Janus Trap
WHEN HE ARRIVED at the operations room thirty-five minutes later, washed and shaved, Grant found the large room a hive of activity. Lakesh had spread a series of papers across his desk that included several maps of the area around the recently destroyed ville of Beausoleil, Tennessee. Beside him, the red-haired Brigid Baptiste was glancing over the papers as Lakesh pointed out specific items of interest. Brigid was dressed in a shadow suit now, a one-piece black body stocking that appeared to be so thin as to be a second skin, and yet the fabric had remarkable properties. The shadow suit worked as a self-contained, self-regulated environment, and the weave was strong enough to deflect a knife blow or other blunt trauma but could not redistribute kinetic shock.
Off to one side of the room, Grant’s longtime partner, Kane, rested against a desk as he spoke with Cerberus physician Reba DeFore. DeFore was a stocky but curvaceous woman with long ash-blond hair that she had tied up in an elaborately braided knot atop her head. Grant couldn’t hear the details of their conversation, but he could see Reba count off items on her fingers. Grant watched as Kane copied her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember each item that she had told him. Like Brigid, Kane was dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits, as was Grant himself. Kane had added a thick belt with a heavy copper buckle to the suit, along with a pair of combat boots, and on the man’s right wrist Grant could see the familiar pressure-sensitive holster containing a Sin Eater handgun.
Grant had added his favored long black duster over his own shadow suit, its dark Kevlar weave reaching past his knees. Like Kane, he wore the familiar weight of the Sin Eater pistol at his right wrist, tucked out of sight, just a little bulge beneath the sleeve. The weapon was a legacy from their days as Magistrates in Cobaltville, a position that Grant had held for almost two decades prior to his exile at the Cerberus redoubt. Kane had been his partner in Cobaltville, and the pair of them had defected together, along with archivist Brigid Baptiste, after stumbling upon the first hints of the Annunaki conspiracy.
Crouched at a desk beside the anteroom that held the mat-trans unit, Donald Bry and one of his technical team, a petite, coffee-skinned woman whom Grant had seen around a few times, were working through a bunch of wiring amid what looked like the remains of a half-dozen computer terminals.
Catching Lakesh’s attention, Grant pointed to the tangle of wiring. “Trouble with the mat-trans?” he asked.
“No, thank goodness,” Lakesh replied. “Just general problems with the old computers. Emphasis on old.”
“Happens to us all,” Grant said amiably as he joined Lakesh and Brigid at their desk to look over the paperwork that had been assembled for the mission.
Ten minutes later, Grant, Brigid and Kane were standing within the mat-trans chamber, ready to blast themselves through the ether in an instantaneous transition from Montana to Tennessee.
Chapter 2
It took the blink of an eye to strip them down to their component atoms and fling the essence of their very beings across the country. And yet, no matter how many times he experienced it, Kane swore that he would never really get used to traveling by mat-trans.
Kane had added a denim jacket, a washed-out black turned gray, over his shadow suit. He stood in the Tennessee mat-trans chamber, its standard tiled floor and ceiling with the familiar, smoked armaglass walls all around. The armaglass here was tinted an odd color, and Kane knew from the color alone that he had not been here before. With the typical paranoia of the prenukecaust military mind, the mat-trans network, now over two hundred years old, used a simple color-coding system to establish location without any explicit indicators.
There were mat-trans units hidden in ancient military bases scattered across the old United States of America, with many others worldwide, including similar units developed by comparable military groups for other nations. The mat-trans units digitized an individual and thrust him or her across quantum space to a chamber at a programmed destination. In the intervening two centuries since their development, the network had remained largely undiscovered, with only a small number of people aware of these hidden gateways scattered across the globe.
Kane and the other Cerberus operatives considered the mat-trans a useful part of their arsenal, although traveling by it was still a disorienting and alien experience to the human body.
As his roiling stomach settled from the instantaneous journey, Kane glanced left and right, checking that his two colleagues had passed through the mat-trans gateway intact.
Grant stood to Kane’s left, his dark skin shining with beads of sweat. While he had grown more used to travel by mat-trans, the man still had a deep-rooted dislike for the transportation method. All muscle, Grant was an ominous presence on any mission.
