Death Cry
Bullets clipped the ground at his feet, ricocheting off trees and rocks all around him, cutting lethal tracks through the snow as they sought their target.
Still running, Kane held the Sin Eater across his body and reeled off a quick burst of gunfire. The 9 mm bullets zipped through the air in the direction of the Scorpinaut before slapping harmlessly on the armor plate at the front of the vehicle in a shower of sparks. Kane kept running to his right, checking over his left shoulder to make sure the vehicle was still following. Wearing the black shadow suit, he wouldn’t be hard to spot, and having taken a few shots at the Scorpinaut, he figured the crew would be just about mad enough to forget about his colleagues until they had finished with him.
Over to the right, at roughly the same height on the snowy bank as he now found himself, Kane saw a pair of trees. Their trunks were thin and their branches loaded with snow like cotton wool. Head down, he forced himself to run faster, kicking his legs high to get clear of the snow that threatened to pull him over or slow him. He aimed his body toward the trees, a plan forming in his mind.
At that moment, a loud crack split the air and a 40 mm shell hurtled over Kane’s head, slamming into the snow-bank twenty feet above him and exploding with an almighty crash. Kane felt the shock wave of the explosion as it slammed into the right side of his abdomen, and dislodged snow tumbled past him as it slid down the slope.
Kane looked back over his left shoulder and saw that the Scorpinaut crew had brought the tail cannon into the fray. The flexible cannon arm was doubled back to shoot over the main body of the vehicle, launching its massive shells in his direction. While the crew could not get the swivel arm low enough to hit its target, if enough snow was dislodged or one of those trees cut down so that it knocked Kane off his feet, then he was done for. He whipped his head back and pushed his body harder, limbs pumping, determined to keep ahead of the approaching vehicle.
Bullets riddled the ground as the Scorpinaut’s foreclaws spit lead at the running figure. Kane skipped to one side, his breath coming heavily now, the cold air burning his nostrils and throat. He was almost at the trees, and the Scorpinaut was just behind him. In fact, it was so close that suddenly he found himself inside the foreclaws’ arc of fire and he realized, horrified, that the millennialists would be just as happy to mow him down.
The snowfall was turning into a blizzard now, everything becoming white on white, so heavy that Kane could barely see two body lengths ahead as he ran. He glanced behind him once more, the dark shadow of the approaching Scorpinaut an ominous presence just a few feet away, its grinding engine loud in his ears. He heard the drums of the machine guns in the foreclaws spin as they reloaded and prepared to shoot once again, and he looked ahead once again to see the two thin trees just feet away. As the machine guns began blasting, Kane threw himself forward, diving between the tree trunks and hurtling face-first into the cushion of the thick snow, bullets racing overhead. There was a sudden, resounding crash, and Kane felt the jarring impact as the Scorpinaut slammed into the thin tree trunks in its way. They were thin but Kane had judged that they had to be hardy, growing there in the harsh wilds of North Dakota.
Still lying on the ground, Kane looked behind him and saw that the Scorpinaut was tangled between the sturdy trunks, its foreclaws still spitting leaden death into the air. It had become wedged at an angle, its claws tilted and pointing into the sky at thirty degrees; good now only for shooting birds, there was no way that the crew would be able to target anything on ground level. Kane heard the angry spluttering of shifting gears as the driver attempted to reverse or move forward, desperately trying to disentangle the vehicle from the trap he had driven into at full speed.
Kane smiled, his breath clouding before him as he watched the millennialists struggling to free their vehicle. Then he pulled himself up, brushing snow from his shadow suit and rolling his shoulders to loosen them after the hard landing. Kane holstered his Sin Eater and made his way back up the hill at a fast jog and continued in the direction of the Mantas.
The snowstorm was so heavy that Kane almost ran straight past where the Mantas were stowed close to a clump of trees. Kane had assumed he would recognize the formation of the trees, but by the time he got there they had been covered with thick snow, blending into the white landscape.
As he jogged by, Kane spied a flash of sunset-red and recognized it for Brigid Baptiste’s brightly colored hair. She was brushing snow from her hair and face when he approached, the white scarf now draped loosely over her shoulders.
“What kept you?” she asked, favoring Kane with a knowing smile.
“A little—” Kane thought for a moment “—horticulturalism.”
Brigid tilted her head querulously. “Were you picking flowers again?”
“More…rearranging trees,” Kane replied evasively, displaying a knowing smile of his own.
Grant appeared from inside one of the Manta craft as he slid down the subtle curve of its bronze-hued wing. Two of the strange aircraft were parked in the clearing by the trees. They had the general shape and configuration of seagoing manta rays. Flattened wedges with graceful wings curved out from their bodies to a span of twenty yards, with a body length of close to fifteen yards and a slight elongated hump in the center as the only evidence of the cockpit location. Curious geometric designs covered almost the entire exterior surface of each craft, with elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols all over. The Mantas were propelled by two different kinds of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes.
