Truth Engine
Truth Engine
James Axler
Earth's darkest days have given way to a new age of war. Launched by an ancient and powerful alien race, the battle has morphed through an aeons-old blueprint for domination.But with it has emerged a resilient group of freedom fighters, true avatars of humanity's fortitude and courage. Now, as mankind's arrogant oppressors engage in their own bitter infighting, they may doom the planet in their personal fires of hatred.Cerberus Redoubt, the rebel base of operations, has fallen under attack. The enemy at the gates is Ullikummis, a scion born of hate, a pawn of his powerful father's game of ultimate manipulation. Kane and the others are his prisoners, losing their free will through his unbreakable mind control. The stone god demands Kane lead his advancing armies as he retakes Earth in the ultimate act of revenge. Ullikummis understands that truth–human or alien–is malleable. And that he will be the ultimate god of the machine, infinite and unstoppable.
“Will it hurt?” Kane asked then, and his question was genuine, no longer a part of his innocent act
Dylan nodded. “The future has to be born, Kane,” he said, “and birth is traumatic. But it will be brief, and the new world awaits you once it’s done. You need never look back, never regret. God will be with you.”
Kane gritted his teeth as he watched Dylan bring the stone closer. Then he felt it brush against his skin, its surface cool, and for a moment the ex-Mag tensed.
“Relax yourself into it,” Dylan advised. “Don’t fight it.”
Dylan pulled his hand back slowly, leaving the stone balanced on Kane’s outstretched arm. The stone was resting against Kane’s wrist now, in the groove that was made there at the heel of his hand. Kane watched as the stone rested there, doing nothing out of the ordinary. And then he felt it move, like an insect’s tiny feet tickling against his wrist, and he almost laughed. The movement was so slight that, in the gloom, he could not really see it. All the same, he felt it, felt as it rolled and turned, inching around in a slow turn at the base of his palm.
Suddenly, Kane felt a strange kind of pain, his skin splitting at his wrist with a burning sensation. It reminded Kane of the way that chapped lips feel in cold weather, a hotness around the wound. He watched as the stone rested at his wrist, watched as it seemed to become slightly smaller. It was sinking, Kane realized—sinking into his flesh, burrowing there like an insect.
Truth Engine
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change.
—James P. Carse
Finite and Infinite Games
The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
“The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change.”
—James P. Carse,
Finite and Infinite Games (1987)
Kane awoke in darkness.
His head ached, a dull sensation as if from too much sleep. He was ravenous, too, and his mouth was dry, so dry it felt as if he had been chewing sand.
Kane felt the rough, cool rock beneath his crumpled form and realized he had no recollection of how he had come to be here, wherever here was. He was lying on his side, the rough surface pressing against him. His muscles ached with a cold burn, like the onset of influenza.
Slowly, Kane rolled onto his back, stifling a groan of pain as his body protested the movement, settled as it was on the rocky ground. He lay there, gazing up into the darkness, his breaths coming out as forced bursts. He tempered his breathing, waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
Kane knew he was a large man, muscular yet well proportioned. He kept his dark hair trimmed short, and more than one person had told him his penetrating, steel-gray eyes seemed full of challenge and fury. His upper body was powerful, with broad shoulders and a firmly defined chest, and his arms and legs were rangy, giving him something of the appearance of a wolf. His was a body suited to stealth and swift movement, a body built to respond. His temperament was like that of a wolf, too. On the one hand, Kane was a natural pack leader, yet on the other, he was a loner who preferred to handle things his own way rather than worry himself with the concerns of others. It was this latter quality that had defined Kane’s life, from his younger years as a Magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville, where he had gone from enforcing the baronial law to rebelling against it, to his subsequent role as a Cerberus exile. The Cerberus rebels had pledged to defend humankind against the insidious threat of a race of aliens called the Annunaki.
Kane was trained in many combat arts, at home with gun and knife, and just as deadly with his fists. In short, he was a magnificent specimen of what man can make of himself.
Or at least he had been.
Now, he lay on the stone floor, his body bruised and aching, scarred even through the armorlike weave of the skintight shadow suit he wore. Whatever had hit him had hit him hard.
At least his breathing was normal now; he could be thankful for that much. His guts seemed to churn, his stomach rumbling in complaint at the lack of sustenance.
“How long have I been here?” Kane wondered aloud. And more to the point, just where the hell was here, anyway?
Lying on his back, his breathing slow and regular, he reached out with his senses, letting what information he could detect flow into him like an empty receptacle. Kane was renowned as a remarkable point man, having an almost Zenlike oneness with his surroundings in any given situation. There was nothing mystical about this ability; it was merely the studied use of his five natural senses with a focus and surety that few people would ever achieve.
He was in a small, enclosed space. He could tell that much without even moving. There was no breeze, just the lightest drafts moving about him. The air seemed normal enough, although it smelled a little of sweat and all those other scents humans create when held in an enclosed space for any length of time. As he realized this, Kane wondered when he had last urinated; his bladder ached dully. His stomach rumbled again with the thought, reminding him of its emptiness.
He could not detect any breathing other than his own, and suspected he was alone.
His eyes were adjusting now, getting used to the darkness he had woken to. There were rocks above him, he saw, and along the walls to either side of him. It seemed he was in a small cave, hidden away from the sun.
His mouth was terribly dry. His tongue felt as if it was swelling up, and his breath had a solid harshness as it passed through his open mouth. He took another breath and could taste the dryness, and something rotten in his throat.
With a grunt of effort, Kane pushed himself up, forced himself into a sitting position. He felt cramps run across his stomach muscles, realized he had been lying in one position for far too long.
“Just how long was I out?” he muttered.
At first his legs did not want to move, and he almost fell as he tried to stand erect. This wasn’t like waking from sleep, Kane noted. It was more as if he had been in some kind of coma. His lack of any immediate memory confirmed that feeling.
Automatically, he reached up and brushed at the wayward strands of hair over his face. He felt the stubble, a rough line running down his jaw, like a bed of tiny needles. He thought back, tried to remember when he had last shaved. It seemed like less than a day ago, just before he and his team had taken the mat-trans leap to Louisiana to fight with the queen of all things dead, but he had at least two days’ growth of beard now, maybe three. It was closer to a beard now than stubble. Somehow time had slipped by without his noticing.
Kane stood, pins and needles running through his toes as he did so, his feet numbed by the boots he wore. His body felt heavy, as if he were waterlogged, an old thing dredged from the river.
Gradually, he made his way to the wall, walking like a geisha girl, with tiny steps as though his feet were bound. He felt sick.
There was so little light, yet he could see the structure looming ahead of him. Kane reached out with his right hand, noticing the absence of weight there for the first time. He had had a Sin Eater stored in a wrist holster, a handgun that reacted to a specific flinch of tendons to deliver the formidable weapon straight into the user’s grip. The blaster was gone. Kane ran his left hand along his arm, felt the torn strands of leather there, the remnants of the holster that had been violently ripped from him, stripped away at some point he could no longer recall.
Then Kane pushed his fingers against the wall before him, pressed his palm flat against it. It was cold and rough like the floor and the ceiling.
He walked along three paces until he found another rock wall in the gloom, their meeting point creating a right-angle corner. He was in a cavern, then, a cave of some sort, just as he had thought.
“Where the hell am I?” Kane muttered as he peered around, his eyes struggling to make sense of the darkness.
Systematically, he ran his hand along the wall, staggering in slow steps, feeling sensations gradually return to the numb muscles of his legs and feet.
It appeared to be a cave. Yet there didn’t seem to be an exit, which made little sense. How had he come to be here, in a cave with no door?
There was the interphaser, of course. Like the mat-trans, the interphaser worked to transport people instantaneously through the quantum ether to new locations. Had he used an interphaser to get here?
Kane knelt down, sweeping his hands across the rough floor, brushing the sand and dust as he sought the little pyramidal shape of the interphaser unit. It wasn’t here. Nothing was here. Just him and the clothes he wore, in a room without a door.
His stomach grumbled again as he struggled back to a standing position, peering around him at the dark cavern. This was it. He was alone, trapped in an impossible space.
So, is this how it ends, Kane asked himself, or simply how it begins?
Chapter 2
Brigid Baptiste’s eyelids fluttered open, revealing two emerald eyes. Her eye color was so vivid it seemed almost luminous in the darkness, like a cat’s eyes. Even as her eyes flickered open, Brigid winced, feeling the pain spike across the left side of her face. Something had hit her at some point, and the ache was still there when she moved.
In her late twenties, Brigid was a striking woman. Her figure was trim and athletic, its curves enhanced by the tight-fitting shadow suit she wore as she sat on the single chair in the darkened room. Her green eyes peered out of a beautiful pale face with a high forehead that signified intelligence, while her full lips promised a more sensuous side. Her face was framed by a cascading wave of red curls that reached midway down her back. Her usually flawless skin was mussed and dirty right now, and a bruise had formed around her left eye socket, an angry yellow crescent from cheek to brow.
Warily, Brigid moved her head, looking about her. She was in an enclosed space, but it was too dark to distinguish much else. The ceiling was high, reaching at least two stories above her, and the walls looked rough in the semidarkness, though it was hard to discern details.
She tried to stand, only to find she was trapped in places, her arms restrained behind her, her ankles bound somehow to the chair. There was a deep ache in her shoulders, she realized as she tried to shift; she had been here a long time, locked in the same position.
But where was here? Brigid thought back, trying to remember how she had come to be in this place. Even in the poor light, the walls looked rough, uneven, and Brigid guessed they had been carved from rock, probably some natural formation. There was a slight breeze, too, the most miniscule movement of cool air about her face, making her skin ripple with goose bumps.
For a moment, the beautiful, red-haired warrior struggled, working through the dull ache in her limbs as she pulled against her bonds. Though she could move her head, she seemed to be stuck fast. Her arms were pulled down and back, held behind her with some kind of wrist ties. Her legs, too, were fastened in place, bound at her ankles to the legs of the chair. It was hard to see what the chair looked like. It felt hard and unforgiving, with no padding to provide support or comfort.
As she struggled against the bonds, her grunts echoing in the still cavern, Brigid became aware of another presence. She stopped, automatically quieting her breathing as she scanned the area about her.
She had missed it the first time, and she almost looked right past it again, her gaze gliding over the shape poised before the rocky wall. But there was a figure carved of rock and almost perfectly camouflaged, its form visible only because of the uneven shadows it cast. It stood over to her right, and Brigid kept her head straight ahead, peering at the form from the corner of her eye so as not to give herself away. It was hard to decipher, for the thing was so well hidden it seemed almost to be encoded into the rock wall itself. She traced its shadows, the way they played at the edges of the bulky form, which was tall, seven feet or more. Brigid realized that with the ceiling so high, it was hard to judge the thing’s height accurately, but she also knew what it looked like—for she had seen it before.
She thought for a moment, recalling her previous encounter with this would-be god of stone. It gave no reaction to her waking, appeared to be dormant itself.
“I can see you,” Brigid announced, her voice like a bell in the quietness of the room.
She waited, but there was no response from the figure in the darkness.
Warily, Brigid turned her head toward the figure hidden in the shadows. It had been easier, somehow, to see it from the corner of her eye, like a trick of the light. Brigid rolled her head, working at the stiffness in her neck as she tried to assess the figure. She estimated that it was standing ten feet away from her, its back pressed against the wall.
“I said I can see you,” Brigid repeated, “Lord Ullikummis.”
For a moment there was no reply, and she wondered if the great stone being was asleep, or perhaps dead. Then, as she watched, a tracery of fire seemed to ignite across the figure in thin streaks, each orange glow affirming the shape of the majestic form and lighting the cavern around it.
Brigid steeled herself as the figure moved, stepping away from the rock wall with one powerful stride. His legs, like his body, appeared to be carved from stone, with rivulets of lava glowing through cracks in their dark, charcoal surface. He had no feet; his legs just seemed to widen at the base like the trunks of mighty oak trees. Each step was heavy, a stride with purpose, such was the gravity that this creature projected in his fearsome movements. He was humanoid in form, standing a full eight feet tall, but appeared fashioned from rock—not like a statue, but jagged and rough, like something weathered by the elements, a confluence of stones smashed together by the environment into this horrifying, nightmarish form. Two thick ridges reached up from his shoulders, curving inward toward his head like splayed antlers. The head itself was a rough, malformed thing, misshapen and awkward, with just the suggestion of features hacked into its hoary surface.
Brigid found she was holding her breath as the hulking man-thing stepped closer. Though she had seen this monster several times before, the immensity of his form remained intimidating.
Then he stopped before her, at last opening his eyes—two glowing portals of magma within his rock face—to stare at her.
“You seem ill at ease, Brigid,” the figure said, and his voice was like two rock plates grinding together. As he spoke, his open mouth revealed more magma, glowing like a beacon in the darkness of the cavern.
This creature was Ullikummis, dishonored son of Enlil of the Annunaki. Thousands of years before, the Annunaki, a lizardlike race, had come to Earth in an effort to stave off the boredom that their near-immortal lives and absolute knowledge engendered. Blessed with infinitely superior technology and a callous disregard for other species, they had appeared as gods to the primitive peoples here, and the stories of their interfamily squabbles had become the stuff of mythology to the lowly indigenous species called man. The Annunaki had walked the Earth for hundreds of years, basking in the glory of their false-idol status, treating humankind as their personal playthings, to do with as they wished.
Their reign on Earth lasted until they ultimately became bored with the deception. Soon after, Overlord Enlil, a malicious and selfish creature even by Annunaki standards, set out to destroy the Earth with a great flood, sweeping away all evidence of mankind’s existence and leaving the planet as one would a fallow field, ready for renewal in the next season. However, Enlil’s purging failed, thanks primarily to the intervention of his own brother, Enki, who had become soft-hearted and felt that humankind’s tenacity deserved rewarding. Since then, the Annunaki had been watching humans and guiding their destiny, manipulating them from the shadows, until finally revealing their presence on the Earth less than two years ago.
Since then, the Annunaki overlords had been driven back into hiding through a combination of their own squabbles and the efforts of a brave band of human warriors known as the Cerberus rebels. But the threat had left a terrible legacy in the form of Ullikummis.
The son of Enlil, Ullikummis had been genetically altered so that he no longer resembled the reptilian race he represented. Described in ancient records as a sentient stone pillar, Ullikummis had been conceived purely to act as his father’s personal assassin, trained from birth in the arts of killing, that he might dethrone Teshub, the so-called god of the sky. When Ullikummis had been shanghaied by a group of Annunaki led by Enki, Enlil’s kindhearted brother, Enlil had been forced to disown his son to distance himself from the assassination plot and save face. Thus, Ullikummis had been banished to the stars by his own father’s hand, where he took a slow orbit through the Milky Way in the stone prison of a meteor.
Three months ago, Ullikummis had returned to Earth in a fantastic meteor shower that had all but destroyed Cerberus’s orbiting satellite communications arrays. By the time the Cerberus techs had their monitoring equipment up and running again, the rogue stone god had taken his first steps in building an army to hunt down and destroy his father, who remained in hiding on Earth. Accompanied by Cerberus personnel Falk and Edwards, Brigid Baptiste had been part of the three-person field team sent to investigate the crash site of Ullikummis’s meteor prison, and she had found herself recruited into a nightmarish training camp called Tenth City, where only the strongest could survive. Within that training camp, Mariah Falk had almost committed suicide at the stone god’s command, while Edwards had temporarily lost his mind. With the help of her Cerberus teammates Kane, Grant and Domi, Brigid and her field team had been freed and the training camp destroyed. Ullikummis, however, had somehow evaded death, his whereabouts undetected by the Cerberus rebels.
The hideous stone god had briefly reappeared while Brigid, Kane and Grant investigated an undersea library along with oceanographer Clem Bryant, but they had seen nothing of Ullikummis since then.
Brigid’s mind raced back, trying to recall how she had ended up here, in this cave, trapped before the brooding form of the stone god. Her mind began to fill in the blanks, but before she could sort it out, Ullikummis reached for her with one of his mighty stone hands and tenderly brushed his rock fingers down her left cheek. They were cold to the touch and rough, like the stone they resembled.
“You were hurt,” Ullikummis said, his uncanny eyes glowing more brightly for just a moment. “Does it hurt still?”
Brigid pondered the question, wondering if this was some kind of trick. Finally, she spoke. “Yes,” she admitted. “It hurts a little.”
“It is nothing,” Ullikummis assured her. “The human form can endure less than the Annunaki, but this wound is but a trifling thing. Do you wish to see it?”
Brigid’s eyes met her captor’s, if that was truly what he was, and she nodded very slowly as his fingers remained pressed against her skin. “Please,” she said.
Ullikummis pulled his hand back, and began to stride away across the space behind her. She waited, bound to the chair, and her heart raced in fear as she heard the creature of living rock pacing across the stone floor, his steps echoing like hammer blows.
As Ullikummis’s mighty footsteps faded into the distance, Brigid took a moment to gather her thoughts. She had a remarkable gift of eidetic recollection, more popularly known as a photographic memory. Brigid was able to remember the smallest details of anything she had witnessed. The last she could recall, she had been with the other members of CAT Alpha—Kane and Grant—as their atoms were digitized and sent across the quantum ether via the mat-trans unit, a teleportation device in use by the Cerberus operation. The three of them had emerged in their home base of the Cerberus redoubt to a scene of carnage. The overhead lighting had been sparking, and the nearest of the computers was shattered, blood smeared across the shards of its monitor screen. There had been shouting, too, and gunfire, and Brigid and her companions had been forced to assess the situation in less than two seconds, realizing their help was needed urgently.
Eight hooded strangers were in the operations room, where the mat-trans unit was located, and they were in the process of destroying the equipment there while Cerberus personnel tried to fend them off. As Brigid scanned the area, Domi’s pure white albino form had dropped from an overhead vent and leaped across the room, bouncing from work surface to work surface like streaking lightning as a stream of bullets—were they bullets?—whipped through the air at her. Beside Brigid, Kane was already drawing his Sin Eater pistol, the 18-inch muzzle of the weapon unfolding in his hand as it was propelled from its hiding place beneath the sleeve of his jacket.
Agile and girlish, Domi blasted a stream of shots from her Detonics Combat Master, firing behind her as she leaped behind one of the computer terminals. In a second, the glass screen of the terminal shattered as one of the enemy’s projectiles struck it, shards bursting across the desk as the circuits fizzled and died.
Grant was still in the doorway to the mat-trans chamber behind Brigid, and she heard him call out one word—“Duck!”—before he began picking off the hooded strangers with rapid blasts from his own Sin Eater weapon, even as Kane hurried to help Domi.
Brigid was in motion then, too, reaching for her own blaster where it jounced against the swell of her hip. She selected her first targets as, bizarrely, a stream of what appeared to be pebbles raced through the air toward her at high speed. As soon as her TP-9 had cleared its holster, Brigid snapped off her first burst of return fire, felling one of the mysterious strangers, who wore a hood to cover his features. The figure went down, tumbling backward as the bullets struck his body.
Brigid was turning, finding her second target even as her semiautomatic shook in her hand with recoil. But as she spun she noticed something unnerving from the corner of her eye: the figure she had just shot was pulling himself up off the ground, pushing the hood from his face. He was still alive….
Back in the cave, Ullikummis’s footsteps grew loud once more, and Brigid focused her thoughts on the present. The looming stone creature came around to stand before her, and he held a rectangular object almost five feet in length. Brigid watched as the stone colossus set it before her, turning it to face her. It was a freestanding, full-length mirror with a swivel mechanism to adjust its tilt.
“Are you able to see?” Ullikummis asked, changing the angle as he spoke.
Brigid peered at her reflection in the mirror, saw the yellow crescent on her cheek despite the gloom. “Yes,” she said.
Nodding sullenly, Ullikummis stood back, and he seemed to wait patiently while Brigid examined her face in the mirror. It wasn’t quite a black eye; the blow had been just a little too low for that. Instead, it had left a nasty bruise, along with some swelling, but there didn’t appear to be a cut or abrasion.
Brigid looked up into the glowing orbs of Ullikummis’s eyes. “Why am I here?” she asked. “And where are we?”
He looked back at her, his face an expressionless mask of rock, like a cliff ruined by erosion. “In time,” he replied, in that terrible voice of grinding stones. And that was all he said.
Brigid watched as Ullikummis walked past her once more, watched his retreat reflected in the mirror. The glowing veins that webbed his body faded as he disappeared into the shadows of the cave behind her, the resounding strikes of his footsteps fading to nothingness.
Brigid watched the reflection of the blackness for a long time.
Chapter 3
Kane struggled to order his thoughts as he stood alone in the cold-walled cavern, trying to remember how he had arrived there. It was hard to think straight. His head ached, not with a throbbing but with a tautness that felt like a clenched fist, as if somehow his hair was too tightly woven into his scalp.
His mouth was still horribly dry, and the ex-Magistrate was conscious that he was woefully dehydrated. His stomach hurt, too, hurt with emptiness.
Kane pushed past the pain in his skull, forced himself to examine more closely the space he found himself in. Pacing it out, Kane estimated it to be a rectangular shape of approximately eight feet by six—small but accommodating so long as he lay on the floor the right way. The floor itself was hard, unforgiving rock, but there was an uneven carpet of sand, enough to cushion the contours of his body and so provide a little comfort while he slept.
The sand reminded Kane yet again of the dryness in his mouth, but there was nothing to drink here; it was just a cave, empty but for its lone occupant—himself. Cold, too, since his shadow suit’s regulated environment had somehow failed.
“It’s a prison,” Kane muttered. “I’m in a cell.”
But who had put him here and why? No, those questions weren’t important, not yet. Those were questions that Kane could address when he needed to. Right now, he needed to find the answer to a far more fundamental question—how had they put him here? Because if he could figure that out he might have a chance to escape.
The room was sealed, and more than that, it was solid. The walls reached all the way around with no signs of a break, he discovered as he ran his fingers slowly along them, high and low. But his captors had managed to place him inside, so there must be a way out; there had to be.
Kane peered up then, the thought occurring to him with slow inevitability. An oubliette—that could be it. A dungeon with its access point in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner. He had seen them before and admired the simplicity of the design, imprisoning a man merely by removing the ladder that led to his freedom.
But no. As far as he could see in the gloom of the cavern, there was nothing up there, just more rock running across the ceiling, like clouds on an overcast day. He reached up, found that if he stretched he could just scrape the tips of his fingers against the stone. It seemed solid enough, not a hologram or an optical illusion. Bending his knees, Kane sprang into the air, slapping his palm against the ceiling. It was solid, giving back no echo to suggest any hollowness beyond.
For the moment, at least, he was trapped.
Kane moved to a corner of the room, unzipped his fly and relieved himself, the pressure in his bladder finally insisting upon release. The stench of his own urine came to him, stronger than he expected. After he was done, he covered the puddle of urine with sand like a cat. He wondered if he was being foolish, if this was the only liquid he would get here, and that, no matter how repellent the thought, he would need to salvage it to combat dehydration.