To Kane’s right stood Brigid Baptiste. Brigid had put a loose-fitting suede jacket over her clinging shadow suit, and the scuffed, shabby-looking jacket gave her ample freedom of movement. Her ankle boots were a matching brown to the jacket, and she wore her compact TP-9 pistol in a low-slung hip holster. A pockmarked leather satchel, also brown, was hanging at her opposite hip, its strap slung across her body, cutting a line between her breasts.
Tensing his wrist tendons, Kane drew the Sin Eater blaster into his hand, the compact weapon opening up to its full size in a half second. Less than fourteen inches in length when fully extended, the 9 mm Sin Eater folded in on itself to be stored in the holster just above Kane’s wrist. The holster reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the weapon would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard—as the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the need for such safety features had been considered redundant; a Magistrate could never be wrong.
Though schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, both Kane and Grant still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a comfortable and familiar wristwatch.
Kane’s partners drew their own weapons as the trio exited the armaglass room and made their way to the corridor at a slow, wary pace. As they entered the corridor, banks of overhead lights stuttered into operation, bathing its walls in their brilliant glow. Although they had traveled here on what was ostensibly a peace mission, they had too much experience to enter any new situation unarmed.
They proceeded through the windowless military bunker at a steady pace. Although the facility was deserted, the lights came on automatically as they found their way along the corridors toward the exit. A bank of powerful generators located in the underground complex had begun channeling power through the redoubt automatically as soon as the old sensor units had detected that the mat-trans had been activated; it was standard protocol for these old military facilities.
Brigid took the lead as they jogged to a staircase and up into the main reception hall of the redoubt. Brigid Baptiste was blessed with an eidetic—or photographic—memory, and she had scrutinized the plans of this facility in preparation for their mat-trans jump here. Now she could recall every detail of its construction from those blueprints merely by calling them to mind.
In less than three minutes, the group stood shoulder to shoulder at a huge door leading to the outside world.
“Everyone ready?” Kane asked, his voice echoing in the empty, gray-walled reception chamber of the redoubt. To one side, a dusty old desk stood behind a pane of armaglass with a grille in its center. A computer sat atop the desk, long since inactive, its monitor stained with the greasy black charring of smoke.
Brigid nodded while Grant just put a finger to his nose in silent acknowledgment of Kane’s question. Brigid typed the code into the old push-button pad to unlock the door. They heard the magnetic lock click, and Grant, having holstered his Sin Eater, worked the large lever on the front of the huge door to move the heavy slab of metal on its ancient rollers. The door creaked a little, juddering on the tracks after so many years locked in one position. But with a little effort, Grant got it moving enough that a three-foot-wide gap appeared at the far right side.
Kane stepped forward, gun held in the ready position, his old point-man sense alert as he peered through the gap and into the Tennessee morning sunshine. “Welcome to Beausoleil, people,” he announced. “Let’s try to keep things friendly out there.” With that, Kane edged sideways and made his way out of the redoubt and up the dirt bank that he found immediately outside.
They had journeyed to Tennessee at the request of Reba DeFore on what could loosely be described as a mercy mission. During her recent inventory, Reba had noticed that supplies of their standard immunization boosters were falling low. With the devastating radiation storms that had accompanied the nukecaust, the whole landscape had become a near-lethal hot zone. Even now, more than two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, there were still dangerous pollutants in the air and pockets of radiation scattered across the globe. While the atmosphere was far cleaner than it had been, the use of immunization boosters remained standard procedure for anyone involved in fieldwork.
Many of the medications in use by Cerberus had actually been produced in the villes of the nine barons who had ruled over America until very recently. Black marketers with connections to the villes remained a convenient source of immunization boosters when necessity demanded it.
A few months earlier, the barony of Beausoleil in the Tennessee River Valley had fallen in a devastating air attack orchestrated by Lilitu, a would-be goddess whose ambition was matched only by her unquenchable blood thirst. Beausoleil had been razed, leaving a vast number of refugees and a blossoming secondary market in salvage. Just a few weeks earlier, Kane, Grant and Brigid had been involved in tracking genetic material that had been stolen from its ashes and had fallen into the hands of a criminal gang on the Pacific coast.
