah chuckled self-consciously and from her satchel removed several pieces of grit-encrusted rock. “I dug these out of the shoreline, and there’s no sign of tectonic fracturing due to shallow oceanic thrust faults. I suppose it’s possible that this whole region experiences weak tremors due to the so-called syzygy effect, but after touring the area, I haven’t found any evidence of fault lines that could trigger episodic tremor and plate slips. Shallow earthquakes near midocean ridges aren’t uncommon in the Pacific, so perhaps you’re experiencing residual ripples.”

Gedrick’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “Two villes being destroyed by earthquakes can’t be a coincidence.”

Mariah returned the rock samples to the satchel. “I agree, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Domi glanced around, her eyes slitted. “There’s not much else we can do here, is there?”

Edwards lifted a broad shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Not really.”

Domi stared levelly at Gedrick. “Then, if you’ll return our weapons, we’ll be on our way.”

The brown man gestured toward the Administrative Monolith. “You can pick them up on the way to the mat-trans. Sorry, but the only way we’ve kept the ville from turning into a bloodbath again is by forbidding all firearms inside the city walls.”

“A reasonable policy,” Philboyd remarked, affecting not to notice the glare Edwards directed at him.

Gedrick blew out a frustrated sigh. “I may not seem like it, but I do appreciate the help. We never would have gotten the ville back together without Cerberus providing aid. I would have liked to have seen Kane, Grant and Brigid again.”

The corner of Philboyd’s mouth quirked in a smile. “We’re the B Squad. Nowadays, the three heads of Cerberus aren’t called in unless something really big happens.”

“Like what?” Gedrick asked, tone edged with sarcasm. “When my fucking ville falls down?”

Mariah Falk opened her mouth to answer, then cocked her head toward the rumble of thunder in the distance. Domi tilted her head back, squinting up into the cloudless expanse of blue sky.

“What the hell is that?” Edwards demanded, shielding his eyes with a hand and scanning the sky.

Philboyd felt a prickle of dread as he glanced around the streets. The sound grew louder, as if a great wheeled machine approached. The ground underfoot began to tremble, then it shifted fractionally. Fragments of brick and masonry tumbled from structures. Spiderweb patterns of cracks spread over the surface of the ville walls.

The people in the streets milled about uncertainly. There came the splintering of glass and a chimney toppled over, crashing onto the ground. A portion of a plastic-coated structure came down, and a vendor’s tent keeled over. Pieces of the ville walls loosened and rained down, first in flakes then in fist-size chunks. Screaming mothers began shoving their terrified children toward the gate.

A series of consecutive hammering tremors struck the ground from beneath. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and mortar, shaken loose from the walls all around, rained down. Philboyd’s legs buckled and he staggered but didn’t fall.

Waving his arms, Gedrick bellowed, “Everybody out! Everybody out of the ville! Stay away from the walls!”

Dodging the falling debris, the people stampeded toward the open gate, jostling one another. A small boy stumbled and fell, squalling. Domi scooped him up in her arms and turned toward the Cerberus personnel. “You heard the man! Let’s get the hell out of here!” she shouted.

Philboyd started to obey, then froze as the flood tide of people swirled around him. At the base of a wall a hundred yards away, a moving ripple appeared in the ground, as if a very large animal slid and burrowed just beneath the surface. Little puffs of dust burst up from the cracks in the topsoil.

The furrow inscribed a crescent and halted. Philboyd heard a steady grinding throb. The ground acquired a split and amid a geyserlike spray of dirt, a darkly gleaming metal form heaved up, surrounded by clouds of pulverized grit and sand. A wave of intense heat like that from an opened blast furnace struck his face. His skin felt as if it instantly dried up and shriveled. He recoiled, lifting a hand to shield his eyes. He glimpsed the earth heaving up like a giant wave and rolling toward him in a crushing comber of rock and soil.

A hand closed tightly around his right arm and hauled him backward.

“Move it, asshole!” Edwards snarled into his ear.

A deep fissure opened up in their path and the two men leaped over it. A span of wall toppled down, crushing vendors’ stalls. Edwards and Philboyd reeled on their feet, doing their best to maintain their balance on the convulsing earth. A shower of flying gravel pelted them.

Philboyd and Edwards dashed through the gate as the ville walls crumbled, folding inward, block after block, crash after crash. Panting, eyes stinging from dust, they ran across the bridge and joined Gedrick, Domi and Mariah on the far side of the canal. Gedrick bled from a raw gash on his left cheek. He did not seem to notice it.

The three people stared at the Administrative Monolith with wide, shocked eyes. As they watched, it swayed from side to side. Pieces of it fell away. Then the entire tower broke apart and collapsed with an earsplitting roar.

Tons of rock plunged downward, scattering in exploding fragments. A reverberating, extended thunderclap rolled as the tower cascaded down in a contained avalanche. Thick clouds of dust billowed up, roiling and rising, enveloping the interior of the ville like a gigantic ball of filthy cotton.

Then Philboyd coughed and fanned the grit-laden air. “I guess it’s time to call in the three heads of Cerberus.”

Chapter 1

Malaysia, the island of Pandakar

The sky rolled with thunderclaps and flashed with bolts of lightning.

So this is the way it’ll end, Kane thought wearily. With a bang so big you couldn’t even hear a whimper.

Lifting his head, he squinted against the glare of a lightning flash. In the white-blue electric blaze, the night shadows crawling over Pandakar’s waterfront looked like caricatures of black animals prowling for prey. Although the men creeping through the rain weren’t animals, they were most definitely on the prowl for prey. He figured at this point the odds were ten to two.

Wind-driven sheets of rain fell in a torrential downpour. Gusts of wind tore at the distant tree line. Another stroke of lightning split the indigo tapestry of the sky, turning the hulking ships docked at the piers into ghostly apparitions. Their rain-slick hulls glistened as if as they were painted with quicksilver.

Kane crouched beside the gaping rectangular hole that had been a window and a fair-size portion of stone wall before the warhead of an RPG had blown it inward in a hailstorm of rubble.

The rain suddenly increased in volume and tempo, sluicing down the sloping roof and through a hole in it. Kane wiped at the warm fluid seeping down the left side of his face and glanced ruefully at the diluted blood shining on his fingertips. He hadn’t even been aware of the superficial cut, inflicted during the brief but fierce firefight that had raged all along the docks until ten minutes ago.

He wasn’t surprised that the mission had gone sour so quickly, but he raged at the concept that his life and Grant’s might end in such a stinking place for such a foolish cause.

“Shit,” muttered Grant, who knelt on the floor across from him. He glared at the leak in the ceiling, then out through the gaping hole in the wall. “How much longer do you think this storm will last?”

Kane shook his head. “It’s monsoon season in this part of the world. It might last all night or it could stop in five minutes.”

Knee joints popping, Grant heaved himself to his feet and peered out at the rain-buffeted darkness. He could see little of the Pacific island called Pandakar beyond the immediate waterfront area.

Grant loomed six feet four inches tall in his stocking feet. He wore a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt, tricolor camo pants and thick-soled jump boots, which added almost an inch to his impressive height. The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds.

His short-cropped hair was touched with gray at the temples, but it didn’t show in the gunfighter’s mustache that swept out fiercely around both sides of his tightlipped mouth. Behind his lantern jaw and broken nose lay a mind of keen intelligence that possessed a number of technical skills, from field-stripping and reassembling an SAR 80 blindfolded to expertly piloting every kind of flying craft, from helicopters to the Annunaki-built transatmospheric vehicles known as Mantas.

A Colt Government Model .45 pistol hung from his right hip in a paddle holster, and he held a Copperhead in his right hand. The abbreviated subgun was slightly less than two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, and the extended magazines held thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for one-handed use.

