by James Axler
The artificial passageway opened out into a larger cavern. Ever-changing eddies of light streamed from a towering, insubstantial pillar located in the center of the space. The pillar seemed to contain a rapid yet graceful turnover of all the colors of the spectrum, with impossible depths that gave the impression that those colors emanated from beyond infinity. Laced through that swirl of color were forks of lightning like witch fire, playing across its impossible depths. Kane and the others had seen its like before. It was an interphase window, a wormhole in space exactly like the one that they had used to reach the fort aboveground less than two hours before.
But, in Kane’s experience at least, interphase windows did not remain open, or they shouldn’t. They were locked in place by parallax points, sites of significant arcane power dating back into prehistory, but they were not like physical doors that remained open indefinitely. Instead, these quantum wormholes had to be tapped—by a device like the interphaser that Brigid was still carrying on her back.
“What is this...thing?” Kane asked, feigning ignorance.
“This is your pathway to new knowledge and an understanding of the world that you cannot begin to imagine,” the French-speaking guard closest to him explained proudly.
Kane winced as his Commtact translated the guard’s grand words. In Kane’s experience of men holding guns, grand words like that generally preceded something nasty that, more often that not, involved the word sacrifice.
The group halted before the shimmering pillar of light. Up close like this, there was no question in Kane’s mind—it was an interphase window, all right, and he felt certain his partners recognized it, too, though they were smart enough not to reveal that knowledge to their captors out loud. After all, the interphaser was unique to the Cerberus operation—no one outside of the redoubt’s walls should even be aware of the existence of the interphase windows known as parallax points, with the very rare exception of their most trusted allies.
The guards continued to hold the Cerberus team at gunpoint as they stood before the towering column of light.
“Wh-what is it we’re looking at?” Brigid asked, as if she didn’t know.
“It’s a door,” one of the guards explained dismissively.
“Most funky, crazy-ass door I’ve ever seen,” Grant muttered, loud enough to be heard. Like Brigid, he was keeping up the pretense of not having seen an interphase window before.
“Now, if you would be so kind, ladies, gentlemen,” the guard to their right said, “I require you to step into the door.”
“Into that?” Brigid asked, faking incredulity.
As she spoke, Kane made a swift, subtle gesture of his hands where Grant and Brigid could see them, briefly flicking three fingers to indicate that they were to all move together on his command and turn the tables on their oppressors. They had come this far, as far as Brigid had wanted to explore, and learned nothing yet about the crack in the earth except that a diamond mine was located at its center; a diamond mine that should not exist.
“Do not be afraid—it’s like stepping into a rain shower,” the guard explained in response to Brigid’s concern. “It looks quite spectacular to your eyes, but it is just light that illuminates another place.”
In your eyes? Kane picked up on that and so did Brigid, he noticed, raising one ginger eyebrow with interest. Yup, there it was again—that suggestion that these people, like the soldier in the fort, were seeing things in an entirely different way.
“Now, step through,” the guard to their left commanded, “and gaze upon the face of god.”
Grant glanced across at Kane, waiting for his signal. But no, Kane wanted to see what was waiting on the other side of that window in quantum space first. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it also served to uncover a lot of mysteries at the heart of the Annunaki conspiracy to subjugate humanity.
Kane took a deep breath and stepped through.
* * *
FOR A MOMENT, the world seemed to whirl, as that restless miasma of wonderful colors obliterated all sense of self.
A moment.
Eternity.
* * *
THEN KANE WAS THROUGH. The first thing to strike him was the change in air temperature. It was cooler here, with a stillness and silence that the mine had not afforded them.
Kane took in his surroundings in a glance. He was standing in a great chamber with four walls slanting upward to an apex, like the inside of a grand pyramid. Set into the apex, Kane saw a huge iris-shaped hatch, over twenty-five feet in diameter and encircled by a metal collar. The whole chamber was lit by the swirling tapestry of the interphase window, picking up the glyphs that had been carved into the walls many millennia ago, along with something else—tiny flecks like rhinestones dotted the walls.
“Wait a minute,” Kane muttered as he took in his surroundings. He’d been here before.
Kane spun back to face the interphase window as his companions stepped through. Mariah came first, gritting her teeth as she passed through the wormhole in space—she was less used to interphase travel than the others and doubled over as if she might vomit. She was followed by Brigid, then Grant, the latter hanging back close to the interphase gateway as their two captors stepped out from its impossible depths. Even as they stepped out, Grant brought his raised arm down in a chop, knocking the pistol from the hand of the closest guard. The pistol skittered across the hard surface of the floor, and Kane leaped for it.
The second guard stepped through, his own pistol raised and ready. His companion was still reeling from Grant’s surprise attack—naturally, he had expected all of the Cerberus team to be momentarily laid low by the journey through the interphaser, little suspecting that they had significantly more experience with the devices than he did. The guard turned to Grant, bleating in surprise as Grant drew back his left fist and drove it hard into his jaw. The guard staggered back into his emerging companion, and the two of them existed for a moment both in the mine in Libya and here, inside the pyramidal structure that Kane had visited years before...if only he could slow down long enough to remember when.
