Callsign Cerberus

by Mark Ellis

  The volume of fire from the cliff decreased in response to words shouted over the loud-hailer. Kane couldn’t make them out, but it sounded like Reeth, very upset, very angry.

  The momentary lull was all the team needed to squirm past Kane into the doorway and into the roofless corridor. He joined them just as the barrage began again. A three-foot-high plume of grit erupted right where he had been standing. He recognized the rattling roar of a .50-caliber machine gun, probably bipod mounted. The steady hammering suddenly stopped.

  Panting, Salvo came to his side. “Good work, Kane.”

  Whirling toward him, Kane stopped short of delivering a leopard’s-paw strike to the man’s windpipe. “You bastard,” he snarled. “What the hell are we up against here?”

  “You forget yourself,” Salvo snapped, shoulders stiffening. “Weren’t you paying attention at the briefing?”

  “I was,” replied Kane grimly. “Milton Reeth, a small time slagger. He’s been smuggling outrunners into the barony for the past year, providing them with forged ID chips and work orders. Shut down his operation, you said. A simple, no-muss, no-fuss serving of a termination warrant. Strictly small-time—you said.”

  Kane thrust an angry hand toward the spotlight array. “Does this look small-time to you?”

  Salvo didn’t answer for a long moment. His lips worked. Kane kept his visored eyes on the man’s half-concealed face. He knew the rest of the team was looking on, waiting for and gauging their commander’s reaction.

  In a low, deadly monotone, Salvo said, “This is a hellzone. One of the first lessons you learn is to expect the unexpected in a hellzone. Now, suck it up or I’ll relieve you of your badge. Hellzone or no hellzone.”

  Kane broke eye contact first, dropping his gaze and turning to look at the team. Pollard rubbed his right knee and cursed softly between clenched teeth. A ricochet had smacked him between the leg joints of his armour. He had incurred a painful injury but not an incapacitating one.

  Carthew had been seriously stung by a steel-jacketed wasp, directly in the visor. Though the bullet had been partially deflected, the plastic shattered, driving splinters into his eyes. His face was a wet, red smear. He was semiconscious, faint moans bubbling from his lips.

  Grant unsnapped a pouch on his belt and took from it a small squeeze hypodermic. It contained a pain reliever and metabolic stabilizer developed by the division medics. He undid the seals on Carthew’s right gauntlet, tugged it off and injected the ampoule’s liquid contents into the vein of the upper wrist.

  Kane fought to control his rage, to keep from either striking out at Salvo or mounting a suicide charge at Reeth’s blastermen. Two men who had been his comrades, as well as his teammates, were wounded, and now all of them were pinned down, waiting for the jaws of the trap to snap shut. From the ridge overhang came a cacophony of taunting hoots and catcalls.

  Taking a deep breath, Kane realized their own arrogance had blinded them from covering all angles, examining all possibilities, no matter how remote. Salvo’s words about expecting the unexpected were true enough, but only rarely had Magistrates ever confronted adversaries as well-armed as they were, at least in living memory. The majority of hard contacts went smoothly due to the advance fear created by their reputations, the fearsome images the Magistrates went to great effort to maintain. It simply hadn’t occurred to Kane that they might encounter serious opposition from outrunners who weren’t terrified of them.

  Reeth’s voice shouting over the ruins snapped him to full attention again. “Salvo, you hear me? I don’t want this! The baron doesn’t want this!”

  Grant’s head swivelled toward Salvo. “How does he know, sir? The baron authorized this mission. Didn’t he?”

  Salvo gestured for him to be quiet. Reeth’s words boomed out into the night, bouncing from the canyon walls.

  “Drop your weapons and leave! My people will box you in, and you’ll have no way to escape unless I allow it. But I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be killed. So, give me your answer!”

  Salvo cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Milton Reeth! You are obstructing the duty of authorized enforcers of Baron Cobalt’s law. By Code 7b of the Territorial Jurisdiction Act—”

  The .50-caliber stammered from overhead, the slugs chopping clay dust out of the doorway on both sides of Salvo. He dropped flat, turning a bleat of terror into a strangled curse.

