by James Axler
"Me," Domi stated in a tone that brooked no debate.
Kane eyed her dispassionately, on the verge of refusing her offer. But the first action that needed to be undertaken once they reached the site would be to secure the immediate area. Domi, swift and stealthy of foot, would be more helpful at achieving that objective than either Brigid or Grant.
He recalled the time when he partnered up with the albino girl in order to join Trader Chapman's ore caravan. Despite a couple of incidents that in retrospect were more annoying than risky, she had proved exceptionally capable of handling herself in a killzone.
Grant fingered his chin. "I guess that makes me and Brigid the B team again."
"If you have any objections, now's the time to put them on the table."
Brigid smiled wanly. "I have plenty. But none hold any water."
Consulting his wrist chron, Kane said, "Let's schedule the jump for 0400 hours. If the gateway is guarded, it'll be the graveyard shift, and the sentries posted there are less liable to be at the top of their game. That'll give us time choose our ordnance, eat and catch some sleep."
"How long should we wait before jumping in after you?" Grant asked.
"A couple of hours should probably be long enough for us to make the initial recce and lock down the immediate area—or get captured or chilled."
"If it's only hybrids and barons there," Domi declared, her teeth flashing in a vulpine grin, "they'll be the ones chilled.''
They left the dining hall. Lakesh, Kane, Grant and Brigid took the elevator up to the first level, while Domi stayed on the second floor for a swim in the pool. Brigid and Lakesh returned to the ops center, and Kane walked to the armory, with Grant beside him.
"I guess you have a strategy in mind," the big man remarked.
"Until we get the lay of the land, there's not much I can do. I'll go in hard, armored up. If there are any Mags there, they might think I'm one of Pollard's squad bringing in merchandise. That should buy me some time."
Grant nodded, but it was a very distracted nod.
They strode down the corridor past the vehicle depot and workroom and entered an open doorway. Kane flicked up the flat toggle switch on the doorframe, and the overhead fluorescent fixtures blazed on, flooding the armory with a white, sterile light.
The big square room was stacked nearly to the ceiling with wooden crates and boxes. Many of the crates were stenciled with the legend Property U.S. Army. Glass-fronted gun cases lined the four walls, containing automatic assault rifles, many makes and models of subguns and dozens of semiautomatic blasters. On the north wall were bazookas, tripod-mounted M-249 machine guns, mortars and rocket launchers.
All of the ordnance was of predark manufacture. Caches of materiel had been laid down in hermetically sealed Continuity of Government installations before the nukecaust. Protected from the ravages of the outraged environment, nearly every piece of munitions and hardware was as pristine as the day it had rolled off the assembly line. Most of the items in the arsenal had been taken by Lakesh from the Anthill over a period of years.
Grant hung back near the door, while Kane went to an open case of grens. The man seemed uncomfortable and not a little embarrassed.
"Something on your mind?" Kane asked as he selected an incendiary gren from its cushion of foam rubber.
Passing a hand over his forehead, Grant shifted from one foot to the other and mumbled, "As a matter of fact, there is. I want to ask you something."
"Go ahead."
"Something…" Grant's voice trailed off, and then he blurted in an almost desperate burst, "Something personal."
Kane was startled into speechlessness, so astonished he nearly dropped the gren. He stared at Grant, nonplussed by the very concept of the man even hinting about making a personal confidence. He could think of nothing to say but to repeat, "Go ahead."
Lowering his voice to just above a whisper, resolutely not looking in Kane's direction, Grant said, "At any time over the past few weeks, have you…I mean has Domi…have you and her—"
Grant broke off, heaved a deep sigh and stated mat-ter-of-factly, "Has Domi come to you, in your quarters, or have you gone to hers?"
Kane felt his eyebrows crawling toward his hairline. "What?"
"You heard me."