No, Kane told himself. If they wanted to kill me they would have done so. I’m alive because someone wanted me to stay alive.
But the thought didn’t ring entirely true. To end up here, he had been defeated, and it was possible that his foe, whoever that was, had such a callous disregard of his opponents that he had locked Kane here to starve, a slow ordeal that would lead to madness and death.
Kane’s nose wrinkled at the acrid stench of urine, and he sat as far from the damp sand as he could, resting his back against the cold rock wall. With no way in or out, he let his thoughts drift, struggling to recall what had happened, to piece together how he had ended up in this pitiful predicament.
They had returned from Louisiana, he remembered that much….
THE FOG AROUND THEM was beginning to clear, and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops center in Montana, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling transport mist.
“Good to be home,” Kane said, brushing back his wet hair.
Brigid Baptiste nodded as she tapped in the code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. The Cerberus redoubt had served as the hub of teleportation research and development for over two hundred years.
Brigid’s hair clung to her face, still damp from her encounter with the queen of all things dead in the Louisiana redoubt. “I need a shower,” she told Kane as the door slid open before her. “A warm one this time, with soap.”
“Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed his aching shoulder.
A few years older than Kane, Grant was a behemoth of a man, tall with wide shoulders and ebony skin. His muscles strained at the weave of his shadow suit. A Kevlar trench coat hugged his shoulders and draped down like a bat’s wings over his legs. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp and he wore a gunslinger’s drooping mustache over his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville. In fact, he had been Kane’s partner in the Magistrate Division, and over the years the two had fallen into an uncanny simpatico relationship during combat. Grant had been recruited into the Cerberus operation along with Kane when the two of them had gone rogue from the barony, after learning it threatened the well-being and natural progression of humankind. They seemed to be somehow closer than just combat partners or friends—they were more like brothers.
Grant rolled his shoulder as he followed Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room with its huge Mercator map dominating the far wall. What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.
Something had paid Cerberus a visit.
Something bad.
The room was a mess. The overhead lighting flickered and flashed. The two neat aisles of computer terminals were wrecked, and Kane saw the glass of monitor screens littering the floor as he dodged beneath a hail of bullets launched at him and his companions. No, not bullets, he realized as they rattled against the desk he had dodged behind—they were tiny chips of rock flying through the air.
Already Kane was moving, his hand preparing to receive the Sin Eater pistol he wore in a wrist rig on his right arm. The fabled sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the compact pistol elongated to its full length of eighteen inches as it was powered into his waiting palm. Once it was there, Kane’s index finger met the gun’s guardless trigger, reeling off a swift burst of fire at the hooded interlopers in the room. A storm of 9 mm titanium-coated bullets sped across the ops room as Kane darted for cover, trusting his colleagues to do the same. His attack was met with another hail of stones.
When the rain of tiny rocks ceased, he popped his head up over the side of the desk and began assessing his targets systematically. Kane counted eight strangers in an eye blink, all of them dressed in dirty cowls that covered their heads like a monk’s habit. They were hurrying through the room, striking out at the last few Cerberus personnel who opposed them as they smashed the remaining computer terminals, using clubs or just their fists. Even as Kane watched, the blond-haired comms op, Beth Delaney, was knocked to the floor by a savage, backhanded slap from one of the strangers. She toppled over with a loud crack of breaking bones.
Through the chaos, Kane spotted his colleague Domi leaping for cover, her agile, alabaster form flying through the air like some crazed jack-in-the-box.
“Domi, what’s going on?” he demanded.
Ten feet ahead of him, the albino girl looked down the aisle, pinpointing Kane by his voice. A true child of the Outlands, she was a strange-looking individual, barely five feet tall with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair. Her tiny frame was more like a teenage girl’s than a woman’s, her small, pert breasts pushing against her maroon crop top. Besides the top, Domi had on a pair of abbreviated shorts pulled high at the hip and leaving the full length of her dazzling white legs exposed. As was her habit, she was barefoot. The albino woman’s weird, crimson eyes flashed as they met Kane’s down the length of the computer aisle. “Took your sweet time getting here, Kane,” she shouted. “We’re under attack! They took Lakesh.”
“Dammit!” Kane spit.
Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, known to his friends as Lakesh, was Domi’s lover, and the founder of the Cerberus operation. A fabled physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh was a freezie—which was to say, he had been born over two hundred years ago, in the twentieth century, bringing his incredible knowledge of the mat-trans system, along with a sense of freedom almost forgotten by humankind, here to the twenty-third century. Lakesh had helped establish the Cerberus operation, and had been there with Kane at the start. While their relationship had not always been one of absolute trust, Kane respected the man and knew they needed to have him in command. Moreover, Lakesh’s exceptional knowledge could prove to be a weapon in enemy hands. Leaving him hostage to the machinations of these mysterious interlopers could very well prove the end of the Cerberus facility as Kane knew it.
He became aware of other gunshots behind him, and he turned to see Grant vaulting over a nearby desk and meeting one of the hooded strangers with both feet, knocking the creep backward.
“We were out in the field,” Kane explained. “No one alerted us to—”
Domi cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “There was no time,” she explained. “These weirdos seemed to come from nowhere. Screwed with the power, screwed with our comms.”
“How did they get in?” Kane asked, mystified. The mountaintop redoubt was well protected from intruders, so a force the size Domi’s words implied should not have been able to waltz in easily.
She glared back at him, a snarl appearing on her alabaster lips. “What am I, the answer girl?”
“Hold that thought,” Kane instructed as he spotted one of the strange robed figures scrambling toward him from the other side of the desk. Kane leaped from cover, blasting off a stream of shots at the approaching intruder, felling him. The stranger toppled as the bullets struck, crashing over a desk before landing in a heap. A little way along, Kane saw Domi reappear from her own hiding spot and snap off three quick shots at another of their foes, while behind them both, Brigid Baptiste was putting up her own defense with her TP-9 semiautomatic.
“Any idea who they are?” Kane asked.
“No, no and no,” Domi snapped, as if guessing his next questions. Then she did the strangest thing—leaped over the desk before her, the Detonics Combat Master spitting fire at her target even as he fell.
“He’s down,” Kane called as he ran to join her, leaping over the fallen body of a Cerberus tech. “No need to expose yourself.”
“No, Kane, you not know,” Domi explained, slipping into her strange, clipped Outlander patois as she glared at him over her shoulder.
But he did. In that moment, he saw the man Domi had felled in a volley of bullets get up, and brush himself off as if her shots had meant nothing. Instantly, a feeling of dread gripping him, Kane turned to see his own foe—the one he had shot and presumably killed—struggle back up off the desk, return to a standing position, the spent bullets dropping from his robe like snowflakes.
“What are they—armored or undead?” Kane asked as he drilled the figure again with 9 mm bullets. “’Cause I have had my fill of undead for one day.”
“Not undead,” Domi told him. “But dead inside. Nothing hurts them.”
Kane spun as another shower of stones hurtled toward him, and he saw now that their enemies were using simple slingshots to launch the projectiles at exceptional speed. It was almost as if the stones themselves could gather speed as they cut through the air. Sharp edges slapped at the protective weave of the shadow suit Kane wore beneath his torn denim jacket as he held his arm up to protect his face. The stones ripped his sleeve, sending pale blue threads flying like seeds blown from a dandelion. Kane pulled the remains away, tossing them aside. When he drew his arm back, he saw that the superstrong fiber of the shadow suit beneath it was torn, and needle-thin streaks of blood ran through it where his bare skin had been exposed. The weave of his suit was akin to armor, so whatever these people were throwing was exceptionally tough.
Kane ran at the hooded stranger who had just thrown the wad of stones at him, vaulting over a desk and bringing his Sin Eater to bear on the woman as she reloaded her catapult from a small pouch tied to her belt. He snapped off another shot as she placed the ammunition in the sling she held poised, and her own shot went wide.
Across the room, Grant was involved in his own scrap with one of the intruders, shoving the hooded man’s fist aside before blasting him in the face with his Sin Eater. His opponent collapsed, a plume of dark smoke pouring from beneath his hood.
“You hit them close enough,” Grant announced, “and they’ll go down.” He didn’t need to shout. Instead, he had automatically engaged the hidden subdermal Commtact unit that was connected to his mastoid bone.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid. Once the pintles 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 user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. Grant, Kane and the other members of the Cerberus field teams had Commtacts surgically embedded beneath their skin, a relatively minor operation that allowed them to keep in real-time contact in any given situation.
Kane picked up on Grant’s advice, jumping over the nearest desk as another volley of stones whizzed across the room at him. He was on the slingshot bearer in an instant, high kicking the guy in the face. It felt like kicking a wall, and Kane staggered back with a grunt.
The man stared at him, eyes burning from beneath his hood. “This is the future,” he stated, his voice eerily calm. “Submit.”
Kane thrust his right fist forward, slamming it up into the stranger’s gut. “Sorry, that ain’t going to work for me, buckaroo,” he growled as he unleashed a burst of bullets into him.
The man keeled over as the blast took him, dropping to the floor like a discarded bag of compost even as the woman Kane had just shot clambered to a standing position behind him.
“Point-blank them,” Kane instructed, looking about him to catch the attention of the other Cerberus personnel in the room. “It’s the best way.”
Then he was back facing the woman who had tossed stones at him just a half minute before, the one he’d thought he had dispatched. Kane whipped the Sin Eater up, driving it toward her face, but she moved fast in the flickering overhead lights, slapping the muzzle of the blaster aside even as Kane squeezed the trigger.
His shots went wide and she drove a powerful fist at his jaw, connecting with such force that his ears rang. When Kane looked up, the woman’s hood had dropped back and he saw her face for the first time. She was older than he had expected, with lined skin and crow’s feet around her eyes—probably in her late forties or early fifties. There was a blister dead center on her forehead, and Kane found his attention drawn to its ugliness for a distracting instant.
The woman grabbed a small lamp off the nearest desk, its cable sparking as she wrenched it from the socket and swung it at Kane’s head. He regained his composure just in time, using the muzzle of his Sin Eater to deflect the projectile. Then he drove the pistol forward and blasted a stream of bullets into the woman’s throat and upward, peppering her face. He did not like doing this, but there was something eerily wrong with these interlopers, who acted with such single-mindedness that they seemed to be automatons.
Somewhere behind Kane, Brigid Baptiste had found herself trapped between two of the slingshot-wielding strangers. As the one to her left flung a handful of tiny stones at her face, she dropped to her knees, feeling them pull at her hair as she managed to duck just in time. The stones struck the other attacker like buckshot, knocking him to the floor. Then Brigid kicked out, striking the first man behind the ankle and bringing him to the ground. As he fell, Brigid whipped up her semiautomatic, blasting a stuttering burst of bullets into his torso.
Behind her, a third assailant had grabbed something from one of the debris-strewed desks, and she turned just in time to see him throw it at her head. It was a two-inch-high, circular object—a magnetic desk tidy designed to hold paper clips and drawing pins while they weren’t being used. Brigid reared back as the thing hurtled toward her, cried out as it struck her just beneath her left eye.
She fell backward, and for a moment her vision swam. She ignored that, bringing up the TP-9 and peppering her attacker with bullets as he charged at her. The man fell forward, his long robes wrapping around his legs as he tumbled. Brigid leaped over his fallen body, hurrying across the room even as another of the strangers lunged for her from his position on the floor.
Ahead of the titian-haired former archivist, another of the strange hooded figures had plucked a slingshot from his robe, and he leveled it at Brigid, preparing to shoot more grit at her. Suddenly, there was a blur of movement as Grant thrust his elbow into the interloper’s back, jabbing at his kidney. Grant snarled in pain as he connected, but the hooded stranger fell, crashing into a wall.
“Either they’re wearing armor,” Grant theorized as Brigid joined him at the next aisle of desks, “or they aren’t human.”
“They’re certainly strong,” she agreed. “Could they be some new form of Nephilim?”
“Shit knows,” Grant spit. “Let’s keep moving.”
Nearby, Kane was looking around the room, with Domi at his side. Among them, the foursome had at last managed to dispatch all eight of the invaders.
Farrell lay in a pool of blood on the floor, his gold hoop earring glistening crimson. Part of the Cerberus team, Farrell sported a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee. Right now, his face was bruised and bloodied, and his eyes were closed.
“Farrell?” Kane demanded. “You okay?”
His teammate groaned, and Kane checked him more closely. He had a nasty cut at the back of his head where he had been coldcocked, but the wound appeared to have stopped pouring blood.
“You’ll be okay,” Kane announced, since his Magistrate training extended to basic medical knowledge. Farrell wasn’t listening; he was at best semiconscious.
Across the aisle, Brigid and Grant did a similar check on the prone form of Beth Delaney. There was an ugly slash across her face, but she seemed otherwise okay.
“We have to find Lakesh,” Domi insisted, hurrying toward the doors beneath the Mercator map, which covered an entire wall of the ops center. Somehow, the streams of light that usually snaked across the map had all been replaced with an eerie red glow.
Kane glanced about him. There were several other Cerberus people in the room, and he had a nasty feeling that at least two of them weren’t breathing. But Domi was right. They needed to keep moving, to worry about the living first. If Lakesh was still here somewhere, and still alive, then it looked as if it was up to Kane’s makeshift army to save him.
The foursome hurried through the doors, emerging into the redoubt’s central corridor. The hallway appeared to be carved through the rock of the mountain, its high ceiling held in place by a network of thick metal girders.
Nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting out there now, on the other side of the door.
KANE OPENED HIS EYES, his breath coming with a suddenness that seemed to snap him out of his reverie. He was sitting on the floor of the cavern that had become his cell, his back pressed against the coolness of the rock wall, and for a moment he wondered just what it was that had shocked him so.
Then he heard it again.
There was a noise off to his left, coming from the wall itself. He strained, trying to make out what the sound was. It seemed to be some kind of scraping or grinding, as if two great rocks were being forced together.
A few months back, Kane had been involved in an escapade that had featured a subterrene, a kind of boring machine that could cut tunnels through rock. Although it was muffled, the noise he heard now reminded him of the subterrene’s underground approach.
He got up from the floor, easing himself further into the darkness, as far away from that scraping sound as he could get. He was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he was trapped here in an eight-by-six cell, and if something was coming through that wall, he had no realistic way to avoid it.
Chapter 4
Grant was ready when the hidden door slid open. There, framed by the light that spilled into his cavelike cell, stood a man carrying a tray of food. The meals were bland and simple, a pitiful scoop of some kind of watery gruel or porridge, with barely any taste, each portion little more than a mouthful. Grant had been slipping in and out of consciousness for an indeterminate time, but they had left the food for him. He had forced himself to choke it down as he tried to recover his ebbing strength. When they last came, just a few hours earlier, to clear the trays, Grant had feigned sleep, listening for the sounds of movement and pinpointing the hidden door’s location in the rock wall.
Now, as the door opened and the person he thought of as his captor entered, Grant pounced from the shadows like a jungle cat. His meaty paw raced through the air, deflecting the plastic tray of food even as he drove his shoulder at the man’s rib cage with a low follow-through. The tray clattered aside, smacking against one of the solid rock walls even as the man in the doorway was knocked backward, losing his footing in a graceless tangle of limbs. As he fell backward, Grant dropped with him, driving a savage punch into his captor’s jaw. His fist connected with a loud crack, and the man’s head bopped backward, his skull knocking against the rocky floor.
Poised over his captor, Grant drew back his arm for another blow, watching as the man’s eyes lost focus and his head rolled from side to side. He was a young man, probably still in his teens, dressed in a simple robe, with a dusting of bristle on his chin where he was encouraging a tidy growth of beard. For a moment, the youth’s head seemed to sway, then his eyes focused on Grant’s and the alarm in them was clear. As the youth opened his mouth, Grant struck him in the face, slapping his head back into the hard flooring once again, striking with the force of a hammer blow. With a pained grunt, the man stopped struggling and slipped into the warm embrace of unconsciousness.
Swiftly, Grant patted down the now-still form. He himself had been stripped of his weapons along with his Kevlar-weave coat when he had been placed in this strange, cavelike cell, just the straps of the wrist holster still in place around his right arm where his Sin Eater handgun had once rested. He had been left in his boots and shadow suit, the latter torn along both arms and his left leg, its armor-like weave damaged but still durable. There was a bump on the back of his head, too, a swelling just below the crown where he had taken a hard knock.
The unconscious body lay motionless as Grant patted the youth down. He held no obvious weapons, just a little pouch tied simply to his waist on a cord. Grant opened it and peered at its contents in the orange-hued light that spilled in from the corridor. The pouch contained a handful of stones, most so small they were little more than grains of sand. Grant had seen these people use the stones as weapons, throwing them from their hands or via little slingshots, but he could locate no slingshot on the guard’s person.
Grant remained there for a moment longer, resting his weight on his foe’s body as he looked warily around him. He peeked outside the cell, and saw that he appeared to be in a dim tunnel carved out of the same rocks as his cell. The ceiling was low, and it arched to a peak in an asymmetrical way, the rough walls scaling down to form a narrow width that could just barely accommodate two men walking abreast. To his left, the tunnel ended abruptly in a wall, while it continued on down to his right, the walls apparently solid, with no signs of any other caves. That didn’t mean spit, Grant knew—he had observed the way they opened the door to his own cell. It was like some kind of flowing rock that slotted perfectly over the entry to the cave, masking its presence with remarkably precise engineering.
The tunnel was lit indifferently by indented patches on the wall that flickered like burning embers. Keeping his movements appreciably silent, Grant rose on tiptoe to examine the nearest of these glowing indentations. The patch appeared to be a clear stone with a sliver of magma burning at its core. Its appearance reminded him of a child’s marble, the way a streak of paint is held in place within the glass.
As he examined the strange light fixture, Grant heard a noise from the end of the tunnel, and immediately recognized the sound of approaching footsteps. He stepped back from the weird light source, his ebony skin and shadow suit helping him blend with the thick shadows of the corridor. The body of the man who had come to feed him was obvious enough if they were looking for it, but it might take them a few seconds to notice it in the semidarkness of the tunnel, half sticking out of the open cell.
Grant watched as two figures appeared at the far end of the tunnel, like dark shadows moving across the volcanic magma lights. They were talking, and while Grant couldn’t hear every word they said, they appeared to be discussing the forthcoming relocation of their captives.
Captives—plural, Grant realized. Then he wasn’t the only one. He had no idea who these people were, but they acted as some kind of prison guards for him and the other captives; that much was obvious. He watched as they came closer, stilling his breathing as they came within earshot.
“Life Camp Zero will welcome them all in time,” the warden figure to the left was saying. “Some of them are beginning to understand already.”
“They all will in time,” the other replied, his voice hoarse, as if he was suffering from a sore throat. “The future’s opening up to us, my brother. It’s all just a matter of t—”
Abruptly, the man stopped talking, and Grant watched warily as he trotted the next few steps forward, having spotted his comrade lying on the rocky floor of the tunnel.
“What the heck’s going on here?” the guard demanded, pressing his fingers to the man’s neck and feeling for a pulse.
Behind him, his companion seemed stunned by the sudden change in tone, and he took a moment to gather his wits, peering into the empty cell where Grant had been held. “That’s Lance, isn’t it?” he said. “He was on food detail….”
“Someone didn’t appreciate dinner,” the first man said, and he looked up along the tunnel, gazing frantically into the darkness.
Grant came at them both then like a runaway train, the reinforced soles of his booted feet slamming against the rock floor as he charged. His hands reached down and grabbed at the one who had checked for his fallen companion’s pulse, wrenching him off the floor even as he struggled to stand up of his own volition. In an instant, Grant had tossed him up against the low ceiling, where his skull smashed with a loud crack. There was something eerily familiar about the move, the thought nagging at Grant for a fraction of a second, like a single flash of lightning, unexpected and bewildering. Then he watched in satisfaction as the guard flew through the air against his partner, both of them crashing to the floor like falling skittles.
Like the one who had come to feed Grant, the two men were dressed in simple clothes, hooded robes with nothing out of the ordinary about them, their dirty uniformity the sole indicator that they shared an allegiance.
“Where am I?” Grant snarled as he loomed over the two struggling guards.
Though physically capable, neither of them appeared to be any great challenge to the huge figure Grant cut. But to his surprise, the second of them—the one at whom he had thrown the first—reared back and launched himself forward, springing from the floor in a flash.
Grant shifted his weight subtly, falling just a little backward as the man lunged at him, swinging a balled fist at his face. Grant dodged, letting the fist swish through the air past him before he reached out and snagged his wrist. With a crack, he snapped the bones, and the guard hissed in pain.
Grant bounced lightly on his heels, readying himself for the next attack. “You want, we can keep this up till I’ve broken both your arms,” he warned. “Or you can just answer my question.”
In response, the man smiled, his dark eyes meeting Grant’s. “I am stone,” he replied.
And then he was upon Grant again, his left arm swinging through the air with phenomenal speed. Grant batted the punch aside, taking a step back as he did so. The man’s first attack may have been of poor quality, but he seemed to be getting into it now—deflecting that second punch had felt like batting aside an iron bar. Furthermore, Grant wanted to finish this quickly before the noise of the scuffle attracted any further attention.
His opponent was hindered by the broken wrist, and his right hand flopped at an uncomfortable angle as he struggled. Still, he seemed incredibly powerful and single-minded in his attack now, fighting more like a machine than a wounded man. Grant ducked, avoiding the arc of the next swinging punch, and drove his hand up and forward, connecting with the man’s jaw with a ram’s-head blow. The guard’s teeth clamped shut with a horrible clack and he staggered back a half step. Grant was already following through, thrusting his left knee into his solar plexus with such swiftness that the man folded in two like a snapped twig. Grant stepped back as his opponent smacked into the wall behind him, then keeled over, a wave of disorientation obviously overwhelming him.
Grant moved swiftly, dismissing his struggling foe as he hurried down the tunnel, leaping over the other one, who was still recovering from being thrown against the ceiling. Boots striking against the hard stone, Grant rushed past the glowing pods of light winking eerily within the wall cavities.
As he ran toward the junction in the tunnel, confused thoughts rattled his mind. Who were these people and how had they trapped him—an ex-Magistrate, of all people? His memory of how he had come to be here was blurry at best, but the torn shadow suit and the evidence of his being stripped of his weapons suggested that he had come here as part of a Cerberus field mission.
He struggled to remember how it had happened. Had he been with Kane? With Brigid? His memory was a closed book to him just now; he couldn’t seem to pinpoint anything at all.
Grant was an ex-Magistrate, trained in the arts of combat. His captors, though fast, appeared to be normal enough. He should not find himself like this, trapped in a cell, with no memory of how he had come to be here. It seemed ludicrous.
At the end of the tunnel, he found himself with two options, left or right. He looked back and forth for just a moment, trying to discern any difference between the choices presented to him. Bland rock walls ill-lit by magma lamps on either side—no choice to speak of.