An optical image intensifier scope and a laser autotargeter were mounted atop the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperhead to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts.

“I don’t know who is who out there,” Grant murmured, “but I don’t care to be caught in a cross fire again.”

“Me either,” Kane agreed. His blue-gray eyes took in the details of the slithering shadows in the rain while his mind kept the raw worry about Brigid Baptiste from preoccupying him.

Dressed similarly to Grant in a black T-shirt, Kevlar vest and camo pants tucked into high-laced combat boots, Kane was a tall man, lean and rangy. He resembled a wolf in the way he carried most of his muscle mass in his upper body. His thick dark hair, showing just enough chestnut highlights to keep it from being a true black, hung in damp strands. A faint hairline scar stretched like a piece of white thread against the sun-bronzed, clean-shaved skin of his left cheek.

A pair of Bren Ten autopistols were snugged in shoulder holsters, and he cradled a Copperhead subgun identical to Grant’s. A canvas rucksack at his feet held spare ammunition clips and other equipment.

Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder subcutaneously embedded in the bone.

Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, a Commtact would still provide a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

Touching a tiny stud, he opened the channel to Brigid, but only a crackling hash of static filled his head. Scowling, he reached inside the rucksack and brought out a compact set of night-vision binoculars. Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.

Craning his neck, Kane looked toward Captain Saragayn’s treasure ship, the Juabal Hadiah, the Mountain of Wealth. Even at over a mile away, the ship looked monstrous. The vessel was less of a less of a seagoing vehicle than a huge anchored pavilion, sprawling across several acres of harbor water.

The Juabal Hadiah rose to exaggerated heights at stern and bow. The stern was built up in several housed decks, one atop the other. The hull crawled with intricate designs carved everywhere above the waterline, from Asian ideograms to representations of fish and dragons. The prow carried a huge figurehead painted, like the balance of the ship, in gaudy hues of red, yellow and gold. The effigy was of a naked red-haired woman, at least fifteen feet long, with an eighty-eight-inch bust.

Cupping his hands around the lenses of the binoculars to shield them from the rain, Kane tried to find movement on the decks. He saw nothing, whether due to the distance or the rain, he wasn’t sure. However, he could make out the huge flag emblazoned with the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle.

“Pirates,” he muttered.

“What?” Grant asked, raising his voice a trifle to be heard over the drumming of the rain.

“Pirates of the goddamn South China Sea,” Kane said loudly. “Who would have figured?”

A gust of wind blew streamers of water into his face. Swallowing a curse, Kane rose and went to stand beside the big man.

“We should’ve figured,” Grant commented sourly. “Who better?”

Kane assumed the query was rhetorical and so didn’t respond. In the world he and Grant shared, the impossible happened often enough to seem commonplace. They had encountered pirates before, like those who prowled the waters off the Western Isles and controlled the island of Autarkic. That term was a catchall to describe a region in the Pacific Ocean of old and new landmasses.

Back during the nuclear holocaust, bombs known as earthshakers had been triggered, seeded months before by submarines along the fault and fracture lines of the Pacific Ocean. ICBM missiles had pounded the Cascades and the region from western Canada down to California. The concentrated destructive force had ripped that part of the Earth to pieces.

The tectonic shifts and undersea quakes triggered by the atomic megacull raised new volcanic islands. Because the soil was scraped up from the seabed, most the islands became fertile very quickly, except for those in the Blight Belt—islands that were still dangerously irradiated. Pandakar wasn’t one of those.

Arriving on a small island in the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia and finding Pandakar to be a stronghold of twenty-third-century pirates was one thing, but landing barely two hours before a bloody insurrection staged by a rival faction was something neither Grant nor Kane could have anticipated. They had been running and hiding along the sprawling waterfront for the past thirty minutes.

Pandakar’s population was a surprisingly mixed lot of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos and quite a few Chinese. Unsurprisingly, the little island stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. Mud-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Still, Brigid, Kane and Grant had been entranced by the people of all colors with monkeys and parrots for sale. There were vendors of magical charms for the healing of wounds and curing of scurvy. There were sellers of maps who offered charts of submerged predark cities and their treasures.

But at night, the waterfront looked quite different, particularly during a rainstorm, than it had during the daytime. When the Cerberus warriors arrived on Pandakar, they had only caught a glimpse of its stilt-legged huts, plank walkways and piers crammed with sampans and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats. In the rainy darkness, the flickering glow of yellow lanterns cast an unearthly aurora over its byways.

A flash of lightning showed only the faint outlines of two figures creeping between a pair of thick wooden pilings draped with fishnets. With the long streamers of rain falling onto them, they resembled life-size mannequins attached to puppet strings.

“Looking for us?” Kane whispered.

“I don’t think it matters much,” Grant replied lowly. “Both sides will probably shoot us on sight.”

Kane sighed heavily. “Why does this shit always happen when we’re making diplomatic overtures?”

Grant uttered a derisive snort. “You’re asking me?”

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the Overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past several years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Grant and Kane had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Another crash of thunder exploded overhead, blasting a shock wave ahead of it, concussing with great force against the roof of the structure. A split roof timber shifted with a creak, and wood splinters mixed with dirty water pattered down.

Grant eyed it apprehensively. “We’re going to have to get out of here pretty soon, no matter what.”

A staccato drumroll wove its way around and through the roar of the storm. Kane and Grant knew the noise wasn’t thunder. They ducked, falling almost prone on either side of the cavity in the wall, and peered into the night.

Illuminated by a lightning stroke arcing overhead, they saw a man lying on the ground near one of the pilings, rain slamming into him. Dark liquid ribbons inched away from his body.

A figure slid away from the shadows, and a stab of orange flame spit from between a stack of wooden crates. Shot after shot cracked in the darkness as the subgun sprayed the gloom with bullets. The muzzle flashes strobed.

A crooked spear of lightning spread a curtain of blue-white radiance across the sky. The figures moved swiftly, bent over in crouches. Kane’s eyes flitted back and forth, trying to fix the men’s position in his mind. Then Grant sucked in his breath and whispered, “They’re behind us.”

Kane wheeled, unholstering a pistol and leveling it at the doorway in the rear of the hut. The plank door hung askew on crooked hinges. Grant threw himself against the wall, putting his Copperhead against his right shoulder. In almost the same shaved fraction of a second, the door crashed open and three men staggered into the hut.

Chapter 2

They were small, fierce Malaysians, all of them adorned in little more than rags. They carried a variety of pistols and carbines. The tallest man, who stood five foot eight, stared at Grant and Kane in astonishment.

A purple silk scarf enwrapped the Malaysian’s forehead, and gold earrings glittered in the lobes of both ears. His face and hands were covered by a network of old scar tracings. A scraggly mustache twisted down around the sides of his mouth, which was open in surprise.

For a long moment no one moved or spoke. Then the man in the purple scarf demanded in passably good English, “Where the fuck did you two come from?”

“Montana,” Kane replied, striving to sound nonchalant. “What about you?”

The man ignored Kane’s question. “You’re not part of Captain Saragayn’s crew. I know all of them.”

“Are you one of his crew?” Grant asked.

The man’s face convulsed with anger. “You don’t know who I am?”

“Should we?” Kane inquired.

The man tapped his chest with a thumb. “I’m Mersano.” The little Malaysian said the name as if it would explain everything.

Kane pointed to himself and Grant. “I’m Kane. This is Grant. We’re trying to find a friend of ours. We got separated when the fighting broke out.”

Mersano’s eyebrows rose. “A friend? A woman?”

Before Kane could reply, a grenade exploded with a muffled crump, blowing a blast of muck and rock fragments in through the hole in the wall. A brief burst of gunfire followed the detonation, and a bullet chipped stone out of the wall beside Grant’s right shoulder. Everyone dropped flat to the floor as three more rounds struck the wall and keened away.

