Janus Trap

“My dears,” Lakesh said as he approached them, “how did it go?”

“You mean initially or overall?” Kane asked as he shrugged out of his faded denim jacket and stretched his tense muscles.

“A summary will suffice,” Lakesh said hopefully.

Pushing Kane gently aside, Brigid stepped ahead of the others and addressed Lakesh, giving the distinct impression that Kane’s response had struck her as juvenile and unnecessary. “It all went fine,” she explained, shirking off the leather satchel and placing it to one side. “We’ll need to speak with the trader again, but everything’s in place.”

“Yeah.” Grant laughed, slapping Kane on the back. “Thanks to Romeo here.”

Lakesh glanced across to Kane, who was looking just a little self-conscious as he busied himself with removing his wrist holster. “Would you care to explain, my friend?”

Kane looked away from Lakesh, glancing around the ops room for a few moments before he replied in a mutter, “Nothing to explain. Just the usual story of bullets, women and, well, mostly bullets.”

Lakesh laughed at that, watching as Kane continued to scan the room. It was strange, but just for a moment, Lakesh saw a side of Kane that he had only really noticed on the few occasions when he had accompanied the ex-Mag on a field mission. If he didn’t know better he would swear that Kane was checking out the room, searching for enemies with that old “point-man sense,” as he called it.

“I’m glad you’re all okay,” Lakesh concluded, “and that we’ve made a new friend.”

“‘Friend’ may be overstating the case a little, Lakesh,” Kane said, “but it is what it is.”

With that, the three warriors marched through the ops room and out into the corridor.

Working at the desks closest to the mat-trans unit, Skylar Hitch tapped Donald Bry lightly on the arm and indicated Kane and his colleagues. “What’s eating them?” she asked in a whisper.

Bry shook his head. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

“They just seemed a little, I dunno, pissy?” Skylar suggested, keeping her voice low.

After a moment’s thought, Bry shrugged. “No one likes traveling by the mat-trans,” he reminded her.

Skylar sat there for a half minute, lost in thought as she looked at the door on the far side of the room.

“Are you okay, Skylar?” Bry asked when he noticed that she had ceased working at the motherboard before her.

“Hmm?” Skylar said, turning to look at him, her eyes coming back into focus. “It’s nothing.” She sighed, rolling her dark eyes and returning to the job at hand.

KANE CHECKED his wrist chron as the three of them strode, shoulder to shoulder, down the wide corridor that stretched the length of the Cerberus redoubt. “It’s 12:34 local time,” Kane told his colleagues, his jacket and holstered Sin Eater slung over one shoulder.

“One, two, three, four,” Brigid stated, smiling as she broke down the time into separate numbers. “That’s lunchtime.”

“Then we should eat,” Grant stated practically.

They slowed, purposefully looking around the twenty-foot-wide corridor as they realized that they were its sole occupants. The vast corridor was carved directly into the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high stone roof. The air never really seemed to heat up here, and it often felt more like working in a mine shaft than being inside a high-tech military facility.

Brigid stopped walking, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she brought to mind the floor plan of the redoubt. After a moment, her emerald eyes reappeared and she pointed to a doorway a few paces behind them. “This way,” she said. “Stairwell B.”

Kane nodded. “Lead the way, Baptiste,” he encouraged as the redhead pulled at the door handle.

The door didn’t move and Brigid turned and smiled with embarrassment. Then she pushed the door to open it and the three of them walked through.

THE CANTEEN WAS BUSY when Kane, Brigid and Grant entered the room. The lunchtime rush had begun, and the cooks and serving staff were busy trying to keep the lines moving as almost forty people waited to be served, trays in hand. Several friendly faces turned to acknowledge the three newcomers as they entered the room and Kane nodded back—albeit self-consciously—in return.

At the far side of the room, Domi sat with Shizuka, the lone occupants of a long table. The remnants of a late breakfast remained on the table between them. Domi rested back in her seat, keeping her back to the wall while Shizuka faced her, bemoaning some of the more mundane political aspects of her leadership of the Tigers of Heaven.