Now, once more, the three Cerberus warriors found themselves tracking down material taken from the devastated ville, only this time it promised to be a far simpler mission—or so the Cerberus desk jockeys would have them believe.
Brigid glanced up at the sun and checked her wrist chron before pointing to her right up the bank of the muddy slope. There were shallow puddles all around, and the air smelled fresh and crisp. It had been raining here less than an hour before, she concluded.
“Ohio’s people said she’d meet us about two klicks to the north,” Brigid explained as she strode up the muddy incline and made her way toward a rusty chain-link iron fence that surrounded the redoubt’s hidden entrance.
“Lead on, Baptiste,” Kane muttered as he watched the beautiful woman duck through a gap in the fence and make her way across the puddle-dotted fields beyond.
Kane and Grant followed, their boots sinking into the sodden ground as they trekked toward the fence.
Grant pulled at the gap in the fence, lifting the chain link a little to provide Kane with more clearance. “She knows what she’s doing,” he reminded his friend.
“I know,” Kane allowed. “I just don’t like dealing with these bandit types. It never ends well.”
Grant agreed as he pulled himself through the gap in the fence after Kane. They found themselves on a grassy hill that sloped gently toward the distant Tennessee River.
“Way I see it, what it really comes down to is you can’t trust anyone,” Grant said. “First rule of survival.”
Kane glanced at him, the trace of a sarcastic smile crossing his lips. “You’re still thinking like a Magistrate.” He laughed.
“It’s kept me alive so far,” Grant retorted.
Kane snorted. “That and having me at your back.”
Grant shook his head in mock disbelief as the pair of ex-Mags made their way across the soft, muddy ground after the svelte figure of Brigid Baptiste.
OHIO BLUE WAS a tall, slender woman in her midthirties with thick, long blond hair that was styled to fall over her right eye. She wore a shimmering sapphire dress that reached almost to her ankles, with an enticing slit revealing almost the entire length of her left leg. She sat, legs crossed, on a crimson-cushioned recliner set in the middle of a vast boathouse located on the banks of the Tennessee, in an area that had once been called Knoxville. Surrounding Ohio Blue and the recliner were approximately fifty large crates and twenty well-armed guards.
The boathouse was solid on three sides, while the fourth was open to the mighty river itself. There was a sunken area in the large structure where boats could be docked, with the dark river waters lapping against the sides with a constant swishing that echoed throughout the vast, high-ceilinged building.
With a graceful shrug, Ohio swept her luxuriant hair over her shoulders and stood up, offering her hand to Brigid. The hand was sheathed in a silk glove that stretched all the way past the elbow in a shade of blue that precisely matched the color of her shimmering dress. “You must be Miss Baptist,” Blue said, her voice wonderfully musical.
“Baptiste,” Brigid corrected as she clutched the woman’s gloved hand and briefly shook it.
Kane and Grant stood a few paces behind Brigid, flanking her with arms crossed, their Sin Eaters hidden once more in their wrist holsters. Ohio Blue swept her hand casually toward them, a smile playing across lips that were painted an ice blue to match the highlights of her sapphire dress as it caught the light with the movements of her curvaceous figure. “A pair of handsome things,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Companions or employees?”
“A little of both.” Brigid smiled. The art of the deal was in making the other party comfortable, and Brigid knew that she had better make this black marketer happy. If Reba DeFore’s estimates were correct, the Cerberus personnel would be needing these shots before the month was out.
Kane and Grant took up positions to the sides of the open area of the boathouse as Ohio Blue sat back down on her crimson-cushioned recliner. The blond-haired woman patted the cushion with her hand, encouraging Brigid to join her. “Let’s talk business, Miss Baptiste,” she drawled. “I understand that you’re in the market for some pharmaceuticals.”
“That’s right,” Brigid replied, resting herself at the edge of the couch beside the stunning woman. “I’m looking for some specific jabs, the kind of stuff they were producing in Beausoleil before the…” She trailed off, her hands open to indicate that she didn’t have the words to describe it.
