by James Axler
Eventually, she set down the pad, pushed back the covers and got out of the bed. The new day awaited, whatever it might bring.
Chapter 3
Kane stepped out of a window in quantum space and into a hail of bullets. He stumbled back under the assault, shouting a command to his three partners before they, too, emerged from the interphase gateway that had materialized in thin air behind him amid the ruins of the Turkish fort.
“Abort the mission!” Kane shouted as his partners stepped out of the quantum ether amid a multicolored swirl laced through with lightning forks. Even as he spoke, he felt the passage of a bullet burn like hellfire across his right bicep, channeling a lance of white-hot pain through his arm.
Behind him, the same bullet—or maybe another from the same source, since it was impossible to be certain amid the hail of gunfire—slammed against the shining surface of the interphaser unit in a shriek of rending metal, sending out a shower of sparks and shattered plating in its wake.
Kane saw the quantum window collapse on itself at that moment, two conjoined cones of multicolored light streaked through with witch-fire lightning, disappearing in the space of a heartbeat, even as his partners stepped from their impossible depths.
The quantum gateway had been generated by the interphaser, a highly advanced device that used a hidden web of pathways across the globe and beyond to move people and objects great distances—even as far as other planets in the solar system—in the blink of an eye. Utilizing principles laid out by an ancient star-born race of aliens, the interphaser was a portable teleportation device which tapped into a network of so-called parallax points to deliver its users to their selected destination. Parallax points were widespread but not infinite, and as such their locations enforced their own strict limitation on where a user might travel—as one could only travel to and from a specific, designated parallax point, not create one at will. These parallax points had often become sites of religious and spiritual interest as primitive man sensed the strange forces contained within them. However, while the interphaser gave Kane and his Cerberus teammates an incredible measure of freedom in their travels across the globe, there was one very obvious problem with any teleportation system, one writ large as life before Kane’s eyes as he dived to the ground with the burn of the bullet stinging against his arm: you just never knew what you were materializing into.
“Down!” Kane cried, slamming against the sandy dirt as the roar of gunfire continued all around him, bullets riddling the ground like rain in a monsoon.
Kane and his partners had emerged in the ruins of an ancient fort, roughly sixty miles south of the Mediterranean Sea in the part of the African continent known as Libya. The fort had no doubt been impressive in its heyday, but now it looked like a scattering of sand-colored slabs—some significantly larger than a Deathbird helicopter—sprawled across the sandy scrub of the Bir Hakeim Oasis. The stones reminded Kane of a graveyard, its gravestones created in colossal proportions as if to mark the passing of titans. Appropriate, perhaps, as the place was yet another reminder of how much of history seemed to have been lost with the nukecaust two hundred years before.
There was a wide crack running through the center of the dilapidated compound, twelve feet across at its widest point and deep enough that its sides disappeared into stygian darkness, even under the relentless brilliance of the midafternoon sun. That sun was obscured by dark cloud cover intermingled with the dense smoke of explosions.
There were at least eighty other people here, Kane guessed as he rolled out of the path of another hail of bullets, one hand clapped against the sting of his arm. Two groups—tribes, gangs, armies, call them what you will—using the ruined fort for cover as they traded bullets from automatic weapons, the sound of gunfire like a thunderstorm echoing across the fallen stones and beyond.
The place had been the site of a Turkish fort a long time ago, back when state borders and ethnic groups mattered, before the nuclear holocaust had rewritten everything in the wink of an eye. It was estimated that 90 percent of the world’s human population had died in the scant few moments that had constituted the nuclear war, and even though two hundred years had passed since those retina-searing bombs had dropped, it seemed that humankind was still striving to recover.
One of Kane’s partners—Brigid Baptiste—was shouting to be heard over the roar of the conflict. “The interphaser’s compromised,” she said. “It’s not respond—”
Another roar of gunfire cut across Brigid’s words, a line of dust plumes accompanying each cough as bullets drilled into the ground all around her. Beside her, another woman—older, with a lean frame and short, dark hair that showed a few traces of gray—wove through the barrage, crouched down and closed her eyes, covering her head with her hands. This was Mariah Falk, a geologist for the Cerberus organization who, unlike the others, was inexperienced in combat situations.
“Get your head down!” the fourth member of the team—a gigantic, dark-skinned man called Grant—yelled, scooping Mariah up in one of his mighty arms and part lifting, part throwing her out of the line of fire. As he did so, another swarm of bullets came lunging through the air, drilling into the dirt and rattling against the chrome sides of the interphaser where it waited on the ground. As they struck, Brigid leaped in the opposite direction, diving for cover behind something that looked like a fallen obelisk.
