by James Axler
Edwards followed Ohio Blue into the tastefully decorated corridor beyond the pool room—simple but expensive in design—with Domi and Sela Sinclair stealthily bringing up the rear. Both women remained alert, eyeing every corner, every door, every shadow for an ambush. Kane might trust this woman—and the emphasis was very much on might—but no one else did.
Ohio led the group to an unremarkable door located midway down the corridor. There were six doors at intervals along this corridor, two of which were open as the group passed. A man called Baxter sat guard on a bar stool at the end of the corridor, working a curious wooden box with his hands. The Cerberus personnel glanced into the open doorways as a matter of course while Ohio answered Edwards’s queries about where they had picked up the woman, how she been brought here and what her medical condition was now—through a friend, by road and physically satisfactory but mentally unbalanced. The rooms beyond the two open doors had revealed a galley where a chef and two cooks were working at a grand gas-lit stove, and a large bedroom with unmade bed, its black sheets ruffled back in a jumble.
Ohio stopped before the closed door, its top portion a series of wooden slats designed to promote air flow while retaining privacy and rested her hand on the brass handle. “The woman du jour is in here,” Ohio said, fixing Edwards with her sapphire-blue eye.
“You said she was mentally altered,” Edwards said. “She conscious?”
“I believe so,” Ohio said, and she worked her free hand on the wooden slats that dominated the top half of the door, opening them a fraction before placing her eye close to the gap. “Do you wish to take a look before you enter?”
Edwards dismissed the offer. “She can hear us out here, right?”
Ohio showed her straight, even teeth in a momentary smile. “No doubt.”
Edwards nodded toward the door. “Let’s go see what this mystery woman has to tell us.”
Ohio worked a lock within the door handle and swung the door open. Within was a medium-sized cabin which featured a porthole beneath which was a writing desk and chair, a second wicker chair that had been placed in the shade beside a whirring fan and a wheeled trolley upon which were the remains of a meal—several plates, bowls and a glass jug of water. A woman sat in the wicker chair flicking through a handmade book that was bound in leather, its pages yellowed, its threads frayed. She was of mixed race, with pale skin and full features, and she was probably somewhere in her midfifties. She wore a badly fitted wig of longish ginger-colored hair. The glinting lines of cheap necklaces circled her neck, their trinkets hidden beneath the neckline of a dress that was made up of layers of autumnal colors, like leaves fallen from the trees. The dress fell past her ankles. She looked up from her book as Ohio led the Cerberus warriors into the cabin.
“You are the people of the three dogs, yes?” the woman asked without preamble.
Edwards frowned, but before he could speak, Sinclair butted in. “She means Cerberus. Yes, yes we are.”
The woman in the chair nodded, wincing with the effort, patently in some discomfort. “You have people here, have visited here before?” she asked in an accent strong with Creole French.
Edwards nodded. “Go on.”
“My name is Dagmar Gellis,” the woman explained. “I followed the path.”
“The path?” Edwards queried.
“She means voodoo,” Ohio Blue stated quietly from where she stood with her back to the room, peering through the porthole.
“Voodoo,” Edwards repeated. “Right.”
“The société broke up when Papa Hurbon left us,” Dagmar said. “Dwindled, like ice left out in the noonday sun. I want things to be like they were. Simple, uncomplicated.”
As she spoke she moved in her seat, and Edwards realized for the first time that the woman called Dagmar Gellis had only one leg beneath the flowing trails of her skirts; her left leg was missing below the knee. He recalled something that had been mentioned in CAT Alpha’s report on an investigation in the Louisiana Bayou two years before—a group of voodoo worshippers had been mesmerized into cutting off their limbs to provide blood sacrifice for their living goddess, a monster called Ezili Coeur Noir. Noir, it transpired, was actually an Annunaki called Lilitu who had been killed and subjected to a failed rebirth program on the Annunaki wombship, Tiamat. Kane, Grant and Brigid had managed to trap her in a cold-fusion reactor located inside an abandoned military redoubt that dated back to the twentieth century.