Kane had the gun now, was working the safety and turning it on the two guards as they hurried back through the interphaser gateway and into the chamber.
Kane shot immediately, sending a 9 mm parabellum bullet between the two guards as they came charging into the room from the rainbow swirl. “The next one goes through your skull, mes amis,” Kane told them, training the Vektor SP on the one guard who remained armed.
“You would be well advised to drop your weapon, monsieur,” Brigid told the man in flawless French.
The guard stood stock-still, a cruel smile twisting his lips. “Are you really so shortsighted?” he asked, speaking to himself.
“What do you—?” Brigid began, but Mariah’s voice interrupted her.
“Guys, I think you need to look at this—like, now!”
Kane took a step back, still holding the blaster trained on the two guards. “Kinda busy here. What is it, Mariah?”
“I... I don’t think I can describe it,” Mariah replied, a definite tremor in her voice.
The guard who remained armed held his gun out, rested on his palm, not pointing at either Kane or his companions. “Here. I am doing as you asked,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now—you have the gun if you want it.”
Grant stepped forward, plucking the gun from the man’s outstretched hand, wary of any tricks. “I’ve got it,” he confirmed, working the pistol’s manual safety catch.
Kane began to turn, and as he did so something illuminated behind him, at the opposite end of the chamber from the interphase gateway. Kane saw the figure sitting there as the shadows were bleached away, something that looked half alive, half dead—and all lizard. It was clearly an Annunaki, one of the cruel race of aliens who had tried to subjugate the people of the Earth and tu
rn them into slaves. It wore a few strips of material like bandages but most of its russet-colored scales were on show. Its skin had dark patches on it, like fungus on a tree’s bark, and the typically defined muscles of the Annunaki were nowhere to be seen. Instead this Annunaki appeared to be wasting away.
But its face, its head...that was another matter. As Kane turned he realized just where that increasing bright light was emanating from—and it was the creature’s head, like a great ball of white lightning propped atop its neck. As Kane looked, the intensity of that brilliance became a hundredfold brighter, not just dazzling but absolutely blinding. His eyes seemed to scream inside his head as his vision winked out like a television switching to standby, and for a few, agonizing seconds, the brightness was so overpowering it seemed to make a sound as he tried to process it.
Beside Kane, Brigid Baptiste was holding her hand up against the growing luminance of the Annunaki’s skull, but already her eyes were hurting, her vision wiped out in a cluster of sudden, painful seconds.
Mariah saw what was happening but all too late to respond. Even as she tried to turn away, her eyesight winked out, images around her switching from bleached out to blurred to a kind of wash of orange and yellow as thought she were looking at the sun through closed eyelids. She dropped to the floor, her hands reaching up for her face.
Even Grant, who had not turned, was caught in the sudden display of brilliance, unable to avoid its spread as the rays bathed the room and its diamond-encrusted walls with sheer radiance. He heard his colleagues drop to the floor, the triple thump of Mariah, then Kane and Brigid almost in unison. “What’s happening?” Grant asked, screwing his eyelids closed against the magnificent glare.
But that could not protect him; eyelids could not protect him against a light so pure it burned itself into the very surface of the retina.
Within the interior of the hidden pyramid, four Cerberus rebels were rendered unto unconsciousness as their sight was utterly overwhelmed by the uncanny radiance.
Chapter 10
“Will my sweet prince be joining us later?” the woman asked in her musical voice as she met with the figures boarding the gangplank of her private yacht.
The yacht was located on the still waters of the Bayou Lafourche, a broad river that wound through Louisiana all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and had, historically, provided much of the shipping traffic to the region. The yacht was an impressive beast, part old-time riverboat, part modern-age tech, its blue-tinted chrome-plated sides were like something from a 1950s vision of the future. It was a popinjay’s vessel, the kind that screamed “Look at me, look at me!” and would have stood out among ships larger and more practical than it, had there been any such about. This stretch of the Bayou Lafourche, however, was empty save for two other boats, smaller vessels that featured three-man crews and ran up and down the quarter mile or so surrounding the blue riverboat in a steady sentry circuit.
The woman, like the boat, cut a striking figure that drew attention. Her name was Ohio Blue, and she was a tall, slender woman in her late thirties, with thick, long blond hair that ran down her back in a perfectly straight line and was styled to fall over her left eye in peekaboo style. Her clothes, like her name, were blue—a long ball gown of sapphire, strapless with a cinched bodice that clung to her body like paint, hiding her long legs down to the ankles where two booted feet were revealed. Blue opera gloves covered her arms to above the elbows, and she wore a bracelet of pearls around her right wrist as her only ornamentation.
Three figures were stepping from the gangway to join Ohio Blue, a man and two women. The man was called Edwards, and he sported a closely shaved head that drew attention to his bullet-bitten left ear, a shirt and jacket that could do nothing to disguise his broad, muscular shoulders and a pair of combat pants with bulging pockets running down their length.
