Scarlet Dream

“Problematic, how?” Philboyd queried.

“Mike’s was a working prototype in operation while the whole process was still at its teething stage,” Lakesh explained. “Ultimately, the idea of powering the units by cold fusion was judged too dangerous to continue to use, and so other avenues were pursued. Of course, several early systems were being tested at this stage. It was a prestige military project, and as is often the way in such cases, money was in place to ensure it would work.”

Philboyd nodded in understanding. “But you said it was buried?” he asked.

“Redoubt Mike was abandoned once the cold-fusion system was deemed unsuitable,” Lakesh explained. “The base itself was primarily belowground, with only the entry at ground level. They concreted over those doors and left it to the mercies of the swamps. Which means no one should be inside.”

Brewster glanced back at his monitor screen where the warning pop-up continue to blink. “Well-lll,” he began, stretching the single syllable, “either we have a glitch in our monitoring system or a caller has come a-knock-knocking for Mike.”

Casting aside the paperwork he had been looking at on his own desk, Lakesh strode across the room and joined Brewster at his monitor, running through the alert data that had appeared there. As he read the details, the old cyberneticist’s expression darkened.

LOCATED HIGH IN THE Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, the Cerberus redoubt was an ancient military facility that had remained largely forgotten or ignored since the nukecaust. The isolation was only reinforced by the curious mythology associated with the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually un-populated; the nearest settlement was found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Native Americans, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Hidden beneath camouflage netting, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team within the redoubt. Gaining access to those satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base, but their efforts now gave Lakesh’s team a near limitless stream of feed data from around the planet, as well as providing global communications links.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was exceedingly rare for strangers to approach the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt via the mat-trans chamber housed within the redoubt itself.

Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans exploited the hyperdimensional quantum stream, transmitting digital information along hyperdimensional pathways. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units, much as a train is restricted by its tracks and the location of its stations.

More recently, the Cerberus personnel had refined an interphaser unit, which functioned along similar principles but relied on naturally occuring parallax points, intersecting lines of intense energy. Requiring no external power source, these parallax points existed across the Earth—and beyond—and could be exploited by use of a portable device called an interphaser, which could be carried by just one person using an attaché-style case. Although not limitless, the interphaser had the distinct advantage of portability and a wider array of receiver locations.

Having read the data on Brewster’s screen, Lakesh stumbled back into the empty chair behind him, almost falling as he sat. Several of the other personnel on shift in the command center turned at the noise, expressing concern for their operational leader.

“Is everything okay?” Brewster asked, although he feared that he already knew the answer.

“This is very bad,” Lakesh said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Once the decision had been taken to decommission Mike, the redoubt was used as a storage facility for other projects of dubious worth. Which is to say, it became a dumping ground, since the impending secure closure of the site meant that whatever was left there could not be accessed ever again.”

“What sorts of things?” Brewster asked.

Lakesh shook his head, feeling weary as the enormity of the breach in redoubt security struck him. “The sort of things the military always involves itself in—weapons, the means of destruction.

“Sooner or later, all our sins come back to haunt us, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh pronounced, standing once more. “I think we had better assemble a team and investigate this intrusion at our earliest opportunity.”

ON ANOTHER LEVEL of the hidden mountain base, Kane stood in front of a punching bag hanging on a rigid spring from the ceiling of the communal gymnasium. Kane gritted his teeth as he attacked the hanging bag with a series of swift, bare-knuckled blows: first right, then left, then right again.

Kane was a powerfully built man, with no-nonsense blue-gray eyes and dark hair cropped short to his collar. Dressed in a black T-shirt and loose slacks, Kane was an outstanding example of physical fitness. His wide shoulders and muscular arms powered his punches with incredible force, smashing the punching bag back on its spring so hard that it rattled in its metal housing. It had been observed that Kane was built like a wolf, sleek and muscular with exceptional power concentrated in his upper torso. He seemed to have the temperament of a wolf, too, for he was both pack leader and a natural loner, depending on the situation.

An ex-Magistrate, enforcer of the laws of the walled villes that dominated the U.S. landscape of the twenty-third century, Kane was a trained fighter, with a razor-keen mind and exceptional combat prowess. What distinguished Kane among his contemporaries, however, was something he referred to as his point man sense, an uncanny awareness of his surroundings that verged on the supernatural. In actuality, there was nothing unearthly about Kane’s ability—it was simply the disciplined application of the same five senses possessed by any other human being.