“What does this have to do with us? With Cerberus?” Sinclair asked, picking up on the line of questioning.
Dagmar sucked her teeth, browned with age and jagged like a wild animal’s. “Something lives,” she said. “Papa Hurbon, he lives still—with the other thing.”
“We know Hurbon’s alive,” Edwards said. “What’s this ‘other thing’?”
“The goddess,” the woman said fearfully, barely breathing the word.
“Ezili?” Edwards asked, turning to his colleagues. “Can’t be. Kane’s team dispatched her sorry ass. That’s what Brigid’s report said.”
“Where is this ‘other thing’ that you speak of?” Sela Sinclair asked, leaning down so that her face was closer to the woman’s. Close up, the woman’s breath was bad, like something that had died.
Gellis spoke some more, about her life and how things had become messed up. She was clearly in an addled and anxious state. It seemed to Sinclair that the woman blamed everyone else for her own failure to face reality, and that most of her talk was in paranoid riddles where she was the only good person caught in a conspiracy of evil.
“Hurbon holds surgery, sometimes, with Mike,” Dagmar concluded, “down under the earth, where the dead things still live.”
They could get no further sense from Gellis. She spoke of things she had mislaid or places she thought she had been, but most of it seemed like the ramblings of one who was deluded, unable to tell fantasy from reality. As far as Edwards could tell, the woman was a dupe who would never amount to anything but a bit player stuck on the sidelines of her own life. He almost felt sorry for her.
Eventually, the Cerberus group left the cabin escorted by Ohio, holding their opinions until they were away from the closed door.
“You make any sense of that?” Sela Sinclair asked her partners as they paced down the corridor to another set of doors.
“I figure Mike is Redoubt Mike,” Edwards proposed.
“Sounds likely,” Sinclair agreed.
Redoubt Mike was located in Louisiana and had been the final resting place of Lilitu in her guise as Ezili Coeur Noir. The cold-fusion generator that powered the redoubt had been utilized to bring her fractured aspects back together before crushing them into nothingness, or so Brigid’s report had explained. But what if that was not the case, the Cerberus team had wondered as they had listened to the anxious ramblings of the one-legged woman. What if Hurbon was involved in something designed to bring Ezili Coeur Noir, the voodun loa of death, back to walk the Earth again?
Domi shook her head as Ohio led them into a room with a large wooden table at its center surrounded by eight chairs. A further set of double doors was open on the far side of the room and led out onto the portside deck. Two men waited in the room, both visibly armed with pistols and both smartly dressed. The Cerberus warriors ignored them.
“You’re trying to make sense of the ramblings of a mad lady,” Domi spit.
“Redoubt Mike was where—” Sinclair began to explain.
“I know what happened at Redoubt Mike,” Domi assured her.
Ohio took a seat at the head of the table and gestured to one of the armed men to get her a drink. The man opened up the twin doors of a drinks cabinet and began preparing a martini.
“What happened at Redoubt Mike?” Ohio asked as she waited for her drink.
“A lot of voodoo hoodoo,” Sinclair told her, explaining not
hing.
As Sela spoke, Edwards stepped out onto the deck and engaged his hidden Commtact to hail the Cerberus operations base. “Cerberus, this is Edwards,” he said, staring up at the cloudless blue sky.
A moment later, the familiar voice of Cerberus operative Brewster Philboyd was channeled through Edwards’s ear canal by the Commtact. “Go ahead.”
“Can you triangulate on this position, Brewster, and tell me how far we are from Redoubt Mike?” Edwards requested.
“Already triangulated,” Philboyd confirmed, working at his computer desk over twelve hundred miles away. Every Cerberus operative had a biolink transponder surgically inserted into their bloodstream. This transponder could be accessed remotely to monitor heart rate and other metabolic functions, and it could also be used to triangulate an individual’s position to within a few feet. It was just one of the miraculous tools at Cerberus’s disposal in its quest to protect humanity. “I have you at forty-two miles out, almost directly to the north of the redoubt.”