“Their grenade fell short but they’ll try again,” Mersano said angrily.

“Who will?” Grant demanded. “What the hell is going on here?”

Mersano gestured toward the gap in the front of the building. “Captain Saragayn’s crew is trying to kill me and my men.”

“Why?” Kane asked.

“Because me and some others tried to boot him out of office,” Mersano answered, raising his head and gazing at the darkness beyond the hole. “I think you two ought to throw in with us.”

“Good call,” Kane commented dryly, turning and aiming his pistol through the gap. He squeezed off a single shot, the Bren Ten slamming like a door.

Immediately a volley of bullets stormed in, ricocheting and chipping out fragments of stone. Kane counted at least four separate muzzle-flashes.

“They’ve got us pinned down,” Grant said. “They’ll chuck in more grens once they can get closer.”

Mersano chuckled, a harsh, bitter sound. He heaved himself to one knee. “Then it’s best not to linger.”

Kane cast him a questioning glance. “Do you know of a way out of here?”

Mersano thumbed back the hammer of the big Casull revolver he carried and spoke to his two men in a dialect that neither Grant nor Kane understood. His men nodded in understanding and readied their carbines. Thunder rolled and lightning flared.

“What’s the escape route?” Grant asked impatiently.

Mersano sprang to his feet. “Through the hole.”

He leaped through the cavity, landing in the mud outside. He crouched, eyes and gun barrel questing for targets. No one shot at him. Over his shoulder, he said quietly, “The captain’s men are circling around behind us. No one is paying much attention to the front.”

“Define ‘much attention,’” Kane demanded.

Mersano’s men jumped through the hole in the wall, joining their chief outside. Kane and Grant exchanged glances of weary resignation and then followed the men. They swept the perimeter with watchful gazes. The rain slackened as the heart of the storm moved farther inland.

Their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Mersano gestured for everyone to follow him. “Move! Bergerak! Move!”

As the group of men sprinted across an open expanse of ground, a barrage of gunfire blazed from the interior of the hut. Voices rose in cries of outrage. Geysers of mud spewed up around them as bullets plowed into the ground.

Kane half turned to return the fire. Then he glimpsed a small projectile lancing overhead, seemingly propelled by a ribbon of spark-shot smoke. It arrowed through the gap in the wall of the hut. The interior instantly lit up with an orange nova of flame, surrounded by a dark mushroom of muck. The explosion slammed against his eardrums. The roof lifted up and one wall collapsed outward.

Kane returned his focus to running through the rain over uncertain ground.

“Don’t shoot! It’s me!” Mersano shouted.

The group ran into a narrow alley formed by several stacks of shipping crates. A tall figure in a hooded rain cape cradling a short-barreled, big-bored LAW rocket launcher stepped out of the shadows to meet them.

“Clarise!” Mersano shouted, showing his discolored teeth in a grin. “I was getting worried about you.”

“I was delayed,” said a soft female voice touched by a French accent. “A thousand pardons.”

Clarise pulled back the hood, revealing a face of surprisingly exotic beauty. She was a tall woman with skin the color of ivory, deep blue eyes and an athletic body with full, proud breasts and strong hips. Her long blond hair glittered with a patina of raindrops.

Clarise cast her suspicious gaze toward Kane and Grant. They met it with neutral expressions. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said.

Mersano nodded toward the two men. “Grant and Kane. From Montana.”

Clarise’s eyebrows rose. “Ah. The Americans from Cerberus who’ve been trying to unite Roamer, robber, Farer and freebooter against a common foe.”

“Yeah, that sounds like us,” Grant said blandly. “How did you know that?”

“I have my sources,” Clarise replied. “How’s that job working out for you?”

“Not so bad in some places, terrible in others,” Kane answered. “Like Pandakar, for example.”

Clarise laughed, but it sounded forced. “If you’d only delayed your arrival by a day or two, your reception would have been quite different. As it is, your timing for a diplomatic effort could not have been worse if you had planned it that way.”

Grant scowled. “Yeah, we figured that out after it was too late.”

Kane gestured in the direction of the huge treasure ship. “One of our party is aboard the Juabal Hadiah.”

The humor in Clarise’s eyes faded. “Yes, I know. A woman named Baptiste.”

Suspicion raised Kane’s nape hairs and his hand tightened around the grip of his pistol. “How do you know her name?”

“I was introduced to her,” Clarise said curtly. “Until a couple of hours ago, I was Captain Saragayn’s executive officer…and his wife.”

“His wife?” Grant echoed incredulously.

“One of five,” Clarise explained smoothly. “I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn the captain has intentions of trying your friend Baptiste out for the sixth.”

Kane’s shoulders stiffened. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Perhaps we should get out of the rain,” Mersano suggested. “This is only good weather for sitting ducks.”

He laughed shortly at his own joke although no else did.

“Follow me.” Clarise led the men farther down the passageway between the wooden crates. It was extremely dark in the narrow aisle, almost pitch-black.

Far too late, Kane sensed the rush of bodies. He tried to acquire a target for his Bren Ten, but a hard foot whipped out of the gloom and slammed into the pit of his stomach, just above his groin. The air exploded from his lungs, and he folded in the direction of the sickening pain. He staggered, trying to force himself erect, only to feel his shoulders gripped by hands that should have belonged to a great ape.

Kane shook himself violently to break free of the agonizing grasp. In the murk, he heard Grant’s voice blurt a curse, then Clarise shouting in French. A series of smacking, thudding impacts filled the damp, the sound of savage struggle at close quarters.

A man cried out in pain and a white shaft of gunfire blazed in the darkness. A body fell heavily almost at Kane’s feet. His assailant shifted his grip from his upper arms to a bear hug, catching him up in a crushing embrace, pinning his arms against his sides. He thought he heard a rib break, but then realized it was the sound of a bladed weapon chopping into a wooden crate.

Sagging forward, Kane shifted his center of gravity into a dead, unresisting mass. His attacker loosened his grip ever so slightly, trying to pull him upright. Planting his feet firmly on the ground, Kane kicked himself backward, smashing the rear of his skull into the nose and mouth of the man standing behind him. He stumbled backward and crashed into a crate. Kane broke free and turned, gasping for air. He glimpsed a shadowy shape rushing toward him, arms outspread, and he squeezed off two shots. He heard a ghastly gurgle and a heavy body toppled nearly at his feet.

Kane leaned against a crate, breathing hard, heart trip-hammering. He heard Grant’s voice, “Kane! Where the hell are you?”

He coughed and replied, “Here. Where the hell are you?”

“Getting the hell out of here. Follow my voice.”

Kane did so, tripping over two bodies before he found his companions clustered at the far end of the aisle formed by the shipping crates. They emerged at the edge of the jungle. The green wall of foliage looked thick enough to be nearly impenetrable, but Clarise found a small path. Everyone fell into step behind her, walking single file. Kane’s mind toyed with images of poisonous snakes coiled to strike, of scorpions clinging to low-hanging branches and worse forms of wildlife. He knew from prior experience that all jungles held nasty surprises.

Clarise led the way with quick confidence despite the dark. The wind died down to no more than an intermittent breeze. The rain ebbed to a drizzle, then only a spritzing. Lightning still arced across the sky, but the heart of the storm was a couple of miles away. Humidity rose, and streamers of mist curled up from the ground. The world was a primeval, menacing green with night-blooming epiphytes and flowering creepers stretching down from the branches overhead.

They roused a family of langurs, monkeys with white eye rings. There was a brief, outraged chittering as they jumped in great arcs between the trees. No one spoke as they marched. There was the constant pelt and drip of water from the canopy of leaves above them. Kane kept checking his bare arms for the giant gray leeches that dropped from the branches and attached themselves to the flesh.