“Computer’s all packed,” Grant told both of them. “You about ready to move out?”
Kane looked at the heavy snow falling all about them. “I think we’ve pretty much outstayed our welcome,” he decided. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to navigate in this horrendous weather by sight alone, but the remarkable transatmospheric vehicles had a dizzying array of onboard sensors that would alert them to any danger long before they eyeballed it.
Brigid leaped into the Manta behind Kane, in the same spot that Grant had secured the computer in his own vehicle. Then, moving together, the two craft took to the skies and blasted away from Grand Forks, heading back to the Cerberus redoubt far to the west.
Chapter 3
When a weary-looking Kane, Grant and Brigid entered the ops center of the Cerberus redoubt, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh rose from his swivel chair and rushed across the large room to greet them enthusiastically. Called Lakesh by those who knew him, the doctor appeared to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age. He was a distinguished man who held himself upright, with an aquiline nose and refined mouth, dusky skin and sleek black hair showing the first hints of white at the temples. However, Lakesh was older than he appeared—much older. He had been a physicist and cyberneticist for the U.S. military before the nukecaust back in 2001, and had spent much of his life in cryogenic suspension.
The ops room was large with a vast Mercator relief map of the world spanning one wall, forming a panorama over the wide door through which the field team entered. The map included more than a hundred tiny lights, each illustrating a point where a known, operational mat-trans unit was located. A plethora of colored lines linked them in a representation of the Cerberus network, the central concern of the redoubt when it had been built over two hundred years before. Strictly speaking, Cerberus was a nickname for the headquarters.
Like all of the military redoubts, this one had been named for a phonetic letter of the alphabet, as used in radio communications. Somewhere in the long-forgotten computer logs and paper files stored deep within the three-story complex, Cerberus was still Redoubt Bravo, a facility dedicated to monitoring the use of the miraculous mat-trans network. But lost somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant illustration of a vicious two-headed hound guarding the doors to the redoubt, like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld. The soldier was long since forgotten, but his bold version of the hellhound lived on as a lucky charm and a mascot to the sixty-plus residents of the complex.
The redoubt was located high in the Bitterroot Range in Montana, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, with their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for Lakesh and his team. Maintaining and expanding access to the satellites had taken long hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the base. Now, Lakesh and his team could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. Despite delays associated with satellite communication, this arrangement allowed access to data surveying the surface of the planet, as well as the ability to communicate with field teams.
The high-ceilinged ops room was indirectly lit to better allow the computer operators to see their screens without suffering glare or obtrusive reflections. Two aisles of computer terminals stretched across the room, although a number of these currently stood unused. The control center was the brain of the redoubt, and Lakesh ensured that it was continuously manned. Right now, there were eight other people sitting at workstations dotted around the room, a mixture of long-term Cerberus staffers and several from the more recent influx of personnel that the base had acquired from a cryogenic-stasis squad found in the Manitius Moon Base.
“It is good to see you in such rude health,” Lakesh announced as he greeted his friends. Almost immediately, his eyes zeroed in on the black, metal-encased unit that Grant carried beneath one arm, and a confused frown furrowed his brow. “Over the comm, you said you were bringing the important files you had located.”
Weary, his muscles aching from his frantic dash across the freezing snow not an hour earlier, Kane’s explanation came out as an emotionless growl. “And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
Grant walked over to a free workstation and flipped the computer base from under his arm as though it didn’t have any weight to it at all. Gently he placed the computer on the desk and gestured to it theatrically. “One computer full of important files.”
Lakesh leaned forward, one hand reaching up to rest under his chin. Then he tilted his head, looking at the scarred computer from several angles before finally muttering, “Highly irregular.” He turned back to his trusted field team, noticing for the first time how exhausted the three of them appeared. “This is highly irregular,” Lakesh said again, more loudly this time as he addressed his colleagues, “but doubtless it is of incalculable value.” There was the trace of a lilting Indian accent to Lakesh’s speech, adding an almost musical tone to his words.
Brigid nodded. “Oh, it is,” she assured him. “I skimmed over the bulk of the files before we left the Grand Forks base. I can’t tell you what’s on there, but it’s encrypted to an almost implausible degree. It’s got to be some important material.”
Lakesh smiled, admiring the battered processor once more. “It certainly sounds promising,” he agreed. “Perhaps all of you would care to take a few hours for yourselves while I make a start on accessing these files.”
Grant didn’t need telling twice; he was already through the door and into the corridor without so much as a goodbye. Kane offered a halfhearted wave as he dashed out of the room after his partner, while Brigid Baptiste remained behind.