“What’s our easiest way of getting there?” Edwards queried, but even as he asked he realized that the answer was obvious.
“Mike has a mat-trans unit, the same as the one you used to meet with Ohio’s people a mile away from your current location,” Philboyd answered, as if he had read Edwards’s mind. “If you return to that unit, I could run a remote jump sequence and send you straight there.”
Edwards smiled. “See, I knew I stayed friends with you desk jockeys for a reason.”
Sela Sinclair looked up as Edwards reentered the yacht’s conference room. She had taken a seat at the table, but declined the offer of a drink. “You have anything?”
Edwards smiled. “Sure do. Let’s go investigate this one from the inside.”
Domi was perched on a seat, not sitting but rather resting on her haunches atop it. She smiled a feral smile at Edwards’s words and turned to Ohio Blue. “I’m going to need my gun back,” she said. “And my knife.”
Chapter 11
Using flashlights, Edwards, Sinclair and Domi entered an abandoned military complex located in an underground facility close to the Bayou Lafourche. The facility was well hidden from prying eyes, located in a bunker between city streets that could only be accessed via a service alleyway. That alleyway, like the streets around it, was covered with a dense carpet of vegetation.
The city itself was unpopulated and partly demolished, an overgrown ruin dating back to a civilization that had been toppled by the nukecaust of 2001, as much a ghost monument as Machu Picchu or the underworld city of Agartha.
“No civilization ever expects it will come to this,” Sela Sinclair said regretfully as the Cerberus trio ducked past the overgrowth and into the stairwell that led down to the hidden redoubt. Thanks to cryogenic hibernation, she was a twentieth-century émigré; she remembered places just like this when they had been vibrant with human life.
Edwards turned to her, offering a grim smile. “Everything ends sooner or later,” he said. “Even Cerberus.”
Domi flinched at that as Edwards led the way down the steps and into the belly of the redoubt itself. “Do you really believe that, Edwards?”
“It’s inevitable,” the shaved-headed ex-Mag said. “Either our organization’s mission will be completed or someone will get the jump on us—either way Cerberus will disappear.”
“It’s not like you to indulge in gallows humor,” Sinclair observed, shaking her head.
Edwards fixed her with a piercing stare of his blue eyes. “Who said I was joking?” he challenged.
Maybe he’s right, Sinclair thought. Maybe there was something in the air; or maybe it was just seeing places like this and the depression that they seemed to engender.
Within a couple of minutes, the group had reached the mat-trans chamber hidden in the bowels of the underground bunker. The chamber was a small, hexagonal room with a tiled floor and armaglass walls tinted the rich pink of cherry blossoms.
The chamber was adjacent to a larger room which featured a line of consoles at which its operators had once sat, a little like the monitoring room at NASA.
The mat-trans room featured a locked door with a numerical keypad beside it. Edwards punched in the code, waiting at the door as Domi and Sinclair trotted inside. As they did so, Edwards engaged his Commtact, hailing Brewster Philboyd at the Cerberus ops center.
“Okay, Brewster,” Edwards said as he pulled the heavy door to. “We’re all in and ready to jump.”
* * *
BREWSTER PHILBOYD WAS sitting at the comms desk within the Cerberus redoubt, tucked away amid the Bitterroot Mountains. He was a scarecrow-thin figure whose lanky body seemed to be a little bit too large for the seat and desk he sat at. He had blond hair, thinning a little and receding from his high forehead, and he wore round-framed spectacles perched above his acne-scarred cheeks. Like all the personnel in the room, Philboyd wore the regulation Cerberus uniform—a white jumpsuit with a blue zipper. “Accessing now,” he told Edwards via the headset mic he wore hooked over his left ear.
