by James Axler
Here, Ezili Coeur Noir knew, buried deep in the sub-levels of the forgotten redoubt, was a thing that could do her bidding on a colossal scale. She could sense it, in the way that she could somehow sense all things that brought decay, a flaming beacon in her mind, calling to her with siren song.
The blank-walled tunnel sloped for almost three hundred paces, and by the time the group had reached its end, the motion-sensitive lights behind them had begun switching off, leaving the area by the entry door in darkness once more. The walls were a bland gray, smoothed concrete and plaster left unpainted. Here and there, notations had been scratched on the walls, tiny markings in pencil, the initials of a soldier or a workman scrawled lightly into the plaster in a spot close to the curved ceiling beside one of the recessed strip lights.
At the end of the tunnel the group stopped at a set of steel double doors that were set horizontally like the jaws of an immense trapped animal. The grinding, whirring noise came from behind these closed doors, and Ezili Coeur Noir halted in front of them. In silence, her undead entourage waited obediently behind her.
Then, the horizontal double doors split, one shunting upward while the other retreated into the base of the floor, and a steel-walled box was revealed. Small halogen lights flickered on in the ceiling as the doors disappeared from view. It was an elevator, reinforced and large enough to hold a supply truck. The tunnel leading here had one purpose only, which was to take people to this elevator, and so the redoubt was designed to automatically call the elevator once the entry doors were opened.
With all the grace that the dead can muster, Ezili Coeur Noir stepped through the doors, and her undead companions shambled behind her, walking into the large boxlike construction of the elevator cage. Behind them, the elevator doors rumbled closed on tracks that hadn’t been used in two hundred years, and then the elevator began to descend into the core of the buried redoubt.
Standing in the shaking elevator, the sound of long-unused pulleys whining in her ears, Ezili Coeur Noir glanced around her, taking in the dead figures who had come to form her entourage. Ezili Coeur Noir had granted the dead life, but truly she wanted the reverse—to give the living the glorious gift of death.
Ezili Coeur Noir was the queen of all things rotten, all things dead, and in that lay her power. For all things must rot, and all things must die. And so they would, and so they shall.
Chapter 2
In another military redoubt, high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, a warning light was blinking urgently on the computer monitor screen of Brewster Philboyd. In his midforties, Philboyd was an astrophysicist by discipline. His blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline. A lanky six feet tall, he looked faintly uncomfortable as he sat in the swivel chair, hunched in front of his monitor in the central operations room of the redoubt with its twin aisles of computer terminals, its walls dedicated to the monitoring equipment that defined the hidden base’s function.
Behind Philboyd, a vast Mercator map dominated the wall above the doors into the operations room, showing every continent of the world, each one connected by dozens of different colored lines like the old flight plan maps that had existed before the nuclear holocaust had all but destroyed civilization. The map was just one part of a monitoring system that was dedicated to the upkeep of the mat-trans project, a transportation system developed in the late twentieth century by the U.S. military. The mat-trans units scattered around the globe could be used to move goods and personnel from location to location in the blink of an eye.
Like the map and the monitoring equipment in the control room, Brewster Philboyd was a relic from the twentieth century. He, along with a number of other military personnel, had been cryogenically frozen and placed in hiding on the Manitius Moon Base just prior to the outbreak of nuclear hostilities between the USA and the old USSR. Like many of other people who manned the redoubt now known as Cerberus, Brewster had been awoken two hundred years later into a new and dangerous world, where a once proud civilization had been replaced by the veiled manipulation of humanity by a poisonous alien race called the Annunaki. In recent years, Cerberus had set itself against this alien threat in a series of dangerous skirmishes, though the odds of actually defeating such a technologically superior enemy seemed astronomical.
Philboyd leaned forward slightly in his seat, adjusting the black-rimmed glasses he wore above his acne-scarred cheeks as he studied the warning pop-up that had appeared on his monitor. Philboyd’s fingers played briefly across his keyboard as he brought up the details of the alert, scrolling through the data swiftly as he scanned the information it imparted. It appeared that there was life—or movement at least—in a long-abandoned redoubt out in Louisiana. According to the scrolling information on his screen, the old military base was designated as Redoubt Mike, adhering to the ancient military protocol of naming redoubts after a phonetic letter of the alphabet.
Turning in his chair, Brewster attracted the attention of his superior, a man called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who was busy at a terminal that sat at the back of the room, overlooking the operations center.
“Lakesh?” Brewster began. “Do you know anything about a redoubt out near White Lake, Louisiana?”
Lakesh’s blue eyes glazed over for a moment as he contemplated the question. He was a well-built man of medium height who appeared to be in his midfifties, with refined features and an aquiline nose. Known to his friends as Lakesh, Dr. Singh was in fact over 250 years old, and he had been with the Cerberus redoubt before the nuclear conflict that had ended the twenty-first century one cold January day. A cyberneticist and accomplished physicist, Lakesh had been involved with the mat-trans project from its earliest days, and it was with some sense of irony that he found himself in the same monitoring room several centuries later.
“Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh mused, his eyes coming back into focus. “I have visited it several times.” When Brewster looked at him curiously, Lakesh inclined his head with self-deprecation, and added noncommittally, “In my youth. Why do you ask about it, Brewster?”
Philboyd gestured to his flickering terminal screen. “According to this, Mike has a visitor. Maybe an intruder.”
“That’s quite impossible,” Lakesh protested, rising from his seat. “That redoubt was sealed in the 1990s. Sealed and buried.”
“Buried?” Brewster intoned.
“Redoubt Mike was a staging area for one of the earliest mat-trans units,” Lakesh explained, “a prototype via which some of our initial exploration was done. Mike’s mat-trans acted primarily as a sending unit, rather than a receiver, but this was in the early days of the project when the colossal amount of power required to operate a chamber was still being investigated. Mike’s mat-trans operated using a cold-fusion generator—a nuclear system that was ultimately considered too problematic for the strains placed upon it.”
“Problematic, how?” Philboyd queried.
“Mike’s was a working prototype in operation while the whole process was still at its teething stage,” Lakesh explained. “Ultimately, the idea of powering the units by cold fusion was judged too dangerous to continue to use, and so other avenues were pursued. Of course, several early systems were being tested at this stage. It was a prestige military project, and as is often the way in such cases, money was in place to ensure it would work.”
Philboyd nodded in understanding. “But you said it was buried?” he asked.
“Redoubt Mike was abandoned once the cold-fusion system was deemed unsuitable,” Lakesh explained. “The base itself was primarily belowground, with only the entry at ground level. They concreted over those doors and left it to the mercies of the swamps. Which means no one should be inside.”
Brewster glanced back at his monitor screen where the warning pop-up continue to blink. “Well-lll,” he began, stretching the single syllable, “either we have a glitch in our monitoring system or a caller has come a-knock-knocking for Mike.”
Casting aside the paperwork he had been looking at on his own
desk, Lakesh strode across the room and joined Brewster at his monitor, running through the alert data that had appeared there. As he read the details, the old cyberneticist’s expression darkened.
LOCATED HIGH IN THE Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, the Cerberus redoubt was an ancient military facility that had remained largely forgotten or ignored since the nukecaust. The isolation was only reinforced by the curious mythology associated with the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually un-populated; the nearest settlement was found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Native Americans, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
Hidden beneath camouflage netting, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team within the redoubt. Gaining access to those satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base, but their efforts now gave Lakesh’s team a near limitless stream of feed data from around the planet, as well as providing global communications links.
Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was exceedingly rare for strangers to approach the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt via the mat-trans chamber housed within the redoubt itself.
Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans exploited the hyperdimensional quantum stream, transmitting digital information along hyperdimensional pathways. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units, much as a train is restricted by its tracks and the location of its stations.
More recently, the Cerberus personnel had refined an interphaser unit, which functioned along similar principles but relied on naturally occuring parallax points, intersecting lines of intense energy. Requiring no external power source, these parallax points existed across the Earth—and beyond—and could be exploited by use of a portable device called an interphaser, which could be carried by just one person using an attaché-style case. Although not limitless, the interphaser had the distinct advantage of portability and a wider array of receiver locations.
Having read the data on Brewster’s screen, Lakesh stumbled back into the empty chair behind him, almost falling as he sat. Several of the other personnel on shift in the command center turned at the noise, expressing concern for their operational leader.
“Is everything okay?” Brewster asked, although he feared that he already knew the answer.
“This is very bad,” Lakesh said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Once the decision had been taken to decommission Mike, the redoubt was used as a storage facility for other projects of dubious worth. Which is to say, it became a dumping ground, since the impending secure closure of the site meant that whatever was left there could not be accessed ever again.”
“What sorts of things?” Brewster asked.
Lakesh shook his head, feeling weary as the enormity of the breach in redoubt security struck him. “The sort of things the military always involves itself in—weapons, the means of destruction.
“Sooner or later, all our sins come back to haunt us, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh pronounced, standing once more. “I think we had better assemble a team and investigate this intrusion at our earliest opportunity.”
ON ANOTHER LEVEL of the hidden mountain base, Kane stood in front of a punching bag hanging on a rigid spring from the ceiling of the communal gymnasium. Kane gritted his teeth as he attacked the hanging bag with a series of swift, bare-knuckled blows: first right, then left, then right again.