"Oh, I heard you. I just can't believe my ears." Kane felt a quiver of embarrassment mixed in with a little guilt. During the Utah mission, he and Domi had shared a room and she made it clear she would not be adverse to sharing more than that with him. He had dashed cold water on her amorous advance by reminding her of her devotion to Grant. That had been the end of it, but he never mentioned the incident to anyone, not to Brigid and certainly not to Grant.
Wearily, Grant said, "Just answer me, will you?"
"No, she didn't and no, we haven't." Kane cocked his head toward him. "Why do you ask?"
"I have my reasons."
"I'm sure you do. I'd like to hear them."
Grant shook his head and murmured, "Domi is tired of waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"Waiting for me, waiting for us to get together. She accused me of being impotent, and then threatened to go to the other men here. You included."
Kane's eyebrows arched even higher, and with a conscious effort, he lowered them. Now he understood the reasons behind the bitterness and tension between the two people. "Domi didn't include me, and as far as I know she hasn't gone to the other men. You'd know about it if she had."
Grant swallowed, his face screwed up in misery. "Yeah, that's what I figured."
The two men shared an awkward, uneasy silence for a long moment. Kane finally ventured, "Maybe it's time you were more honest with her, about your feelings. Have you ever spoken to her about Olivia?"
Grant's head swung up, his lips compressed tightly.
"No, I haven't. It's none of her business. Or yours, either."
Kane bristled at Grant's tone but didn't respond to it. For the past year he had wondered if his friend had tired of resisting the albino girl's charms and surrendered to them, and now he knew. Furthermore, he had suspected the emotional wounds inflicted by his rained affair with Olivia years ago in Cobaltville had yet to fully heal. Until now, Kane had never asked Grant about Olivia. The two men had observed an unspoken understanding that it was a forbidden topic.
Kane raised conciliatory hands. "All right, all right I've told you what you wanted to know."
As he returned his attention to the crate of grens, Grant intoned, "There's something else."
"What is it?"
"I let one of Pollard's Mags go. I didn't allow the Tigers to chill him. I tied him up, and when it was all over I set him free."
Kane bunked at him surprise. "Why?"
"His name was Mace…brother to the man we chilled in Cobaltville."
For a long tense stretch of seconds, Kane said nothing, searching his memory for the face of the man. He nodded shortly. "It's done. You did what you thought was right."
"Mebbe." Grant's tone was dubious. "I didn't see any sign of him in Redoubt Charlie. That means he either didn't make it back, or he returned to Cobaltville and reported what happened. And if he did that,
Baron Cobalt will sure as hell put two and two together."
Kane exhaled noisily. "And he'll know we're on to him, and he might be expecting us."
"Yeah."
Kane thought for a moment, then stated, "There's nothing that can be done. We'll have to take our chances."
Hesitantly, Grant said, "There's one more thing."
Kane angled an eyebrow at him. "I'm listening."
Squaring his broad shoulders as if steeling himself to perform an unpleasant task, he declared, "You remember Shizuka."
Kane snorted. "Yes, I remember Shizuka." His voice acquired a tone of patronizing weariness. "Even if it hadn't been only three days since I last saw her, she's a little on the unforgettable side."
A ghost of a smile tugged at
the corners of Grant's mouth. "She sure is that."
"What about her?"
The smile vanished. "Domi saw us."
Kane's eyes slitted in confusion. "Domi saw you? What do you mean? She saw you and Shizuka…"
"Me and Shizuka." Grant gestured helplessly. "We were only kissing, but Domi may think we'd gone further. And we might have if she hadn't shown up. Anyhow, Domi saw us together."
Kane groaned inwardly, then aloud. Grant continued speaking, faster and faster as if in a great hurry to get the words out of his mouth. "After the way
Shizuka defeated Domi, humiliated her, really, even though she started it, it was probably the worst thing she could've seen. Especially with what's been going on between us. Or not been going on."
He shook his head frustration. "It's not like I owe Domi anything. She's just a child as far as I'm concerned, but I don't want to her hurt her. Or have her do a Guana on me one night."