In the darkness, the danger of straying off the path, and becoming lost was a greater hazard than leeches. Even in daylight, enveloped within the suffocating heat and humidity and thick foliage it would have been difficult to find the trail.

Then the overgrowth opened up in a small clearing. In the center rose a mat hut built on rickety, leaning stilts. The tips of the thatched roof dripped incessantly with rainwater.

The people quickly climbed up a bamboo ladder into the interior of the hut. The reed walls exuded a cloying, pungent aroma, and the floor was damp. Neither Kane nor Grant relaxed, keeping their weapons close to hand. Mersano produced a candle from a small box and lit the wick with a wooden match.

In the flickering, yellow illumination, everyone stared at the outlanders with a mixture of bemusement and distrust, but no one spoke. Irritably, Kane asked, “Is anybody going to tell us what’s going on here?”

Clarise’s shoulders lifted in a shrug beneath her rain cape. “Pandakar is a pirate stronghold and has been for the last one hundred years. It’s a family business.”

“Not surprising,” Grant said. “Piracy flourished in this part of the world up until the late twentieth century.”

“The extent of it is becoming a little too broad,” Kane stated. “Trade lanes and shipping routes are closing down. According to our intel, Captain Saragayn’s fleet looted 300 ships last year.”

“More like 310,” Clarise replied. “He tried to expand onto land, setting up an empire along the China coast. He seized territory and villages, but the armies of several warlords united and drove him out.”

“Saragayn suffered major losses,” Mersano interposed smoothly. “He’s weak in terms of manpower and matériel. We thought this would be the optimum time to overthrow him.”

“Apparently you miscalculated,” Kane pointed out dryly.

“Not as much as you might think,” Clarise countered. “We drew most of his forces away from his treasure ship. We’ve got our own people on the inside.”

“Like you?” Grant inquired. He looked toward Mersano. “And you’re one of his rivals?”

An enigmatic smile touched his lips. “You might say that. I’m his son, back from exile. Most of the captain’s inner circle is made up of his bastard spawn who have their own designs on the old man’s fortune.”

Kane gusted out a sigh. “This is starting to sound complicated.”

Clarise chuckled. “We did say it was a family business.”

“I have my own small fleet,” Mersano continued proudly. “My theater of operations is the Sulu Sea. Occasionally we raid along the south China coast, but I prefer the merchant junks. I also run military supplies—guns, food and medicine—to some of the warlords setting up in shop in Indochina. I have my own connections, so I don’t need Saragayn.”

“Then why are you staging this attack?” Grant challenged.

“Saragayn is considered a devil incarnate, even here where life is not held even to the value of a cigar,” Clarise said grimly.

“My father is still ambitious,” Mersano went on, “but his ambitions exist now for their own sake. Wealth is only a means to an end with him. He’ll never be satisfied. And now he’s negotiating with outsiders who’ve promised him support if he stages a new assault on China.”

“These outsiders you mentioned…do they happen to travel under the name of the Millennial Consortium?” Kane intoned quietly.

Clarise’s eyes narrowed, her full lips creasing in a frown. “They do. Is it because of them you are here? To prevent that alliance?”

Kane dug into a pants pocket and produced a small button made of base metal. He flipped it toward Clarise, who snatched it out of the air. Holding it close to the flame of the candle, she examined the image inscribed upon it: the stylized representation of a standing, featureless man holding a cornucopia—a horn of plenty—in his left hand and a sword in his right, both crossed over his chest.

“Have you seen anyone wearing that button?” Kane asked.

Clarise nodded. Tossing aside her rain cloak, she turned out the lapel of her shirt and displayed an identical disk. “This should give you an idea of how deep the infiltration has become. Even Saragayn’s top officers are required to wear those buttons.”

“Who is the consortium emissary?” Grant asked.

“He goes by the name of Mr. Book. Obviously an alias.”

“Obviously,” Grant agreed. “Is he here now?”

The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps he got wind of the insurrection and fled, with the idea of returning and cutting a deal with the winner.”

Kane smiled without humor. “Yeah, that’s the consortium’s strategy, all right.”

“I placed my men all along the waterfront,” Mersano said. “Even aboard the Juabal Hadiah. Scores of them are masquerading as laborers, fishermen, deckhands. We thought when the time came, we would strike all at once and seize power quickly.”

“We were betrayed,” Clarise said softly, bleakly.

“That’s all very interesting,” Grant stated, “but at this point all we care about is recovering our friend and getting out of here.”

“Captain Saragayn won’t let Baptiste go now,” Clarise replied.

Kane’s jaw muscles tightened into knots. “Why not?”

“For one thing,” Mersano said, “he might suspect she had something to do with the insurrection.”

“Or,” Grant interjected, “if she was spotted by the consortium agent and recognized, she could have been ratted out.”

“Or,” Clarise said, “there could be a simpler explanation—Saragayn wants her for himself. But whatever the reason, if you want Baptiste back, your only option is to ally yourselves with us. I’m sure you’ve heard the old bromide about the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Yeah, we have.” Kane blew out a disgusted breath. “Too many damn times.”

Chapter 3

After the first warhead exploded, Brigid Baptiste plunged into the crowded emporium of vice, figuring Captain Saragayn wouldn’t think to look for her among the prostitutes, gambling tables and cockfighting arenas.

Brigid found it difficult to believe that the huge palace of lust and greed was confined within the hulls of a ship. As far as she had been able to learn, the Juabal Hadiah pandered to all tastes, however mundane or perverted. Gambling, drugs, women or even children, she reflected grimly.

Brigid crossed a casino swiftly, trying not to appear intent on leaving. The various gambling stations were decorated with colorful bunting and a band played a variety of musical instruments, blaring forth with a cacophony at a volume she found painful.

From the ceiling hung mirror balls that reflected distorted bird’s-eye views of the blackjack, roulette, paikow and fan-tan tables. The beeps, burps and bells of slot machines added to the clangor.

Barely audible over the noise rose the murmur of a dozen languages, as varied as the clothing styles worn by the men and women clientele—white jackets, saris, Malay sarongs and bajus.

Brigid felt distinctly underdressed in her black whipcord pants with the cuffs tucked into thick-soled combat boots. She wore a gray T-shirt that accentuated her full-breasted, willowy figure. Her bare arms rippled with hard, toned muscle.

A tall woman with a fair complexion, Brigid’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual. A mane of red-gold hair fell down her back in a long sunset-colored braid to the base of her spine. Her emerald eyes were narrowed behind the rectangular lenses of her wire-rimmed spectacles as she pushed through the crowd.

Brigid ignored a drink offered to her by a surprisingly buxom Asian woman in a topless outfit and circled a baccarat table. She didn’t think she was pursued by Saragayn’s security staff. She assumed—she hoped—they had other matters to occupy them. She just kept moving through the low-ceilinged gambling hall.

Her distinctly un-Asian features and coloring did not draw the attention of the patrons. Most of them were too engrossed in their own activities at the roulette wheel and blackjack tables to give her more than cursory glances. Still, she kept the TP-9 autopistol pressed against her right thigh as she walked.

Cages filled with colorfully plumed tropical birds hung on the walls and they screeched in agitation. They sensed the violence outside on the decks of the huge ship.

The smell of roasting meat drew her toward a small kitchen. Small, sweating men stripped to the waist labored over smoking grills. Cigarettes dangled from their lower lips, and the stench of marijuana mixed in with the odor of flame-seared fat.

Brigid swiftly moved through the kitchenette, barely avoiding being spattered by sizzling grease. She went through the door on the far side and found herself in a cool, dimly lit corridor. Soft red carpeting muffled her steps, and she paused to catch her breath.