“Sometimes,” Shizuka was saying, her eyes on the water jug that stood a few seats along from her in the middle of the table, “I wonder that there might be more to life than politics and war. And by more, quite naturally, I truly mean less.”

Domi nodded, enjoying the company of the fascinating warrior woman whose background was so unlike her own. The two hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but they had a healthy respect for each other. Domi certainly felt more comfortable around Shizuka than she did around many of the big brains who resided at Cerberus on a permanent basis.

As Shizuka took a sip of her green tea, Domi noticed the new arrivals and waved them over. “I think lover boy’s returned,” she told Shizuka with a meaningful wink as Kane, Grant and Brigid spotted her and approached the table.

Shizuka’s eyes flicked delicately to the silvered surface of the water jug that sat just beyond her grip once more, then she smiled indulgently at the albino woman. “You’re slowing down, Domi,” she said. “I saw them enter almost a minute ago. Everything after that was just distraction.”

Domi shook her head, a cardsharp solidly outplayed. Shizuka’s eyes went back to the water jug as she watched the three figures approach, and unconsciously her left hand reached beneath the table to where her katana rested in its scabbard.

“Hey, guys,” Domi said, gesturing to the empty, molded seats of the table. “How did everything go?”

Kane looked at the albino woman for a long moment, blue-gray eyes like steel lingering over her small frame before affixing on the quiver of arrows that she had propped against the wall behind her. “It went fine, Domi,” he stated. “Planning a hunt?”

Domi looked confused for a second, before she saw where the ex-Mag was looking and realized what he meant. “Ha, no—just doing a little exploring this morning,” she explained. “Haven’t had the time to put things back.”

Kane nodded, then he glanced back to Brigid and Grant before he sat down. In that moment, it seemed, a significant look passed between the three, and Domi wondered if they were mocking her. “You could join me sometime,” she said defensively, though she didn’t relish the thought of company on her morning jaunts.

Grant took the seat to the left of Shizuka, and a broad smile played across his face as he watched her sip from the teacup. “Miss me?” he asked as she placed the cup delicately back on its saucer.

“An infinitesimal amount, perhaps,” Shizuka allowed, turning to look at him. After a second, a smile broke across her face and her hand reached out to entwine with his beneath the table.

Kane took the seat on the other side of Shizuka. Brigid walked around the table and took the seat opposite Kane, leaning back and surveying the other denizens of the cafeteria.

“Aren’t you guys eating?” Domi asked, looking from Kane to Brigid. Neither of them responded, and she snapped her fingers to get their attention. They both looked at her, their expressions inscrutable. “What’s up with you? Hey, you’re not doing that anam-chara thing again, are you?”

Brigid tilted her head indulgently as she looked at the albino woman. “Anam-chara?” she asked. Then, after a long blink, she continued, looking significantly at Kane. “The bond of the soul friends. No, Domi. Why do you ask?”

“Because the last time we were all together like this,” Domi began, “you were all—” she waved her hands around “—wooo-ooo! Soul-friend magic shit.”

Kane smiled. “We’ll try not to do that,” he assured her before pushing back from the table and standing. “I’m going to grab a tray and see what’s cooking,” he announced.

Excusing herself, Brigid followed him to the rear of the queue.

Shizuka leaned close to Grant and asked in a soft voice, “Are you not going to acquire something to eat, Grant-san?”

“In a minute,” he told her, still clutching her hand beneath the table.

“Keep your energy up,” she whispered, a tantalizing twinkle in her eye.

“Careful, Shizuka,” Grant whispered back. “That’s a threat I may just hold you to.”

BACK IN THE OPERATIONS room, Lakesh was placing Brigid’s discarded satchel of gold coins back in a secure cupboard, having removed the hidden stash of flash-bangs and other minor weapons and sent them on to the armory for secure storage.

“You’re pleased to have them back on-site, aren’t you?” Donald Bry said, calling across from the desk where he worked with Skylar.