"I don't know if she'd go that far." Kane made a wordless utterance of irritation. ' 'This is all we need. We finally get the Beth-Li issue settled, and here you are, dragging it back in, breathing new life into it."
"It's not the same thing at all," Grant said hotly, defensively.
"The hell it isn't," Kane argued.
More than a year before, Lakesh had concocted a plan to turn Cerberus from a sanctuary to a colony. To that end, babies needed to be born, ones with superior genes. Making a unilateral decision, he arranged for Beth-Li Rouch to be brought into the redoubt to mate with Kane, to insure that his superior abilities were passed on to offspring.
Kane had refused to cooperate for a variety of reasons, primarily because he felt the plan was a continuation of sinister elements that had brought about the nukecaust and the tyranny of the villes. His refusal had tragic consequences. Only a thirst for revenge and a conspiracy to murder had been birthed within the walls of the redoubt, not children.
Kane inhaled a calming breath. "Out of all the women you've met in the past year—Domi, Mother Fand, DeFore—why choose Shizuka to break your celibate streak?"
"How the hell should I know?" Grant snapped. "I didn't plan it. How can you explain mutual attraction? For one thing, she's closer to my own age and a hell of lot more mature than Domi."
Kane wagged his head in disbelief. "If Domi fuses out on me during the op, at least I'll know the reason why."
He leaned against the gren crate and smiled sourly. "You beat everything, you know that? You turn down Domi and God only knows how many other women, then at the worst possible time you decide to lock lips with a samurai—and not just any run-of-the-mill samurai, either, but one that made a fool out of Domi. You really beat everything."
Grant took it all without a flicker of emotion. He probably wasn't hearing anything he had not already thought over before. Contritely, he muttered, "Yeah, I guess I do."
Chapter 21
Kane flexed his fingers, brushing them against the interlocking metal hexagons that composed the floor of the mat-trans chamber. He felt the pins-and-needles static discharge from the polished plates even through his gloves.
They had already lost their silvery shimmer, and the last wisps of spark-shot mist disappeared even as he looked at it. Lakesh claimed that the vapor was not really a mist at all, but a plasma wave form brought into existence by the inducer's "quincux effect." Beneath the platform, he heard the emitter array's characteristic hurricane howl fading away to a high-pitched whine.
He lay on his back, his stomach spasming, his head swimming. He took slow deep breaths, trying to speed his recovery. The vertigo was routine by now, a customary side effect of rematerialization. The nausea seeped away, but he knew better than to sit up until the dizziness went away completely.
All things considered, temporary queasiness and light-headedness were small prices to pay in exchange for traveling hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles in a handful of minutes. Occasionally, the toll exacted was terrible, as when he, Brigid and Grant jumped to a malfunctioning unit in Russia. The matter-stream modulations could not be synchronized with the destination lock, and all of them suffered a severe case of debilitating jump sickness that included hallucinations, weakness and vomiting.
Brigid had told him of the accounts written by Dr. Mildred Wyeth regarding gateway transits. She described the symptoms of jump sickness, the pain and nightmares she and her comrades had suffered while traversing the Deathlands via the mat-trans units.
Wyeth and the others who followed the legendary Ryan Cawdor had been forced to jump blind, without the knowledge of how to program a specific destination. As a result, they were subjected to physical and mental tortures that would have tormented the damned.
Hearing a rustle of cloth beside him, Kane slowly and carefully eased himself up on one polycarbonate-shod elbow. Domi stirred from her prone position on the platform, then sat up, blinking at the armaglass walls enclosing the jump chamber. Their pale green hue told her they had completed a transit from the brown-walled chamber in the Cerberus redoubt. The six-sided units in the Cerberus mat-trans network were color-coded so authorized jumpers could tell at a glance into which redoubt they had materialized.
It seemed an inefficient method of differentiating one installation from another, but Lakesh had once explained that before the nukecaust, only personnel holding color-coded security clearances were allowed to make use of the system. Inasmuch as their use was restricted to a select few of the units, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.