“What do you think it contains?” Brigid asked. “And more importantly, do you really think we can still access it? I told Kane that this was an insane way of looking at the files, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Oftentimes there is an admirable directness to Kane’s actions, I find,” Lakesh told her as he reached across the desk and pulled out several cables from the powered-down computer terminal located there.
Brigid smiled. For all of the apparent friction between herself and Kane, they were a good fit when push came to shove. Grant had reminded her earlier of the number of times that Kane had stepped in and put himself at risk to protect her and ensure that she reached her objective. She had done the same for him, of course—they were partners in peril. But there was more to it than that, a mystical bond that the two of them didn’t speak of often. They were anam-charas, soul friends, bonded throughout history to accompany each other as they faced whatever destiny threw at them.
Brigid unzipped her sable-collared jacket and pulled out the spectacles she had tucked safely in the inside pocket during the rushed exit from the underground base in North Dakota. “What can I do to help?” she asked, reaching past Lakesh to unplug the keyboard from the unused computer terminal.
He turned to watch her as she began searching for the right port at the back of the black box to insert the keyboard jack. He admired her utter focus and unwavering determination, feeling at that moment that he could watch her work forever. He stopped himself, blinking and remembering the task at hand. “Why don’t you take a few minutes to wash up and get yourself a change of clothes, Brigid?” he told her. “I can handle this and I’m sure that the joint expertise in this room can likely pull me free if I get tangled in any loose wires.”
Smiling, Lakesh gestured the breadth of the room, and Brigid looked up. Among the operatives at the terminals in the vast control center she could see Brewster Philboyd, an inspired astrophysicist of some renown, Dr. Mariah Falk, a caring woman and expert in the field of geology, and Donald Bry, the communications specialist who had helped get the satellites online. Lakesh was right. Between them, she realized, these people could probably fashion a working computer from scratch given enough pieces.
Brigid glanced at her reflection in the glass screen of the dead computer monitor before her, seeing her disheveled hair where it had been freed from the scarf, the mud-spattered white coat and scarf she still wore about her shoulders, and she realized that Lakesh had nothing but her own health at heart. “Yes, siree, I’ll take that advice,” she said breezily, plucking the glasses from her nose and turning to the exit doors of the ops center. “But you promise you’ll call me the second you find anything, okay?” she called back as she stepped toward the door.
K ANE HURRIED TO CATCH UP with Grant as he left the ops center. The redoubt’s main corridor was a twenty-foot-wide tunnel carved through the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high roof.
“What’s the hurry, hero?” Kane asked, keeping his tone light despite the creeping exhaustion he felt washing over him now that he was out of the field. “You hardly said a word on the flight back here—something on your mind?”
Grant held up his left arm, fist clenched and his wrist chron close to Kane’s face. “I promised I’d cook for Shizuka tonight,” he grumbled, “and didn’t expect to be out in the field most of the afternoon.”
Tilting his head, Kane looked at the wrist chron and noted that it was almost six o’clock. “So?” he asked. “Cooking is just cooking, it won’t take that long.”
“Sure.” Grant nodded. “Cooking will take no time at all. It’s not the cooking that I’m worrying about.” He brushed a hand over his chops and beneath his chin, feeling the first, spiky itch of forming stubble as it met with his fingers. “Shower, shave, clean clothes—gotta look my best.”
Before he could stop himself, Kane blurted out a loud guffaw. “Man, when did you two become such an old married couple? Listen to you!”
“Old married nothing,” Grant replied. “What are we doing all this for, Kane—what are we fighting this crazy-ass war for—if not for people like Shizuka?” He held Kane’s gaze for a moment before turning and heading to his private quarters.
Kane remained standing in the corridor, stunned and feeling suddenly very alone. The war. Sometimes he forgot about the war. When he was in point-man mode, when it was all instinct, all action and do-or-die, he just went with the flow, didn’t think too much about where it was all leading. But Grant was right. They were in the middle of a war, a war that had raged on the planet Earth for more than five thousand years.
An alien race called the Annunaki had arrived on Earth in an effort to prevent their own stagnation. They had toyed with the primitive creatures that they had found there, shaping them to their own ends, for their own amusements. And when the toys had begun to lose their luster, the Annunaki had unleashed a great flood to wash away the remnants of this childlike race called humanity and begin anew. New forms of terrestrial subjugation emerged, and humankind was once again exploited by the alien master race.
Nobody really knew how long the Annunaki had shaped world events, and no one really understood why an all-powerful race would take so much time over what were, to them, little more than insects. And yet, the Annunaki had set events in motion to build up the Earth only to have the great civilizations destroy each other in another cataclysm, this time seemingly of their own making. Where water had failed the first time, fire took its place.
The planned nuclear holocaust had served a simple purpose, akin to leaving a field fallow so that the crops could be better harvested in the next cycle. The small percentage of the population that survived that fateful day in 2001 reverted to a state of savagery that ensured only the very strongest survived.