As Kane worked at the punching bag, each mighty uppercut, jab and cross forcing the leather teardrop to shake in its mountings, he became aware of another person entering the otherwise empty gymnasium. Kane’s blue-gray eyes flicked across the room as he looked over his shoulder, his fists still working at the high punching bag. The newcomer was a woman, her body sheathed in a skin-tight white jumpsuit that accentuated her trim curves and athlete’s body. A cascade of curling red locks flowed past her shoulders to the midpoint of her back.

Brigid Baptiste and Kane shared a long history. Where Kane was a man of action, Brigid’s background was as an archivist. Which wasn’t to say that Brigid could not hold her own in a fight—far from it, as she could handle herself with fists or guns, and she had proved to be a hellcat when riled. However, Brigid Baptiste had one trait that had proved immeasurably useful in the adventures she had shared with Kane: a mental talent known as an eidetic, or photographic, memory, which allowed her to visually remember in precise detail everything she had ever seen.

For almost half a minute Kane continued to beat at the punching bag, working rhythmically in a tarantella of swift punches as beads of sweat glistened on his skin. As he drilled his final right cross against the leather bag, Brigid Baptiste stopped in front of him, eyebrows raised in an inquisitive expression that betrayed her mocking humor.

“Feeling a little frustrated today?” she asked as Kane stepped back on the balls of his feet, leaving the punching bag swinging to and fro from its mounting between them.

Kane looked at her and smiled. “Aw, it had it coming,” he said, indicating the swaying bag as it slowly returned to a static position, waiting for its next opponent.

Brigid looked at the punching bag and laughed, creases of delight appearing momentarily around her emerald eyes as she did so. “What, did it outsmart you at chess?” she asked. “Again?”

Brushing a hand through his sweat-damp hair, Kane reached for the hand towel that he had left on a nearby bench. “What can I do for you, Baptiste?” he asked, ignoring her friendly taunt.

“Lakesh is asking us to meet in the ops room,” Brigid explained as she watched Kane wiping the sweat from his powerful arms. “I don’t know the details yet, but it seems there’s trouble out there in paradise and he wants us ready to ship out in the next hour.”

Kane tapped at the side of his head, indicating the subdermal Commtact unit that was hidden there beneath the skin. “Guess I didn’t hear the call,” he explained.

Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the military artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels 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, a deaf person would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtacts had other properties, too, including acting as intelligent, real-time translators on the condition that a sufficient sample of a language had been programmed into them to decipher a dialect.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Brigid assured Kane. “I told him I’d come find you.”

Kane fixed Brigid with his most mischievous look as he slung the towel over one shoulder. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

In reply, Brigid leaped from a standing start, high into the air, and kicked the punching bag that hung between them, making it rebound so hard that it almost clipped Kane in his smugly smiling face.

“You wish,” she told him as she landed in a graceful crouch.

Despite their outward antagonism, Kane and Brigid had the utmost respect for one another and they shared a very special bond. That bond was known as anam-charas, or soul friends, and it referred to a connection that transcended history itself. No matter what form the two found themselves in, no matter the nature of their reincarnations throughout eternity, the pair would remain unequivocally linked, tied together by some invisible umbilical cord that meant they would always be there for each other. Some had interpreted this link to mean that they were lovers, but the anam-chara bond was something more than that—the friendship and love of siblings or respectful contemporaries, with Brigid the yin to Kane’s yang.

While Kane and Brigid had been partners for a long time, there was a third integral member of their group, as well. Grant was also an ex-magistrate and had been Kane’s original partner in his Magistrate days. Grant was as much Kane’s brother as any blood relative. Together, the three of them formed an exceptional exploration group who seemed able to handle themselves in any given situation. Which was fortunate, as the situations they encountered while working for Cerberus had ranged from the improbable to the outright impossible.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Kane strolled into the operations room dressed in a clean shadow suit, his hair still damp from the shower he had taken on leaving the gym.

As Kane walked through the doors beneath the Mercator map with its multicolored lines of light, Lakesh stepped forward to greet him. “I am glad you could make it so quickly, Kane,” he said briefly.