He was trapped like a rat in a maze, he realized, with no idea which way to turn.
He glanced behind him, saw his foes rolling on the floor. Then he made a decision on instinct, turning right and hurrying down the tunnel, while keeping his movements as quiet as he could. He needed to put as much space as possible between himself and the three people he’d left outside his featureless cell, and the more turns he took, the more difficult he would be to track down.
Right, then left, then another right, keeping up a zigzag pattern, boots slapping against the floor of the empty tunnels carved from rock. An open doorway led him to a stone stairwell, eerily lit by the same magma pods.
Here and there, Grant found low walls, some barely reaching to his knee, and he leaped over these, wondering at their purpose. It seemed that the labyrinthine cavern was a natural feature, adapted for use as a prison block, yet the shifting walls gave him the distinct impression there was more to it than that.
Grant ran on, frequently peering over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t being pursued. Turning a corner, he found himself in a wider tunnel, its ceiling stretching approximately twenty feet above him. He peered up into the gloom, seeing the stalactites that lined the ceiling, scarcely visible in the dull glow of the magma pods lining the walls at irregular intervals. This tunnel stretched a long way, and Grant saw two of the now-familiar hooded figures moving toward him, some distance away. He pulled back, pressing his flank to the wall of the tunnel he had emerged from.
The hooded figures walked toward him, talking in low mumbles. Hidden in the gloomy shadows, Grant prepared himself, bunching his hands into fists. It was hard to think clearly for some reason; he felt as though he was recovering from a hangover. Was it the lack of food, perhaps? Or was something else affecting him here?
Grant was about to pounce upon the robed figures when they turned off the main tunnel, into a side corridor in the opposite wall. The entrance was almost hidden in shadow, the lighting here was so poor.
Grant reached over, tapping his finger against the nearest glowing orb of magma. Close up, it seemed to flicker, as if it were alive. The light became brighter for a moment as the lava within the pod was drawn to his hand, then it ebbed back to its dull glow as he moved away.
“Weird,” he muttered.
Carefully, Grant made his way out into the main tunnel once more, looking all around him. Jutting rock walls were place here and there like hurdles on a race course, low to the stone floor. At one end, perhaps a dozen paces from where he now stood, there was an open archway, the low rocks overhanging in a jagged pattern. From beyond that arch, the eerie orange glow of lava seemed brighter.
With as much stealth as he could muster in his tired body, Grant padded toward the archway. Edging up to it, he put one hand on the wall there and peered at the scene beyond.
Beyond the opening was a large cave, where several more of the hooded figures were moving about. Waist-high ridges of rock cut across the space in two curved lines, with breaks in them here and there. Grant’s attention was drawn to something over in the far left corner of the room. Lightning bolts seemed to flash there, behind a screen of misted glass, and he recognized with a start that it was a mat-trans unit, with fingers of rough stone cladding branching across the armaglass like a creeping vine.
“Where the hell am I?” Grant muttered.
A mat-trans, he thought, turning the fact over in his head. If these people had a mat-trans, then here was a chance for him to escape, to bring help. If he could access that device, he could return to Cerberus and bring his allies to shut down this hellhole. Or he could take a quantum jump to New Edo, call upon his lover, Shizuka, and her fearsome Tigers of Heaven, to back him up as he closed down this perverse prison. He wouldn’t need to program in the correct coordinates for the mat-trans unit—he could take a random leap, then recover at that destination, once he was out of the vipers’ nest. But to access that unit in the first place would mean somehow crossing this room without getting caught. He could wait it out, maybe, skulk in the shadows until such time as an opportunity arose. The prison guards were all dressed in shapeless hooded robes, and if Grant could snag one of these, he could likely pass unchallenged for a short while at least, until word of his escape from his cell became widespread. Or he could fight it out now, take on the eight figures in this cavern, but in his hungry, weakened state that could be suicidal.
In the far corner of the cave, the crackling lightning ceased and the mist inside the mat-trans unit began to dissipate. Another robed figure appeared within it, and Grant watched with interest as the figure stepped forward through the opening door, greeting others in the room with friendly authority.
Grant stepped back from the archway as the new arrival turned in his direction and began walking toward him, with two of his similarly dressed companions in tow. Dammit, they’re coming out here, he thought.
The ex-Magistrate turned, heading for the access tunnel he had recently used, only to spot the three figures he had left by his open cell.
He turned back, looking across at the far side of the tunnel, to a branching corridor where the other figures were disappearing. A moment later, he ran through that doorway and found himself in another rock-walled tunnel. This one ended in a sharp turn, and Grant heard something from the far end as he rushed along it. Pulling up short, he leaned against the wall and peered around the corner. A bank of elevator doors was embedded in the rock. The glistening steel was at odds with the cavernous tunnel, reflecting the glowing pods of magma like fire.
Grant peered behind him for a moment, checking that he wasn’t being followed, before he turned back to examine the situation.
As he stood there, the farthest set of elevator doors slid open and a familiar figure stepped out.
Chapter 5
The wall behind shook Kane as he pressed against it, vibrations carrying from the other side of the tight cave. The wall before him, eight feet away and almost lost in darkness, seemed to be rocking, as if struck by a quake.
Kane watched as the wall began to shift. And then, to his astonishment, it seemed to part before his eyes, more akin to liquid than something solid, like the Red Sea’s fabled parting before Moses. Where once had stood a solid barrier, now there was a gap running from floor to ceiling, easily wide enough for a man to fit through. Light filtered dimly through this impossible doorway, the orange-red of flowing lava.
Kane was about to take a step forward, wondering what new trick this was, when two figures appeared at the edge of the doorway, their features hidden, backlit by the lava flow in the tunnel beyond. “Kane.”
It was a man’s voice, firm and solid, with a slight accent.
“Yes,” Kane replied warily.
The figures strode through the doorway, and Kane saw that both wore hooded robes that hid their features. He waited, pressed back against the wall, assessing the shapes their robes disguised, automatically checking behind them for more people. The one in front was a man, tall and well-built, with wide shoulders and a swagger to his step that spoke of power and confidence. Behind him was a thinner figure, also tall but more shapely—obviously a woman. Behind them, silhouetted in the doorway, Kane noticed a mongrel dog following them with weary disinterest, stopping to sniff at the new doorway and the floor and walls.
“Well, it seems you know me,” Kane said, “but I’m a little at a loss. Care to bring me up to speed?”
The couple stopped before him, and Kane watched as they pushed back their low-hanging hoods, revealing their faces in the dim orange glow of the lava flow beyond the cave. To his surprise, Kane recognized both of them, although it took a moment to place the man’s features.
He had short, dark hair and a hard face with tanned skin. He was in his forties and had grown a beard since Kane last saw him. His right ear was mangled now, but Kane recognized him as one of the farmers who had been indoctrinated by the Annunaki prince Ullikummis in Tenth City, out in the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Kane thought for a moment, struggling to recall the farmer’s name. Dylan, that had been it. But Kane’s team had freed the man, released him from the mind worm that had controlled his thoughts. What the hell was he doing here, holding Kane captive? Was it some kind of misguided revenge? It made no sense.
Standing behind Dylan was a beautiful woman whom Kane had last seen many months ago out in the Snake-fishville desert close to the fishing village of Hope. In her early twenties, the shapely woman had long, dark hair and hazel eyes like pools of chocolate. Her olive skin showed a tan, and there was something altogether entrancing about her, the way she carried herself, the swell of her breasts and the casual sway of her round hips. This beautiful woman was called Rosalia, and when Kane had last seen her she had been a bodyguard in the employ of a group of immoral profiteers who were trading in pirated DNA. Kane’s team had burned down that operation, halting the threat of reborn baronies in the process, but evidently Rosalia herself had escaped. She looked more tired than Kane remembered, tired and drawn. But then, Kane suspected that he, too, looked pretty exhausted just now.
“This is your future, Kane,” Dylan began. “The world changed while you weren’t looking, and you’ve woken up to the new reality. Rejoice.”
Kane smiled in self-deprecation. “New reality, huh? Just how long was I asleep?” he taunted.
Dylan ignored his frivolity. “Your team, Cerberus, waged a war upon the Annunaki,” he stated, as if this fact was commonplace. “The Annunaki were your betters, of course, but you stood up to them, managed to disrupt their plans and, in your limited and infantile way, stymie their progress.”
“Well, I do what I do what I do,” Kane muttered.
“That is to be commended,” Dylan affirmed. “Though primitive, your efforts repelled the hated Overlord Enlil and the others of his coven. But you did not stop him entirely. Enlil still lives and his power base is growing once more, on the banks of the ancient Euphrates.”
This was news to Kane. The last time he had seen Enlil, the lizard-faced monster was trapped aboard an exploding spaceship called Tiamat.
“The future requires men like you,” Dylan continued, “men of good standing, to extinguish Enlil’s threat once and for all.”
Kane ran a hand through his hair as he considered the proposition. “This all sounds good…Dylan, isn’t it?”
The man nodded. “First Priest Dylan of the New Order,” he clarified.
Kane locked eyes with him in challenge. “And whose New Order is that?” he asked, his interest piqued.
“Lord Ullikummis,” Dylan said. “Our savior. He has seen the great works you have done. You, Kane, have faced Enlil when he was Baron Cobalt, Sam the Imperator, and as Enlil himself. And no matter what face he presented, you have always sought to stop him, to strike that face.”
“Well, what can I tell you?” Kane said. “I’m a face striker.”
“Lord Ullikummis studied the history, saw your works,” Dylan repeated.
Kane realized what the man was referring to. Less than two months before, Kane had been part of a team sent to protect an undersea archive called the Ontic Library. According to their information, this archive was the storehouse for the rules that governed reality, hosting a sentient data stream that contained and ordered all of history, down to the smallest minutiae. When Kane’s team had arrived, they’d found Ullikummis working his way through the data, where he’d appeared to be searching for evidence of his mother, Ninlil, whose rebirth had been the source of much conflict between Cerberus and the Annunaki overlords. In accessing those records, Ullikummis would have learned of the role of Cerberus, and the almost archenemy status that existed between Enlil and Kane. Ullikummis himself was an adept assassin, so little wonder that he would see the benefit in recruiting Kane’s skills if he planned to do battle with Enlil and his armies.
“He wishes you to join him,” Dylan concluded.
“You know, I’m really not a big joiner-upper,” Kane replied flippantly, “but you thank the big guy for the offer.”
“The world has changed,” Dylan repeated. “Sooner or later, you will submit. Take this path now, and it will be easy. You will become a lieutenant in his army. You will live like a king when the world is reshaped, with a barony of your own, and all you need do is pledge your fealty to Ullikummis.”
Kane looked away, girding himself, hiding his fist behind him as he bunched it in the shadows. “It sounds so easy, but I’ve got a better idea—that you surrender.”
Dylan almost spit, he was so surprised by the demand. “Surely you can’t be serious, Kane. Look around you. Look at what you’ve been reduced to, you and your people. You’ve lost. You’re lucky that he even kept you alive.”
Kane held the man’s gaze as he spoke. “You and your boss’s little army surrender now,” he snarled, “and I’ll go easy on you.”
Dylan sniggered. “You’re a fool, Kane. A blind fool. You cannot stop the future from happen—”
Kane struck suddenly, swinging his arm forward and punching the man in the face with his balled fist, forty-eight hours of frustration and rage finding primitive release in that one blow. He staggered a step backward in surprise and Kane was on him in that instant, swinging his other fist at Dylan’s face even as the first priest of the New Order tried to fend off the blows.
Rosalia, the woman who had entered with Dylan, moved then, taking two swift paces forward before high kicking Kane in the face with professional detachment. The blow knocked the ex-Magistrate back against the wall, and Kane felt his head spin with nausea as the rusty taste of blood filled his mouth.
Behind the woman, somewhere close to the open door, the dog yipped before assuming a low growling, clearly irritated.
When Kane looked up, he saw the dark hair of Rosalia as she pressed her face close to his. “Don’t be a fool, Magistrate man,” she hissed.
It was good advice, Kane knew. He was weak from lack of food, and his body was still recovering from some battle he could not fully recall. Or perhaps he could. The name Ullikummis had triggered something in his memory, and he was just beginning to remember what had happened in Cerberus’s main corridor.
Kane discarded the nagging memory for the moment, struggling to stay on his feet as he leaned against the rough wall.
Dylan stepped close to him, standing over him but not bothering to strike him. “You will learn the error of your ways in time,” he said, “and you will come to embrace the New Order. The Life Camp is calling you, Kane. You cannot begin to imagine how the world has altered, how different it is becoming.”
The priest turned and paced toward Rosalia, who waited at the doorway, her dark eyes fixed on Kane’s pitiful figure as he slumped against the wall, gingerly fingering his lip, which dripped with blood.
“The world is changing,” Dylan said yet again as he stepped through the door. “Your time—the age of Cerberus—is over.”
Then he was gone, and Rosalia followed him, the dog trotting along at her heels. Kane watched as the strange stone doorway slid back into place, the magma glow of the space beyond obscured by a rock wall. Once more, Kane was locked in a cell with no exit.
“First priest, huh?” he muttered as he wiped at the blood that trickled from his mouth. “Didn’t I know you when you were just the understudy, you self-important prick?”
Chapter 6
Grant hunkered down in the shadows of the tunnel as the silvery elevator doors in the rock wall slid apart just a few feet from him.
Striding from the elevator, much to his surprise, was the familiar form of Edwards, an ex-Magistrate like Grant himself, and a member of the Cerberus outfit. Edwards was tall and broad shouldered, with hair cropped so close to his scalp he appeared almost bald. His lack of hair left his ugly, bullet-bitten right ear on show. Like the other people Grant had seen here, Edwards was disguised in a dark fustian robe, its hood pushed back from his head as he scratched his ruined ear. Grant was relieved to see a friendly face, and he realized immediately that the ex-Magistrate must have had the same idea as him—disguising himself in one of the enemy’s robes so that he could scope out this prison. The thought struck Grant that maybe Edwards was part of a larger rescue party, and he waited for a moment to see if anyone else would emerge from the elevator cage. No such luck.
Or maybe Edwards had come with Grant, whose memory was so scrambled it was hard to recall how he had come to find himself in that cell. Maybe they had infiltrated together and Grant had been captured. Maybe his long-trusted partner, Kane, was somewhere nearby, too.
Grant watched as Edwards reached for the hood of his robe, pulling it down over his face.
“Edwards,” he whispered, stepping out of the shadows to reveal himself to his Cerberus ally.
Edwards turned to look at him, his face an emotionless mask.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” Grant continued, as he took a step forward, keeping his voice low. “I guess they caught us both, huh?”
With the speed of a flinch, Edwards’s right arm snapped out, his fist clenched. Surprised, Grant tried to avoid the blow, but he was too slow. With the solidity of stone, Edwards struck him across the left cheek, sending him lurching against the nearest wall.
“Whoa, whoa! Cool your jets, man,” Grant cried. “It’s me—Grant. I ain’t one of them.”
Edwards’s blue eyes focused on him, and his brows knitted in an angry scowl. “Yes, you are,” he replied, following his first punch with a vicious left cross.
Grant was so surprised, he didn’t have time to avoid that blow, either, and he grunted as Edwards’s knuckles rapped the side of his face, knocking him even farther backward. Grant stumbled as he tried to stay upright.
Edwards’s hood fell back from his face, and before Grant could protest, the shaven-headed figure drove another punch at his skull. Grant deflected it with a grunt, batting the swinging fist away with his outstretched hand.
“Edwards!” Grant cried as the fierce ex-Mag came at him with a savage right jab. “It’s not a trick. It’s me. They had me in a cell but…”
Edwards wasn’t listening, Grant realized. Not exactly renowned for his even temper even in the best of circumstances, his teammate had built up a head of fury now, and was coming at him with the relentlessness of a thunderstorm, driving punch after punch at his face and torso, years of Magistrate training making his body a lethal weapon. Grant held up his left arm, blocking Edwards’s latest blow and turning it against him, making his fist snap back and cuff himself across the nose. Edwards ignored it.
Grant leaped backward, putting a few feet between them. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but you keep up this ruckus and we’re going to get ourselves caught and tossed back in our cells.”
Edwards dipped his head, and for a moment Grant thought he was acknowledging the point he had just made. But no—he suddenly charged again, his boots slapping against the rocky floor. The tunnel was too narrow, Grant realized; he had no chance to step out of this maniac’s way. Even as that fact sank in, Edwards’s shoulder was slamming against his ribs, forcing Grant to give ground. There was nothing for it, he knew. Edwards was out of control, and he would have to fight back, restrain him if the man was to see sense.
They had fought before, when Edwards had been under the influence of the faux god Ullikummis. Grant recalled how Edwards had been singular in his purpose then, too, when Grant had infiltrated Tenth City with Kane and Domi to rescue Edwards’s scouting party. As Brigid had explained it, the architecture of the metropolis had been designed to grip the inhabitants’ minds in stasis, forcing them to do the bidding of Lord Ullikummis. It had been a subtle and strange form of brain control, and the implication that it had been employed across the globe and was inherent in the design of every city ever built by man was worrying, to say the least. But like so much that the Cerberus warriors had encountered since Ullikummis had returned to Earth, the implication remained unexplored while other problems commanded their attention.
Grant stumbled backward once again, almost toppling over one of the strange ridges that broke up the tunnels. He stepped up onto it before kicking out with his other foot, slamming the charging Edwards across his breastbone. His old colleague staggered back, his arms wind-milling as he fought to keep his balance.
As he stepped down from the low stone wall, Grant heard other sounds coming from the tunnel at his back, the noise of hurried footsteps as prison guards were alerted and rushed to grab their escapees. If he hadn’t been sure before now, Grant knew at that moment that he needed to stop this insanity or dispatch Edwards quickly and come back for him later.
“Just listen to me for a moment,” he urged. “Try to think. They have a mat-trans. I saw it. If we work together we can—”
But Edwards didn’t seem to be listening. He had stepped back slightly, and Grant noted how he was lowering his center of gravity in preparation for delivering a nasty double kick. A moment later, Edwards’s right leg swung forward, slamming hard into the cartilage at the back of Grant’s knee before sweeping up to connect with his face. Grant held his position as the first blow struck, not quite placed to pop his kneecap, though Grant knew he had to put that down to luck. He was more concerned by the second blow, anticipating it and deflecting it with both hands.
Edwards’s foot came back down to the floor, but he was already spinning, driving his left knee upward toward Grant’s groin. Grant stepped aside and his opponent’s knee missed him by the smallest of margins.
Then he saw the opening in Edwards’s defense, and he grabbed the material of the man’s tunic in his left hand even as his right fist powered out, striking him across the cheek. Grant cried out as his fist connected, for it felt as if he was striking a solid wall.
“What the hell?” Grant spit as he followed up with his right fist again, swinging it in a powerful cross.
Edwards took the blow to the side of his face without even blinking, the whites of his eyes flashing red in the dim magma glow of the inset lights.
Grant glanced back down the tunnel, saw the approaching forms of the three guards he had dispatched outside his cell. “Dammit, Edwards,” he said, turning back to his old colleague, “there’s no time for this shit. You have to trust me or we’ll both end up dead.”
“Don’t you get it yet?” Edwards snarled in response, his leg kicking upward at Grant’s face. “Haven’t you figured out where you are?”
Grant dropped low as Edwards’s foot brushed past his jaw, kicking out his own foot in a sweep designed to knock Edwards’s legs from under him. The blow struck hard, and Edwards sagged against the far wall of the tunnel, collapsing to his knees with a grunt of pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Grant growled at the ex-Mag, leaping toward Edwards’s toppling form, his fists bunched.
“Look around you,” Edwards growled, indicating the rough walls and the flickering volcanic lights. “You’re in hell now, Grant. And you’re here to stay.”
Grant stopped short, his fist poised to strike Edwards in his wickedly grinning mouth.
The man took advantage of his momentary hesitation, driving his foot up across his foe’s jaw, knocking him backward. Grant cried out as he rolled away, tumbling across the rough tunnel floor beneath the glowing embers of the magma lights. His mind was racing, trying to piece together what Edwards had just told him. Could it possibly be true? Wasn’t hell just some crazy old myth, like all the others he and Kane and Brigid had exposed across the globe? Another primitive belief based on nothing more than ignorance and superstition?
From behind, the three people Grant had come to think of as prison guards hurried toward his fallen form, their feet clattering on the hard floor. The lead figure was pointing at him, his finger jabbing the air.
“Stop him!” he called.
Standing over Grant’s sprawled form, Edwards smiled, his teeth glinting orange in the eerie glow of the volcanic lights. “Already ahead of you,” he assured the prison guards. “This little puke ain’t gonna cause us no more trouble.”
“Sorry, Mojambo,” Grant snarled, “gonna have to rain on your parade here.” Then he leaped from the floor, driving himself at Edwards like a wound spring.
Grant struck out with both fists, slamming one into the underside of the man’s jaw, even as the other pounded into his solar plexus. Edwards yelped with pain, toppling over into a fetal crouch. Behind him, the three hooded guards rushed forward, and Grant turned to face the newcomers.
“Grab him,” one of the guards ordered, “quickly!”
Instantly, Grant went on alert. He struck out blindly with his fist and caught the first of the men across the chest. He followed up with a low punch to his gut, striking with such force that the slender man doubled over, spitting gobs of blood as he tumbled to the floor.
Then the second one was upon him, and Edwards had recovered also, pushing his muscular form off the rough rock floor. Grant spun, booting the first in the face in a roundhouse kick that left him facing the ex-Magistrate again, whom he identified as the more dangerous foe.
As Grant turned, the third guard rushed at him, holding something in his bunched fist. Instinctively, Grant raised his left arm to block the blow, which had been intended for his skull. Flames of pain rushed through his forearm, and Grant screamed in agony, his voice high and strained.
Then Edwards socked him in the jaw, even as Grant tried to block him. It was like being hit in the face by a hammer, such was the power behind Edwards’s punch.
Grant staggered back, found himself stumbling against the rough tunnel wall, his ankles catching on one of those low ridges. Then the guard struck again, and Grant saw that he held a sliver of rock shaped like a blackjack, and was using it to strike out at his foe.
The tunnel before Grant seemed to whirl, the elevator doors to spin, and his vision blurred as he was set upon by the two men. He kicked out blindly, and felt his toe connect with one of his attackers. The dark form fell backward, toppling over and slamming into one of the walls with a thud. But the other one struck Grant again, kicking at his chest and face, forcing his head back against the hard floor of the cavern.
Grant was conscious of how the sounds around him changed, becoming distant as his skull struck the rock again. He reached out, trying to push his opponent away, but couldn’t seem to locate him through the miasma of his fuzzy vision. Then he felt another hammerlike punch, and his head snapped back once more.
And as Grant sank into unconsciousness under the rain of blows, he heard Edwards laugh.
“Welcome to hell, bitch,” his old colleague guffawed. “Enjoy your stay.”