Two hundred years after that first nuclear strike, the Annunaki had reappeared as the overlords, reborn in new bodies formed from the chrysalis state of a mysterious ruling elite called the barons. As far as Kane could understand it, the whole trick had been pulled through a computer download; an organic computer on a starship called Tiamat found orbiting Earth, utilizing vastly superior technology to regenerate the godlike Annunaki pantheon. But for all intents and purposes, it was just another file download, a saved memory opened and accessed once more.
And working with Brigid and Lakesh had taught Kane that one file download meant that you could do another. And another and another and another. Tiamat had taken a crippling hit during a recent squabble between different factions of the alien Annunaki, and their tight grip on the affairs of Earth seemed to be relenting, but Kane suspected—as did all of the Cerberus exiles—that the chances were good that a backup file of Annunaki personalities was just waiting to be downloaded. The threat had abated temporarily, but the war was far from over.
Grant was right. He had Shizuka, the beautiful leader of a society of samurai warriors called the Tigers of Heaven who inhabited Thunder Isle in the Pacific. She was a noble warrior, every bit as brave and formidable as Grant.
And who did Kane have? Who was his fight for?
“The hell with it,” the ex-Mag muttered, turning toward his own quarters to take a hot shower to loosen the kinks in his muscles. He didn’t need to hang a face or a name on the person he was saving. He was there to save humanity, there to save himself and others like him. It wasn’t a war; it was basic survival.
A S L AKESH ATTACHED a new keyboard to the recovered computer in the ops center, communications expert Donald Bry, sitting several seats across from him, thought he saw a quick flash of code whip across the monitor at his workstation.
A round-shouldered man of small stature, Bry wore a constant expression of consternation, no matter his mood, beneath the curly mop of unruly, copper-colored hair. Bry was a long-serving and trusted member of the Cerberus crew, acting as Lakesh’s lieutenant and apprentice in all things technological.
Bry leaned forward in his seat, peering at his computer monitor, waiting for whatever it was to reappear. His monitor was linked to the Keyhole communications satellite, allowing Cerberus to remain in touch with field operatives and to pass information to them as required.
As he watched the surveillance image with thermal overlay taking up the main window on-screen, he urged whatever it was that had flashed up to reappear. When nothing happened, he began typing frantically at the keyboard, then slid his chair a few feet along the desk to review the past forty seconds at a separate monitor to his left.
Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. No code. No flash. Nothing.
Turning back to the live feed, Donald Bry leaned forward once again and ran his index finger across the lower right-hand side of the screen, where he had thought he had seen the code flash for a fraction of a second.
Farrell leaned over from a nearby desk, a quizzical look on his face. “Everything okay, Donald?” he asked.
Bry looked up, feeling awkward and suddenly stupid. “I thought I saw something for a moment,” he told the other operator, “but it was nothing. Just tired, I guess. Been looking at the old boob tube too long.”
Bry accepted when Farrell offered to cover communications monitoring for a while, and he got up to stretch his muscles and get out of the room for a few minutes, assuring his colleague he would be back shortly.
As Bry passed him, Lakesh was hooking a new monitor to the recovered computer. “Be sure you save some of the action for me,” Bry instructed Lakesh with forced geniality before exiting the ops center into the vanadium-steel corridor.
Outside the quiet hum of the operations center, Bry stood and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?” he asked himself quietly, trying to remember. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had flashed across the screen so quickly that it had to have been there for no more than a nanosecond, utterly subliminal. If it had been anything at all, he reminded himself.
Chapter 4
On the plateau outside the heavy accordion-style doors to the Cerberus redoubt, two figures were sparring. A rough circle had been etched in the dirt around them, stretching to a diameter of roughly twenty feet. The early-morning sun was rising over the mountain, casting long shadows across the ground as the two combatants paced the edge of the marked area as they prepared to battle.
The two figures could not have been more different.
To one side of the circle stood Grant, the dark-skinned, heavily muscled ex-Mag dressed in loose-fitting combat trousers and a dark-colored vest. His outfit was finished by a pair of scuffed, black leather boots, a souvenir of his Magistrate days.
Across the circle, her bare feet crossing each other as she walked around the edge of the temporary arena, her eyes never leaving those of her opponent, was Domi. Lithe and thin, Domi was an albino, her skin chalk-white and her short-cropped hair the cream color of bone. She wore an olive-drab ensemble made up of an abbreviated halter top that barely covered her tiny, pert breasts and a pair of shorts, rolled up high in the leg. The most startling aspect of Domi’s appearance, however, were her ruby-red eyes. The young woman weighed little more than a third of her opponent, yet showed no fear as she prepared to do combat with the bigger man.
“First outside the circle, toss or misstep,” she told him, “either counts as a loss.”