Edwards was accompanied by Domi, an albino woman who had grown up in the Outlands and sometimes struggled to portray an aura of civilization when in company, and Sela Sinclair, a dark-skinned African-American woman with short hair wound into ringlets and a stocky, muscular frame. Both women were dressed in similar attire to Edwards, although Domi had chosen to skip the jacket in favor of a tight T-shirt that clung to her upper body as if it had been sprayed on. The women could not have looked more different—Domi was petite, elfin, with a pixie haircut, and had the striking chalk-white skin and bone-white hair of an albino, her eyes two vivid scarlet orbs burning beneath her brows; while Sela Sinclair had skin the color of coffee, an easy smile and a weight to her movements that made it clear you didn’t want to mess with her.
The three mismatched colleagues were long-serving members of the Cerberus organization and had arrived here via mat-trans at the behest of the woman trader who owned this luxury yacht.
“Kane?” Edwards asked in response to Ohio’s query. When she nodded, he shook his head. “Kane’s otherwise engaged, he can’t make it right now.”
Ohio Blue dipped her head sorrowfully as she led the way across the deck of the yacht. “How regrettable,” she said. “Far too much time has passed since I last saw my sweet prince.”
Quite why Ohio Blue habitually referred to Kane as her sweet prince no one really knew. He had saved her life once, over two years ago, when he, Brigid and Grant had met with the elusive trader to obtain much-needed medical supplies for the Cerberus redoubt. The deal had threatened to go sour until enemy agents representing Blue’s estranged brother had appeared on the scene, cutting down her men and targeting her. Kane had stepped in and rescued the trader, and she had considered him her sweet prince ever since.
By her own admission, Ohio Blue was an independent trader, what some people called a bandit. She traded in various commodities—“never slaves, too gauche”—and had a vast network of connections and hideaways in the black market of the Louisiana Basin. Blue had stuck her neck out for Cerberus once before, helping them hide personnel in safe houses across the region when they had been exiled from their own headquarters and been forced to go on the run. Whether she was truly trustworthy remained open to debate, but her connections and eye for a profit made her a useful ally.
This time, she had contacted Cerberus through one of her many networks with news of an informer who may have information that the team might be interested in. Ohio never gave anything away in remote communications, distrusting the fragile security of such systems—most likely because a part of her own vast operation was geared to tapping and decoding those very same “secure channels.”
Thus it was that Cerberus had sent CAT Beta, the three-man field team made up of Edwards, Domi and Sinclair, to liaise with the mysterious black marketer.
“Can’t help you, ma’am,” Edwards said, keeping pace with the beautiful blonde trader. “So, what have you got for us?”
“A woman came into my circle last night,” Ohio explained as she led the way to a set of double doors made of glass engraved with bluebirds. Two men waited at the doors, opening them as Ohio and her guests approached. “Distraught, in need of medical assistance, she prevailed upon a gentleman of my acquaintance—a sawbones—to provide her with said assistance, and when he heard her story, he felt it prudent to inform me.”
“What’s her story?” Edwards asked. He was an ex-Magistrate like Kane, but he wondered how Kane had the patience to deal with this woman, who seemed to always speak in slow reveals and dramatic pauses.
“Why don’t you ask her yourself, Mr.—?”
“Edwards,” Edwards told her as they passed through the doors and entered a sunroom within which was located a small swimming pool full of clear, blue water. He had told her his name once already, as he and his team had requested permission to board. He had also been patted down and checked for hidden weapons, though he had been reticent to relinquish the Sin Eater pistol he had locked against his wrist in its spring-loaded holster. He had given his weapon up, as his colle
agues had theirs, recalling Lakesh’s words when they departed for this mission: “Ohio Blue is wary of strangers and very security conscious, but she has been a valuable ally to us. Don’t upset her, just remember that she’s harmless so long as you play along.”
Edwards was playing along as best as his fiery temperament would allow. “What? She in here, taking a dip?”
“No, through here,” Ohio said, pacing along beside the pool in long-legged strides. “My, but you are an impatient one, aren’t you, Mr.—?”
“Edwards,” Edwards reminded her—again.
“Yes, that’s right,” the woman acknowledged, a patronizing smile crossing her lips.
A few paces behind them, Sinclair turned to Domi and raised her eyebrows. A transplant from the twentieth century who had been trained by the US Air Force, Sinclair had seen a lot of impressive ships in her time, but nothing like this. This was a floating example of astonishing craftsmanship.
In response, Domi rolled her eyes. She had visited great places and crappy ones. What did it matter to her unless they planned to stay?
Ohio halted close to the door on the far side of the pool, kneeling down to run her hands through the crystal clear water. “Do you swim, Mr....Edwards?” she asked.
“I can swim,” Edwards assured her, “but right now we’re on a tight schedule. I’m sure if Kane was here he’d want you to hurry things up.”
Ohio nodded. “Of course,” she said, rising once more and leading Edwards and his team through a door, located at the end of the pool room, with a gleaming brass handle within which Edwards could see his own distorted reflection.
This woman’s a game player, Edwards told himself. He had experience of the type, both from his days as a Mag and in his capacity as an operative for Cerberus. The deeper you became involved with the thriving black market here in the Outlands, the more levels of gamesmanship you needed to master. Edwards wasn’t good at that, not the way Kane and especially Brigid Baptiste were. He didn’t have the same patience they did, was more inclined to bluster his way into a situation than negotiate.