The rock walls…the glowing magma within them…it all seemed to make some perverse kind of sense in that instant. Grant couldn’t recall how he had come to be here, but maybe Edwards was right. Maybe he was trapped in hell. Maybe they all were.
Chapter 7
Brigid waited a long time in the empty cavern, tied to the chair with nothing but the mirror for company. She tried to remember what had happened after she and her companions had arrived at Cerberus via the mat-trans and engaged with the hooded intruders, but every time her mind thought back on it, she found herself distracted by something in the mirror, certain she could see someone stalking toward her from behind. When she looked more closely, she saw it was nothing, just the dark shadows of the cavern playing tricks in the faintly swirling magma lighting.
And yet she could not relax. The mirror was like a ghost thing, an object sent to haunt her, to render her in a permanent state of anxiety. Perhaps that had been Ullikummis’s plan all along, to leave her with this simple torture, this way to seize her mind, her most powerful weapon.
So she watched the mirror, studied her reflection. Her cheeks were dirty, scuffed with grime. There was a crescent-shaped bruise dominating the righthand side of the face in the mirror. She remembered now how the magnetic desk tidy had been thrown at her, smashing her so hard she had felt the ache in her teeth.
But outside the ops room, it had been worse. There had been blood, washing down the walls and across the floor, a ghastly glistening sheet of crimson a half inch thick, enough to turn her stomach. She, Kane, Grant and Domi had stopped dead in their tracks, horrified by that sea of red swirling around their feet.
The lighting of the tunnel-like main corridor had been strobing on and off, illuminating the high rock ceiling in a firework staccato, flashing against the steel girders that held the roof in place above them.
Amid the pulsing lighting, Brigid had seen several figures lying motionless. She’d recognized Henny Johnson lying facedown in the pooling blood, her short dark bob matted against the side of her face. Automatically, Brigid had hurried over to the woman, her boots splashing in the wash of blood.
“Henny?” she’d asked, rolling the woman’s head. “Henny, are you—?”
She’d stopped. Henny’s eyes were open, but there was no acknowledgment on her blood-drenched face. Above her lifeless eyes, a wicked bruise showed across her pale forehead, and there was a clear indentation in her skull above her right eye. She was dead, struck by a stone.
Gently, Brigid had closed Henny’s eyelids, giving the armorer what little dignity she could in her final rest.
“Life spilled,” Domi had said, lifting one bare foot and looking at the blood oozing into the cracks and ridges between her toes. “Nasty shit.”
“What happened to the power?” Brigid asked, glancing to Domi as she stepped away from Henny’s fallen form. Domi had been the only one of them on site when the attack had begun; she was their only hope now of piecing things together.
“They attacked like locusts,” she explained. “Swarmed through the redoubt before we could respond. I watched on the monitors as they surged through the doors like a tidal wave. A tidal wave of people.”
“It makes no sense,” Brigid argued. “How could they just walk in?”
Domi raised her hands in a gesture of defeat, the Detonics Combat Master still clutched in her right fist. “They did—that’s all I know. It was so quick, Brigid. You wouldn’t believe.”
“They must have planned it, then,” Grant growled from where he was checking on one of the rooms that led off from the main artery. The room was empty, but the thin pool of blood was spreading across the floor even here.
Kane turned to Domi as the foursome continued hurrying along the wide corridor, he and Grant checking the side rooms with brutal efficiency in a standard Magistrate sweep pattern. “They must have got to the generator,” he surmised. “That’s why the lights are on the fritz. But I don’t get it—why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“We tried, Kane,” Domi told him hotly. “There are dead people all about—you notice that?”
Kane stopped, looking about him as if for the first time. The blood, the bodies, the ruin of familiar places. It seemed faintly unreal.
“Kane,” Grant called, standing in the doorway of one of the rooms. “You need to see…”
Kane had hurried over to join his partner, Brigid and Domi just a step behind him. Grant was standing at the door to a closet used for storing cleaning supplies. The light inside the cupboard was flashing on and off, making a tinkling note each time it winked on. Inside, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was crouched on the floor, pulling her knees in close to her face. She was sobbing in silence, her shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle each cry.
“Reba?” Kane asked. “DeFore, it’s me. It’s Kane.”
The medic looked up, her brown eyes rimmed with red as she peered through the untidy mess of her blonde hair. DeFore had always taken special care with her hair, forming elaborate creations with the ash blonde tresses, different every day. Kane had never seen her like this.
“Reba?” Kane said again, his voice gentle. “Come on, it’s okay. What happened here? What happened to you?”
As he stepped forward, Kane felt the liquid under his heel, and realized that Reba DeFore was sitting in a pool of blood. She continued to shake as he approached her.
“He’s here,” DeFore said, her voice breathless with fear. “I saw him.”
Brigid was standing in the doorway, listening to their companion’s words. “He who?” she asked.
“The stone man,” DeFore explained.
Brigid could still remember the chilling sense of dread in DeFore’s tone, as if a part of her sanity had been stripped away.
BACK IN THE CAVE, there was movement in the mirror. Brigid shifted in her seat, feeling her tension rise as she warily watched the huge stone figure appear from the shadows. It was Ullikummis, the glowing strands of lava glittering across his charcoal flesh.
Brigid tried to turn, but couldn’t shift her head far enough, and was forced to watch the reflection of the great stone god striding toward her in the dim light. He stopped directly behind her, peering over her head at his own reflection in the mirror.
“You see the mirror?” Ullikummis asked.
Brigid studied the reflection of his craggy stone face looming out of the darkness above her own. He looked damaged, the stonework more ruined than she remembered, as if hit with buckshot, or a dead thing eaten by worms.
“Yes.” She nodded, the word little more than a breath.
She saw the stone colossus move his hands then, reaching behind her until she felt his hard, cool fingers pressing against the nape of her neck.
“What are you doing?” she blurted, unable to keep the fear out of her voice.
“Watch the mirror, Brigid,” Ullikummis replied, “for in it is contained your future.”
Brigid felt something drag along the nape of her neck, bumping over the vertebrae there where it pressed against her skin. It felt like needles, or the feet of an insect playing along her spine.
“Please,” she said, cursing herself for showing weakness in front of her enemy.
Then she felt something jab at her skin, and she stifled a cry of pain. Something was pressing into her, pushing against the flesh at the back of her neck.
“Please stop,” Brigid cried. “Please tell me what—”
Ullikummis met her eyes in the mirror as he worked something at the top of her spine. “You have fought with the Annunaki for the longest time as apekin measure,” he stated, as Brigid felt the hidden thing burrowing into her flesh. “Have you never wondered what it is like to be one of us?”
Brigid screamed as something clawed beneath her flesh, plucking at the ganglion of nerves that wrapped around her spine.
“Are you aware of casements, Brigid?” Ullikummis asked.
She couldn’t answer. Her mouth was frozen open in silent agony as the sharp thing, whatever it was, continued to pull at her beneath her skin.
“Other worlds,” Ullikummis continued, “a theory of alternatives where futures may be played out differently.”
Brigid had heard of the theory, had been privy to it on occasion, where a future with Kane as her lover had been foreseen. She tried to focus her mind on the words Ullikummis was saying in his gravelly tones, tried to reach past the pain as her body struggled against its ties.
“I was taught by a wise Annunaki named Upelluri,” Ullikummis told her, his voice like the grinding of stone. “Upelluri once explained to me how the Annunaki differ from humans by explaining their simple-minded concept of the casements. He said that naive and short-sighted philosophers had misinterpreted them, treating the different vibrational frequencies as one would the rooms of a house. Instead, Upelluri had compared it to looking in a mirror.”
Brigid rocked in place, wailing in pain as the thing burrowed through her spine, seeming to tear at her very being. “Please,” she howled. “Please stop.” Her breath was coming faster and faster, a runaway steam locomotive hurrying to disaster.
Ullikummis reached forward with one hand, clasping her head by the crown, holding it rigidly in place as she tried to squirm, forcing her to look into the mirrored glass.
“You see your reflection,” Ullikummis explained, “and behind it you see the reflection of the cavern beyond, and the cavern in the mirror appears to have depth. But in reality, the whole thing is but a picture on a flat, reflective surface, with no more depth than the surface of a blade of grass.”
Brigid stared at her reflection, at the thing that loomed behind her, even as pain surged across her back like fire.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis instructed.
She tried to shake her head, to tell this nightmarish thing that walked like a man no.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis repeated, “and the pain will pass.”
Her breathing was coming so fast now, the steam engine jumping the tracks and hurtling off the cliff. The pain was oblique, an impossible thing to calculate, to comprehend. She closed her eyes, praying it wasn’t a trick, praying that Ullikummis was not toying with her as a cat toys with a mouse.
“This world,” she heard Ullikummis intone, “this galaxy with all its depth and color and difference—this is but the image on the surface of the mirror to the Annunaki. That was how Upelluri explained your ways to me.”
Brigid waited, eyes closed, feeling the thing rummaging beneath her spine, like a rapist’s hand tugging at the hair at the nape of her neck, plunging her down, down, down. She whined, a gasp coming through clenched teeth.
“Don’t fight,” Ullikummis instructed placidly. “Relax, Brigid.”
Brigid struggled to hold herself still as the burning continued, trying the whole while to pretend it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t there.
“You fought with my father,” Ullikummis said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I saw this when I imbibed time in the Ontic Library. You fought with my father, and others of our race, of the Annunaki.”
In her fixed position in the seat, Brigid squirmed as the pain shifted, reaching down her back like claws.
“I saw there,” Ullikummis continued, “that you have exceptional knowledge for an apekin, a…” he stopped, as if trying to recall the word “…human. And yet you never questioned what it was you fought.”
“Tried,” Brigid replied, the single word coming out as a gasp between her gnashing teeth.
“They acted like you,” Ullikummis said. “My father and the other overlords were aliens to your world, yet they behaved like you, like actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits. Humans in everything but appearance,” he mused, adding as if in afterthought, “and perhaps stamina. Yet you never questioned this.”
“They had technology,” Brigid began, her words strained. “They differed from—”
“No, they did not,” he interrupted. “The Annunaki are beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once. The rules of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle was, and the Annunaki have shamed themselves in portraying it thus.”
Brigid listened, wondering at what Ullikummis was telling her. She recalled travelling to the distant past via a memory trap, and seeing the Annunaki as their slaves, the Igigi, perceived them. They had been beautiful, just as Ullikummis was telling her, shining things that seemed so much more real than the world around them, colored beings amid a landscape of gray. But when she had faced Enlil, Marduk and the others in her role as a Cerberus rebel, they had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Ullikummis called them? Actors on a stage? People dressed in masks and rubber suits like some hokey performance designed for children? Had Brigid and her companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feeble-minded?
As Brigid considered this thought, Ullikummis spoke once more in his gruff, throaty growl. “They started their current cycle as hybrids, half human, half advanced DNA. The human part clings, holding them back. If you saw the true battles between the gods, if you had witnessed the ways they fought across the planes millennia ago, you would never even recognize the creatures you fought as the Annunaki—you would think them a joke.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Brigid asked, baffled.
In reply, Ullikummis gave a single, simple instruction. “Open your eyes, Brigid.”
She did so, found herself staring into her own green eyes in the mirror as the agony in her back abated, faded to nothingness. The mirror was like a drawing, a picture that could be falsified, that owed no one the truth.
Brigid let out a slow breath, felt her heart still pounding against her rib cage. The pain in the back of her neck was gone as if it had never been.
“Do you understand now?” Ullikummis asked, his voice coming from above her head.
Brigid nodded. “I’m beginning to,” she said.
Chapter 8
There was a deep vein of pain in Mariah Falk’s left leg, down at the back of her ankle. A couple months ago, she had been shot there, and now the coldness of the cell was getting into the old wound.
Wincing, she opened her blue eyes and reached down, rubbing her leg to relieve the aching numbness.
Falk was a slender woman in her midforties, with short brown hair streaked with gray. Though not conventionally attractive, she had an ingratiating smile that served to put others at their ease. A highly trained geologist, Mariah was one of the brain trust of experts who had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and now formed a significant part of the Cerberus staff.
Right now, however, she found herself lying on the rocky floor of a cavern, where she had been brought by Ullikummis’s loyal troops. Mariah remembered being transported here, and for the past two days she had waited patiently as the hooded troops had brought her basic meals of watery gruel. The food tasted foul and she suspected there was barely enough nutrition to sustain a person, but what option did she have? She was trapped in a cell with a door that appeared only at her captors’ request, with no warmth, barely any light other than the faint disk in the wall that offered a dull orange glow like a sodium streetlamp.
Ullikummis. He had brought this upon her. In a roundabout way, he had been the one to cause her to get shot in the leg a few months earlier, as well, for it had been during her indoctrination into his regime in Tenth City that Mariah had sustained the wound.
But why her? She wasn’t like Brigid Baptiste or Domi. They were warriors, soldiers in the war against the Annunaki. But Mariah was just a geologist. She had no place being here, locked away in a cell, treated like something inhuman. Soldiers playing soldier games, that’s what this was.
But then Mariah remembered the soldier game she had become embroiled in forty-eight hours earlier, the same way she had remembered it a hundred times before while lying on this cool, unforgiving rock floor.
SHE HAD BEEN SITTING in the canteen waiting for Clem Bryant when it began. The Cerberus canteen was never a lonely place; there was always something going on, some group just coming off shift or wolfing down breakfast—be it six in the morning or six in the evening—prior to starting their shift.
Mariah sat at one of the tables with its shiny, wipe-down plastic top, a book propped open in her hands, watching the world go by. Now and then she would spot someone she knew stride through the swinging doors and head over to the serving area, and they would wave or nod in acknowledgment before she went back to her book.
Sometimes it was weird, Mariah reflected, living in the future. She was a freezie, a refugee from the Manitius moon base who had been woken two centuries after her own time and forced to adapt. Mariah was quite happy to chug along at her own pace, studying rocks and offering insights into the changes in soil structure that had been wrought by the nuclear war of 2001. Still, it was a strange thing to be living in the future. The book she was reading, for instance, was a relic of another age, for the mass production of literature for entertainment had somehow fallen by the wayside during Earth’s darkest days, and the barons who had risen to control America had frowned upon such frivolity. Perhaps, Mariah thought, they had been scared that people might use books to expose the truth, to encourage the free-thinking that the baronial system had almost managed to stamp out. The barons had turned out to be the chrysalis state for the Annunaki overlords—little wonder they were afraid of freethinking and the sharing of ideas. Things could be hidden in books, even in the most innocuous fiction.
Mariah chuckled to herself. Perhaps not this particular fiction, she mused as she admired the cover painting of a handsome, broad-shouldered man in a doctor’s white coat consulting a chart with intensity, while the pretty nurse in the foreground bit her lip and looked concerned. It was a done deal that the two of them would get together just in time before the final page, to live happily ever after—the novel’s pink spine promised that, even if the book itself strived to add tension to the romance.
Mariah looked up, eyeing the door that led into the kitchen area. Did she and Clem have a pink spine on their book? She hoped so. She had been getting closer to him over the past six months or so, spending more time in his company.
Clem Bryant was a fascinating mixture of contradictions. On the one hand he was polite, well-spoken, sophisticated and urbane, able to verbally fence his way out of any situation. On the other, he had a spiritual side that seemed to be at odds with the image he presented to the outside world. The first time Mariah had realized this was when Clem had taken her on a trip—a date, really—to the steps down to the River Ganges, where he had explained to her about washing away one’s sins. Mariah had been taken aback by this, as Clem had always seemed so straight-laced. And yet it seemed to fit with his personality perfectly. He gave off the impression of having an amazing sense of inner peace. A freezie just like Mariah, Clem was an oceanographer by trade, but had found his true vocation as a cook in the Cerberus kitchen.
As Mariah watched idly, the staff door to the kitchen swung open and he came striding toward her, carrying a plate of something in his hand. In his late thirties, Clem was tall and slender, with dark hair swept back from an expanse of forehead, a carefully groomed goatee on his chin. Though he looked typically well-kempt, Clem’s white apron was speckled with cocoa powder. He greeted Mariah with a broad smile as he took the seat opposite hers.
Mariah glanced down at the plate, which he’d placed between them, and saw it contained a little stack of brownies dusted with icing sugar. “Chocolate brownies, Clem?” she asked. “I’ve never seen these on the canteen menu.”
Clem gazed at her, his intelligent blue eyes peering into hers. “Well, one has to shake up the menu now and then or become stale,” he said with a raised eyebrow. “But I require a guinea pig to test the first batch. Any suggestions?”
Mariah held one hand above her head excitedly. “Ooh, pick me, pick me!” she trilled.
He laughed, pushing the plate toward her. As he did so, the doors to the canteen crashed open and one of the Cerberus security detail—a woman called Sela Sinclair—came running into the large room.
“We’re under attack,” she shouted, her eyes wide with fear.
“What th—?” Mariah muttered. But before she or anyone else in the room could respond any further, the doors slammed open on their hinges and seven mysterious figures in hooded robes spread out into the room. The strangers launched small stones out of something held in their palms, and the stones seemed to race through the air, picking up speed as they hurtled toward their victims. Two struck a diner in the back before he could even react, and his head exploded as a third stone smashed through his skull.
Sela Sinclair dropped and spun, raising the M-16 she held and blasting off a half dozen shots in quick succession. The weapon had an underbarrel grenade launcher, a little bulky, but designed for maximum damage. Sela herself was a wiry, lean-muscled, dark-skinned woman with a perpetually fierce expression. A noble warrior and efficient combatant, she was ex-USAF and had been part of the Cerberus Away Teams since their formation.
The woman’s shots struck the lead pair of hooded figures, and the one to her left fell, his robe sweeping up like a sail catching the wind. Then incredibly—impossibly—the figure sat up and pulled himself back to a standing position as if nothing had happened. Mariah felt a lump in her throat as she tried to swallow, watching the scene unfold before her.
Another of the hooded figures swept his hand through the air, unleashing more of the small, sharp stones. They whistled slightly as they whizzed through the air, shattering drinking glasses and embedding themselves in the walls even as quick-thinking Cerberus personnel dived for cover.
Sela rattled off a swift volley of shots, scampering beneath a table even as the hurtling stones hit their next victims. She cursed as she watched several of the diners drop as the pebbles struck them, falling facefirst into their meals or tumbling from their chairs, their eyes wide in shock. The stones were traveling at the speed of bullets, somehow picking up velocity once they had left their wielder’s hand. There was no time for Sela to worry about the victims now; she had to deal with these interlopers who had followed her up the stairs, had to defend as many people as she could.
A number of the Cerberus personnel were battle hardened, and all of them had been trained in basic combat techniques. Immediately, the two-man team closest to Sela were on their feet, asking what they could do.
“Are you armed?” she asked as she leaped between tables, her bullets ripping through the hooded shrouds of the interlopers.
Several people in the room said that they were, producing four pistols and a combat knife between them. As Mariah and Clem watched from the far table, Sela’s shots struck another of the intruders—only for the man in question to continue walking forward, brushing the shells aside like raindrops.
“Come on, Mariah,” Clem urged, leaping from his seat.
“Where are we going?” she asked as the battle raged behind them.
“Kitchen,” he told her, grabbing her wrist.
Mariah hurried to keep up, her feet slipping on the tiled floor of the canteen. “What the heck’s going on?” she asked, glancing back as Clem pulled her through the swinging door into the cooking area. Something else was following the hooded strangers through the door, something tall and bulky, its footsteps shaking the room.
“I don’t know,” Clem answered, hurrying over to the stove and grabbing a bubbling saucepan by its handle. Other cooks were hurrying about the area, wondering what was going on as they heard the gunshots and the barrage of stones pelting the walls.
The word went out immediately—Cerberus was under attack. Several of the kitchen personnel grabbed cooking items, wielding them like weapons as they hurried outside, determined to help. A kitchen hand beside Mariah grabbed a vicious-looking meat cleaver and hurried through the door.
“We should have heard the alarm,” Mariah complained. “Why wasn’t there an alert?”
Clem looked at her anxiously as he adjusted the heat on the hob. “Perhaps these visitors hit the PA system first,” he suggested.
“But there are—” Mariah began, pitching her voice loud over the sound of a grenade being launched outside.
Clem cut her off. “Mariah, I need sugar. Top cupboard.”
She stood there helplessly for a moment, trying to make sense of his request. Outside, the tarantella of bullets and stones rattled against hard surfaces.
“Sugar,” Clem repeated, raising his voice but never sounding angry or rushed.
Mariah opened the cupboard he had indicated, pulled out a large container marked Sugar.
“What are you making?” she asked as she handed it to Bryant. “I don’t think this is really the time to start baking a sweet, Clem.”
“You saw those people,” he reasoned. “They brushed aside Sela’s bullets.” On the stove, the saucepan of boiling water bubbled as he poured sugar into it. “In prison, they call this napalm. Boiling water and sugar—sticks to the skin and burns, just like its namesake.”
Clem dipped a Pyrex mixing jug into the bubbling saucepan and filled it before reaching for a nearby mug with his other hand. “Come on, Mariah. Time to sound the horn and get in the hunt.”
As if caught up in a whirlwind, she grabbed the steaming cup he passed her, and followed him back into the canteen. “Clem, I think you should know something…” she began.
Clem was already through the door to the eatery, the steaming contents of the mixing jug slopping against its sides as he ran. His shoes slid on the tiled floor as he skidded to an abrupt halt, hardly able to believe his eyes. There, striding across the room like some animated cliff face, came Ullikummis, rogue scion of the Annunaki. He was bent down, his misshapen head ducked so as not to scrape against the ceiling, which seemed suddenly low in his presence. The rock lord’s feet slammed against the floor, cracking tiles and leaving dents with each mighty step. Even as Clem watched, a Cerberus staffer called Watts, who had joined Sela’s makeshift army, was cast aside, the Beretta in his hand blasting shots into the ceiling as he was tossed feet over head by a mighty backhand slap from the stone giant.
“Oh, my goodness gracious,” Clem exclaimed, the words coming in an abrupt tumble like a thunder strike.
“That’s what I was about to tell you,” Mariah said as she stood at his elbow. “Ullikummis is here.”
Both Clem and Mariah had encountered the stone-clad Annunaki before. Her unfortunate meeting had occurred in Tenth City and resulted in her being very nearly indoctrinated into Ullikummis’s war cult. Clem had met the rock monstrosity later, during the exploration of the undersea Ontic Library, which housed all history and knowledge. Now they faced him once again, as his hooded troops rushed about him, clearing aside Cerberus personnel in swiftly fought battles.