As with Brigid Baptiste, Kane had known Lakesh for a long time and he recognized when the formidable scientist sounded worried. Behind Lakesh, Brigid and Grant waited along with several other personnel who were prepping the mat-trans for use. The mat-trans chamber was located in an antechamber at the far corner of the large room, well away from the entry doors. The unit itself was situated within a small, eight-foot-high cubicle surrounded by armaglass walls tinted a brown hue. The door to the unit operated using a numeric key code, and the use of the unit was monitored by a computer terminal located just to the side of its entry door. Right now, Lakesh’s deputy, the copper-haired Donald Bry, sat at the mat-trans terminal, a look of deep concern on his features. Normally, Kane would not take Bry’s expression as a reliable indicator of the situation. The man was a compulsive worrier and Kane struggled to recall an instance when his brow wasn’t furrowed beneath his untamed mop of copper curls. However, the atmosphere in the room was such that Kane knew immediately that he had entered a serious situation.

“Well, I aim to please,” Kane replied as Cerberus weaponsmith Henny Johnson rushed over to arm the ex-Mag for the field. “What’s going on?”

Briefly, Lakesh outlined the situation regarding the intrusion alert at Redoubt Mike and how the Louisiana redoubt potentially contained any number of decommissioned weapons along with its outdated mat-trans unit.

“This may be a simple glitch in our system, or in Mike’s,” Lakesh concluded, “but there’s an adage that I think applies here—it is better to be safe than sorry.”

“I quite agree,” Kane said as he strapped a familiar wrist holster to his right arm and checked that the Sin Eater pistol that Henny handed him was fully loaded.

Henny glared at Kane as he checked the pistol, as if offended that he would, for even a moment, believe she might send him out into the field with equipment that wasn’t fully prepared. She was a small woman, five foot five with blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below her ears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as Kane placed the compact pistol snugly in its wrist holster and shrugged the sleeve of his black denim jacket over it to conceal it. “Don’t trust me anymore, cowpoke?”

Kane glanced up at the armorer. “I trust you, Johnson,” he said, “but I’d also expect you to double-check my work if your life was about to depend on it.”

“Thanks… I think,” Henny said as she passed Kane a handful of spare ammo cartridges and flash-bang globes for use in the field.

“Well, then.” Grant’s voice rumbled from where he sat, perched on the edge of one of the computer desks. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Grant was a huge man, well over six feet in height and broad like an oak door. A little older than Kane, he was a solid wall of muscle, with skin like polished ebony and a gunslinger’s mustache curling down from his top lip. Grant wore his hair cropped so close to his skull that he seemed almost bald, and he had placed a dark woollen cap over his head now, pulled low so that it met with his thick eyebrows, enhancing his permanent scowl.

Like Kane, Grant had dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits beneath his long, Kevlar-weave black coat. Though they appeared to be made of the thinnest of material, the tight-fitting one-piece shadow suits acted as artificially controlled environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.

Kane peered around the room for a moment, his eyes searching before he turned back to his partners where they waited at the desks. “Was I meant to bring the interphaser?” he asked.

“No interphaser this time, buddy,” Grant advised in his deep voice.

Lakesh gestured to the doorway in the far corner of the room. “Ah, yes, you weren’t here when I explained this, old friend,” he told Kane. “We’ve used our remote access to power the receiver unit at Redoubt Mike,” he stated briefly.

Kane felt a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

Brigid smiled brightly as she looked over her shoulder, encouraging Kane to follow her toward the armaglass cubicle that dominated a corner of the operations room. “Oh, yes. We’re going via mat-trans for this one,” she told him. “Old school.”

“Oh, great,” Kane muttered sarcastically as he followed his two companions through the doorway into the ancient mat-trans unit. “If there’s one thing I miss, it’s doing things the really shitty way.”

“We’ll briefly activate the outdated system by remote,” Lakesh told Kane as he peered through the open doorway. “It’s risky, but every second counts, so the closer we can get you to the site of infraction, the better.”

“Right blindly into the thick of it, huh?” Kane said, shaking his head. “Yeah, that plan can’t go wrong.”

“For our security, the mat-trans will power down immediately after you’ve materialized at Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh said to assure him. “Which means you’ll need to comm us when you’re ready to return.”

Kane nodded irritably. “Got it.”

Kane closed the door, locking the three companions in the ancient mat-trans chamber and enabling the jump sequence. Donald Bry’s fingers worked the computer keyboard and the trio were reduced to their component atoms, digitized and sent across the quantum ether to the receiver unit in far-off Louisiana.

At least it’s quick, Kane reasoned as his substance ceased to exist.

Chapter 3

Traveling via mat-trans was a little like waking in the middle of the night to the awful realization that you had contracted food poisoning. A moment earlier, one’s life was a restful dream, then suddenly it had turned into a bewildering nightmare, colored only by one’s need to vomit.