Wincing, she flexed the fingers of her right hand, noting that they all moved despite the pain. She had punched Mr. Book in the face, but her knuckles seemed intact. She hoped the same thing could not be said for his jaw.

Reaching up behind her ear, Brigid activated the Commtact and opened the channel to Kane and Grant. She heard only the hiss and pop of static, and she guessed her partners were forced to retreat out of the reception range of the little comm unit. She tamped down the rise of fear, finding it hard to assemble her thoughts.

Kane had told her more than once there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. She still didn’t know what had happened to Kane and Grant, since the situation developed with startling rapidity, but she had taken advantage of it nevertheless.

Upon arriving in Pandakar early in the afternoon, she, Grant and Kane had spent only a short time learning the lay of the land before entering the island’s only settlement. Definitely taller than most of the people in the noisy, narrow, crowded streets, the Cerberus warriors let themselves be carried along by the press of bodies, the conical straw hats and the shuffling of feet. The people who looked at them directly did so with blank eyes. A hot wind blew between the wooden houses with their thatched roofs and long eaves that looked like the prows of canoes.

Overlooking the harbor was a vast tumble of reed huts and shanties built on docks. A maze of waterways crowded with canoes and sampans confused the eye but not the nose—the smell of fish overhung it like a cloud.

When Brigid asked locals about Captain Saragayn, the ordinarily friendly faces of the villagers became tight and hostile. Still, they were directed to the waterfront and a private pier leading to the immense treasure ship named the Juabal Hadiah.

At first sight, the vessel was impressive. Colored lights flared from the rigging of the huge craft, which was twice as broad in the beam and double the length of any ship docked at harborside. The ship had very high poops and overhanging stems, looking somewhat top-heavy because of the exceptionally tall pole masts and huge sails with batten lines running entirely across the fore- and afterdecks.

The sun cast streaks of copper and gold over the hulls of the motorized sampans, launches and water taxis clustering around the four boarding ramps that extended down from the ship’s port side.

The two Indonesian guards at the security kiosk were suspicious but not overly hostile. They wore grayish-green coveralls with the sleeves hacked off. Web belts cinched their waists and from them hung holstered revolvers.

When Brigid stated their business, speaking the Magindano dialect perfectly, one of the guards grinned at her and then waved meaningfully toward the Juabal Hadiah and the carved figurehead of the well-developed, redheaded woman.

“Ordinarily Captain Saragayn wouldn’t see any stranger on such short notice,” the man said, “but he’d have us lashed if we didn’t let you through.”

Brigid maintained a stony expression, even when the guard’s eyes flicked from her bosom to the gigantic one of the figurehead. The other man took a small trans-comm unit from a pocket and spoke into it softly for a few seconds. Then he folded it up and said roughly to Brigid, “The captain will see you.”

Kane and Grant were directed to wait. Since they weren’t disarmed, they didn’t lodge serious objections, despite hearing the rumble of thunder that heralded a tropical storm front. Both men had learned long ago that when on the home turf of a potential ally, the easiest way to turn him or her into an adversary was to resist local protocol.

One guard escorted Brigid down the long private pier toward the treasure ship looming above them. Exterior galleries ran along each of the decks, with peaked eaves and elaborately carved roof-trees. When they reached a ramp, the guard gestured for Brigid to precede him. Quickly, she climbed it and when she reached the top, she found her way blocked by a door made of bamboo struts.

She noted that the bars were actually steel rods painted to look like bamboo. A young Malaysian woman in a formfitting sheath dress of cobalt blue stared at her expressionlessly. One long bare leg showed through the slit in the skirt. Beyond the door, Brigid saw a wide corridor lit by ceiling bulbs of pale yellow.

A trans-comm unit in the girl’s hand buzzed. She quickly lifted it to her ear, spoke one word that Brigid didn’t catch and stepped back. Brigid didn’t see her touch anything, but the steel-barred door slid aside on a noiseless track.

She stepped over the track and saw a very tall man, dark-skinned and wearing a silk scarf of bright yellow around his head standing in the alcove. The man did not speak, but the black eyes he turned toward Brigid betrayed a contempt of death—either his own or hers. He stepped toward her, moving with a controlled tension as he strained against an invisible leash around his neck.

He held out a very broad hand, and wordlessly Brigid placed her TP-9 autopistol and Copperhead subgun into it. With a jerk of his head, the man escorted her down the corridor. They walked about a dozen yards when they passed a tall blond woman hurrying past. Brigid received only a brief impression of urgency and blue eyes before the man led her into a poorly lit chamber. Her gaze was instantly drawn to the throne-like chair placed atop a dais. Two oval plaques rose from the back, both of them inscribed with Chinese ideograms.

The air smelled of sandalwood incense, and little wind chimes tinkled at the far edge of audibility. Brigid felt a sense of being in a dream or a fairy tale. The man seated in the throne looked as if he had designed his clothes by copying the illustrations found in a children’s book about ancient caliphates.

His gold-embroidered tunic was made of shimmering black satin, and a crest of peach-colored feathers sprayed from the jeweled forepart of his bright red turban. She half expected to see pointy-toed slippers on his feet, but he wore sandals, exposing toenails painted a bright red. Brigid guessed he was Captain Saragayn.

Everything looked exaggerated about the man—the sharp, curved nose, thin slit of a mouth, black almond-shaped eyes and his smooth, amber-hued skin gave him the appearance of a raptorial bird. His face was clean-shaved except for a long, thin mustache. An electric aura seemed to charge the air around the throne.

“On your knees!” the tall man barked in Magindano.

Brigid affected not to have understood.

“On your knees, outlander bitch!” the man shouted. He reached for the back of her neck.

Without otherwise moving, Brigid’s right hand lashed up, caught the man by the thumb and secured a wrist lock. Twisting sharply, she took a swift step back and kicked the man behind his left knee. He dropped her guns to the floor.

His leg buckled and he went down awkwardly, catching himself by his right hand. Gritting her teeth, Brigid locked the man’s wrist under her left arm and heaved up on it, hoping to dislocate it at the shoulder. He cried out in pain.

Captain Saragayn lifted his right hand, the fingers sparkling with jeweled rings. “Our guest apparently does not understand either our language or our etiquette.”

In Magindano, Brigid said, “I understand the one and have no tolerance for the other.”

Saragayn smiled blandly. “You can let Daramurti up now, I think. Forgive his overzealous attitude. He feels he has more to prove to me now than ever before.”

Saragayn spoke in cultured English, a very affected form as if he had learned the language from watching old vids of upper-crust Bostonians.

Brigid obligingly released the man’s arm and stepped back. Grimacing, Daramurti pushed himself to his knees and then to his feet. He worked his shoulder up and down and took a menacing step toward Brigid.

Saragayn spoke a single sharp word and the man picked up Brigid’s fallen weapons and took them to him, then retreated to the doorway. Captain Saragayn briefly inspected the guns but said nothing. Watching him, Brigid knew she should have felt fear, or at the very least, apprehension, but instead she felt the tingling warmth of excitement as the prospect of danger spread through her.

For a very long time, she was ashamed of that anticipation, blaming her association with Kane and Grant for contaminating her. Now she had accepted the realization that their own desire for thrill-seeking hadn’t infected her, but only forced her to accept an aspect of her personality she had always been aware of but refused to consciously acknowledge.

In the years long past during her life as a baronial archivist, Brigid Baptiste had prided herself on her intellect and logical turn of mind. She was a scholar first and foremost. Back then, the very suggestion she would have been engaged in such work would have made her laugh. Now she was a veteran warrior, and at some point during her time with Cerberus she realized the moments of danger no longer terrified her but brought a sharper sense of being alive.