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James Axler
Earth's darkest days have given way to a new age of war. Launched by an ancient and powerful alien race, the battle has morphed through an aeons-old blueprint for domination.But with it has emerged a resilient group of freedom fighters, true avatars of humanity's fortitude and courage. Now, as mankind's arrogant oppressors engage in their own bitter infighting, they may doom the planet in their personal fires of hatred.Cerberus Redoubt, the rebel base of operations, has fallen under attack. The enemy at the gates is Ullikummis, a scion born of hate, a pawn of his powerful father's game of ultimate manipulation. Kane and the others are his prisoners, losing their free will through his unbreakable mind control. The stone god demands Kane lead his advancing armies as he retakes Earth in the ultimate act of revenge. Ullikummis understands that truth–human or alien–is malleable. And that he will be the ultimate god of the machine, infinite and unstoppable.
“Will it hurt?” Kane asked then, and his question was genuine, no longer a part of his innocent act
Dylan nodded. “The future has to be born, Kane,” he said, “and birth is traumatic. But it will be brief, and the new world awaits you once it’s done. You need never look back, never regret. God will be with you.”
Kane gritted his teeth as he watched Dylan bring the stone closer. Then he felt it brush against his skin, its surface cool, and for a moment the ex-Mag tensed.
“Relax yourself into it,” Dylan advised. “Don’t fight it.”
Dylan pulled his hand back slowly, leaving the stone balanced on Kane’s outstretched arm. The stone was resting against Kane’s wrist now, in the groove that was made there at the heel of his hand. Kane watched as the stone rested there, doing nothing out of the ordinary. And then he felt it move, like an insect’s tiny feet tickling against his wrist, and he almost laughed. The movement was so slight that, in the gloom, he could not really see it. All the same, he felt it, felt as it rolled and turned, inching around in a slow turn at the base of his palm.
Suddenly, Kane felt a strange kind of pain, his skin splitting at his wrist with a burning sensation. It reminded Kane of the way that chapped lips feel in cold weather, a hotness around the wound. He watched as the stone rested at his wrist, watched as it seemed to become slightly smaller. It was sinking, Kane realized—sinking into his flesh, burrowing there like an insect.
Truth Engine
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change.
—James P. Carse
Finite and Infinite Games
The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
“The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change.”
—James P. Carse,
Finite and Infinite Games (1987)
Kane awoke in darkness.
His head ached, a dull sensation as if from too much sleep. He was ravenous, too, and his mouth was dry, so dry it felt as if he had been chewing sand.
Kane felt the rough, cool rock beneath his crumpled form and realized he had no recollection of how he had come to be here, wherever here was. He was lying on his side, the rough surface pressing against him. His muscles ached with a cold burn, like the onset of influenza.
Slowly, Kane rolled onto his back, stifling a groan of pain as his body protested the movement, settled as it was on the rocky ground. He lay there, gazing up into the darkness, his breaths coming out as forced bursts. He tempered his breathing, waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
Kane knew he was a large man, muscular yet well proportioned. He kept his dark hair trimmed short, and more than one person had told him his penetrating, steel-gray eyes seemed full of challenge and fury. His upper body was powerful, with broad shoulders and a firmly defined chest, and his arms and legs were rangy, giving him something of the appearance of a wolf. His was a body suited to stealth and swift movement, a body built to respond. His temperament was like that of a wolf, too. On the one hand, Kane was a natural pack leader, yet on the other, he was a loner who preferred to handle things his own way rather than worry himself with the concerns of others. It was this latter quality that had defined Kane’s life, from his younger years as a Magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville, where he had gone from enforcing the baronial law to rebelling against it, to his subsequent role as a Cerberus exile. The Cerberus rebels had pledged to defend humankind against the insidious threat of a race of aliens called the Annunaki.
Kane was trained in many combat arts, at home with gun and knife, and just as deadly with his fists. In short, he was a magnificent specimen of what man can make of himself.
Or at least he had been.
Now, he lay on the stone floor, his body bruised and aching, scarred even through the armorlike weave of the skintight shadow suit he wore. Whatever had hit him had hit him hard.
At least his breathing was normal now; he could be thankful for that much. His guts seemed to churn, his stomach rumbling in complaint at the lack of sustenance.
“How long have I been here?” Kane wondered aloud. And more to the point, just where the hell was here, anyway?
Lying on his back, his breathing slow and regular, he reached out with his senses, letting what information he could detect flow into him like an empty receptacle. Kane was renowned as a remarkable point man, having an almost Zenlike oneness with his surroundings in any given situation. There was nothing mystical about this ability; it was merely the studied use of his five natural senses with a focus and surety that few people would ever achieve.
He was in a small, enclosed space. He could tell that much without even moving. There was no breeze, just the lightest drafts moving about him. The air seemed normal enough, although it smelled a little of sweat and all those other scents humans create when held in an enclosed space for any length of time. As he realized this, Kane wondered when he had last urinated; his bladder ached dully. His stomach rumbled again with the thought, reminding him of its emptiness.
He could not detect any breathing other than his own, and suspected he was alone.
His eyes were adjusting now, getting used to the darkness he had woken to. There were rocks above him, he saw, and along the walls to either side of him. It seemed he was in a small cave, hidden away from the sun.
His mouth was terribly dry. His tongue felt as if it was swelling up, and his breath had a solid harshness as it passed through his open mouth. He took another breath and could taste the dryness, and something rotten in his throat.
With a grunt of effort, Kane pushed himself up, forced himself into a sitting position. He felt cramps run across his stomach muscles, realized he had been lying in one position for far too long.
“Just how long was I out?” he muttered.
At first his legs did not want to move, and he almost fell as he tried to stand erect. This wasn’t like waking from sleep, Kane noted. It was more as if he had been in some kind of coma. His lack of any immediate memory confirmed that feeling.
Automatically, he reached up and brushed at the wayward strands of hair over his face. He felt the stubble, a rough line running down his jaw, like a bed of tiny needles. He thought back, tried to remember when he had last shaved. It seemed like less than a day ago, just before he and his team had taken the mat-trans leap to Louisiana to fight with the queen of all things dead, but he had at least two days’ growth of beard now, maybe three. It was closer to a beard now than stubble. Somehow time had slipped by without his noticing.
Kane stood, pins and needles running through his toes as he did so, his feet numbed by the boots he wore. His body felt heavy, as if he were waterlogged, an old thing dredged from the river.
Gradually, he made his way to the wall, walking like a geisha girl, with tiny steps as though his feet were bound. He felt sick.
There was so little light, yet he could see the structure looming ahead of him. Kane reached out with his right hand, noticing the absence of weight there for the first time. He had had a Sin Eater stored in a wrist holster, a handgun that reacted to a specific flinch of tendons to deliver the formidable weapon straight into the user’s grip. The blaster was gone. Kane ran his left hand along his arm, felt the torn strands of leather there, the remnants of the holster that had been violently ripped from him, stripped away at some point he could no longer recall.
Then Kane pushed his fingers against the wall before him, pressed his palm flat against it. It was cold and rough like the floor and the ceiling.
He walked along three paces until he found another rock wall in the gloom, their meeting point creating a right-angle corner. He was in a cavern, then, a cave of some sort, just as he had thought.
“Where the hell am I?” Kane muttered as he peered around, his eyes struggling to make sense of the darkness.
Systematically, he ran his hand along the wall, staggering in slow steps, feeling sensations gradually return to the numb muscles of his legs and feet.
It appeared to be a cave. Yet there didn’t seem to be an exit, which made little sense. How had he come to be here, in a cave with no door?
There was the interphaser, of course. Like the mat-trans, the interphaser worked to transport people instantaneously through the quantum ether to new locations. Had he used an interphaser to get here?
Kane knelt down, sweeping his hands across the rough floor, brushing the sand and dust as he sought the little pyramidal shape of the interphaser unit. It wasn’t here. Nothing was here. Just him and the clothes he wore, in a room without a door.
His stomach grumbled again as he struggled back to a standing position, peering around him at the dark cavern. This was it. He was alone, trapped in an impossible space.
So, is this how it ends, Kane asked himself, or simply how it begins?
Chapter 2
Brigid Baptiste’s eyelids fluttered open, revealing two emerald eyes. Her eye color was so vivid it seemed almost luminous in the darkness, like a cat’s eyes. Even as her eyes flickered open, Brigid winced, feeling the pain spike across the left side of her face. Something had hit her at some point, and the ache was still there when she moved.
In her late twenties, Brigid was a striking woman. Her figure was trim and athletic, its curves enhanced by the tight-fitting shadow suit she wore as she sat on the single chair in the darkened room. Her green eyes peered out of a beautiful pale face with a high forehead that signified intelligence, while her full lips promised a more sensuous side. Her face was framed by a cascading wave of red curls that reached midway down her back. Her usually flawless skin was mussed and dirty right now, and a bruise had formed around her left eye socket, an angry yellow crescent from cheek to brow.
Warily, Brigid moved her head, looking about her. She was in an enclosed space, but it was too dark to distinguish much else. The ceiling was high, reaching at least two stories above her, and the walls looked rough in the semidarkness, though it was hard to discern details.
She tried to stand, only to find she was trapped in places, her arms restrained behind her, her ankles bound somehow to the chair. There was a deep ache in her shoulders, she realized as she tried to shift; she had been here a long time, locked in the same position.
But where was here? Brigid thought back, trying to remember how she had come to be in this place. Even in the poor light, the walls looked rough, uneven, and Brigid guessed they had been carved from rock, probably some natural formation. There was a slight breeze, too, the most miniscule movement of cool air about her face, making her skin ripple with goose bumps.
For a moment, the beautiful, red-haired warrior struggled, working through the dull ache in her limbs as she pulled against her bonds. Though she could move her head, she seemed to be stuck fast. Her arms were pulled down and back, held behind her with some kind of wrist ties. Her legs, too, were fastened in place, bound at her ankles to the legs of the chair. It was hard to see what the chair looked like. It felt hard and unforgiving, with no padding to provide support or comfort.
As she struggled against the bonds, her grunts echoing in the still cavern, Brigid became aware of another presence. She stopped, automatically quieting her breathing as she scanned the area about her.
She had missed it the first time, and she almost looked right past it again, her gaze gliding over the shape poised before the rocky wall. But there was a figure carved of rock and almost perfectly camouflaged, its form visible only because of the uneven shadows it cast. It stood over to her right, and Brigid kept her head straight ahead, peering at the form from the corner of her eye so as not to give herself away. It was hard to decipher, for the thing was so well hidden it seemed almost to be encoded into the rock wall itself. She traced its shadows, the way they played at the edges of the bulky form, which was tall, seven feet or more. Brigid realized that with the ceiling so high, it was hard to judge the thing’s height accurately, but she also knew what it looked like—for she had seen it before.
She thought for a moment, recalling her previous encounter with this would-be god of stone. It gave no reaction to her waking, appeared to be dormant itself.
“I can see you,” Brigid announced, her voice like a bell in the quietness of the room.
She waited, but there was no response from the figure in the darkness.
Warily, Brigid turned her head toward the figure hidden in the shadows. It had been easier, somehow, to see it from the corner of her eye, like a trick of the light. Brigid rolled her head, working at the stiffness in her neck as she tried to assess the figure. She estimated that it was standing ten feet away from her, its back pressed against the wall.
“I said I can see you,” Brigid repeated, “Lord Ullikummis.”
For a moment there was no reply, and she wondered if the great stone being was asleep, or perhaps dead. Then, as she watched, a tracery of fire seemed to ignite across the figure in thin streaks, each orange glow affirming the shape of the majestic form and lighting the cavern around it.
Brigid steeled herself as the figure moved, stepping away from the rock wall with one powerful stride. His legs, like his body, appeared to be carved from stone, with rivulets of lava glowing through cracks in their dark, charcoal surface. He had no feet; his legs just seemed to widen at the base like the trunks of mighty oak trees. Each step was heavy, a stride with purpose, such was the gravity that this creature projected in his fearsome movements. He was humanoid in form, standing a full eight feet tall, but appeared fashioned from rock—not like a statue, but jagged and rough, like something weathered by the elements, a confluence of stones smashed together by the environment into this horrifying, nightmarish form. Two thick ridges reached up from his shoulders, curving inward toward his head like splayed antlers. The head itself was a rough, malformed thing, misshapen and awkward, with just the suggestion of features hacked into its hoary surface.
Brigid found she was holding her breath as the hulking man-thing stepped closer. Though she had seen this monster several times before, the immensity of his form remained intimidating.
Then he stopped before her, at last opening his eyes—two glowing portals of magma within his rock face—to stare at her.
“You seem ill at ease, Brigid,” the figure said, and his voice was like two rock plates grinding together. As he spoke, his open mouth revealed more magma, glowing like a beacon in the darkness of the cavern.
This creature was Ullikummis, dishonored son of Enlil of the Annunaki. Thousands of years before, the Annunaki, a lizardlike race, had come to Earth in an effort to stave off the boredom that their near-immortal lives and absolute knowledge engendered. Blessed with infinitely superior technology and a callous disregard for other species, they had appeared as gods to the primitive peoples here, and the stories of their interfamily squabbles had become the stuff of mythology to the lowly indigenous species called man. The Annunaki had walked the Earth for hundreds of years, basking in the glory of their false-idol status, treating humankind as their personal playthings, to do with as they wished.
Their reign on Earth lasted until they ultimately became bored with the deception. Soon after, Overlord Enlil, a malicious and selfish creature even by Annunaki standards, set out to destroy the Earth with a great flood, sweeping away all evidence of mankind’s existence and leaving the planet as one would a fallow field, ready for renewal in the next season. However, Enlil’s purging failed, thanks primarily to the intervention of his own brother, Enki, who had become soft-hearted and felt that humankind’s tenacity deserved rewarding. Since then, the Annunaki had been watching humans and guiding their destiny, manipulating them from the shadows, until finally revealing their presence on the Earth less than two years ago.
Since then, the Annunaki overlords had been driven back into hiding through a combination of their own squabbles and the efforts of a brave band of human warriors known as the Cerberus rebels. But the threat had left a terrible legacy in the form of Ullikummis.
The son of Enlil, Ullikummis had been genetically altered so that he no longer resembled the reptilian race he represented. Described in ancient records as a sentient stone pillar, Ullikummis had been conceived purely to act as his father’s personal assassin, trained from birth in the arts of killing, that he might dethrone Teshub, the so-called god of the sky. When Ullikummis had been shanghaied by a group of Annunaki led by Enki, Enlil’s kindhearted brother, Enlil had been forced to disown his son to distance himself from the assassination plot and save face. Thus, Ullikummis had been banished to the stars by his own father’s hand, where he took a slow orbit through the Milky Way in the stone prison of a meteor.
Three months ago, Ullikummis had returned to Earth in a fantastic meteor shower that had all but destroyed Cerberus’s orbiting satellite communications arrays. By the time the Cerberus techs had their monitoring equipment up and running again, the rogue stone god had taken his first steps in building an army to hunt down and destroy his father, who remained in hiding on Earth. Accompanied by Cerberus personnel Falk and Edwards, Brigid Baptiste had been part of the three-person field team sent to investigate the crash site of Ullikummis’s meteor prison, and she had found herself recruited into a nightmarish training camp called Tenth City, where only the strongest could survive. Within that training camp, Mariah Falk had almost committed suicide at the stone god’s command, while Edwards had temporarily lost his mind. With the help of her Cerberus teammates Kane, Grant and Domi, Brigid and her field team had been freed and the training camp destroyed. Ullikummis, however, had somehow evaded death, his whereabouts undetected by the Cerberus rebels.
The hideous stone god had briefly reappeared while Brigid, Kane and Grant investigated an undersea library along with oceanographer Clem Bryant, but they had seen nothing of Ullikummis since then.
Brigid’s mind raced back, trying to recall how she had ended up here, in this cave, trapped before the brooding form of the stone god. Her mind began to fill in the blanks, but before she could sort it out, Ullikummis reached for her with one of his mighty stone hands and tenderly brushed his rock fingers down her left cheek. They were cold to the touch and rough, like the stone they resembled.
“You were hurt,” Ullikummis said, his uncanny eyes glowing more brightly for just a moment. “Does it hurt still?”
Brigid pondered the question, wondering if this was some kind of trick. Finally, she spoke. “Yes,” she admitted. “It hurts a little.”
“It is nothing,” Ullikummis assured her. “The human form can endure less than the Annunaki, but this wound is but a trifling thing. Do you wish to see it?”
Brigid’s eyes met her captor’s, if that was truly what he was, and she nodded very slowly as his fingers remained pressed against her skin. “Please,” she said.
Ullikummis pulled his hand back, and began to stride away across the space behind her. She waited, bound to the chair, and her heart raced in fear as she heard the creature of living rock pacing across the stone floor, his steps echoing like hammer blows.
As Ullikummis’s mighty footsteps faded into the distance, Brigid took a moment to gather her thoughts. She had a remarkable gift of eidetic recollection, more popularly known as a photographic memory. Brigid was able to remember the smallest details of anything she had witnessed. The last she could recall, she had been with the other members of CAT Alpha—Kane and Grant—as their atoms were digitized and sent across the quantum ether via the mat-trans unit, a teleportation device in use by the Cerberus operation. The three of them had emerged in their home base of the Cerberus redoubt to a scene of carnage. The overhead lighting had been sparking, and the nearest of the computers was shattered, blood smeared across the shards of its monitor screen. There had been shouting, too, and gunfire, and Brigid and her companions had been forced to assess the situation in less than two seconds, realizing their help was needed urgently.
Eight hooded strangers were in the operations room, where the mat-trans unit was located, and they were in the process of destroying the equipment there while Cerberus personnel tried to fend them off. As Brigid scanned the area, Domi’s pure white albino form had dropped from an overhead vent and leaped across the room, bouncing from work surface to work surface like streaking lightning as a stream of bullets—were they bullets?—whipped through the air at her. Beside Brigid, Kane was already drawing his Sin Eater pistol, the 18-inch muzzle of the weapon unfolding in his hand as it was propelled from its hiding place beneath the sleeve of his jacket.
Agile and girlish, Domi blasted a stream of shots from her Detonics Combat Master, firing behind her as she leaped behind one of the computer terminals. In a second, the glass screen of the terminal shattered as one of the enemy’s projectiles struck it, shards bursting across the desk as the circuits fizzled and died.
Grant was still in the doorway to the mat-trans chamber behind Brigid, and she heard him call out one word—“Duck!”—before he began picking off the hooded strangers with rapid blasts from his own Sin Eater weapon, even as Kane hurried to help Domi.
Brigid was in motion then, too, reaching for her own blaster where it jounced against the swell of her hip. She selected her first targets as, bizarrely, a stream of what appeared to be pebbles raced through the air toward her at high speed. As soon as her TP-9 had cleared its holster, Brigid snapped off her first burst of return fire, felling one of the mysterious strangers, who wore a hood to cover his features. The figure went down, tumbling backward as the bullets struck his body.
Brigid was turning, finding her second target even as her semiautomatic shook in her hand with recoil. But as she spun she noticed something unnerving from the corner of her eye: the figure she had just shot was pulling himself up off the ground, pushing the hood from his face. He was still alive….
Back in the cave, Ullikummis’s footsteps grew loud once more, and Brigid focused her thoughts on the present. The looming stone creature came around to stand before her, and he held a rectangular object almost five feet in length. Brigid watched as the stone colossus set it before her, turning it to face her. It was a freestanding, full-length mirror with a swivel mechanism to adjust its tilt.
“Are you able to see?” Ullikummis asked, changing the angle as he spoke.
Brigid peered at her reflection in the mirror, saw the yellow crescent on her cheek despite the gloom. “Yes,” she said.
Nodding sullenly, Ullikummis stood back, and he seemed to wait patiently while Brigid examined her face in the mirror. It wasn’t quite a black eye; the blow had been just a little too low for that. Instead, it had left a nasty bruise, along with some swelling, but there didn’t appear to be a cut or abrasion.
Brigid looked up into the glowing orbs of Ullikummis’s eyes. “Why am I here?” she asked. “And where are we?”
He looked back at her, his face an expressionless mask of rock, like a cliff ruined by erosion. “In time,” he replied, in that terrible voice of grinding stones. And that was all he said.
Brigid watched as Ullikummis walked past her once more, watched his retreat reflected in the mirror. The glowing veins that webbed his body faded as he disappeared into the shadows of the cave behind her, the resounding strikes of his footsteps fading to nothingness.
Brigid watched the reflection of the blackness for a long time.
Chapter 3
Kane struggled to order his thoughts as he stood alone in the cold-walled cavern, trying to remember how he had arrived there. It was hard to think straight. His head ached, not with a throbbing but with a tautness that felt like a clenched fist, as if somehow his hair was too tightly woven into his scalp.
His mouth was still horribly dry, and the ex-Magistrate was conscious that he was woefully dehydrated. His stomach hurt, too, hurt with emptiness.
Kane pushed past the pain in his skull, forced himself to examine more closely the space he found himself in. Pacing it out, Kane estimated it to be a rectangular shape of approximately eight feet by six—small but accommodating so long as he lay on the floor the right way. The floor itself was hard, unforgiving rock, but there was an uneven carpet of sand, enough to cushion the contours of his body and so provide a little comfort while he slept.
The sand reminded Kane yet again of the dryness in his mouth, but there was nothing to drink here; it was just a cave, empty but for its lone occupant—himself. Cold, too, since his shadow suit’s regulated environment had somehow failed.
“It’s a prison,” Kane muttered. “I’m in a cell.”
But who had put him here and why? No, those questions weren’t important, not yet. Those were questions that Kane could address when he needed to. Right now, he needed to find the answer to a far more fundamental question—how had they put him here? Because if he could figure that out he might have a chance to escape.
The room was sealed, and more than that, it was solid. The walls reached all the way around with no signs of a break, he discovered as he ran his fingers slowly along them, high and low. But his captors had managed to place him inside, so there must be a way out; there had to be.
Kane peered up then, the thought occurring to him with slow inevitability. An oubliette—that could be it. A dungeon with its access point in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner. He had seen them before and admired the simplicity of the design, imprisoning a man merely by removing the ladder that led to his freedom.
But no. As far as he could see in the gloom of the cavern, there was nothing up there, just more rock running across the ceiling, like clouds on an overcast day. He reached up, found that if he stretched he could just scrape the tips of his fingers against the stone. It seemed solid enough, not a hologram or an optical illusion. Bending his knees, Kane sprang into the air, slapping his palm against the ceiling. It was solid, giving back no echo to suggest any hollowness beyond.
For the moment, at least, he was trapped.
Kane moved to a corner of the room, unzipped his fly and relieved himself, the pressure in his bladder finally insisting upon release. The stench of his own urine came to him, stronger than he expected. After he was done, he covered the puddle of urine with sand like a cat. He wondered if he was being foolish, if this was the only liquid he would get here, and that, no matter how repellent the thought, he would need to salvage it to combat dehydration.
No, Kane told himself. If they wanted to kill me they would have done so. I’m alive because someone wanted me to stay alive.
But the thought didn’t ring entirely true. To end up here, he had been defeated, and it was possible that his foe, whoever that was, had such a callous disregard of his opponents that he had locked Kane here to starve, a slow ordeal that would lead to madness and death.
