by James Axler
Kane gritted his teeth as the Manta sped beyond gravity’s reach.
The Manta was burning through the last vestiges of the atmosphere now, hurtling up past its blue limit. Up ahead in the viewport, the blackness of space was becoming more pronounced as they reached the very edge of the atmosphere.
“What...do...you...plan to...do?” Brigid asked, every word a struggle as the gravity compensators in the Manta strove to keep up with the crushing pressure of the g-forces.
“Turn...around,” Kane bit out, “and catch...Grant...on the...flip side.”
Brigid was not certain what that meant, but it was too much effort to ask. She sat back in the acceleration couch behind Kane’s seat, clinging to its sides with a death grip.
Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact at that moment, his concern clear. “Kane? Your transponder is showing some incredible physical strain, as is Brigid’s. Where are you? What’s going on?”
“Backing...my partner...up,” Kane replied, his eyes locked on the blurring numbers racking up on the altimeter where it was displayed on his heads-up software. They were beyond the limit of the atmosphere now, where the Manta would engage a secondary propulsion system.
Wind drag cut abruptly and Kane felt the Manta lurch forward as it was freed from the grip of gravity. Kane felt the ramjet cut out as the solid-fuel pulse detonation rockets kicked in, blasting the Manta out into the void. Below them, Earth turned very slowly, and Kane counted equally slowly in his head, trying not to rush. In his mind, he had counted to three, but it felt like forever knowing that Grant was in danger. A moment later, Kane flipped the Manta, cutting a tight arc around, bringing the beautiful craft almost a full 180 degrees until it began to hurtle back toward Earth. Behind him, the Manta left a streak of flame as the solid fuel blasted from its rear.
* * *
GRANT’S MANTA CONTINUED coasting toward the city in the sky, caught up in the magnetic net cast by the golden air vehicles. The city hung a mile and a half above Earth’s surface, moving at a swift pace over the lush greenery of the Brazilian rain forest. As Grant tried to focus on it, it seemed to flicker in and out of the air, its golden spires and minarets wavering into view like a mirage.
Grant studied the there-again-gone-again buildings that covered its surface. There were mighty towers that shot high into the sky, many as tall as forty stories or more. There was also an abrupt line beneath the city, a straight plain like a flat disc on which the whole thing rested. The floating spectacle was big as a ville; in fact, it reminded him a little of Cobaltville, where he had grown up. Grant estimated it was larger than Cobaltville, though it was hard to be sure from this distance and with the flicker.
Grant refocused his eyes, scanning the two craft ahead of him as they drew him closer to the city in the sky.
“Come on, Kane,” he muttered to himself. “Wherever you are—get back here quick.”
As Grant watched through the viewport, the air below seemed to shimmer with new energy, and he saw something burst from the floating city like the beam of a powerful searchlight. It could only be described as a wide track hanging in the sky, its lines straight and parallel. It glistened there like a river surface catching the moonlight.
Grant’s heads-up display analyzed the new data, detecting powerful ion energy. The thick line of energy wavered into place as if it were a waterfall catching the sunlight. The beam appeared to be stretching out from the mirage city, reaching out toward his Manta and its silent escorts.
Grant felt something lock on to his craft with an abrupt shunt, saw the twin golden pebbles similarly locked in place as they were caught within the twinkling beam. The Manta rattled as it was pulled on a new vector toward the city in the sky. But where was Kane?
* * *
“KEEP...HOLDING ON TO...something,” Kane advised Brigid as they slammed back into the atmosphere with a red scar of reentry heat.
His crazed maneuver had cut a tiny corner from the journey, using Earth’s rotation to boost Kane’s craft forward, as if it were a skipping stone bouncing on the planet’s atmosphere. Both engines were working to power the ship back to the ground, driving the Manta ahead at a breathtaking velocity, gravity adding even more urgency to the descent.
The sense of speed was incredible—at this distance, their eyes told them that they were hardly moving at all, and yet their bodies could feel the velocity in every organ, every bone.
“Kane, I can’t see anything down there,” Brigid admitted as she tried to spot Grant far below them.
“He’s there,” Kane insisted. “He’s got to be.”
Kane scanned the ground as it loomed into view. At first there was simply the rich darkness of the foliage like a splash of green paint. And then Kane identified the Juruena River, a snaking line cutting through the green, while his heads-up display gave him a location update so that he could get his bearings.
A moment later, Grant and his unwanted wingmen came into view on Kane’s scanner, still just pinprick dots in the distance, Grant’s ship automatically tagged by the Manta’s unique software.
There was something else there, too, Kane saw: a shimmering line, a quarter mile long and fifty feet in width, streaking across the sky above the dense forest.
“What th—?” Kane muttered as he pulled his Manta out of its dive, wrestling it toward the streak of light.
From this angle, the beam of light hung in the air like a sunbeam catching dust motes before disappearing in a broken, fading line.
“What is that?” Brigid asked from behind Kane’s ear. She still sounded breathless.
“I don’t know, Baptiste,” Kane admitted, “but Grant’s heading right for it.