Her life in Cobaltville’s Historical Division had not been fulfilling, but merely a puppet show she had performed so the string pullers wouldn’t become displeased and direct their grim attention toward her. Of course, eventually they had. Over the past few years, she had left her tracks in the most distant and alien of climes and breasted very deep, very dangerous waters.

The man on the throne showed the edges of his teeth in a vulpine grin. “I am Captain Saragayn, if you haven’t guessed.”

“I had. I am—”

“Brigid Baptiste,” the man broke in. “A chief field operative for the group known as Cerberus, based in Montana, in the former United States of America.”

Brigid smiled with a confidence she did not feel. “Very good. How did you know that?”

“Would you care to guess again?”

Brigid presented the image of pondering the question before replying calmly, “The emissary of the Millennial Consortium either described me or showed you a picture.”

Saragayn clapped his hands together in delight. “Excellent. Mr. Book said you were very smart…and very dangerous.” A frown suddenly replaced the smile on his lips. “I’ve already witnessed the dangerous part.”

“What else did Mr. Book tell you?”

Captain Saragayn shrugged. “Many things. Mostly about the bit of bad blood between your two houses. Very interesting.”

“No doubt,” Brigid responded flatly. “Was Mr. Book alone?”

“Yes,” a male’s voice said from behind her. “Due to a personnel shortage, thanks in large part to Cerberus.”

Brigid turned quickly, just as a slender man stepped around the guard in the doorway and entered the throne room. He wore a one-piece zippered coverall of a neutral dun color. A small button glinted dully on the collar of his garment, and she didn’t need to see the image inscribed on it to know she faced an agent of the Millennial Consortium.

“My name is Mr. Book,” the man stated coldly. “It’s about time we met.”

Chapter 4

Brigid’s first impulse was to shoot back with a witticism or an insult. But when she looked into Book’s eyes, she saw the glint of cruelty in their pale depths, glimmering like the fires of a furnace that had only been banked, not extinguished.

Although of medium height, Book was so excessively lean he appeared taller. His hair was cropped so short it resembled a gray skullcap of bristles. His rawboned, leathery face was deeply seamed, as if it had been cooked by the sun and leached by acid rain until only bone, muscle and sinew were left.

His posture and attitude reminded her of Magistrates she had encountered, and she realized that Book was quite possibly a former Mag, one who had been recruited by the Millennial Consortium. Her mouth went dry as she experienced a rare moment of fear. She opted to remain silent.

Book regarded her broodily. “Brigid Baptiste. And where you are, so are Kane and Grant. The question is why.”

Brigid frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You people from Cerberus are enigmas, Baptiste. Oh, I know your names and your histories—renegades from Cobaltville, baron blasters and all that overblown bullshit told about you in the Outlands.”

Brigid forced a taunting smile to her face, but she didn’t reply. Over the past five-plus years, the Cerberus warriors had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.

Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the Overlords, all of them wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. Brigid privately feared that everything she and her friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict, the Armageddon yet to come.

Seeing the smile, Book challenged, “I amuse you?”

“To a point. If our reps are overblown bullshit, why has the consortium black-tagged our files?”

Saragayn stirred in his chair. “What means this ‘black-tagged’?”

Staring levelly at Book, Brigid declared, “It means that my friends and I from Cerberus are high-priority targets for the millennialists. There is a big bonus paid to any of their agents who manage to kill us.”

Saragayn angled at eyebrow at Book. “Is this so?”

The man nodded and then glared at Brigid. “Why are you here in Pandakar?”

Brigid smiled defiantly. “Take a guess, Mr. Book.”

“The cheap heroics of you Cerberus people nauseate me,” Book said harshly. “But let’s be frank with each other. The consortium’s enterprises in America are imperiled by the continual interference of Cerberus. You’ve destroyed our satraps, killed our personnel and disrupted our operations. You’ve forced us to move farther and farther from the American shores, yet you keep coming after us. Why?”

Brigid cast a glance at Saragayn. “That’s an example of the bad blood you mentioned.”

Saragayn nodded. “I gathered as much. I’m interested in your perspective.”

Brigid made a dismissive gesture. “Is there any point in that? You’ve already made up your mind.”

Saragayn chuckled. “You severely over- or underestimate me. I am responsible for nearly a thousand people, most of them related to me. Pandakar is surrounded by tides of change, and I do not want my island to be swept away. Therefore, I don’t make decisions rashly or choose sides until I’ve gauged every advantage and disadvantage.”

Brigid nodded as if she agreed, although she surreptitiously looked around for another way out of the room. Daramurti still blocked the doorway. “Do you know what the Millennial Consortium really is, Captain?”

“I only know what Mr. Book told me—a union of organized salvagers and traders.” Saragayn cocked his head at her in an exaggerated pose of puzzlement. “Is that not the truth?”

“To a point,” Brigid admitted, pinching the air between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. “A very small and very blunt point.”

The Millennial Consortium was, on the surface, a group of very well-organized traders who dedicated their lives to recovering predark artifacts from the ruins of cities. In the Outlands, such scavenging was actually the oldest profession.

After the world burned in atomic flame, enough debris settled into the lower atmosphere and very nearly created another ice age. The remnants of humankind had waited in underground shelters until the Earth became a little warmer before they ventured forth again. Most of them became scavengers mainly because they had no choice.

Looting the abandoned ruins of predark cities was less a vocation than it was an Outland tradition. Entire generations of families had made careers of ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe. The locations of those hidden, man-made caverns scattered across the country, filled with hardware, fuel and weapons, had become legend to the descendants of the nukecaust survivors.

Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally a hitherto untouched one would be located. As the stockpiles became fewer, so did the independent salvaging and trading organizations. Various trader groups had combined resources for the past several years, forming consortiums and absorbing the independent operators.

The consortiums employed and fed people in the Outlands, giving them a sense of security that had once been the sole province of the barons. There were some critics who compared the trader consortiums to the barons and talked of them with just as much ill will.

Since first hearing of the Millennial Consortium a few years before, the Cerberus warriors had learned firsthand that the organization was deeply involved in activities other than seeking out stockpiles, salvaging and trading. The group’s ultimate goal was to rebuild America as a technocracy, with a board of scientists and scholars governing the country and parceling out the resources where they saw the greatest need. They had taken over the smaller trading groups, absorbing their resources and personnel.

Although the consortium’s goals seemed utopian, the organization’s overall policy was pragmatic beyond the limit of cold-bloodedness. Their influence was widespread, well managed, and they were completely ruthless when it came to the furtherance of their agenda, which when distilled down to its basic components, was nothing more than the totalitarianism of a techno-tyranny. The final objective sought by the Millennial Consortium was to impose a supranation over the world. The Cerberus warriors had faced millennialists in far-flung parts of the planet.

“Do you know what technocracy is?” Brigid asked.

Captain Saragayn nodded. “Again, only what Mr. Book told me—it is a form of government rooted in science, not politics or religion. It was first developed in the early twentieth century by scientists, engineers and other specialists.”

“Yes,” Brigid drawled sardonically. “The conclusion reached by these specialists was that an industrialized society governed by a council of scientists and technologists would be far more productive, less prone toward crime and deviation from the standard and certainly not inclined to bomb itself out of existence.”

“That’s not the case?”

Book started to speak, but Saragayn held up a silencing hand. “I want to hear what she has to say.”

Confidently, Brigid declared, “Technocracy is a serviceable set of ideals, I suppose. But it can only function by imposing a dictatorship. That is what lies at the heart of technocracy. The ruling elite are selected through a bureaucratic process on the basis of specialized knowledge rather than through anything remotely similar to the democratic process.”

“The Millennial Consortium curtails human freedom, then.” Saragayn did not ask a question; he made a statement.