Kane’s nose wrinkled at the acrid stench of urine, and he sat as far from the damp sand as he could, resting his back against the cold rock wall. With no way in or out, he let his thoughts drift, struggling to recall what had happened, to piece together how he had ended up in this pitiful predicament.
They had returned from Louisiana, he remembered that much….
THE FOG AROUND THEM was beginning to clear, and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops center in Montana, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling transport mist.
“Good to be home,” Kane said, brushing back his wet hair.
Brigid Baptiste nodded as she tapped in the code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. The Cerberus redoubt had served as the hub of teleportation research and development for over two hundred years.
Brigid’s hair clung to her face, still damp from her encounter with the queen of all things dead in the Louisiana redoubt. “I need a shower,” she told Kane as the door slid open before her. “A warm one this time, with soap.”
“Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed his aching shoulder.
A few years older than Kane, Grant was a behemoth of a man, tall with wide shoulders and ebony skin. His muscles strained at the weave of his shadow suit. A Kevlar trench coat hugged his shoulders and draped down like a bat’s wings over his legs. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp and he wore a gunslinger’s drooping mustache over his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville. In fact, he had been Kane’s partner in the Magistrate Division, and over the years the two had fallen into an uncanny simpatico relationship during combat. Grant had been recruited into the Cerberus operation along with Kane when the two of them had gone rogue from the barony, after learning it threatened the well-being and natural progression of humankind. They seemed to be somehow closer than just combat partners or friends—they were more like brothers.
Grant rolled his shoulder as he followed Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room with its huge Mercator map dominating the far wall. What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.
Something had paid Cerberus a visit.
Something bad.
The room was a mess. The overhead lighting flickered and flashed. The two neat aisles of computer terminals were wrecked, and Kane saw the glass of monitor screens littering the floor as he dodged beneath a hail of bullets launched at him and his companions. No, not bullets, he realized as they rattled against the desk he had dodged behind—they were tiny chips of rock flying through the air.
Already Kane was moving, his hand preparing to receive the Sin Eater pistol he wore in a wrist rig on his right arm. The fabled sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the compact pistol elongated to its full length of eighteen inches as it was powered into his waiting palm. Once it was there, Kane’s index finger met the gun’s guardless trigger, reeling off a swift burst of fire at the hooded interlopers in the room. A storm of 9 mm titanium-coated bullets sped across the ops room as Kane darted for cover, trusting his colleagues to do the same. His attack was met with another hail of stones.
When the rain of tiny rocks ceased, he popped his head up over the side of the desk and began assessing his targets systematically. Kane counted eight strangers in an eye blink, all of them dressed in dirty cowls that covered their heads like a monk’s habit. They were hurrying through the room, striking out at the last few Cerberus personnel who opposed them as they smashed the remaining computer terminals, using clubs or just their fists. Even as Kane watched, the blond-haired comms op, Beth Delaney, was knocked to the floor by a savage, backhanded slap from one of the strangers. She toppled over with a loud crack of breaking bones.
Through the chaos, Kane spotted his colleague Domi leaping for cover, her agile, alabaster form flying through the air like some crazed jack-in-the-box.
“Domi, what’s going on?” he demanded.
Ten feet ahead of him, the albino girl looked down the aisle, pinpointing Kane by his voice. A true child of the Outlands, she was a strange-looking individual, barely five feet tall with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair. Her tiny frame was more like a teenage girl’s than a woman’s, her small, pert breasts pushing against her maroon crop top. Besides the top, Domi had on a pair of abbreviated shorts pulled high at the hip and leaving the full length of her dazzling white legs exposed. As was her habit, she was barefoot. The albino woman’s weird, crimson eyes flashed as they met Kane’s down the length of the computer aisle. “Took your sweet time getting here, Kane,” she shouted. “We’re under attack! They took Lakesh.”
“Dammit!” Kane spit.
Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, known to his friends as Lakesh, was Domi’s lover, and the founder of the Cerberus operation. A fabled physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh was a freezie—which was to say, he had been born over two hundred years ago, in the twentieth century, bringing his incredible knowledge of the mat-trans system, along with a sense of freedom almost forgotten by humankind, here to the twenty-third century. Lakesh had helped establish the Cerberus operation, and had been there with Kane at the start. While their relationship had not always been one of absolute trust, Kane respected the man and knew they needed to have him in command. Moreover, Lakesh’s exceptional knowledge could prove to be a weapon in enemy hands. Leaving him hostage to the machinations of these mysterious interlopers could very well prove the end of the Cerberus facility as Kane knew it.
He became aware of other gunshots behind him, and he turned to see Grant vaulting over a nearby desk and meeting one of the hooded strangers with both feet, knocking the creep backward.
“We were out in the field,” Kane explained. “No one alerted us to—”
Domi cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “There was no time,” she explained. “These weirdos seemed to come from nowhere. Screwed with the power, screwed with our comms.”
“How did they get in?” Kane asked, mystified. The mountaintop redoubt was well protected from intruders, so a force the size Domi’s words implied should not have been able to waltz in easily.
She glared back at him, a snarl appearing on her alabaster lips. “What am I, the answer girl?”
“Hold that thought,” Kane instructed as he spotted one of the strange robed figures scrambling toward him from the other side of the desk. Kane leaped from cover, blasting off a stream of shots at the approaching intruder, felling him. The stranger toppled as the bullets struck, crashing over a desk before landing in a heap. A little way along, Kane saw Domi reappear from her own hiding spot and snap off three quick shots at another of their foes, while behind them both, Brigid Baptiste was putting up her own defense with her TP-9 semiautomatic.
“Any idea who they are?” Kane asked.
“No, no and no,” Domi snapped, as if guessing his next questions. Then she did the strangest thing—leaped over the desk before her, the Detonics Combat Master spitting fire at her target even as he fell.
“He’s down,” Kane called as he ran to join her, leaping over the fallen body of a Cerberus tech. “No need to expose yourself.”
“No, Kane, you not know,” Domi explained, slipping into her strange, clipped Outlander patois as she glared at him over her shoulder.
But he did. In that moment, he saw the man Domi had felled in a volley of bullets get up, and brush himself off as if her shots had meant nothing. Instantly, a feeling of dread gripping him, Kane turned to see his own foe—the one he had shot and presumably killed—struggle back up off the desk, return to a standing position, the spent bullets dropping from his robe like snowflakes.
“What are they—armored or undead?” Kane asked as he drilled the figure again with 9 mm bullets. “’Cause I have had my fill of undead for one day.”
“Not undead,” Domi told him. “But dead inside. Nothing hurts them.”
Kane spun as another shower of stones hurtled toward him, and he saw now that their enemies were using simple slingshots to launch the projectiles at exceptional speed. It was almost as if the stones themselves could gather speed as they cut through the air. Sharp edges slapped at the protective weave of the shadow suit Kane wore beneath his torn denim jacket as he held his arm up to protect his face. The stones ripped his sleeve, sending pale blue threads flying like seeds blown from a dandelion. Kane pulled the remains away, tossing them aside. When he drew his arm back, he saw that the superstrong fiber of the shadow suit beneath it was torn, and needle-thin streaks of blood ran through it where his bare skin had been exposed. The weave of his suit was akin to armor, so whatever these people were throwing was exceptionally tough.
Kane ran at the hooded stranger who had just thrown the wad of stones at him, vaulting over a desk and bringing his Sin Eater to bear on the woman as she reloaded her catapult from a small pouch tied to her belt. He snapped off another shot as she placed the ammunition in the sling she held poised, and her own shot went wide.
Across the room, Grant was involved in his own scrap with one of the intruders, shoving the hooded man’s fist aside before blasting him in the face with his Sin Eater. His opponent collapsed, a plume of dark smoke pouring from beneath his hood.
“You hit them close enough,” Grant announced, “and they’ll go down.” He didn’t need to shout. Instead, he had automatically engaged the hidden subdermal Commtact unit that was connected to his mastoid bone.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid. Once the pintles 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 user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. Grant, Kane and the other members of the Cerberus field teams had Commtacts surgically embedded beneath their skin, a relatively minor operation that allowed them to keep in real-time contact in any given situation.
Kane picked up on Grant’s advice, jumping over the nearest desk as another volley of stones whizzed across the room at him. He was on the slingshot bearer in an instant, high kicking the guy in the face. It felt like kicking a wall, and Kane staggered back with a grunt.
The man stared at him, eyes burning from beneath his hood. “This is the future,” he stated, his voice eerily calm. “Submit.”
Kane thrust his right fist forward, slamming it up into the stranger’s gut. “Sorry, that ain’t going to work for me, buckaroo,” he growled as he unleashed a burst of bullets into him.
The man keeled over as the blast took him, dropping to the floor like a discarded bag of compost even as the woman Kane had just shot clambered to a standing position behind him.
“Point-blank them,” Kane instructed, looking about him to catch the attention of the other Cerberus personnel in the room. “It’s the best way.”
Then he was back facing the woman who had tossed stones at him just a half minute before, the one he’d thought he had dispatched. Kane whipped the Sin Eater up, driving it toward her face, but she moved fast in the flickering overhead lights, slapping the muzzle of the blaster aside even as Kane squeezed the trigger.
His shots went wide and she drove a powerful fist at his jaw, connecting with such force that his ears rang. When Kane looked up, the woman’s hood had dropped back and he saw her face for the first time. She was older than he had expected, with lined skin and crow’s feet around her eyes—probably in her late forties or early fifties. There was a blister dead center on her forehead, and Kane found his attention drawn to its ugliness for a distracting instant.
The woman grabbed a small lamp off the nearest desk, its cable sparking as she wrenched it from the socket and swung it at Kane’s head. He regained his composure just in time, using the muzzle of his Sin Eater to deflect the projectile. Then he drove the pistol forward and blasted a stream of bullets into the woman’s throat and upward, peppering her face. He did not like doing this, but there was something eerily wrong with these interlopers, who acted with such single-mindedness that they seemed to be automatons.
Somewhere behind Kane, Brigid Baptiste had found herself trapped between two of the slingshot-wielding strangers. As the one to her left flung a handful of tiny stones at her face, she dropped to her knees, feeling them pull at her hair as she managed to duck just in time. The stones struck the other attacker like buckshot, knocking him to the floor. Then Brigid kicked out, striking the first man behind the ankle and bringing him to the ground. As he fell, Brigid whipped up her semiautomatic, blasting a stuttering burst of bullets into his torso.
Behind her, a third assailant had grabbed something from one of the debris-strewed desks, and she turned just in time to see him throw it at her head. It was a two-inch-high, circular object—a magnetic desk tidy designed to hold paper clips and drawing pins while they weren’t being used. Brigid reared back as the thing hurtled toward her, cried out as it struck her just beneath her left eye.
She fell backward, and for a moment her vision swam. She ignored that, bringing up the TP-9 and peppering her attacker with bullets as he charged at her. The man fell forward, his long robes wrapping around his legs as he tumbled. Brigid leaped over his fallen body, hurrying across the room even as another of the strangers lunged for her from his position on the floor.
Ahead of the titian-haired former archivist, another of the strange hooded figures had plucked a slingshot from his robe, and he leveled it at Brigid, preparing to shoot more grit at her. Suddenly, there was a blur of movement as Grant thrust his elbow into the interloper’s back, jabbing at his kidney. Grant snarled in pain as he connected, but the hooded stranger fell, crashing into a wall.
“Either they’re wearing armor,” Grant theorized as Brigid joined him at the next aisle of desks, “or they aren’t human.”
“They’re certainly strong,” she agreed. “Could they be some new form of Nephilim?”
“Shit knows,” Grant spit. “Let’s keep moving.”
Nearby, Kane was looking around the room, with Domi at his side. Among them, the foursome had at last managed to dispatch all eight of the invaders.
Farrell lay in a pool of blood on the floor, his gold hoop earring glistening crimson. Part of the Cerberus team, Farrell sported a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee. Right now, his face was bruised and bloodied, and his eyes were closed.
“Farrell?” Kane demanded. “You okay?”
His teammate groaned, and Kane checked him more closely. He had a nasty cut at the back of his head where he had been coldcocked, but the wound appeared to have stopped pouring blood.
“You’ll be okay,” Kane announced, since his Magistrate training extended to basic medical knowledge. Farrell wasn’t listening; he was at best semiconscious.
Across the aisle, Brigid and Grant did a similar check on the prone form of Beth Delaney. There was an ugly slash across her face, but she seemed otherwise okay.
“We have to find Lakesh,” Domi insisted, hurrying toward the doors beneath the Mercator map, which covered an entire wall of the ops center. Somehow, the streams of light that usually snaked across the map had all been replaced with an eerie red glow.
Kane glanced about him. There were several other Cerberus people in the room, and he had a nasty feeling that at least two of them weren’t breathing. But Domi was right. They needed to keep moving, to worry about the living first. If Lakesh was still here somewhere, and still alive, then it looked as if it was up to Kane’s makeshift army to save him.
The foursome hurried through the doors, emerging into the redoubt’s central corridor. The hallway appeared to be carved through the rock of the mountain, its high ceiling held in place by a network of thick metal girders.
Nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting out there now, on the other side of the door.
KANE OPENED HIS EYES, his breath coming with a suddenness that seemed to snap him out of his reverie. He was sitting on the floor of the cavern that had become his cell, his back pressed against the coolness of the rock wall, and for a moment he wondered just what it was that had shocked him so.
Then he heard it again.
There was a noise off to his left, coming from the wall itself. He strained, trying to make out what the sound was. It seemed to be some kind of scraping or grinding, as if two great rocks were being forced together.
A few months back, Kane had been involved in an escapade that had featured a subterrene, a kind of boring machine that could cut tunnels through rock. Although it was muffled, the noise he heard now reminded him of the subterrene’s underground approach.
He got up from the floor, easing himself further into the darkness, as far away from that scraping sound as he could get. He was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he was trapped here in an eight-by-six cell, and if something was coming through that wall, he had no realistic way to avoid it.
Chapter 4
Grant was ready when the hidden door slid open. There, framed by the light that spilled into his cavelike cell, stood a man carrying a tray of food. The meals were bland and simple, a pitiful scoop of some kind of watery gruel or porridge, with barely any taste, each portion little more than a mouthful. Grant had been slipping in and out of consciousness for an indeterminate time, but they had left the food for him. He had forced himself to choke it down as he tried to recover his ebbing strength. When they last came, just a few hours earlier, to clear the trays, Grant had feigned sleep, listening for the sounds of movement and pinpointing the hidden door’s location in the rock wall.
Now, as the door opened and the person he thought of as his captor entered, Grant pounced from the shadows like a jungle cat. His meaty paw raced through the air, deflecting the plastic tray of food even as he drove his shoulder at the man’s rib cage with a low follow-through. The tray clattered aside, smacking against one of the solid rock walls even as the man in the doorway was knocked backward, losing his footing in a graceless tangle of limbs. As he fell backward, Grant dropped with him, driving a savage punch into his captor’s jaw. His fist connected with a loud crack, and the man’s head bopped backward, his skull knocking against the rocky floor.
Poised over his captor, Grant drew back his arm for another blow, watching as the man’s eyes lost focus and his head rolled from side to side. He was a young man, probably still in his teens, dressed in a simple robe, with a dusting of bristle on his chin where he was encouraging a tidy growth of beard. For a moment, the youth’s head seemed to sway, then his eyes focused on Grant’s and the alarm in them was clear. As the youth opened his mouth, Grant struck him in the face, slapping his head back into the hard flooring once again, striking with the force of a hammer blow. With a pained grunt, the man stopped struggling and slipped into the warm embrace of unconsciousness.
Swiftly, Grant patted down the now-still form. He himself had been stripped of his weapons along with his Kevlar-weave coat when he had been placed in this strange, cavelike cell, just the straps of the wrist holster still in place around his right arm where his Sin Eater handgun had once rested. He had been left in his boots and shadow suit, the latter torn along both arms and his left leg, its armor-like weave damaged but still durable. There was a bump on the back of his head, too, a swelling just below the crown where he had taken a hard knock.
The unconscious body lay motionless as Grant patted the youth down. He held no obvious weapons, just a little pouch tied simply to his waist on a cord. Grant opened it and peered at its contents in the orange-hued light that spilled in from the corridor. The pouch contained a handful of stones, most so small they were little more than grains of sand. Grant had seen these people use the stones as weapons, throwing them from their hands or via little slingshots, but he could locate no slingshot on the guard’s person.
Grant remained there for a moment longer, resting his weight on his foe’s body as he looked warily around him. He peeked outside the cell, and saw that he appeared to be in a dim tunnel carved out of the same rocks as his cell. The ceiling was low, and it arched to a peak in an asymmetrical way, the rough walls scaling down to form a narrow width that could just barely accommodate two men walking abreast. To his left, the tunnel ended abruptly in a wall, while it continued on down to his right, the walls apparently solid, with no signs of any other caves. That didn’t mean spit, Grant knew—he had observed the way they opened the door to his own cell. It was like some kind of flowing rock that slotted perfectly over the entry to the cave, masking its presence with remarkably precise engineering.
The tunnel was lit indifferently by indented patches on the wall that flickered like burning embers. Keeping his movements appreciably silent, Grant rose on tiptoe to examine the nearest of these glowing indentations. The patch appeared to be a clear stone with a sliver of magma burning at its core. Its appearance reminded him of a child’s marble, the way a streak of paint is held in place within the glass.
As he examined the strange light fixture, Grant heard a noise from the end of the tunnel, and immediately recognized the sound of approaching footsteps. He stepped back from the weird light source, his ebony skin and shadow suit helping him blend with the thick shadows of the corridor. The body of the man who had come to feed him was obvious enough if they were looking for it, but it might take them a few seconds to notice it in the semidarkness of the tunnel, half sticking out of the open cell.
Grant watched as two figures appeared at the far end of the tunnel, like dark shadows moving across the volcanic magma lights. They were talking, and while Grant couldn’t hear every word they said, they appeared to be discussing the forthcoming relocation of their captives.
Captives—plural, Grant realized. Then he wasn’t the only one. He had no idea who these people were, but they acted as some kind of prison guards for him and the other captives; that much was obvious. He watched as they came closer, stilling his breathing as they came within earshot.
“Life Camp Zero will welcome them all in time,” the warden figure to the left was saying. “Some of them are beginning to understand already.”
“They all will in time,” the other replied, his voice hoarse, as if he was suffering from a sore throat. “The future’s opening up to us, my brother. It’s all just a matter of t—”
Abruptly, the man stopped talking, and Grant watched warily as he trotted the next few steps forward, having spotted his comrade lying on the rocky floor of the tunnel.
“What the heck’s going on here?” the guard demanded, pressing his fingers to the man’s neck and feeling for a pulse.
Behind him, his companion seemed stunned by the sudden change in tone, and he took a moment to gather his wits, peering into the empty cell where Grant had been held. “That’s Lance, isn’t it?” he said. “He was on food detail….”
“Someone didn’t appreciate dinner,” the first man said, and he looked up along the tunnel, gazing frantically into the darkness.
Grant came at them both then like a runaway train, the reinforced soles of his booted feet slamming against the rock floor as he charged. His hands reached down and grabbed at the one who had checked for his fallen companion’s pulse, wrenching him off the floor even as he struggled to stand up of his own volition. In an instant, Grant had tossed him up against the low ceiling, where his skull smashed with a loud crack. There was something eerily familiar about the move, the thought nagging at Grant for a fraction of a second, like a single flash of lightning, unexpected and bewildering. Then he watched in satisfaction as the guard flew through the air against his partner, both of them crashing to the floor like falling skittles.
Like the one who had come to feed Grant, the two men were dressed in simple clothes, hooded robes with nothing out of the ordinary about them, their dirty uniformity the sole indicator that they shared an allegiance.
“Where am I?” Grant snarled as he loomed over the two struggling guards.
Though physically capable, neither of them appeared to be any great challenge to the huge figure Grant cut. But to his surprise, the second of them—the one at whom he had thrown the first—reared back and launched himself forward, springing from the floor in a flash.
Grant shifted his weight subtly, falling just a little backward as the man lunged at him, swinging a balled fist at his face. Grant dodged, letting the fist swish through the air past him before he reached out and snagged his wrist. With a crack, he snapped the bones, and the guard hissed in pain.
Grant bounced lightly on his heels, readying himself for the next attack. “You want, we can keep this up till I’ve broken both your arms,” he warned. “Or you can just answer my question.”
In response, the man smiled, his dark eyes meeting Grant’s. “I am stone,” he replied.
And then he was upon Grant again, his left arm swinging through the air with phenomenal speed. Grant batted the punch aside, taking a step back as he did so. The man’s first attack may have been of poor quality, but he seemed to be getting into it now—deflecting that second punch had felt like batting aside an iron bar. Furthermore, Grant wanted to finish this quickly before the noise of the scuffle attracted any further attention.
His opponent was hindered by the broken wrist, and his right hand flopped at an uncomfortable angle as he struggled. Still, he seemed incredibly powerful and single-minded in his attack now, fighting more like a machine than a wounded man. Grant ducked, avoiding the arc of the next swinging punch, and drove his hand up and forward, connecting with the man’s jaw with a ram’s-head blow. The guard’s teeth clamped shut with a horrible clack and he staggered back a half step. Grant was already following through, thrusting his left knee into his solar plexus with such swiftness that the man folded in two like a snapped twig. Grant stepped back as his opponent smacked into the wall behind him, then keeled over, a wave of disorientation obviously overwhelming him.
Grant moved swiftly, dismissing his struggling foe as he hurried down the tunnel, leaping over the other one, who was still recovering from being thrown against the ceiling. Boots striking against the hard stone, Grant rushed past the glowing pods of light winking eerily within the wall cavities.
As he ran toward the junction in the tunnel, confused thoughts rattled his mind. Who were these people and how had they trapped him—an ex-Magistrate, of all people? His memory of how he had come to be here was blurry at best, but the torn shadow suit and the evidence of his being stripped of his weapons suggested that he had come here as part of a Cerberus field mission.
He struggled to remember how it had happened. Had he been with Kane? With Brigid? His memory was a closed book to him just now; he couldn’t seem to pinpoint anything at all.
Grant was an ex-Magistrate, trained in the arts of combat. His captors, though fast, appeared to be normal enough. He should not find himself like this, trapped in a cell, with no memory of how he had come to be here. It seemed ludicrous.
At the end of the tunnel, he found himself with two options, left or right. He looked back and forth for just a moment, trying to discern any difference between the choices presented to him. Bland rock walls ill-lit by magma lamps on either side—no choice to speak of.
He was trapped like a rat in a maze, he realized, with no idea which way to turn.
He glanced behind him, saw his foes rolling on the floor. Then he made a decision on instinct, turning right and hurrying down the tunnel, while keeping his movements as quiet as he could. He needed to put as much space as possible between himself and the three people he’d left outside his featureless cell, and the more turns he took, the more difficult he would be to track down.