Kane’s heads-up display informed him of the increased ionic activity, just as Grant’s sensors had done seconds earlier. Kane remembered what Lakesh had told him about the ion transfer, how its energy had been used to power rocket ships in the twentieth century.
“They’re boosting Grant’s Manta using an ion beam,” Kane realized. “Piggybacking him on its energy trail to shunt him to wherever it is they’re going.”
The Manta was closer now, whipping through the sky and leaving a double sonic boom in its wake. Below, Grant and his mysterious companions seemed to be stretching across the farthest end of the ion beam, pulling away into infinity.
“They’re disappearing,” Brigid gasped. “What can we do?”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Kane told her. “Maybe your legs and your eyes crossed, too. I’m going in.”
With that, Kane ignored the straining engines of the Manta and entered the glistening beam of light as Grant’s Manta began to flicker and fade from its far end.
Kane watched as Grant’s Manta seemed to evaporate before his eyes. Without conscious thought, he pressed hard on the accelerator, willing the twin engine systems of his own Manta to catch its disappearing twin.
There was a flicker of light as Kane struck the space where the three aircraft had been just moments before. And then—nothing.
* * *
AN IMPOSSIBLE INSTANT PASSED, a swirl of colors racing before their eyes as Kane and Brigid hurtled tangentially across infinity.
The lush green canopy of Serra do Norte had disappeared. The blue sky had also been replaced, too, a slowly changing kaleidoscope of color taking its place, one shade flowing into the next, no one point remaining the same. Ahead of that, Kane and Brigid saw the golden city for the first time where it rested on its disclike base, hovering in multicolored limbo.
“It’s beautiful,” Brigid said as she craned her neck to peer through the viewport.
“It’s dangerous,” Kane spat in response. “Remember that—always.”
Unseen by Kane, Brigid nodded, checking the sidearm she had holstered at her hip. It was a TP-9 semiautomatic, a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope a
cross the top, finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel so that, when removed from the holster, it created a lopsided square with the user’s hand and wrist forming the final side and corner.
In the pilot’s chair, Kane hailed Cerberus but received no answer. Wherever they were, their communications with the outside world had been blocked.
Before him, the two ovoid vehicles were descending toward the city, dragging Grant’s unpowered Manta behind them. Wouldn’t they be surprised to learn the Manta was undamaged! Kane spotted a landing strip ahead, a golden-butter color, jutting out from the side of the flying city.
“What have we stumbled on to this time?” he muttered incredulously. Kane had seen a lot of strange things in his time with the Cerberus organization. He had visited the city of Agartha hidden beneath the surface of Earth and fought running battles on the Annunaki mothership, Tiamat, as she coasted Earth’s atmosphere. But this golden city was something new, a settlement hidden...where?
“What is this place?” Kane wondered. “The gold at the end of the rainbow?”
“No, Kane,” Brigid said. “Look again. Don’t the colors remind you of anything?”
Kane eyed the rainbow display that painted the heavens before them. The constant flux was reminiscent of the blossom of force exuded by the interphaser, a portable teleportation device that Cerberus had made use of on countless occasions. That projection included not only a swirl of color but streaks of lightning that would crackle like witch fire when the quantum portal was opened for a teleportational jump. “The interphaser,” he replied. “But where’s the lightning?”
“Below us,” Brigid said, and Kane peered down at the ion stream that shimmered with white streaks.
“The stream—it’s lightning?” he said in stunned astonishment.
Brigid nodded. “Great gouts of it arranged in parallel, like a colossal circuit board.”
“Then we’re jumping parallax points?” Kane guessed uncertainly.
“I think we’re in some kind of cosmic rift between dimensions,” Brigid suggested, “with the positive charge of the ion stream boosting us toward our destination.”
“The ville,” Kane finished.
They continued on toward the butter-colored airstrip, carving a path through a space that didn’t seem to exist.
Within seconds, all four vehicles were brought down to the surface, executing smooth landings arrayed in a diamond shape on the landing strip. Neither Kane nor Grant had had to do anything to land their Mantas; instead, there appeared to be an automated system in place that guided the air vehicles down to the required point from the ion stream.
“Pretty smooth,” Kane muttered, watching the landing area through the sensor mask of the Manta.
The Manta’s engines were powering down automatically, even though Kane had sent no command for them to do so. It made him suspicious.
“Keep your eyes open, Baptiste,” he instructed. “I don’t like it when someone else starts calling the shots.”
They waited for the better part of a minute while the lead vehicles went through their postlanding sequence. Then their smooth exteriors buckled momentarily and a trapezoid door appeared in both, through which the interior of each craft could be seen. Their insides looked dark, with a smattering of glowing streaks in green and red.
Moments later, the pilots stepped out. They were clearly humanoid, and they were dressed in what appeared to be sleek, form-fitting armor that featured illuminated strips running across the torso and up and down the limbs.
One pilot’s armor was blue, while his companion’s was a rich purple that shimmered in the light like shot silk. Their flight helmets looked like upside-down buckets with stylized wings retreating back from just above the ears, running six inches behind them in a polished metal that might have been silver. The metal helmets covered the top half of each pilot’s face and included a molded pair of goggles with tinted black lenses, leaving the mouth, chin and the bottom of the nose exposed.