“Basically, yes. Technocracy as envisioned by the Millennial Consortium cannot coexist with freedom.”

“You think that is important?” Saragayn asked. “Freedom?”

Brigid cast him a questioning glance. “You don’t?”

“I confess I don’t quite understand it.”

Mr. Book snorted. “It’s a strictly emotional concept, illusory. Freedom is also a very great danger because human beings are ignorant by nature and are dominated by the wild side of their consciousness.”

“Freedom,” Captain Saragayn echoed thoughtfully. “I have heard a few chants of that here, from some of the discontented islanders. Freedom to do what? Freedom from who?”

“From the leash of serfdom,” Brigid retorted. “Held by men like you.” She inclined her head toward Book. “And you.”

“The people of Pandakar are simple, primitive souls,” the captain said. “They need a father to look after them and apply discipline. If they did not have that, then the entire system established by my family a hundred years ago falls apart. For example—”

Saragayn paused and his eyes fixed on Daramurti. “My nephew here has served as my bodyguard for over three years. He has been loyal, true and faithful for three years. Then he fell victim to one who did not share those virtues—my wife Clarise. She seduced you, didn’t she Daramurti?”

Daramurti’s shoulders stiffened, then sagged. He swallowed hard and cast his eyes toward the floor.

“I can’t really blame him,” Saragayn continued smoothly. “Clarise is beautiful—and French. That is a heady combination for a young and oversexed man. I am sure he resisted her wiles for as long as he could. But then one day not too long ago, he fell into her bed and after a day and night of vigorous fucking, Daramurti swore to be loyal to her. To that end, he allowed seditionists controlled by my wastrel son, Mersano, to infiltrate Pandakar.”

Captain Saragayn sighed, shifted his throne and idly examined Brigid’s TP-9, turning it back and forth in his right hand. “Mersano and Clarise’s force plan to stage an attack tonight as soon as the storm hits. That should be within the next couple of minutes, I think.”

Book’s eyebrows rose, his forehead acquiring new creases. “Then why are we standing here, Captain?”

“Ah, calm yourself, sir,” Saragayn replied softly. “I intend to trap my enemies, and the best way to do that is to let them think their plot against me is succeeding.”

Brigid glanced over at Daramurti. “So you told him of the plan?”

The man did not make eye contact and Saragayn laughed. “Well, of course he did. All of Pandakar is filled with my informants, and the Juabal Hadiah—” he used the barrel of the pistol to indicate the ship “—is wired with spy eyes…particularly the bedrooms of my wives. Nothing goes on here without my knowledge. I may pay no attention to it, but I do know about it.”

“Be that as it may, what precautions have you taken?” Mr. Book asked uneasily.

“It should suffice that I have taken them.” Saragayn stared steadily at Daramurti. “With his help.”

“His help?” Book echoed.

“Although my nephew had sworn loyalty to me, and then to my wife Clarise, ultimately he learned that his primary loyalty lay to himself. He was only too eager to tell me everything I wished to know to protect first his young, impudent cock and then his life.”

Saragayn chuckled, a sound like the warning buzz of a rattlesnake. “Isn’t that right, nephew?”

Daramurti finally lifted his head. Tears glimmered in his eyes. He looked as fearsome as a small boy caught with a forbidden piece of candy. His mouth opened and closed like a fish stranded on dry land. “I live only to serve you, glorious Uncle. Ever and always.”

“Yes,” Saragayn whispered. “How well I know that.”

The autopistol in his hand blasted out a wave of sound, like a thunderclap. Daramurti’s head jerked violently back on his neck. A piece of scalp exploded from the rear of his skull, riding a slurry of blood that splattered the wall of the corridor. He staggered backward and fell heavily.

While the gunshot echoed in the throne room, another explosion shook the bulkhead. Brigid recognized it as the detonation of an RPG. Book stumbled, his eyes widening. “What the hell—?”

Without a word, Brigid wheeled on him, her right fist whipping up fast, connecting with the underside of Book’s jaw. The uppercut snapped the man’s head back. Arms windmilling, he toppled off his feet, slamming against Captain Saragayn.

Surging forward, Brigid snagged the barrel of her autopistol and gave it a vicious corkscrew twist, tearing it out of Saragayn’s hand and then slashing down with the butt against the crown of his head. Although cushioned by the turban, the blow still landed solidly enough to drive consciousness out of the man’s eyes with the suddenness of a candle being extinguished.

Then Brigid turned and ran out into the corridor, leaping nimbly over the corpse of Daramurti.

Chapter 5

Oil lamps glowing from behind panes of yellow glass illuminated the corridor. Brigid considered breaking the glass and dousing the flames because she suspected Captain Saragayn watched her through a closed-circuit spy eye. She doubted he would stay unconscious for long—if he did nothing else for his host, Book would see to his revival.

From outside she heard more explosions, but now they sounded more like thunderclaps. Woven faintly through the racket, she heard the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire. Behind her came the murmur of male voices and thump of running feet. Brigid plunged through the first open door she saw.

She stood in a dim chamber, somewhat Asian in decor but with an Arabian Nights kind of furnishing. There were heaps of big satin and tasseled pillows, tapestries hung from the ceiling and several women of all sizes, shapes and colors stared at her. The only thing they shared in common was nudity. They stared at her silently, their overly made-up faces as immobile as masks.

Brigid put a finger to her lips as she moved deeper into the room, toward an archway at the rear of the cabin. The women stared at her soberly. Astringent smoke curled from a brass brazier set before a multi-armed, many-breasted statue. She stifled a cough as she sidled past. Then the solemn, shivery boom of a gong pressed against her eardrums.

Casting a startled glance behind her, she saw a naked black woman, her flesh glistening with oil, standing before a huge disk of bronze, a mallet in her hands. She struck it again and the heavy note reverberated throughout the chamber. Then three Malaysian men rushed through the door. They wore yellow head scarves like Daramurti and they swung the barrels of their pistols in short arcs. Judging by their bare-toothed grimaces and wild eyes, Brigid figured they were on the verge of panic.

The beaded curtain clattered as Brigid bounded through the arch. The door on the other side swung open easily and she quickly closed it behind her, noting sourly it had no lock. She found herself in a very narrow passageway lit by overhead neon tubes. A small closet opened off to the left, holding cleaning and janitorial supplies.

Grabbing a push broom and a heavy, long-handled mop, Brigid placed the wide head of the broom beneath the doorknob and jammed the blunt end of the handle against the wall, inside the angle where it joined with the floor.

The mop was more difficult to affix, but she managed to brace it just above the knob. Fists and feet began hammering against the door. It shook under the repeated impacts, but the improvised barricades held. She heard a man cursing in Magindano, then the door spit dust and wood splinters as a triburst erupted.

Brigid broke into a sprint down the passageway, navigating through a labyrinth of rusting pipes and wheel valves crisscrossing in all directions. She maneuvered around fuse boxes and cooling systems, all the machinery that kept the giant treasure ship alive. The bulkheads, coated with grease and layers of grime, told her she was very close to the engine room.

When the passage terminated at a closed door, Brigid cursed under her breath, but she knew she could no longer afford to be cautious. Lifting the handle, she took a deep breath, threw the door open wide and plunged into a solid wall of wind- and rain-swept fury.

Staggering on the wet deck, Brigid slammed the door behind her and leaned against it. Rain crashed down in a solid torrent from the dark sky. The downpour pounded her in sheets, virtually blinding her and making it difficult to breathe without inhaling water. In an instant, she was soaked to the skin. She cupped a hand over her nose and mouth so she could breathe without difficulty.