“A terrible thing,” Ohio agreed. “Truly, truly terrible. My brother died in the attack.”
“I’m sorry,” Brigid lamented.
“No matter,” the slender blonde continued. “Many a good business opportunity has come out of that disaster, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
As Baptiste continued to talk with the trader, Kane and Grant warily scanned the vast room. The place smelled damp. There was green mold scabbing over the walls and the wooden floor planks, and the lighting was inadequate for such a large room. There were several broken windows high in the walls of the building, and the whole place felt cold and dank. Guards patrolled all around, armed with subguns, heavy rifles and pistols. When he looked up, Kane spotted half a dozen more guards walking across the tops of the highest crates, and two more just standing up there, their blasters trained on the negotiating parties below. He turned to Grant, caught the man’s eye and mouthed the words, “We are very outnumbered.”
In response, Grant just nodded and beamed a bright smile. Kane knew what that meant—they were here now, and there wasn’t a lot they could do about it.
The discussions seemed to be going well between Ohio Blue and Brigid Baptiste, until Brigid opened up her satchel and showed the trader its contents.
“What is this?” Ohio said, clearly affronted. “Some kind of joke?”
“Fifty gold coins,” Brigid stated, trying to remain calm. “Exactly as requested in your communiqué.”
Blue held one of the ancient coins before her visible blue eye and, for a moment, Brigid half expected her to bite down on it like an olden-day pirate testing if a gold piece was genuine.
“We’ve traveled quite some distance to obtain this merchandise,” Brigid prompted.
Blue looked at the gold coin for another half minute before finally flipping it back into Brigid’s satchel. “I need more,” she said.
Brigid was incredulous. “You’re upping the price?” she said. “But all I brought was fifty pieces.”
“Seventy,” Ohio declared, her lone blue eye staring at Brigid.
Brigid sighed, considering her options quickly. “What if I take less?” she suggested. “What does fifty get me?”
Ohio Blue smiled tightly. “Nothing. Deal’s off.”
“Wait,” Brigid instructed. “I can get seventy. I just don’t have it here.”
A wicked smile crossed Ohio’s thin blue lips. “Perhaps,” she said, gazing openly at Grant, “we can work out a trade?”
Brigid followed the woman’s eye line, watching Grant as the huge ex-Mag stood with his broad back to them, checking their surroundings. “What kind of trade?” she asked, her tone dubious.
“One can always use more…employees,” Ohio said, her tone dripping with meaning.
“Grant’s not for sale,” Brigid stated firmly.
Ohio Blue’s gloved hands turned inward, held open before her as though such a suggestion were beneath her. “I’m not talking about a sale, Miss Baptiste,” she said. “I’m not a barbarian. A simple trade is all. Your impressive friend there for the items you wish to acquire.”
Brigid appeared to be giving the matter some serious consideration before she finally shook her head, her red tresses flowing back and forth with the movement. “I’m afraid I can’t let Grant go right now,” she explained sadly.
“In which case,” Ohio told her, standing up from the couch, “you’ll be leaving empty-handed.”
After a moment, Brigid stood, too, and turned to offer the woman her hand once more. “It was nice meeting you, Miss Blue,” she said, a tight, businesslike smile on her face. “Seventy coins. My people will be in touch to organize another meeting.”
Blue nodded her agreement, and Brigid walked back through the makeshift alleyways of stacked crates with Kane and Grant falling into step behind her. The coins in the satchel chinked as it slapped against Brigid’s leg with the roll of her hips.
“A swing and a miss,” Grant muttered. “I could have stayed in bed.”
Brigid turned to look at him, a mischievous smile on her lips. “You almost ended up in someone else’s,” she said quietly as they neared the door. Just then, Kane flinched, an almost unconscious movement, and his arms swept forward in a blur, shoving Brigid to the floor and pulling Grant down to join them. “Down!” he shouted, but the word was obscured by the explosive sounds of gunfire coming from behind them.
“What the hell!” Grant snarled, scrambling to cover between the crates in a rapid crouch walk.