  The roar of the weapon ceased, and Reeth shrieked, “Then stay there, you treacherous shit! Stay there and starve!”

  Pushing himself to a sitting position, Salvo spit out a mouthful of grit. He said nothing and avoided looking in the direction of the team. Grant and Kane shared a brief glance, then Kane said quietly, “Sir, if I was Reeth, I’d be packing up and moving out while he keeps us pinned down here.”

  As if on cue, Grant added, “If that fortress is where he’s processing the outrunners and the ID chips, then there must be a way up there from down here.”

  Still not making eye contact, Salvo asked, “And how do you propose to find that way up there from down here?”

  Ignoring the note of sarcasm, Kane declared matter-of-factly, “We look for it.”

  Salvo pursed his thin lips but didn’t respond. Kane’s anger flared again as the image of the Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower flashed in his mind. He wanted to put his Sin Eater to Salvo’s head and ask why there hadn’t been a recon of the area before the mission had been ordered.

  Instead, he sat and watched Salvo silently assess the situation. Perspiration flowed down his sallow cheeks. Finally, the man bit out one short word, “Go.”

  Kane and Grant inserted full magazines into their weapons. From their belts, they removed black, six-inch-long cylinders and screwed them into the bores of the Copperheads. They were two-stage sound suppressors, absorbing muzzle-flash and gases. They adjusted the selector switches were to fire 3-round bursts.

  There was no discussion of tactics, no time to devote to a reccee. They were entering dark territory, and from now on, everything depended on improvisation and reaction.

  Grant and Kane duck-walked through the ruins of the building, found a break in a wall and squeezed through it. They kept to wedges of shadow, angling toward the dark areas not touched by the floodlights. Both men threaded their way through the crumbling structures as swiftly as they could, not penetrating a new area of the labyrinth without checking it out first.

  The Cliff Palace complex was utterly silent below the long black clouds racing across the face of the rising moon. Grant was fast and agile for a big man, darting quickly in and out of doorways, striding to the spots affording best cover.

  A wide passageway led straight ahead, with a break in the walls on the left. The two men took positions on either side of the gap and scanned the area beyond it. A cloud whipped past the moon, and its lambent glow shone on the many-windowed fortress built into the canyon wall. The flat bottom was only a few dozen yards away, and they could see the many fissures in the stonework below it.

  Studying it intently, they saw a narrow opening in the embrasure, a little less than fifteen feet above the floor of the courtyard. Hand- and footholds had been chipped into the rock, making a crude, almost invisible ladder. Because of a puddle of illumination splashed by one of the floodlights, they couldn’t risk a frontal approach. Kane and Grant crept away at an oblique angle, staying close to the shadow of the wall.

  Kane knew the blastermen would concentrate their attention only on the terrain lit up by the floodlights, not in the murk beyond. Knowing they had Magistrates outnumbered, they were content to play a waiting game, for a few hours at least. Kane’s instincts and experience told him he and Grant could slip past their defences and end the game.

  The two men followed the wall into another roofless building. One entire side of it had collapsed into a mass of broken masonry and clay. The pile of rubble spread outside, most of it
butting up against the cliff wall.

  They stopped to catch their breath, collect their thoughts and scan the terrain. Then carefully they moved forward, picking their way across the sea of rubble.

  The crunch of a shard of adobe under Grant’s boot raised the hair on the back of Kane’s neck and sent a jolt of adrenaline surging through his body. He froze in mid-step, weapon at the ready. Grant followed his lead, coming to a complete halt.

  After a moment, they moved again, not pausing until they were safe in the darkness beneath the overhanging bottom of the fortress. With infinite caution, they crept sideways, crouched to listen but heard nothing.

  They reached the junction of the courtyard floor and the cliff face. Looking up along the embrasure, they saw the stone niches leading up to a hole. A light flickered feebly past the rim of the portal. Kane wasn’t sure, but he figured it to be lamplight. That seemed odd, since the fortress was obviously equipped with electrical generators.