Rising to his feet, Kane made a swift visual inspection of his armor, making sure all the sections and joints were sealed. Domi stood, swaying for a moment on unsteady legs. Whether it was due to dizziness or because of the weight she carried, Kane had no way of knowing.
"Where do you think we are?" Domi asked. The small albino girl was dressed to kill—literally. She wore a padded bulletproof vest over black coveralls, the pouches and pockets bulging with extra magazines for her Combat Master snugged in a thigh holster.
A kit bag containing three flash-bangs, two high-ex V-60 minigrens, four incends and two CS grens hung from her left shoulder. Her serrated knife was sheathed outside the top of her right boot. A black knit balaclava was pulled down around her throat. She could tug it up to conceal her hair and most of her face within a couple of seconds.
Kane gestured to the armaglass walls. "We're someplace else, that's all I can tell you. How are you feeling?"
"Never better," she responded breezily. "You?"
"I'm grand." Lifting his left wrist, Kane turned toward the door. Strapped around it was a small de-vice made of molded black plastic and stamped metal. A liquid crystal display window exuded a faint glow. The motion detector showed no movement within the radius of its invisible sensor beams.
"It appears no one knows we've arrived," he said.
"Arrived where?" Domi asked irritably.
He did not bother to answer. Gripping the handle placed in the center of the door, Kane heaved up on it. With a click, the door of dense, semitranslucent material swung outward on counterbalanced hinges. Manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century, armaglass was a special compound combining the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.
Kane cautiously shouldered the door aside, fairly certain in advance of what he would he would see. Most of the jump chambers opened onto to small anterooms, which in turn led to the control rooms. He was not disappointed.
Sin Eater unleathered and in hand, he padded softly through the antechamber, walking heel to toe. Domi followed him at a distance of six feet. There was a quiet hum of machinery in the air, as well as the slight hiss of filtered oxygen being pushed through ventilation grilles high up on the walls.
Just before he stepped through the open door, Kane came to a halt, indicating for Domi to take up position on the opposite side of the frame. She did so, and just barely man
aged to bite back a gasp.
The control room was immense, far, far larger than any they had seen in any redoubt. Kane guessed that it measured out to be eighty by a hundred feet, which made it even larger than the ops center in Cerberus. Three aisles of computer stations lined the walls. He surveyed the banks and consoles of electronics for a moment, knowing all of the equipment was not there just to monitor and manage the gateway systems.
He strode to a nearby instrument panel bearing the blank screens of a closed-circuit vid system. When he thumbed a row of toggle switches, pale black-and-white images appeared, most of them displaying empty, dimly lit corridors. They could be anywhere, he reflected, much less Groom Lake, Nevada.
One screen lit up with an exterior view, a rolling plain of desert terrain, the landscape silvered by the moon. It butted up against jagged hills and ridgelines. The area looked quiet and almost hauntingly peaceful. He touched another switch, and the view changed, showing what appeared to be at least a mile's worth of ruins, all laid out against an extremely long runway. A line of compacted rubble still stood above ground. The only descriptive adjective that came to Kane's mind was godforsaken.
"Where are the hybrids, the guards?" Domi's voice was hushed as she looked around uneasily. "The power is on, so somebody has to be here."
"Not necessarily," Kane replied. "All the controls are locked on automatic settings, powered by the nuke generators."
"I just wish we knew where the fuck we are," Domi said angrily.
' 'We could be in Area 51 or even that East Asshole place Grant mentioned."
Almost as soon the last word passed his lips he spied a square notebook on a shelf beneath the vid screens. He tugged it out. Embossed on the plastic cover was a deep blue insignia, an eagle with outspread, upcurving wings. Beneath it were the words United States Air Force Base, Nellis Reservation. Site S-4 Security Protocols, Authorized Personnel Only. MJ-Green Clearance Required. The notebook was sealed with a tiny combination lock.
"That answers our question," he said flatly. "We're in Area 51."