Kane rolled beside him, while Brigid ducked behind the stacked crates across from them, pulling the TP-9 from its holster. Kane and Grant powered the Sin Eaters into their hands as they backed up against the tall stacks of crates.
“This is crazy,” Brigid hissed across the gap between them in a harsh whisper. “They had us outnumbered, could have killed us at any time. Why now?”
There were more gunshots, and a hailstorm of bullets drilled against the crates beside them. When the shooting stopped, Kane flicked his head out into the space between the crates, taking in the scene in a fraction of a second before ducking back behind cover as more bullets whizzed past.
“It’s not us they’re after,” Kane told Brigid as he returned to cover. “I think someone’s come to speak to your new friend.”
“With bullets,” Grant added, shaking his head. “Nice.”
Chapter 3
At the back of the cave, the assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently as Decimal River’s fingers played across the laptop’s glowing keyboard. At the other side of the low-ceilinged cave, Cloud Singer’s eyes flicked to the ghost woman, still wary of her despite all that had happened in the month since she had found her way back to the Original Tribe.
The woman, the assassin whose warrior name was Broken Ghost, had such an air of stillness about her, of utter calm despite the tenseness of the situation, that it made Cloud Singer uncomfortable. The woman’s flesh seemed almost washed-out compared to the café-au-lait complexions of the other members of the tribe. Her braided black hair and dark eyes gave Broken Ghost a striking appearance unlike anyone else in the tribe. She had painted her face with subtle blends, adding the illusion of shadow, intensifying her cheekbones, making her sharp-angled face appear almost skeletal, and she had weaved bits of glass and small, sharp chips of rock into her thick hair. She wore a loose undershirt that left her lean arms bare, their tight, corded muscles visible. Her skirt was really just two strips of material—one in front and one in back—that dangled to her knees and left her firm legs unencumbered.
Cloud Singer looked down at her own body, perversely unable to stop comparing herself to the magnificent warrior. By contrast, Cloud Singer was just a girl. Sixteen years old, with all the energy and suppleness that that granted, but none of the raw power of the formidable woman at the back of the cave. She wore her warrior’s garb, as she had done ever since returning home to the outback: a tight strip of material stretched across her small breasts like a bandage, with more strips across her groin and legs, wrapped around her arms and encasing her scarred knuckles. Once upon a time, those strips of material had been the pure white of the clouds for whom she sang. After the massacre in Georgia, of which she was the only survivor, the strips had been washed with the blood of a squealing boar while Cloud Singer slit its neck, squeezing its life out of it, until the material was dyed red. After that, despite protests from the elders of the tribe, Cloud Singer had refused to remove her warrior clothes, to the point of even bathing in them in the underground pool that the tribe used. Only alone, in her few moments of absolute solitude, had she stripped out of the strange uniform, and then only to be naked. Until the mission was complete, she would never wear anything other than her warrior’s garb. She had promised that much to Neverwalk as he lay there, head lolled at that dreadful angle, the dried blood splashed all about him in the underground bunker in the Caucasus Mountains.
“They’ve used their slicer,” Decimal River stated, his head turning right then left as he addressed the two women on opposite sides of the cave. He was a young man, just a few years older than Cloud Singer, and his left arm was decorated with tattoos of circuitry. He wore baggy shorts and a loose shirt, open to the waist. The shirt was dark with sweat, and clung to his dark skin where its folds touched him. His hair was braided, like Broken Ghost’s, and his face showed a nasty scar from a burn across the left cheek, stopping just shy of his eye.
“Not slicer,” Broken Ghost corrected, her voice low, eyes closed in meditation. “Mat-trans. They call it a mat-trans.”
Decimal River pulled up a window of scrolling information on the laptop’s screen, flicking his hand before the motion sensor to run quickly through the pages of information displayed there. “Fifty-seven minutes ago,” he continued, “they activated the mat-trans, crossing from their home in the Montana mountains to…here.” He pointed to a paper map that was stretched across the wall of the cave. The map showed North America, and a red cross marked the Bitterroot Mountains. His finger tapped at an area close to the bottom right, but it meant nothing to Cloud Singer.