  A faint sound came from overhead, and a shadow shifted across the lamplight. Kane and Grant stepped back quickly, easing into a wedge of pitch-blackness. An armed man appeared at the portal, then began climbing down, the scuffed toes of his boots digging into the notches carved in the wall. He had a revolver strapped to his hip.

  The guard dropped the last few feet and gazed slowly around. By the elongated shape of his skull, the back-sloping forehead, the apparent lack of ears and the suction pads on his inhumanly long, tentacle-like fingers, Kane recognized him as a Squidoo, one of the most common of the mutant strains spawned by the Nukeday. No one really knew where they first appeared, nor was it certain what monstrous combination of genetic malfunctions had created them in the first place.

  Kane had only seen a few in his life, since they tended to give the baronies wide berths. At one time, the Squidoos had been terrors of Terra Infernus because of their psychotic love of mutilating humans and torching settlements. But the days of the great Squidoo clans were long over.

  The Squidoo stood, giving the darkness around him an unblinking stare with his huge round eyes. They held a contemplative expression that chilled Kane’s blood. One malformed finger touched the microphone affixed to the base of his throat, and the Squidoo spoke. Kane expected to hear sounds as repulsive as his appearance, but his words were in flawless English. “Timoto reporting. All clear.”

  As soon as he dropped his hand from the microphone, Kane shot him three times. The suppressor made whispery sounds as the subsonic rounds took the Squidoo in the face, the heart and the throat. The final bullet stifled his death cry to a husky rattle that couldn’t carry up through the thick rock embrasure.

  The Squidoo jerked backward, started to fall, but Kane bounded forward and grabbed him by the collar of his tunic, pulling him into the shadows. He lowered the limp body quietly, grateful for his gloves. The thought of touching that slick, rubbery flesh made his bowels loosen.

  The guard had given Reeth an all-clear report, so there was no better time to breach the fortress. He and Grant couldn’t wait for the rest of the team to join them, since the Squidoo was probably under orders to supply status reports at regular intervals. At best, they had five minutes to get inside—at worst, one. Regardless, there wasn’t sufficient time for Salvo and the others to reach their position before the guard was missed.

  Kane planted his feet firmly in the first niche and began an awkward, turtle-like climb, not using his hands. When his eyes were above the edge of the opening, he stopped.

  Illuminated by an old, flare-topped oil lamp on a table he saw a narrow landing of stone and timber. Directly opposite him yawned an open doorway and a flight of stone steps leading up into gloom. Kane climbed through the portal and moved aside as Grant’s head and broad shoulders emerged. It was a tight squeeze, but Kane didn’t help him—he kept the bore of the Copperhead trained on the dark doorway.

  When Grant stood beside him, Kane moved through the door, starting up the steps. The stairway was too narrow for them to walk abreast, so Grant gave Kane a six-foot lead.

  They went up three complete windings of the corkscrew staircase before emerging onto a broader landing. A steel slab of a door was jammed firmly in the stone. A wheel-lock jutted from the cross-braced, rivet-studded metal mass. A naked light-bulb shone from a socket in the roof.

  Kane and Grant eyed the door, looking for trip wires, photoelectric sensors or vid cameras. They saw nothing but stone and steel. Smiling wryly, Kane whispered, “I think it’s safe to talk now.”

  “Kane!” Salvo’s voice issued into his helmet, tight with tension, urgent with anxiety. “Location!”

  “Inside the fortress,” Kane replied softly. “Prepping for penetration.”

  “That’s a big neg. Wait till we get there.”

  “That’s a big neg,” whispered Kane fiercely. “No time. You’ll have to wait until we fuse out the power system, kill the spots.”

  Grimly, as though he resented each word passing his lips, Salvo said,” Affirm, then. If and when you see Reeth, serve the termination warrant. On sight. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Kane gestured toward the door, and Grant stepped to it, putting his hands on the wheel-lock, letting the Copperhead dangle from his belt. Taking and holding a deep breath, the big man gave the wheel a counter clockwise twist. The door swung inward silently on recently lubricated hinges.