Kane was a powerfully built man, with no-nonsense blue-gray eyes and dark hair cropped short to his collar. Dressed in a black T-shirt and loose slacks, Kane was an outstanding example of physical fitness. His wide shoulders and muscular arms powered his punches with incredible force, smashing the punching bag back on its spring so hard that it rattled in its metal housing. It had been observed that Kane was built like a wolf, sleek and muscular with exceptional power concentrated in his upper torso. He seemed to have the temperament of a wolf, too, for he was both pack leader and a natural loner, depending on the situation.
An ex-Magistrate, enforcer of the laws of the walled villes that dominated the U.S. landscape of the twenty-third century, Kane was a trained fighter, with a razor-keen mind and exceptional combat prowess. What distinguished Kane among his contemporaries, however, was something he referred to as his point man sense, an uncanny awareness of his surroundings that verged on the supernatural. In actuality, there was nothing unearthly about Kane’s ability—it was simply the disciplined application of the same five senses possessed by any other human being.
As Kane worked at the punching bag, each mighty uppercut, jab and cross forcing the leather teardrop to shake in its mountings, he became aware of another person entering the otherwise empty gymnasium. Kane’s blue-gray eyes flicked across the room as he looked over his shoulder, his fists still working at the high punching bag. The newcomer was a woman, her body sheathed in a skin-tight white jumpsuit that accentuated her trim curves and athlete’s body. A cascade of curling red locks flowed past her shoulders to the midpoint of her back.
Brigid Baptiste and Kane shared a long history. Where Kane was a man of action, Brigid’s background was as an archivist. Which wasn’t to say that Brigid could not hold her own in a fight—far from it, as she could handle herself with fists or guns, and she had proved to be a hellcat when riled. However, Brigid Baptiste had one trait that had proved immeasurably useful in the adventures she had shared with Kane: a mental talent known as an eidetic, or photographic, memory, which allowed her to visually remember in precise detail everything she had ever seen.
For almost half a minute Kane continued to beat at the punching bag, working rhythmically in a tarantella of swift punches as beads of sweat glistened on his skin. As he drilled his final right cross against the leather bag, Brigid Baptiste stopped in front of him, eyebrows raised in an inquisitive expression that betrayed her mocking humor.
“Feeling a little frustrated today?” she asked as Kane stepped back on the balls of his feet, leaving the punching bag swinging to and fro from its mounting between them.
Kane looked at her and smiled. “Aw, it had it coming,” he said, indicating the swaying bag as it slowly returned to a static position, waiting for its next opponent.
Brigid looked at the punching bag and laughed, creases of delight appearing momentarily around her emerald eyes as she did so. “What, did it outsmart you at chess?” she asked. “Again?”
Brushing a hand through his sweat-damp hair, Kane reached for the hand towel that he had left on a nearby bench. “What can I do for you, Baptiste?” he asked, ignoring her friendly taunt.
“Lakesh is asking us to meet in the ops room,” Brigid explained as she watched Kane wiping the sweat from his powerful arms. “I don’t know the details yet, but it seems there’s trouble out there in paradise and he wants us ready to ship out in the next hour.”
Kane tapped at the side of his head, indicating the subdermal Commtact unit that was hidden there beneath the skin. “Guess I didn’t hear the call,” he explained.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the military artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, a deaf person would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtacts had other properties, too, including acting as intelligent, real-time translators on the condition that a sufficie
nt sample of a language had been programmed into them to decipher a dialect.
“You didn’t miss anything,” Brigid assured Kane. “I told him I’d come find you.”
Kane fixed Brigid with his most mischievous look as he slung the towel over one shoulder. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”
In reply, Brigid leaped from a standing start, high into the air, and kicked the punching bag that hung between them, making it rebound so hard that it almost clipped Kane in his smugly smiling face.
“You wish,” she told him as she landed in a graceful crouch.
Despite their outward antagonism, Kane and Brigid had the utmost respect for one another and they shared a very special bond. That bond was known as anam-charas, or soul friends, and it referred to a connection that transcended history itself. No matter what form the two found themselves in, no matter the nature of their reincarnations throughout eternity, the pair would remain unequivocally linked, tied together by some invisible umbilical cord that meant they would always be there for each other. Some had interpreted this link to mean that they were lovers, but the anam-chara bond was something more than that—the friendship and love of siblings or respectful contemporaries, with Brigid the yin to Kane’s yang.
While Kane and Brigid had been partners for a long time, there was a third integral member of their group, as well. Grant was also an ex-magistrate and had been Kane’s original partner in his Magistrate days. Grant was as much Kane’s brother as any blood relative. Together, the three of them formed an exceptional exploration group who seemed able to handle themselves in any given situation. Which was fortunate, as the situations they encountered while working for Cerberus had ranged from the improbable to the outright impossible.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Kane strolled into the operations room dressed in a clean shadow suit, his hair still damp from the shower he had taken on leaving the gym.