Pressing herself against the superstructure, she found a little shelter beneath the overhang of the deck above. She squinted away from the great crooked fingers of lightning scorching their way across the sky and grimaced at the deafening claps of thunder. Brigid had been in wild weather before, but she had never encountered a monsoon. She wondered if the storm’s violence was common in this part of the world or due to the aftereffects of skydark.

After a few minutes, the wind died down to no more than intermittent gusts. The rain slacked off to a steady drizzle. Lightning still arced across the sky, but the heart of the storm had moved away. The humidity rising in its wake was oppressive.

Staring through the shifting sheets of water, she gazed toward the harbor front. She saw bursts of flame and tiny lights strobing in the shadows. Dimly she heard the crump of grenades and the chatter of subguns. A battle raged up and along the quayside. The insurrection was in full swing, proceeding despite the weather.

A twisting thread of red fire streaked up from the darkness, rising into the sky in a wide arc, then lancing down toward the upper decks of the ship. Brigid crouched. Because of a thunderclap, she barely heard the rocket’s detonation, but the blaze of the explosion painted the shadows a flickering orange for a couple of seconds. The vessel shuddered. Men and women began screaming. She assumed the first rocket had either fallen short or struck an underpopulated section of the Juabal Hadiah.

Brigid pushed herself away from the bulkhead and sprinted along the deck, looking over the railing at the murky water glimmering at least fifty feet below. A man yelled behind her, and she heard the sharp report of a pistol. A bullet thumped the air less than an inch from the right side of her head.

Swiveling at the waist, Brigid squeezed off two rounds. She didn’t aim—the shots were fired strictly for effect. She saw no one, but she heard more men shouting in frantic Magindano.

She sprinted along the slippery deck and reached a square hatch and a ladder stretching downward. A closed door was opposite it. She opened the door, set it to swinging on its hinges, then half climbed, half slid down the ladder, listening to the thump of running feet overhead.

On the deck below Brigid scanned the vicinity for either a hiding place or adequate cover from bullets. She rounded a corner and saw a stack of crates. Without hesitation she threw herself behind them and crouched motionless, trying not to breathe too loudly. No one came by so she guessed she had divided her pursuers. She heard more scattered shots, but this time from the direction of the waterfront. A rocket exploded, filling the area with an eye-hurting brilliance. There were more stuttering shots, a series of screams and shouts. The ripping sounds of multiple subguns firing on full-auto came from somewhere nearby aboard the ship.

A small sampan floating less than fifty yards away spit a tongue of flame. She caught a glimpse of a quick, fiery streak, and the ship shuddered under a blow that shook the deck violently. The harbor erupted astern, water rising in a column.

Realizing that the rocket had most likely punched a deep hole in the Juabal Hadiah’s hull below the waterline, Brigid rose from her hiding place, made sure the zone was clear, then ran out along the deck again. She ran down a short flight of steps and ducked through a low archway onto a gallery overlooking the stern of the ship. The giant flag of Saragayn, bearing the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle, hung from a sturdy mast overhead.

A pistol cracked and the sharp reports of an autorifle tore through the fabric of the air, but the shots were not aimed at her.

Returning through the archway, she saw a dozen armed men ranged around the railings of the gallery. They exchanged a flurry of gunfire at point-blank range. Two of them clutched at themselves and folded over. The racket of the gunfire and the whine of ricochets stunned Brigid’s senses.

Men rolled on the deck—keening, strangling with their hands, clubbing with empty revolvers, struggling hand-to-hand with knives. She could not differentiate between Captain Saragayn’s men and the insurrectionists, and she didn’t try.

Taking a breath, she focused her attention on an area of the gallery free of combatants and lunged for it, running flat-out. A man in a coverall suddenly loomed out of the darkness and straight-armed her. His slamming palm caught her in the upper chest, driving almost all the wind from her lungs and sending her sprawling.

Brigid slid across the deck on her shoulders and back. As she did, she squeezed off two quick shots between her outspread legs. The man’s shirt sprouted a pair of holes and he went over backward. Dragging air back into her lungs, she climbed to her feet and sprinted for the railing again.

Before she covered much of the distance, two men raced to intercept her. Brigid saw them coming, but she kept going, knowing a retreat back to the archway would only give them clear shots at her back.

She altered direction, racing toward them, firing with the TP-9 at the end of an outstretched arm. They returned fire with handguns and she felt a bullet pluck at her hair, ripping out a few strands by the roots.

Wincing, she kept her finger pressed down on the trigger, directing precision bursts. A man’s face broke apart in flying arcs of blood. Then the slide of the TP-9 blew back into the locked-and-open position. Since stopping or slowing meant an instantaneous death, she increased her speed, the length of her stride, legs pumping fast and furiously.

She flung her weapon in front of her. The metal frame of the TP-9 smashed into the face of Saragayn’s soldier barely half a second before her knee slammed into his solar plexus. Carried by the momentum of her rush, she bowled into him and both of them went down. A shot from the man’s pistol went up into the sky.

Going into a shoulder roll, Brigid cartwheeled up and over the man, using his chest as a springboard. She landed on her feet in a deep squat, and then sprang up and onto the Pandakaran. His face was spattered with blood from a laceration on his forehead. Her right foot, with all her weight behind it, drove into his neck. She pivoted sharply and smartly on her heel, crushing his larynx, grinding her foot into his windpipe.

Clutching at his throat, a flood of scarlet spilling from his open mouth, the man went into convulsions, clawing at the deck with his free hand, legs kicking spasmodically.

Brigid raced for the edge of the deck, leaped atop the railing and then jumped feetfirst into the black water far below. As she fell, she inhaled a deep lungful of oxygen and held it. She slammed through the oily surface of the harbor cleanly. The water felt tepid, almost as warm as the air. Water gushed up her nose and filled her sinus passages, trickling into her throat.

She let herself plunge downward, pulled by the weight of her boots and clothes. Brigid tamped down the panic surging within her. Over five years before she had nearly drowned in the Irish Sea, and since that day, she had developed a morbid fear, almost a phobia, of dying by water.

Slitting her eyes open, the brine stinging them, she stared at the roiling surface above her. She glimpsed only intermittent flashes of light. Her ears registered the muffled, multiple thumps of bullets striking the water. She saw the bubble-laced streaks of the slugs punching into the sea around her.

When her boot soles sank into the soft ooze of the bottom mud, she carefully pushed off at angle, stroking in the general direction of the waterfront. Only when her lungs began to ache intolerably did Brigid decide to surface. She came up slowly near an area of the pier crowded with sampans. She fought the impulse to cough and gasp.

Raking strands of hair away from her eyes, spitting out water, she tried raising Kane and Grant via the Commtact. She received no response and wondered briefly if immersion in seawater had caused the comm unit to malfunction.

Brigid swam underneath the pier. Close overhead was a tangle of timber braces and struts. Long growths of moss dangled from them, like the beards of old wise men she had seen in pictures.

A dull pounding shook the air for a couple of seconds. Looking toward the Juabal Hadiah, she saw a plume of white steam billowing out of a hole in her port-side hull. She assumed various combustibles had exploded within the ship. Treading water, she looked for a way to climb out of the harbor without being seen. Voices shouted back and forth, and slowly they diminished in volume.

Brigid swam quietly toward the shoreline, still keeping just beneath the pier, the barnacle-encrusted pilings scraping her arms. She pulled herself along by the cross struts until her feet touched the bottom and she was able to wade. She reached a wooden ladder made of crudely hammered-together slats, and after resting a minute to regain her breath, she climbed it as quickly as she could. The weight of her sodden clothes and boots dragged at her as she pulled herself up, hand over hand.

When Brigid reached the top, she raised her head by degrees so she could see over the edge of the pier. The first thing she saw was the bore of a gun, staring directly into her face like a hollow, cyclopean eye.

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