  Beyond it stretched a tunnel, with neon light strips stretching along the ceiling. The tunnel was fairly long and had been hacked out of the rock, running deep into the bowels of the cliff. A faint murmur of voices and a mechanical hum like a power generator reached them.

  “After you,” murmured Grant. “Point man.”

  Kane took a tentative step forward. “One day something’ll happen to tarnish this rep of mine.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting myself killed.” He didn’t smile when he said it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ABSENCE OF guards was suspicious, but they were in too deep to backtrack. Kane stalked along the tunnel, comforted by the faint sounds of Grant’s footfalls six feet behind him.

  Kane kept close to the right-hand wall, and Grant walked down the centre so he would have a clear field of fire. The tunnel opened onto a scaffold-like assembly made of pipes and heavy wooden planks. A staircase of two-by-fours extended down into the room twenty feet below. The scaffold was built at an angle to the tunnel mouth, so Kane had to creep forward to get an unobstructed view.

  The room was square, maybe fifty feet wide, the walls reinforced by heavy timbers and sheet metal. The walls climbed to a ceiling of chiselled rock that was part of the cliff itself. Ten light fixtures attached to wall stanchions provided weak illumination. Taking a wary survey of the room, Kane understood the absence of guards in the tunnel.

  He saw only four people, all very busy packing reams of paper and odds and ends of electronic equipment into crates. Obviously, most of their force was outside, watching the Cliff Palace complex, making sure the Magistrates weren’t moving in on them.

  Milton Reeth supervised the packing. Kane recognized him from the pics he had seen during the briefing. He was a tall, dark-skinned man, the sides and top of his head clean shaved, but a clump of dreadlocks dangled from the back of his skull, falling down the centre of his back like a quartet of greasy black snakes. He wore a puffy-sleeved, powder blue bodysuit with a touch of green lace at the collar. A red, yellow and blue snake tattoo coiled across the right side of his face, its fanged jaws gaping open as though it were preparing to devour his eye.

  Beside him stood his strong-arm. An identical tattoo was imprinted on the left side of her high-planed face. She wore a brass-studded, red-leather harness that left her heavily muscled arms bare. Her lank hair was styled like Reeth’s. Judging by the shape of her skull and the length of her fingers, she was a Squidoo, and Kane realized the guard he had killed was pro
bably one of her kin, either a brother or a cousin, or maybe even a son.

  Slaggers like Reeth never went anywhere without a strong-arm, but rarely were they women, let alone a Squidoo. Obviously, Reeth was more than a slagger. He was something of a deviant, as well.

  On the far side of the room was a tangle of electronic and computer equipment, a nest of wires and keyboards and monitor screens that took up almost the entire wall with shelves and worktables. Kane saw a whining, gasoline-fuelled electric generator with dozens of feed conduits sprouting from it.

  The black-and-white images flickering across the four monitor screens showed different perspectives of the complex, including a rear view of the blastermen posted behind the floodlights on the ledges outside.

  Light also flashed from a large tabletop console computer screen. Numbers and words scrolled across it with a dizzying rapidity. On the same wall as the tech nest gaped an open doorway.

  One of the men packing a crate asked Reeth a question, his voice muted by the rumbling whine of the generator. Reeth responded petulantly, his sharp, high-pitched voice carrying easily to Kane.

  “We’ve got to wait until all the files are downloaded, don’t we, Neal? We can’t just cut and run and leave everything, can we, Neal? That would be foolish, wouldn’t it, Neal?”

  Neal mumbled something and returned to his packing.

  Kane gestured for Grant to join him on the scaffold. The big man stepped forward and gazed down into the room without expression. When he saw the female strong-arm stroke Reeth’s snake-adorned face with suction-pad-tipped fingers, he drew in a quick breath of revulsion. His Copperhead rose. Kane laid the noise suppressor of his blaster over the barrel of Grant’s gun and pushed it down.

  Shaking his head vigorously, Kane touched a finger to his lips and stepped back into the mouth of the tunnel. Reluctantly Grant moved beside him. Kane covered the transceiver grid of his helmet with a finger, and Grant hesitantly did the same.

  “I want him alive,” Kane whispered.