The world seemed to spin around Mariah as Grant released his grip on her. Still moving, she seemed for a moment to dance toward the cover of a fallen stone archway that, even in its ruinous state, still loomed twice the height of Mariah herself. Then she slammed against it, back and shoulders striking it in a solid thump accompanied by a woof of expelled air from her lungs. She wore a camo jacket like the others, pants and hiking boots, and she had a leather satchel hanging behind her, its strap stretching in a diagonal line across her chest and back. Mariah was slight of frame and, though not conventionally pretty, she had an easy smile and a kindly way that put most people at ease. Right now, however, neither her easy smile nor her homespun charm were likely to help save her life. Instead, she took deep breaths and tried to hold down her breakfast as a drumbeat of bullets caromed off the other side of the stone archway she was pressed against. It was cover—scant but holding—and she knew it was the only thing keeping her alive in those frantic, heart-stopping moments. How did the others cope with this as part and parcel of their everyday lives? she wondered.
Grant scrambled out of the path of the bullets, darting past Mariah and ducking down behind the far side of the collapsed archway. “What the hell did we walk into?” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard over the cymbal crash of bullets.
Grant was a tall man with a muscular body and mahogany skin, his head was shaved and he sported a goatee. An ex-Magistrate in his midthirties, Grant was dressed in a camo jacket similar to his partners’, though it did nothing to disguise his hulking proportions, as well as a Kevlar duster. As Grant scrambled out of the line of fire, it was hard to miss the sheer power that was contained within his well-defined muscles—there was not an ounce of fat on his whole body.
“Don’t know,” Kane answered through clenched teeth, still pressing one hand against his arm where the bullet had glanced off his protective shadow suit, his back against a half-collapsed wall a little way from his partner. “Some kind of local trouble by the look of it.”
Kane was a tall man in his early thirties with broad shoulders and rangy limbs. His dark hair was cropped short and his eyes were the gray-blue color of steel. An ex-Magistrate like Grant, Kane wore a light jacket—desert camouflage colors—that reached down past his waist and featured a dozen pockets of various sizes, light-colored pants and calf-high boots whose leather had the satisfying creases of shoes that have been worn in. Beneath this, Kane wore another layer of clothes, the black all-in-one body glove known as a shadow suit, and it was this that had deflected the 9 mm bullet that
had grazed his arm like an angry wasp when he’d stepped from the interphase window. Constructed from a superstrong nanoweave, the shadow suit was a skintight environmental suit that could regulate the wearer’s body temperature, even in extremes of heat and cold. While it was not bulletproof, the strong weave could repel blunt trauma and deflect small-caliber bullets, minimizing injury. Right now, Kane’s arm burned where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, but its full impact had been reduced thanks to the armor-strong weave of the protective suit.
There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his rangy, loping strides and his personality, for he could be both a loner and pack leader, depending on circumstance. Right now he was here as an operative of Cerberus, the outlawed organization that dealt in the esoteric, with a particular emphasis on protecting humankind from the hidden forces, human and alien, that seemed always arrayed against it. Together with Grant and Brigid, Kane formed one-third of Cerberus Away Team—or CAT—Alpha.
Between Kane and his partners was the interphaser, its square base and pyramidal sides now dotted with the impact of bullets so that it looked as if some carnivorous creature had sunk its teeth into it. Brigid was staring at it from her own hiding place behind a fallen obelisk of stone that lay close to the mighty rent in the ground.
“How do we get out of here now?” Brigid asked, reaching for the weapon holstered at her hip. She was dressed in a similar camouflage outfit to the others. Theirs was a noble pursuit, but sometimes it seemed that walking into a hail of bullets was a too-frequent part of the job. Almost as though to illustrate this, Brigid unholstered the TP-9 semiautomatic that she habitually wore at her hip, unlocked the safety and scanned their surroundings with alert eyes. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol finished in molded matte black with a covered targeting scope across the top. “Well?”
“Don’t ask me,” Kane spit, ducking his head down as another volley of bullets came hurtling past overhead. “I’m fresh out of ideas. Besides, I thought you were the brains of this outfit, Baptiste!”
Brigid glared at him. “Brains, yes. Miracle maker—that’s your department, I believe.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Belief will get you a miracle, all right.” As he spoke, he performed a long-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. The maneuver activated the catch on a holster located on the underside of Kane’s forearm, commanding a retractable blaster to his hand from its hiding place beneath his jacket’s sleeve. Kane’s weapon was a fourteen-inch-long automatic pistol called a Sin Eater, a compact hand blaster able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The weapon was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one, and a Mag’s judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch feels natural on a habitual wearer.