The analysis software in Kane’s heads-up display was feeding him conflicting reports on the composition of the armor, as if it was unable to scan it properly. Kane pushed back the visor, shaking his head. “Giving me a headache,” he muttered, wishing once again that he could break radio silence.
The pilots turned to the grounded Mantas and acknowledged them with a curt nod. It looked a lot like a warning. Then they turned in unison and marched toward a low building that crouched at the side of the airfield. Similarly armored figures waited there, poised behind large shieldlike plates with transparent windows.
The Cerberus warriors watched as the pilots disappeared into the building. The building had gold walls with vertical strips of light running up its surface, reaching from ground to roof in a line no wider than a man’s hand. Above, the sky swirled with a rainbow mix of color, reds and yellows colliding to form new shades of orange, blues meeting the reds in rich shades of violet.
Kane, Brigid and Grant were left idling on the airstrip, waiting in readiness.
“They’re going to kill us,” Kane muttered.
“Optimist!” Brigid chided, but she wondered if he might be right.
Chapter 8
Bitterroot Mountains, Montana
It had been ninety seconds since Kane’s Manta had disappeared from sight, following Grant’s own disappearance scant seconds before.
In the operations center of the Cerberus redoubt, Brewster Philboyd breathed deeply as he studied the satellite image over the Serra do Norte region of Brazil, trying to settle his racing heart. The feed was live, albeit with a momentary delay as the signal was bounced back down to the redoubt’s pickups and translated into an overhead image from high in the air. The satellite could be trained on specific sites as required, and Brewster had directed it to the area in Brazil by Lakesh’s command.
Another freezie exile from the Manitius Moon Base, Philboyd was a highly adept astrophysicist whose problem-solving abilities and general computer know-how put him at the core of a very small group of Cerberus personnel who might genuinely be described as irreplaceable. A tall man with a gaunt face and lanky frame that seemed just a little too long for the desks and chairs of the ops room, Philboyd had blond hair that was swept back from a high forehead and his cheeks bore evidence of acne scars from his teenage years. Besides the uniform white jumpsuit of all personnel, Philboyd wore a pair of black-framed eyeglasses that could make his blue-eyed gaze seem rather challenging.
“We’ve lost them,” he announced, not quite believing the words himself. “Am initiating a full sweep of the area to see if we’ve missed anything.”
Lakesh was pensively watching the same feed from the comm desk. He had felt the same sense of unreality when he saw Kane’s Manta wink out of the picture and desperately hoped he hadn’t lost his field team on a fool’s errand the same way he had lost Domi. “Check the satellite feed, Mr. Philboyd,” he commanded automatically before switching to the Commtact receiver without taking breath. “Kane? Do you read me, Kane? We have lost visual and I have received no response to my summons. I repeat—we have lost visual. Do you read? Please come in. Brigid? Grant?”
Lakesh waited for any response, but none came. Just the same as nothing had come over the Commtact for the past two minutes.
Two and a half minutes.
The clock in the corner of Lakesh’s monitor screen was relentless.
“We’ve lost their transponder signals,” Donald Bry reported, calling the information across the busy ops room. “Checked twice now, including full system analysis.”
“Confirmed,” Reba DeFore said grimly from her seat at the medical monitoring station. “Their lights went out three minutes ago. I can’t home in on anything.”
Lakesh looked plaintively at his colleagues, then turned back to the satellite feed where it showed o
n his screen. “Mr. Philboyd, do we have anything?”
“Feed is still live, Dr. Singh,” Brewster said, using Lakesh’s formal title for a change. It seemed appropriate somehow, in a situation like this, when the chips were down. “Lot of trees still there, but no sign of the Mantas or the other two. Wide scan shows nothing, no evidence of their passage.”
Lakesh nodded solemnly, still listening with dwindling hope to the static over the Commtact headset. Three minutes had passed already since their last contact, longer by far than CAT Alpha should have been out of touch. As he waited, Lakesh felt his heart sink. This was how they had lost Domi, only that time he had not even had a satellite in place to watch her.
Lakesh pressed his fingers to the sides of his nose in frustration, tweaking it with pressure. You foolish, foolish man, he cursed himself. First you lose the beacon of your life, then your most trusted allies.
He had sent them into this trap, planned it and briefed the crew who had prepped the Mantas for the ruse. And now he had lost them all and they were nowhere nearer learning where Domi had gone. He had lost everything.
“Keep scanning,” Lakesh told Philboyd. “Donald, I want a full report on the transponder signals, triangulation with prospected movement based on last known point of contact, speed, trajectory—the works. We follow that through to the ultimate end point, and I want a field team ready to scramble to that position in ten minutes. Call Edwards, Sinclair— whoever is available from R and D.”
Bry nodded, his fingers already working his keyboard.
“Reba,” Lakesh continued, turning to the stocky ash-blond physician, “I want a full report of the search team’s health at the moment of their disappearance, as well as constant monitoring for if—for when—the signals return.”