Right, then left, then another right, keeping up a zigzag pattern, boots slapping against the floor of the empty tunnels carved from rock. An open doorway led him to a stone stairwell, eerily lit by the same magma pods.
Here and there, Grant found low walls, some barely reaching to his knee, and he leaped over these, wondering at their purpose. It seemed that the labyrinthine cavern was a natural feature, adapted for use as a prison block, yet the shifting walls gave him the distinct impression there was more to it than that.
Grant ran on, frequently peering over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t being pursued. Turning a corner, he found himself in a wider tunnel, its ceiling stretching approximately twenty feet above him. He peered up into the gloom, seeing the stalactites that lined the ceiling, scarcely visible in the dull glow of the magma pods lining the walls at irregular intervals. This tunnel stretched a long way, and Grant saw two of the now-familiar hooded figures moving toward him, some distance away. He pulled back, pressing his flank to the wall of the tunnel he had emerged from.
The hooded figures walked toward him, talking in low mumbles. Hidden in the gloomy shadows, Grant prepared himself, bunching his hands into fists. It was hard to think clearly for some reason; he felt as though he was recovering from a hangover. Was it the lack of food, perhaps? Or was something else affecting him here?
Grant was about to pounce upon the robed figures when they turned off the main tunnel, into a side corridor in the opposite wall. The entrance was almost hidden in shadow, the lighting here was so poor.
Grant reached over, tapping his finger against the nearest glowing orb of magma. Close up, it seemed to flicker, as if it were alive. The light became brighter for a moment as the lava within the pod was drawn to his hand, then it ebbed back to its dull glow as he moved away.
“Weird,” he muttered.
Carefully, Grant made his way out into the main tunnel once more, looking all around him. Jutting rock walls were place here and there like hurdles on a race course, low to the stone floor. At one end, perhaps a dozen paces from where he now stood, there was an open archway, the low rocks overhanging in a jagged pattern. From beyond that arch, the eerie orange glow of lava seemed brighter.
With as much stealth as he could muster in his tired body, Grant padded toward the archway. Edging up to it, he put one hand on the wall there and peered at the scene beyond.
Beyond the opening was a large cave, where several more of the hooded figures were moving about. Waist-high ridges of rock cut across the space in two curved lines, with breaks in them here and there. Grant’s attention was drawn to something over in the far left corner of the room. Lightning bolts seemed to flash there, behind a screen of misted glass, and he recognized with a start that it was a mat-trans unit, with fingers of rough stone cladding branching across the armaglass like a creeping vine.
“Where the hell am I?” Grant muttered.
A mat-trans, he thought, turning the fact over in his head. If these people had a mat-trans, then here was a chance for him to escape, to bring help. If he could access that device, he could return to Cerberus and bring his allies to shut down this hellhole. Or he could take a quantum jump to New Edo, call upon his lover, Shizuka, and her fearsome Tigers of Heaven, to back him up as he closed down this perverse prison. He wouldn’t need to program in the correct coordinates for the mat-trans unit—he could take a random leap, then recover at that destination, once he was out of the vipers’ nest. But to access that unit in the first place would mean somehow crossing this room without getting caught. He could wait it out, maybe, skulk in the shadows until such time as an opportunity arose. The prison guards were all dressed in shapeless hooded robes, and if Grant could snag one of these, he could likely pass unchallenged for a short while at least, until word of his escape from his cell became widespread. Or he could fight it out now, take on the eight figures in this cavern, but in his hungry, weakened state that could be suicidal.
In the far corner of the cave, the crackling lightning ceased and the mist inside the mat-trans unit began to dissipate. Another robed figure appeared within it, and Grant watched with interest as the figure stepped forward through the opening door, greeting others in the room with friendly authority.
Grant stepped back from the archway as the new arrival turned in his direction and began walking toward him, with two of his similarly dressed companions in tow. Dammit, they’re coming out here, he thought.
The ex-Magistrate turned, heading for the access tunnel he had recently used, only to spot the three figures he had left by his open cell.
He turned back, looking across at the far side of the tunnel, to a branching corridor where the other figures were disappearing. A moment later, he ran through that doorway and found himself in another rock-walled tunnel. This one ended in a sharp turn, and Grant heard something from the far end as he rushed along it. Pulling up short, he leaned against the wall and peered around the corner. A bank of elevator doors was embedded in the rock. The glistening steel was at odds with the cavernous tunnel, reflecting the glowing pods of magma like fire.
Grant peered behind him for a moment, checking that he wasn’t being followed, before he turned back to examine the situation.
As he stood there, the farthest set of elevator doors slid open and a familiar figure stepped out.
Chapter 5
The wall behind shook Kane as he pressed against it, vibrations carrying from the other side of the tight cave. The wall before him, eight feet away and almost lost in darkness, seemed to be rocking, as if struck by a quake.
Kane watched as the wall began to shift. And then, to his astonishment, it seemed to part before his eyes, more akin to liquid than something solid, like the Red Sea’s fabled parting before Moses. Where once had stood a solid barrier, now there was a gap running from floor to ceiling, easily wide enough for a man to fit through. Light filtered dimly through this impossible doorway, the orange-red of flowing lava.
Kane was about to take a step forward, wondering what new trick this was, when two figures appeared at the edge of the doorway, their features hidden, backlit by the lava flow in the tunnel beyond. “Kane.”
It was a man’s voice, firm and solid, with a slight accent.
“Yes,” Kane replied warily.
The figures strode through the doorway, and Kane saw that both wore hooded robes that hid their features. He waited, pressed back against the wall, assessing the shapes their robes disguised, automatically checking behind them for more people. The one in front was a man, tall and well-built, with wide shoulders and a swagger to his step that spoke of power and confidence. Behind him was a thinner figure, also tall but more shapely—obviously a woman. Behind them, silhouetted in the doorway, Kane noticed a mongrel dog following them with weary disinterest, stopping to sniff at the new doorway and the floor and walls.
“Well, it seems you know me,” Kane said, “but I’m a little at a loss. Care to bring me up to speed?”
The couple stopped before him, and Kane watched as they pushed back their low-hanging hoods, revealing their faces in the dim orange glow of the lava flow beyond the cave. To his surprise, Kane recognized both of them, although it took a moment to place the man’s features.
He had short, dark hair and a hard face with tanned skin. He was in his forties and had grown a beard since Kane last saw him. His right ear was mangled now, but Kane recognized him as one of the farmers who had been indoctrinated by the Annunaki prince Ullikummis in Tenth City, out in the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Kane thought for a moment, struggling to recall the farmer’s name. Dylan, that had been it. But Kane’s team had freed the man, released him from the mind worm that had controlled his thoughts. What the hell was he doing here, holding Kane captive? Was it some kind of misguided revenge? It made no sense.
Standing behind Dylan was a beautiful woman whom Kane had last seen many months ago out in the Snake-fishville desert close to the fishing village of Hope. In her early twenties, the shapely woman had long, dark hair and hazel eyes like pools of chocolate. Her olive skin showed a tan, and there was something altogether entrancing about her, the way she carried herself, the swell of her breasts and the casual sway of her round hips. This beautiful woman was called Rosalia, and when Kane had last seen her she had been a bodyguard in the employ of a group of immoral profiteers who were trading in pirated DNA. Kane’s team had burned down that operation, halting the threat of reborn baronies in the process, but evidently Rosalia herself had escaped. She looked more tired than Kane remembered, tired and drawn. But then, Kane suspected that he, too, looked pretty exhausted just now.
“This is your future, Kane,” Dylan began. “The world changed while you weren’t looking, and you’ve woken up to the new reality. Rejoice.”
Kane smiled in self-deprecation. “New reality, huh? Just how long was I asleep?” he taunted.
Dylan ignored his frivolity. “Your team, Cerberus, waged a war upon the Annunaki,” he stated, as if this fact was commonplace. “The Annunaki were your betters, of course, but you stood up to them, managed to disrupt their plans and, in your limited and infantile way, stymie their progress.”
“Well, I do what I do what I do,” Kane muttered.
“That is to be commended,” Dylan affirmed. “Though primitive, your efforts repelled the hated Overlord Enlil and the others of his coven. But you did not stop him entirely. Enlil still lives and his power base is growing once more, on the banks of the ancient Euphrates.”
This was news to Kane. The last time he had seen Enlil, the lizard-faced monster was trapped aboard an exploding spaceship called Tiamat.
“The future requires men like you,” Dylan continued, “men of good standing, to extinguish Enlil’s threat once and for all.”
Kane ran a hand through his hair as he considered the proposition. “This all sounds good…Dylan, isn’t it?”
The man nodded. “First Priest Dylan of the New Order,” he clarified.
Kane locked eyes with him in challenge. “And whose New Order is that?” he asked, his interest piqued.
“Lord Ullikummis,” Dylan said. “Our savior. He has seen the great works you have done. You, Kane, have faced Enlil when he was Baron Cobalt, Sam the Imperator, and as Enlil himself. And no matter what face he presented, you have always sought to stop him, to strike that face.”
“Well, what can I tell you?” Kane said. “I’m a face striker.”
“Lord Ullikummis studied the history, saw your works,” Dylan repeated.
Kane realized what the man was referring to. Less than two months before, Kane had been part of a team sent to protect an undersea archive called the Ontic Library. According to their information, this archive was the storehouse for the rules that governed reality, hosting a sentient data stream that contained and ordered all of history, down to the smallest minutiae. When Kane’s team had arrived, they’d found Ullikummis working his way through the data, where he’d appeared to be searching for evidence of his mother, Ninlil, whose rebirth had been the source of much conflict between Cerberus and the Annunaki overlords. In accessing those records, Ullikummis would have learned of the role of Cerberus, and the almost archenemy status that existed between Enlil and Kane. Ullikummis himself was an adept assassin, so little wonder that he would see the benefit in recruiting Kane’s skills if he planned to do battle with Enlil and his armies.
“He wishes you to join him,” Dylan concluded.
“You know, I’m really not a big joiner-upper,” Kane replied flippantly, “but you thank the big guy for the offer.”
“The world has changed,” Dylan repeated. “Sooner or later, you will submit. Take this path now, and it will be easy. You will become a lieutenant in his army. You will live like a king when the world is reshaped, with a barony of your own, and all you need do is pledge your fealty to Ullikummis.”
Kane looked away, girding himself, hiding his fist behind him as he bunched it in the shadows. “It sounds so easy, but I’ve got a better idea—that you surrender.”
Dylan almost spit, he was so surprised by the demand. “Surely you can’t be serious, Kane. Look around you. Look at what you’ve been reduced to, you and your people. You’ve lost. You’re lucky that he even kept you alive.”
Kane held the man’s gaze as he spoke. “You and your boss’s little army surrender now,” he snarled, “and I’ll go easy on you.”
Dylan sniggered. “You’re a fool, Kane. A blind fool. You cannot stop the future from happen—”
Kane struck suddenly, swinging his arm forward and punching the man in the face with his balled fist, forty-eight hours of frustration and rage finding primitive release in that one blow. He staggered a step backward in surprise and Kane was on him in that instant, swinging his other fist at Dylan’s face even as the first priest of the New Order tried to fend off the blows.
Rosalia, the woman who had entered with Dylan, moved then, taking two swift paces forward before high kicking Kane in the face with professional detachment. The blow knocked the ex-Magistrate back against the wall, and Kane felt his head spin with nausea as the rusty taste of blood filled his mouth.
Behind the woman, somewhere close to the open door, the dog yipped before assuming a low growling, clearly irritated.
When Kane looked up, he saw the dark hair of Rosalia as she pressed her face close to his. “Don’t be a fool, Magistrate man,” she hissed.
It was good advice, Kane knew. He was weak from lack of food, and his body was still recovering from some battle he could not fully recall. Or perhaps he could. The name Ullikummis had triggered something in his memory, and he was just beginning to remember what had happened in Cerberus’s main corridor.
Kane discarded the nagging memory for the moment, struggling to stay on his feet as he leaned against the rough wall.
Dylan stepped close to him, standing over him but not bothering to strike him. “You will learn the error of your ways in time,” he said, “and you will come to embrace the New Order. The Life Camp is calling you, Kane. You cannot begin to imagine how the world has altered, how different it is becoming.”
The priest turned and paced toward Rosalia, who waited at the doorway, her dark eyes fixed on Kane’s pitiful figure as he slumped against the wall, gingerly fingering his lip, which dripped with blood.
“The world is changing,” Dylan said yet again as he stepped through the door. “Your time—the age of Cerberus—is over.”
Then he was gone, and Rosalia followed him, the dog trotting along at her heels. Kane watched as the strange stone doorway slid back into place, the magma glow of the space beyond obscured by a rock wall. Once more, Kane was locked in a cell with no exit.
“First priest, huh?” he muttered as he wiped at the blood that trickled from his mouth. “Didn’t I know you when you were just the understudy, you self-important prick?”
Chapter 6
Grant hunkered down in the shadows of the tunnel as the silvery elevator doors in the rock wall slid apart just a few feet from him.
Striding from the elevator, much to his surprise, was the familiar form of Edwards, an ex-Magistrate like Grant himself, and a member of the Cerberus outfit. Edwards was tall and broad shouldered, with hair cropped so close to his scalp he appeared almost bald. His lack of hair left his ugly, bullet-bitten right ear on show. Like the other people Grant had seen here, Edwards was disguised in a dark fustian robe, its hood pushed back from his head as he scratched his ruined ear. Grant was relieved to see a friendly face, and he realized immediately that the ex-Magistrate must have had the same idea as him—disguising himself in one of the enemy’s robes so that he could scope out this prison. The thought struck Grant that maybe Edwards was part of a larger rescue party, and he waited for a moment to see if anyone else would emerge from the elevator cage. No such luck.
Or maybe Edwards had come with Grant, whose memory was so scrambled it was hard to recall how he had come to find himself in that cell. Maybe they had infiltrated together and Grant had been captured. Maybe his long-trusted partner, Kane, was somewhere nearby, too.
Grant watched as Edwards reached for the hood of his robe, pulling it down over his face.
“Edwards,” he whispered, stepping out of the shadows to reveal himself to his Cerberus ally.
Edwards turned to look at him, his face an emotionless mask.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” Grant continued, as he took a step forward, keeping his voice low. “I guess they caught us both, huh?”
With the speed of a flinch, Edwards’s right arm snapped out, his fist clenched. Surprised, Grant tried to avoid the blow, but he was too slow. With the solidity of stone, Edwards struck him across the left cheek, sending him lurching against the nearest wall.
“Whoa, whoa! Cool your jets, man,” Grant cried. “It’s me—Grant. I ain’t one of them.”
Edwards’s blue eyes focused on him, and his brows knitted in an angry scowl. “Yes, you are,” he replied, following his first punch with a vicious left cross.
Grant was so surprised, he didn’t have time to avoid that blow, either, and he grunted as Edwards’s knuckles rapped the side of his face, knocking him even farther backward. Grant stumbled as he tried to stay upright.
Edwards’s hood fell back from his face, and before Grant could protest, the shaven-headed figure drove another punch at his skull. Grant deflected it with a grunt, batting the swinging fist away with his outstretched hand.
“Edwards!” Grant cried as the fierce ex-Mag came at him with a savage right jab. “It’s not a trick. It’s me. They had me in a cell but…”
Edwards wasn’t listening, Grant realized. Not exactly renowned for his even temper even in the best of circumstances, his teammate had built up a head of fury now, and was coming at him with the relentlessness of a thunderstorm, driving punch after punch at his face and torso, years of Magistrate training making his body a lethal weapon. Grant held up his left arm, blocking Edwards’s latest blow and turning it against him, making his fist snap back and cuff himself across the nose. Edwards ignored it.
Grant leaped backward, putting a few feet between them. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but you keep up this ruckus and we’re going to get ourselves caught and tossed back in our cells.”
Edwards dipped his head, and for a moment Grant thought he was acknowledging the point he had just made. But no—he suddenly charged again, his boots slapping against the rocky floor. The tunnel was too narrow, Grant realized; he had no chance to step out of this maniac’s way. Even as that fact sank in, Edwards’s shoulder was slamming against his ribs, forcing Grant to give ground. There was nothing for it, he knew. Edwards was out of control, and he would have to fight back, restrain him if the man was to see sense.
They had fought before, when Edwards had been under the influence of the faux god Ullikummis. Grant recalled how Edwards had been singular in his purpose then, too, when Grant had infiltrated Tenth City with Kane and Domi to rescue Edwards’s scouting party. As Brigid had explained it, the architecture of the metropolis had been designed to grip the inhabitants’ minds in stasis, forcing them to do the bidding of Lord Ullikummis. It had been a subtle and strange form of brain control, and the implication that it had been employed across the globe and was inherent in the design of every city ever built by man was worrying, to say the least. But like so much that the Cerberus warriors had encountered since Ullikummis had returned to Earth, the implication remained unexplored while other problems commanded their attention.
Grant stumbled backward once again, almost toppling over one of the strange ridges that broke up the tunnels. He stepped up onto it before kicking out with his other foot, slamming the charging Edwards across his breastbone. His old colleague staggered back, his arms wind-milling as he fought to keep his balance.
As he stepped down from the low stone wall, Grant heard other sounds coming from the tunnel at his back, the noise of hurried footsteps as prison guards were alerted and rushed to grab their escapees. If he hadn’t been sure before now, Grant knew at that moment that he needed to stop this insanity or dispatch Edwards quickly and come back for him later.
“Just listen to me for a moment,” he urged. “Try to think. They have a mat-trans. I saw it. If we work together we can—”
But Edwards didn’t seem to be listening. He had stepped back slightly, and Grant noted how he was lowering his center of gravity in preparation for delivering a nasty double kick. A moment later, Edwards’s right leg swung forward, slamming hard into the cartilage at the back of Grant’s knee before sweeping up to connect with his face. Grant held his position as the first blow struck, not quite placed to pop his kneecap, though Grant knew he had to put that down to luck. He was more concerned by the second blow, anticipating it and deflecting it with both hands.
Edwards’s foot came back down to the floor, but he was already spinning, driving his left knee upward toward Grant’s groin. Grant stepped aside and his opponent’s knee missed him by the smallest of margins.
Then he saw the opening in Edwards’s defense, and he grabbed the material of the man’s tunic in his left hand even as his right fist powered out, striking him across the cheek. Grant cried out as his fist connected, for it felt as if he was striking a solid wall.
“What the hell?” Grant spit as he followed up with his right fist again, swinging it in a powerful cross.
Edwards took the blow to the side of his face without even blinking, the whites of his eyes flashing red in the dim magma glow of the inset lights.
Grant glanced back down the tunnel, saw the approaching forms of the three guards he had dispatched outside his cell. “Dammit, Edwards,” he said, turning back to his old colleague, “there’s no time for this shit. You have to trust me or we’ll both end up dead.”
“Don’t you get it yet?” Edwards snarled in response, his leg kicking upward at Grant’s face. “Haven’t you figured out where you are?”
Grant dropped low as Edwards’s foot brushed past his jaw, kicking out his own foot in a sweep designed to knock Edwards’s legs from under him. The blow struck hard, and Edwards sagged against the far wall of the tunnel, collapsing to his knees with a grunt of pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Grant growled at the ex-Mag, leaping toward Edwards’s toppling form, his fists bunched.
“Look around you,” Edwards growled, indicating the rough walls and the flickering volcanic lights. “You’re in hell now, Grant. And you’re here to stay.”
Grant stopped short, his fist poised to strike Edwards in his wickedly grinning mouth.
The man took advantage of his momentary hesitation, driving his foot up across his foe’s jaw, knocking him backward. Grant cried out as he rolled away, tumbling across the rough tunnel floor beneath the glowing embers of the magma lights. His mind was racing, trying to piece together what Edwards had just told him. Could it possibly be true? Wasn’t hell just some crazy old myth, like all the others he and Kane and Brigid had exposed across the globe? Another primitive belief based on nothing more than ignorance and superstition?
From behind, the three people Grant had come to think of as prison guards hurried toward his fallen form, their feet clattering on the hard floor. The lead figure was pointing at him, his finger jabbing the air.
“Stop him!” he called.
Standing over Grant’s sprawled form, Edwards smiled, his teeth glinting orange in the eerie glow of the volcanic lights. “Already ahead of you,” he assured the prison guards. “This little puke ain’t gonna cause us no more trouble.”
“Sorry, Mojambo,” Grant snarled, “gonna have to rain on your parade here.” Then he leaped from the floor, driving himself at Edwards like a wound spring.
Grant struck out with both fists, slamming one into the underside of the man’s jaw, even as the other pounded into his solar plexus. Edwards yelped with pain, toppling over into a fetal crouch. Behind him, the three hooded guards rushed forward, and Grant turned to face the newcomers.
“Grab him,” one of the guards ordered, “quickly!”
Instantly, Grant went on alert. He struck out blindly with his fist and caught the first of the men across the chest. He followed up with a low punch to his gut, striking with such force that the slender man doubled over, spitting gobs of blood as he tumbled to the floor.
Then the second one was upon him, and Edwards had recovered also, pushing his muscular form off the rough rock floor. Grant spun, booting the first in the face in a roundhouse kick that left him facing the ex-Magistrate again, whom he identified as the more dangerous foe.
As Grant turned, the third guard rushed at him, holding something in his bunched fist. Instinctively, Grant raised his left arm to block the blow, which had been intended for his skull. Flames of pain rushed through his forearm, and Grant screamed in agony, his voice high and strained.
Then Edwards socked him in the jaw, even as Grant tried to block him. It was like being hit in the face by a hammer, such was the power behind Edwards’s punch.
Grant staggered back, found himself stumbling against the rough tunnel wall, his ankles catching on one of those low ridges. Then the guard struck again, and Grant saw that he held a sliver of rock shaped like a blackjack, and was using it to strike out at his foe.
The tunnel before Grant seemed to whirl, the elevator doors to spin, and his vision blurred as he was set upon by the two men. He kicked out blindly, and felt his toe connect with one of his attackers. The dark form fell backward, toppling over and slamming into one of the walls with a thud. But the other one struck Grant again, kicking at his chest and face, forcing his head back against the hard floor of the cavern.
Grant was conscious of how the sounds around him changed, becoming distant as his skull struck the rock again. He reached out, trying to push his opponent away, but couldn’t seem to locate him through the miasma of his fuzzy vision. Then he felt another hammerlike punch, and his head snapped back once more.
And as Grant sank into unconsciousness under the rain of blows, he heard Edwards laugh.
“Welcome to hell, bitch,” his old colleague guffawed. “Enjoy your stay.”
The rock walls…the glowing magma within them…it all seemed to make some perverse kind of sense in that instant. Grant couldn’t recall how he had come to be here, but maybe Edwards was right. Maybe he was trapped in hell. Maybe they all were.