Back pressed tightly to the wall, Kane poked his head above the edge of the sand-colored bricks and scanned the area. There were people moving in all directions, some in groups, some alone, all of them armed. Some were dressed in semi-military uniforms, cobbled-together outfits that created a ragtag kind of uniformity. Others wore civilian clothing that looked like a cross between a long coat and a woman’s nightdress. All of them were scrambling through the ruins and blasting at one another with a wide variety of weapons. Someone must have seen the interphase window open and figured it for a bomb or a rocket launch or something—with the place full of hair-triggered nut balls the way it was, it was little wonder, Kane concluded, that someone had tried to blast the interphaser to smithereens.
Kane continued scanning the area beyond for a few moments, as another rush of bullets came rattling against the far side of his protective wall. Kane spotted a long-barreled machine gun on a tripod mount, hitched above one of the few remaining walls on the second level of the ruined fortress. It was unleashing serious damage on the fighters below in a continuous stream of 24 mm slugs. Four soldiers fell to its assault even as he watched.
Across from him, Grant and Brigid were scanning other sections of the collapsed fort, while Mariah just kept her head down, flinching at each new shout of a gun being blasted, each pee-ow of a bullet’s flight. They had appeared, it seemed, smack-dab in the middle of the ruined fort—which was smack-dab in the middle of what seemed to be a raging war zone.
“Nowhere to run,” Grant concluded, peering left and right, front and back. As he spoke, he pulled a Copperhead assault subgun—almost two feet of thick black pipe with mounted laser scope—from a hidden holster rig under his jacket and was already ducking back behind the cover of a fallen stone archway, scanning for targets.
The Copperhead was a favored field weapon of Grant’s. The grip and trigger were in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the long length of barrel to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant favored the Copperhead for its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.
“We can’t fight them all,” Brigid reasoned, even though she looked set to try.
“I don’t want to fight anyone,” Mariah added, ducking lower as a bullet clipped the archway six inches from her left shoulder.
Kane nodded in resignation. “Libya,” he muttered. “I think I hate the place already and I ain’t been here two minutes.”
Chapter 4
Several hours earlier and a continent away, Mariah Falk had been running an analysis on some data she had received from her earthquake monitoring equipment when her interest was piqued.
A geologist for the Cerberus organization, Mariah was a twenty-first-century émigré who had found herself in the postnukecaust world after being cryogenically frozen, alongside a number of other top scientists and military personnel, on the Manitius Moon Base. The Moon Base had been rediscovered in the twenty-third century by Cerberus explorers, who had revived its residents and given them a new home on Earth in the Cerberus redoubt.
The redoubt was located in one of the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, North America, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog. The shaman had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago, and Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so keep his friends undisturbed.
Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom, like Mariah, had been cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.
Cerberus relied on two dedicated orbiting satellites—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humanity. Gaining access to the sate
llites had taken countless hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range where they chattered incessantly with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth as well as providing almost instantaneous communication with its agents across the globe, wherever they might be, and it was this stream of data that provided Mariah with cause to investigate further.
Mariah traced the tip of her index finger across her computer screen, which was located in a small, rectangular office with off-white walls and harsh lighting, and set in a large rig that hung from the high ceiling. She was alone, a cup of coffee beside the computer screen.
“A blip,” she muttered to herself, frowning, “a definite blip.”
She cross-referenced the blip with the location coordinates and satellite feed data from Cerberus’s mighty data banks, tapping commands into her computer keyboard. She reached for her cup as the computer whirred, bringing up the data she had requested. It took just a few moments for Mariah to confirm the location of the blip: it was in the North African territory that was still called Libya on her maps.
“Lakesh is going to want to see this,” Mariah muttered, tapping the command key to print off the data. As the printer rumbled to life, Mariah swigged from her cup and grimaced, discovering that her coffee had gone cold. Ghastly. Still, if cold coffee had been the worst of her worries today, she could have rested easy.
* * *
THE CERBERUS OPERATIONS ROOM was abuzz with activity as Mariah brought her findings to the attention of the founder of the organization. It was an environment where many highly educated personnel operated in harmony, plotting out field missions and surveying data. Mariah had not always been confident here, feeling somewhat intimidated by the array of physics and chemistry degrees possessed by the on-call staff. In the past two and half years, however, she had grown in confidence, beginning with a relationship with an oceanographer called Clem Bryant. Clem had encouraged Mariah to be more involved in the fieldwork that was crucial to her discipline, something she had at first shied away from when she had been faced with this dangerous new world. But Clem had been killed during an enemy infiltration of the redoubt base, and he had died protecting Mariah from attackers. She still thought of him often, a year after his death, and she regretted that their relationship had not developed further, that he was no longer with her to help guide her and assist the Cerberus operation.