The comms desk was found within the large operations room, where twin rows of a dozen desks each ran from one wall to the other. Most of the desks were occupied by operators at this time of day, and Lakesh was sitting at his own desk to the rear of the room, drinking tea as he supervised operations.
Philboyd worked the keyboard of his computer, his fingers running over it with speed and precision as he brought up the remote overrides for the mat-trans network. He had already run through the procedure and coded in the details of the remarkable trip beforehand. As he worked on the final commands, Lakesh joined him at his desk, watching as new data flashed across the screen.
Suddenly aware of Lakesh’s presence, Philboyd turned for a moment and glanced at his colleague, mouthing the word okay?
Lakesh had that haunted expression on his face, one that Philboyd had seen too many times before. But after a moment, he nodded, offering a wide, if not entirely genuine, smile.
Philboyd tapped the key command and, in an underground room hundreds of miles to the south, the three Cerberus warriors were suddenly bathed with a wash of light and sound as the mat-trans fired up and launched them across quantum space to their destination at Redoubt Mike.
* * *
THE PHYSICAL SENSATION of having one’s atoms thrown across the quantum ether to a receiver station many miles away was not for the fainthearted. Traveling via mat-trans had once been described by Lakesh as being similar to the feeling of waking up to discover you’d just been punched repeatedly in the gut. He had been one of the very first technicians to work on the project, and when he said things like that, it amazed his colleagues that the network had ever gotten off the ground.
The way the system worked was via fixed points, artificially constructed as sender-receiver stations and located across the old United States of America and beyond. The sender-receiver stations, known as matter transmitters or mat-trans, would reduce travelers to their component atoms before sending them in a targeted beam to a designated receiver station, teleporting them instantaneously from point to point. The system had been developed by the US military toward the end of the twentieth century, and its existence had never been revealed to the general public.
The mat-trans stations were located deep within military compounds where they could be kept secure. That, of course, had been over two hundred years before, but the redoubts had by and large remained undiscovered, which meant that even today they remained the province of the Cerberus organization. That said, the mat-trans had been compromised before, such as when a group of technological shamans from Australia had cut into the signal and split it from its original destination, causing Cerberus some degree of turmoil.
There came a rush of white mist and the sense of physical assault and internal bodily pressure. And then Edwards, Sela Sinclair and Domi were standi
ng in a new mat-trans chamber inside the confines of Redoubt Mike, a chamber of the exact same proportions as the one they had entered in Bayou Lafourche, only with armaglass walls a golden yellow.
“Everyone okay?” Sinclair asked between slow, deliberate breaths.
Edwards nodded, pale where the blood had drained from his face, his lips pressed together. “Yeah.”
Beside him, Domi had adopted a crouching position and pulled her Detonics Combat Master pistol from where she had holstered it at the small of her back. Her eyes were narrowed, watching the sealed door to the mat-trans chamber, and her shoulders trembled slightly as she brought her own breathing under control. The small, silver barrel of the blaster in her hands, however, remained steady, despite her heavy breathing—Domi was a professional. “Let’s go,” she said, motioning toward the door.
The door was off center and, like the one in the underground chamber forty miles distant, was locked via numerical keypad. Sinclair took point, working the code and smiling at the satisfying click of the magnetic locks being released. The door swung outward, releasing the last of the white transportation mists, even as overhead fans within the chamber itself drew away the rest.
Outside, the redoubt was in six inches of water and smelling of mildew. It was silent, too, eerily so, and the automated lights that were designed to come on whenever the mat-trans received a package or traveler flickered and dimmed, several bulbs burned out completely.
“Looks like a friendly place,” Sinclair muttered as she stepped from the mat-trans chamber, her own pistol now in hand, a Colt Mark IV. The Mark IV was a compact pistol, which featured an eight-and-half-inch matte black barrel and set-back grip. It was the kind of weapon she had grown up with, trained with, two hundred years before when she had been a part of the US Air Force.