Chapter 7
Brigid waited a long time in the empty cavern, tied to the chair with nothing but the mirror for company. She tried to remember what had happened after she and her companions had arrived at Cerberus via the mat-trans and engaged with the hooded intruders, but every time her mind thought back on it, she found herself distracted by something in the mirror, certain she could see someone stalking toward her from behind. When she looked more closely, she saw it was nothing, just the dark shadows of the cavern playing tricks in the faintly swirling magma lighting.
And yet she could not relax. The mirror was like a ghost thing, an object sent to haunt her, to render her in a permanent state of anxiety. Perhaps that had been Ullikummis’s plan all along, to leave her with this simple torture, this way to seize her mind, her most powerful weapon.
So she watched the mirror, studied her reflection. Her cheeks were dirty, scuffed with grime. There was a crescent-shaped bruise dominating the righthand side of the face in the mirror. She remembered now how the magnetic desk tidy had been thrown at her, smashing her so hard she had felt the ache in her teeth.
But outside the ops room, it had been worse. There had been blood, washing down the walls and across the floor, a ghastly glistening sheet of crimson a half inch thick, enough to turn her stomach. She, Kane, Grant and Domi had stopped dead in their tracks, horrified by that sea of red swirling around their feet.
The lighting of the tunnel-like main corridor had been strobing on and off, illuminating the high rock ceiling in a firework staccato, flashing against the steel girders that held the roof in place above them.
Amid the pulsing lighting, Brigid had seen several figures lying motionless. She’d recognized Henny Johnson lying facedown in the pooling blood, her short dark bob matted against the side of her face. Automatically, Brigid had hurried over to the woman, her boots splashing in the wash of blood.
“Henny?” she’d asked, rolling the woman’s head. “Henny, are you—?”
She’d stopped. Henny’s eyes were open, but there was no acknowledgment on her blood-drenched face. Above her lifeless eyes, a wicked bruise showed across her pale forehead, and there was a clear indentation in her skull above her right eye. She was dead, struck by a stone.
Gently, Brigid had closed Henny’s eyelids, giving the armorer what little dignity she could in her final rest.
“Life spilled,” Domi had said, lifting one bare foot and looking at the blood oozing into the cracks and ridges between her toes. “Nasty shit.”
“What happened to the power?” Brigid asked, glancing to Domi as she stepped away from Henny’s fallen form. Domi had been the only one of them on site when the attack had begun; she was their only hope now of piecing things together.
“They attacked like locusts,” she explained. “Swarmed through the redoubt before we could respond. I watched on the monitors as they surged through the doors like a tidal wave. A tidal wave of people.”
“It makes no sense,” Brigid argued. “How could they just walk in?”
Domi raised her hands in a gesture of defeat, the Detonics Combat Master still clutched in her right fist. “They did—that’s all I know. It was so quick, Brigid. You wouldn’t believe.”
“They must have planned it, then,” Grant growled from where he was checking on one of the rooms that led off from the main artery. The room was empty, but the thin pool of blood was spreading across the floor even here.
Kane turned to Domi as the foursome continued hurrying along the wide corridor, he and Grant checking the side rooms with brutal efficiency in a standard Magistrate sweep pattern. “They must have got to the generator,” he surmised. “That’s why the lights are on the fritz. But I don’t get it—why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“We tried, Kane,” Domi told him hotly. “There are dead people all about—you notice that?”
Kane stopped, looking about him as if for the first time. The blood, the bodies, the ruin of familiar places. It seemed faintly unreal.
“Kane,” Grant called, standing in the doorway of one of the rooms. “You need to see…”
Kane had hurried over to join his partner, Brigid and Domi just a step behind him. Grant was standing at the door to a closet used for storing cleaning supplies. The light inside the cupboard was flashing on and off, making a tinkling note each time it winked on. Inside, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was crouched on the floor, pulling her knees in close to her face. She was sobbing in silence, her shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle each cry.
“Reba?” Kane asked. “DeFore, it’s me. It’s Kane.”
The medic looked up, her brown eyes rimmed with red as she peered through the untidy mess of her blonde hair. DeFore had always taken special care with her hair, forming elaborate creations with the ash blonde tresses, different every day. Kane had never seen her like this.
“Reba?” Kane said again, his voice gentle. “Come on, it’s okay. What happened here? What happened to you?”
As he stepped forward, Kane felt the liquid under his heel, and realized that Reba DeFore was sitting in a pool of blood. She continued to shake as he approached her.
“He’s here,” DeFore said, her voice breathless with fear. “I saw him.”
Brigid was standing in the doorway, listening to their companion’s words. “He who?” she asked.
“The stone man,” DeFore explained.
Brigid could still remember the chilling sense of dread in DeFore’s tone, as if a part of her sanity had been stripped away.
BACK IN THE CAVE, there was movement in the mirror. Brigid shifted in her seat, feeling her tension rise as she warily watched the huge stone figure appear from the shadows. It was Ullikummis, the glowing strands of lava glittering across his charcoal flesh.
Brigid tried to turn, but couldn’t shift her head far enough, and was forced to watch the reflection of the great stone god striding toward her in the dim light. He stopped directly behind her, peering over her head at his own reflection in the mirror.
“You see the mirror?” Ullikummis asked.
Brigid studied the reflection of his craggy stone face looming out of the darkness above her own. He looked damaged, the stonework more ruined than she remembered, as if hit with buckshot, or a dead thing eaten by worms.
“Yes.” She nodded, the word little more than a breath.
She saw the stone colossus move his hands then, reaching behind her until she felt his hard, cool fingers pressing against the nape of her neck.
“What are you doing?” she blurted, unable to keep the fear out of her voice.
“Watch the mirror, Brigid,” Ullikummis replied, “for in it is contained your future.”
Brigid felt something drag along the nape of her neck, bumping over the vertebrae there where it pressed against her skin. It felt like needles, or the feet of an insect playing along her spine.
“Please,” she said, cursing herself for showing weakness in front of her enemy.
Then she felt something jab at her skin, and she stifled a cry of pain. Something was pressing into her, pushing against the flesh at the back of her neck.
“Please stop,” Brigid cried. “Please tell me what—”
Ullikummis met her eyes in the mirror as he worked something at the top of her spine. “You have fought with the Annunaki for the longest time as apekin measure,” he stated, as Brigid felt the hidden thing burrowing into her flesh. “Have you never wondered what it is like to be one of us?”
Brigid screamed as something clawed beneath her flesh, plucking at the ganglion of nerves that wrapped around her spine.
“Are you aware of casements, Brigid?” Ullikummis asked.
She couldn’t answer. Her mouth was frozen open in silent agony as the sharp thing, whatever it was, continued to pull at her beneath her skin.
“Other worlds,” Ullikummis continued, “a theory of alternatives where futures may be played out differently.”
Brigid had heard of the theory, had been privy to it on occasion, where a future with Kane as her lover had been foreseen. She tried to focus her mind on the words Ullikummis was saying in his gravelly tones, tried to reach past the pain as her body struggled against its ties.
“I was taught by a wise Annunaki named Upelluri,” Ullikummis told her, his voice like the grinding of stone. “Upelluri once explained to me how the Annunaki differ from humans by explaining their simple-minded concept of the casements. He said that naive and short-sighted philosophers had misinterpreted them, treating the different vibrational frequencies as one would the rooms of a house. Instead, Upelluri had compared it to looking in a mirror.”
Brigid rocked in place, wailing in pain as the thing burrowed through her spine, seeming to tear at her very being. “Please,” she howled. “Please stop.” Her breath was coming faster and faster, a runaway steam locomotive hurrying to disaster.
Ullikummis reached forward with one hand, clasping her head by the crown, holding it rigidly in place as she tried to squirm, forcing her to look into the mirrored glass.
“You see your reflection,” Ullikummis explained, “and behind it you see the reflection of the cavern beyond, and the cavern in the mirror appears to have depth. But in reality, the whole thing is but a picture on a flat, reflective surface, with no more depth than the surface of a blade of grass.”
Brigid stared at her reflection, at the thing that loomed behind her, even as pain surged across her back like fire.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis instructed.
She tried to shake her head, to tell this nightmarish thing that walked like a man no.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis repeated, “and the pain will pass.”
Her breathing was coming so fast now, the steam engine jumping the tracks and hurtling off the cliff. The pain was oblique, an impossible thing to calculate, to comprehend. She closed her eyes, praying it wasn’t a trick, praying that Ullikummis was not toying with her as a cat toys with a mouse.
“This world,” she heard Ullikummis intone, “this galaxy with all its depth and color and difference—this is but the image on the surface of the mirror to the Annunaki. That was how Upelluri explained your ways to me.”
Brigid waited, eyes closed, feeling the thing rummaging beneath her spine, like a rapist’s hand tugging at the hair at the nape of her neck, plunging her down, down, down. She whined, a gasp coming through clenched teeth.
“Don’t fight,” Ullikummis instructed placidly. “Relax, Brigid.”
Brigid struggled to hold herself still as the burning continued, trying the whole while to pretend it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t there.
“You fought with my father,” Ullikummis said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I saw this when I imbibed time in the Ontic Library. You fought with my father, and others of our race, of the Annunaki.”
In her fixed position in the seat, Brigid squirmed as the pain shifted, reaching down her back like claws.
“I saw there,” Ullikummis continued, “that you have exceptional knowledge for an apekin, a…” he stopped, as if trying to recall the word “…human. And yet you never questioned what it was you fought.”
“Tried,” Brigid replied, the single word coming out as a gasp between her gnashing teeth.
“They acted like you,” Ullikummis said. “My father and the other overlords were aliens to your world, yet they behaved like you, like actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits. Humans in everything but appearance,” he mused, adding as if in afterthought, “and perhaps stamina. Yet you never questioned this.”
“They had technology,” Brigid began, her words strained. “They differed from—”
“No, they did not,” he interrupted. “The Annunaki are beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once. The rules of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle was, and the Annunaki have shamed themselves in portraying it thus.”
Brigid listened, wondering at what Ullikummis was telling her. She recalled travelling to the distant past via a memory trap, and seeing the Annunaki as their slaves, the Igigi, perceived them. They had been beautiful, just as Ullikummis was telling her, shining things that seemed so much more real than the world around them, colored beings amid a landscape of gray. But when she had faced Enlil, Marduk and the others in her role as a Cerberus rebel, they had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Ullikummis called them? Actors on a stage? People dressed in masks and rubber suits like some hokey performance designed for children? Had Brigid and her companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feeble-minded?
As Brigid considered this thought, Ullikummis spoke once more in his gruff, throaty growl. “They started their current cycle as hybrids, half human, half advanced DNA. The human part clings, holding them back. If you saw the true battles between the gods, if you had witnessed the ways they fought across the planes millennia ago, you would never even recognize the creatures you fought as the Annunaki—you would think them a joke.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Brigid asked, baffled.
In reply, Ullikummis gave a single, simple instruction. “Open your eyes, Brigid.”
She did so, found herself staring into her own green eyes in the mirror as the agony in her back abated, faded to nothingness. The mirror was like a drawing, a picture that could be falsified, that owed no one the truth.
Brigid let out a slow breath, felt her heart still pounding against her rib cage. The pain in the back of her neck was gone as if it had never been.
“Do you understand now?” Ullikummis asked, his voice coming from above her head.
Brigid nodded. “I’m beginning to,” she said.
Chapter 8
There was a deep vein of pain in Mariah Falk’s left leg, down at the back of her ankle. A couple months ago, she had been shot there, and now the coldness of the cell was getting into the old wound.
Wincing, she opened her blue eyes and reached down, rubbing her leg to relieve the aching numbness.
Falk was a slender woman in her midforties, with short brown hair streaked with gray. Though not conventionally attractive, she had an ingratiating smile that served to put others at their ease. A highly trained geologist, Mariah was one of the brain trust of experts who had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and now formed a significant part of the Cerberus staff.
Right now, however, she found herself lying on the rocky floor of a cavern, where she had been brought by Ullikummis’s loyal troops. Mariah remembered being transported here, and for the past two days she had waited patiently as the hooded troops had brought her basic meals of watery gruel. The food tasted foul and she suspected there was barely enough nutrition to sustain a person, but what option did she have? She was trapped in a cell with a door that appeared only at her captors’ request, with no warmth, barely any light other than the faint disk in the wall that offered a dull orange glow like a sodium streetlamp.
Ullikummis. He had brought this upon her. In a roundabout way, he had been the one to cause her to get shot in the leg a few months earlier, as well, for it had been during her indoctrination into his regime in Tenth City that Mariah had sustained the wound.
But why her? She wasn’t like Brigid Baptiste or Domi. They were warriors, soldiers in the war against the Annunaki. But Mariah was just a geologist. She had no place being here, locked away in a cell, treated like something inhuman. Soldiers playing soldier games, that’s what this was.
But then Mariah remembered the soldier game she had become embroiled in forty-eight hours earlier, the same way she had remembered it a hundred times before while lying on this cool, unforgiving rock floor.
SHE HAD BEEN SITTING in the canteen waiting for Clem Bryant when it began. The Cerberus canteen was never a lonely place; there was always something going on, some group just coming off shift or wolfing down breakfast—be it six in the morning or six in the evening—prior to starting their shift.
Mariah sat at one of the tables with its shiny, wipe-down plastic top, a book propped open in her hands, watching the world go by. Now and then she would spot someone she knew stride through the swinging doors and head over to the serving area, and they would wave or nod in acknowledgment before she went back to her book.
Sometimes it was weird, Mariah reflected, living in the future. She was a freezie, a refugee from the Manitius moon base who had been woken two centuries after her own time and forced to adapt. Mariah was quite happy to chug along at her own pace, studying rocks and offering insights into the changes in soil structure that had been wrought by the nuclear war of 2001. Still, it was a strange thing to be living in the future. The book she was reading, for instance, was a relic of another age, for the mass production of literature for entertainment had somehow fallen by the wayside during Earth’s darkest days, and the barons who had risen to control America had frowned upon such frivolity. Perhaps, Mariah thought, they had been scared that people might use books to expose the truth, to encourage the free-thinking that the baronial system had almost managed to stamp out. The barons had turned out to be the chrysalis state for the Annunaki overlords—little wonder they were afraid of freethinking and the sharing of ideas. Things could be hidden in books, even in the most innocuous fiction.
Mariah chuckled to herself. Perhaps not this particular fiction, she mused as she admired the cover painting of a handsome, broad-shouldered man in a doctor’s white coat consulting a chart with intensity, while the pretty nurse in the foreground bit her lip and looked concerned. It was a done deal that the two of them would get together just in time before the final page, to live happily ever after—the novel’s pink spine promised that, even if the book itself strived to add tension to the romance.
Mariah looked up, eyeing the door that led into the kitchen area. Did she and Clem have a pink spine on their book? She hoped so. She had been getting closer to him over the past six months or so, spending more time in his company.
Clem Bryant was a fascinating mixture of contradictions. On the one hand he was polite, well-spoken, sophisticated and urbane, able to verbally fence his way out of any situation. On the other, he had a spiritual side that seemed to be at odds with the image he presented to the outside world. The first time Mariah had realized this was when Clem had taken her on a trip—a date, really—to the steps down to the River Ganges, where he had explained to her about washing away one’s sins. Mariah had been taken aback by this, as Clem had always seemed so straight-laced. And yet it seemed to fit with his personality perfectly. He gave off the impression of having an amazing sense of inner peace. A freezie just like Mariah, Clem was an oceanographer by trade, but had found his true vocation as a cook in the Cerberus kitchen.
As Mariah watched idly, the staff door to the kitchen swung open and he came striding toward her, carrying a plate of something in his hand. In his late thirties, Clem was tall and slender, with dark hair swept back from an expanse of forehead, a carefully groomed goatee on his chin. Though he looked typically well-kempt, Clem’s white apron was speckled with cocoa powder. He greeted Mariah with a broad smile as he took the seat opposite hers.
Mariah glanced down at the plate, which he’d placed between them, and saw it contained a little stack of brownies dusted with icing sugar. “Chocolate brownies, Clem?” she asked. “I’ve never seen these on the canteen menu.”
Clem gazed at her, his intelligent blue eyes peering into hers. “Well, one has to shake up the menu now and then or become stale,” he said with a raised eyebrow. “But I require a guinea pig to test the first batch. Any suggestions?”
Mariah held one hand above her head excitedly. “Ooh, pick me, pick me!” she trilled.
He laughed, pushing the plate toward her. As he did so, the doors to the canteen crashed open and one of the Cerberus security detail—a woman called Sela Sinclair—came running into the large room.
“We’re under attack,” she shouted, her eyes wide with fear.
“What th—?” Mariah muttered. But before she or anyone else in the room could respond any further, the doors slammed open on their hinges and seven mysterious figures in hooded robes spread out into the room. The strangers launched small stones out of something held in their palms, and the stones seemed to race through the air, picking up speed as they hurtled toward their victims. Two struck a diner in the back before he could even react, and his head exploded as a third stone smashed through his skull.
Sela Sinclair dropped and spun, raising the M-16 she held and blasting off a half dozen shots in quick succession. The weapon had an underbarrel grenade launcher, a little bulky, but designed for maximum damage. Sela herself was a wiry, lean-muscled, dark-skinned woman with a perpetually fierce expression. A noble warrior and efficient combatant, she was ex-USAF and had been part of the Cerberus Away Teams since their formation.
The woman’s shots struck the lead pair of hooded figures, and the one to her left fell, his robe sweeping up like a sail catching the wind. Then incredibly—impossibly—the figure sat up and pulled himself back to a standing position as if nothing had happened. Mariah felt a lump in her throat as she tried to swallow, watching the scene unfold before her.
Another of the hooded figures swept his hand through the air, unleashing more of the small, sharp stones. They whistled slightly as they whizzed through the air, shattering drinking glasses and embedding themselves in the walls even as quick-thinking Cerberus personnel dived for cover.
Sela rattled off a swift volley of shots, scampering beneath a table even as the hurtling stones hit their next victims. She cursed as she watched several of the diners drop as the pebbles struck them, falling facefirst into their meals or tumbling from their chairs, their eyes wide in shock. The stones were traveling at the speed of bullets, somehow picking up velocity once they had left their wielder’s hand. There was no time for Sela to worry about the victims now; she had to deal with these interlopers who had followed her up the stairs, had to defend as many people as she could.
A number of the Cerberus personnel were battle hardened, and all of them had been trained in basic combat techniques. Immediately, the two-man team closest to Sela were on their feet, asking what they could do.
“Are you armed?” she asked as she leaped between tables, her bullets ripping through the hooded shrouds of the interlopers.
Several people in the room said that they were, producing four pistols and a combat knife between them. As Mariah and Clem watched from the far table, Sela’s shots struck another of the intruders—only for the man in question to continue walking forward, brushing the shells aside like raindrops.
“Come on, Mariah,” Clem urged, leaping from his seat.
“Where are we going?” she asked as the battle raged behind them.
“Kitchen,” he told her, grabbing her wrist.
Mariah hurried to keep up, her feet slipping on the tiled floor of the canteen. “What the heck’s going on?” she asked, glancing back as Clem pulled her through the swinging door into the cooking area. Something else was following the hooded strangers through the door, something tall and bulky, its footsteps shaking the room.
“I don’t know,” Clem answered, hurrying over to the stove and grabbing a bubbling saucepan by its handle. Other cooks were hurrying about the area, wondering what was going on as they heard the gunshots and the barrage of stones pelting the walls.
The word went out immediately—Cerberus was under attack. Several of the kitchen personnel grabbed cooking items, wielding them like weapons as they hurried outside, determined to help. A kitchen hand beside Mariah grabbed a vicious-looking meat cleaver and hurried through the door.
“We should have heard the alarm,” Mariah complained. “Why wasn’t there an alert?”
Clem looked at her anxiously as he adjusted the heat on the hob. “Perhaps these visitors hit the PA system first,” he suggested.
“But there are—” Mariah began, pitching her voice loud over the sound of a grenade being launched outside.
Clem cut her off. “Mariah, I need sugar. Top cupboard.”
She stood there helplessly for a moment, trying to make sense of his request. Outside, the tarantella of bullets and stones rattled against hard surfaces.
“Sugar,” Clem repeated, raising his voice but never sounding angry or rushed.
Mariah opened the cupboard he had indicated, pulled out a large container marked Sugar.
“What are you making?” she asked as she handed it to Bryant. “I don’t think this is really the time to start baking a sweet, Clem.”
“You saw those people,” he reasoned. “They brushed aside Sela’s bullets.” On the stove, the saucepan of boiling water bubbled as he poured sugar into it. “In prison, they call this napalm. Boiling water and sugar—sticks to the skin and burns, just like its namesake.”
Clem dipped a Pyrex mixing jug into the bubbling saucepan and filled it before reaching for a nearby mug with his other hand. “Come on, Mariah. Time to sound the horn and get in the hunt.”
As if caught up in a whirlwind, she grabbed the steaming cup he passed her, and followed him back into the canteen. “Clem, I think you should know something…” she began.
Clem was already through the door to the eatery, the steaming contents of the mixing jug slopping against its sides as he ran. His shoes slid on the tiled floor as he skidded to an abrupt halt, hardly able to believe his eyes. There, striding across the room like some animated cliff face, came Ullikummis, rogue scion of the Annunaki. He was bent down, his misshapen head ducked so as not to scrape against the ceiling, which seemed suddenly low in his presence. The rock lord’s feet slammed against the floor, cracking tiles and leaving dents with each mighty step. Even as Clem watched, a Cerberus staffer called Watts, who had joined Sela’s makeshift army, was cast aside, the Beretta in his hand blasting shots into the ceiling as he was tossed feet over head by a mighty backhand slap from the stone giant.
“Oh, my goodness gracious,” Clem exclaimed, the words coming in an abrupt tumble like a thunder strike.
“That’s what I was about to tell you,” Mariah said as she stood at his elbow. “Ullikummis is here.”
Both Clem and Mariah had encountered the stone-clad Annunaki before. Her unfortunate meeting had occurred in Tenth City and resulted in her being very nearly indoctrinated into Ullikummis’s war cult. Clem had met the rock monstrosity later, during the exploration of the undersea Ontic Library, which housed all history and knowledge. Now they faced him once again, as his hooded troops rushed about him, clearing aside Cerberus personnel in swiftly fought battles.
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Earth′s darkest days have given way to a new age of war. Launched by an ancient and powerful alien race, the battle has morphed through an aeons-old blueprint for domination.But with it has emerged a resilient group of freedom fighters, true avatars of humanity′s fortitude and courage. Now, as mankind′s arrogant oppressors engage in their own bitter infighting, they may doom the planet in their personal fires of hatred.Cerberus Redoubt, the rebel base of operations, has fallen under attack. The enemy at the gates is Ullikummis, a scion born of hate, a pawn of his powerful father′s game of ultimate manipulation. Kane and the others are his prisoners, losing their free will through his unbreakable mind control. The stone god demands Kane lead his advancing armies as he retakes Earth in the ultimate act of revenge. Ullikummis understands that truth–human or alien–is malleable. And that he will be the ultimate god of the machine, infinite and unstoppable.