Locking the cupboard, Lakesh turned and smiled. “Somehow, Donald, the three of them seem to complete Cerberus. The place always feels a little empty in their absence, present company notwithstanding, of course.”

Sitting beside Donald, a soldering iron in her hand, Skylar Hitch tsked.

“Something bothering you, Skylar?” Bry asked.

“Just thinking,” she said as she replaced a burned-out chip on the motherboard, “how you can get too attached to people sometimes.”

Lakesh joined the two of them, wheeling over a chair. “Now, then, what is that supposed to mean?” he asked, concern in his voice.

Skylar looked up at him for a few seconds before averting her gaze and turning back to her soldering. “Nothing, Dr. Singh,” she said quietly.

Lakesh and Donald shared a look; neither of them was quite sure what was going on with the normally quiet Miss Hitch.

IN A DARK CAVE many thousands of miles away, Decimal River was checking the results on his laptop’s screen for a fifth time. Finally satisfied, he shifted his body, turning away from the screen so that he could see both Cloud Singer and Broken Ghost where they stood across from each other within the small cave. “Infiltration complete,” he told them proudly. “They’re inside Cerberus.”

Cloud Singer felt a flush of warmth over her body at the thought. “What now?” she asked, looking at Decimal River.

In response, the young man simply inclined his head toward Broken Ghost, waiting for her to answer Cloud Singer’s question. “We wait,” Broken Ghost told them, “showing great patience always.”

“Always,” Cloud Singer repeated, despite feeling the intense need for action. She yearned to find Kane and the others and make them hurt for all they had done. But, she wondered, just where are they now?

Chapter 6

The side lighting of the room was dimmed, and Kane lay snoozing on the sagging couch in his two-room apartment. A plate rested on the low table before him, a half-eaten meal left to stew in its own juices. Beside it, catching the lights from the nearby residential towers through the window, brown drapes pulled back, a half-drained glass of milk, the bone-white liquid clinging to its interior sides as it was slowly dragged back down the glass by gravity.

Kane lay in a peaceful, dreamless sleep, head back, mouth open, and a quiet snoring came with his deep breaths. For the first time in a very, very long time, Kane was at peace.

“THE QUICK BROWN FOX never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Brigid Baptiste smiled as her fingers raced across the computer’s keys and these words formed on the display before her. The phrase contained every letter of the alphabet, an old typist’s mnemonic to ensure that all the keys could be reached and were operational.

“The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Never.

The computer and keyboard sat on a little desk that was hidden in a converted wardrobe within Brigid’s tiny apartment. Strictly speaking, she should not own a computer. Despite her high ranking as a Cobaltville archivist, Brigid was not legally allowed ownership of a personal computer of any form—the designated work databases should be enough for her, where her data queries could be monitored and questioned at any time.

Her computer at the Historical Division was newer than this one, using voice-recognition commands in place of this clumsy, old-fashioned keyboard with its “quick brown fox.” The keyboard felt old and slow by comparison, unable to keep up with the speed of Brigid’s thoughts. Still, it did the job.

She had found the computer, a cast-off DDC model, in the trash close to her one-person apartment. It had seemed to be serendipity, a stroke of luck, but she suspected it had been planted for her to find by her friends in the Preservationists, an underground movement dedicated to retaining the complete records of the world as it was before 2001. Brigid’s job, as an archivist, was to smooth the rougher edges of history to ensure that it was palatable with the enlightened baronial world view. Which was to say, hide the truth.

They could ask Brigid to smooth and hide all they liked, but her eidetic memory ensured that a perfect, untouched copy of it remained in her mind’s eye. She spent long evenings at the DDC’s keyboard, re-creating this information into computer files once more before leaving it at a specified drop-off point for the Preservationists to collect.

Sometimes she wondered if the Preservationists really existed. Sometimes she woke in a cold sweat, convinced that she had been snared in a web of deceit and the Preservationists were a simple fallacy that the emotionless Magistrates had created to prove her guilt.

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