Almost doubled over, Kane took deep breaths as he stood in the mat-trans chamber that he and his companions had materialized in an instant before. His heart was pounding, his stomach was doing some crazy kind of acrobatics and he could taste bile at the back of his throat. For a moment he stood hunched over, staring at the white-tiled floor as he tried to bring himself back to a state of calm.

The tiled floor at Kane’s feet was familiar, exactly the same as the one that the companions had left in Montana just an instant earlier, dusty white tiles glinting beneath harsh overhead lighting. White mist floated in the air like fog, slowly dissipating as extractor fans began their designated task of clearing the glass-walled chamber.

While mat-trans travel was possible for humans, it had not initially been designed with people in mind. Rather, it was intended for the movement of matériel, and its application to transporting the human form could be traumatic. Despite the churning of his stomach, Kane was fairly used to this ghastly system of travel, and had made his peace with it years before. Grant, by contrast, had never liked traveling via mat-trans, and he endured it with a determined mixture of bitterness and hostility, even after all these years with Cerberus.

“Everyone arrive in one piece?” Kane asked, straightening to check on his two companions.

They stood behind him, one over each shoulder in the manner of a fighter pilot’s wingmen. Brigid Baptiste had her hand to her mouth and was biting down on her knuckle, her skin visibly paler than even its usual near-alabaster hue.

Realizing that Kane was looking at her for an answer, Brigid nodded, still biting down on her knuckle.

Across from the red-haired former archivist, Grant had his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed up tight, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts.

“Grant?” Kane urged, reaching for his other companion.

“Present,” Grant muttered, his eyes still closed.

Kane felt his own stomach lurch then, and he gagged for a moment, holding down its contents with considerable effort. “You okay?” he asked once he had got himself back under control.

Grant opened his eyes, the dark orbs looking bloodshot, focused on some far distant point. “That was…that was really something,” he said through gasping breaths.

“Lakesh said this was a prototype unit,” Brigid reminded them both. She had removed her hand from her mouth now, but she still seemed unsteady on her feet as she staggered forward, the chunky heels of her cowboy boots clacking loudly against the white tiles. “I guess they didn’t iron out all the kinks on this one.”

“Guess not,” Kane agreed as he recovered himself.

The pale transportation gas had almost disappeared now, the extractor fans whirring loudly above the companions’ heads, and Kane turned to face the door. The door was offset from center in a bank of tinted armaglass, its panes colored a golden yellow. When traveling via mat-trans, the differently colored armaglass was one rudimentary way to recognize that a person had actually been shunted to a new location. In the direct manner of the military mind, each location had differently colored glass, a coded sequence that identified each mat-trans and its location. Presumably, when the system was still in its earliest days and the number of units was small, one might say, “I’m going to gold,” which meant the individual was traveling to Redoubt Mike in Louisiana. As a general rule, what a military force seemed to lack in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness. The speed and ease of identification could often be crucial in such situations, where goods and personnel were effectively being shoved through the unknown.

Still a little woozy, Kane stilled his mind and went into the near trancelike state that put him on high alert, powering his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a flinch of his wrist tendons as he stepped over to the sealed door. The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, and both Kane and Grant had kept them when they had fled from the barony of Cobaltville that they had been tasked to protect years before. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist, in Kane’s case one tucked beneath the unbuttoned sleeve of his darkly colored denim jacket. The holsters reacted to a specific flinch movement of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety feature for the weapon would ever be required, for a Magistrate’s judgment was considered infallible.

Kane and Grant were schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old and trusted companion, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a wristwatch.

Kane worked the electronic lock, ordering the others to stay alert as the door slid open. Grant still looked decidedly uncomfortable, but Kane knew that they didn’t have the luxury to wait around if there were intruders on site. “You ready?” Kane asked his old Magistrate partner.

Slowly, Grant nodded, ordering his own Sin Eater blaster into his hand with a well-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. “Yeah, let’s go crash this party.”

Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste unfastened her own pistol from its position at her hip, the bulky block of the TP-9 looking large in her delicate, feminine hands. Unlike the two ex-Magistrates, Brigid had not grown up being schooled in the application of weaponry. However, she had learned swiftly as an adult, her eidetic memory allowing her to perfect the techniques of combat far quicker than an average person. Her TP-9 was a compact semiautomatic, a large hand pistol with the grip set just off center beneath the barrel and a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. With its grip so close to the center, it looked a little like a square block, the bottom edge of that square completed by the holder’s forearm. Weapon now in hand, Brigid nodded her own silent agreement.