Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  As Kane walked through the doors beneath the Mercator map with its multicolored lines of light, Lakesh stepped forward to greet him. “I am glad you could make it so quickly, Kane,” he said briefly.

  As with Brigid Baptiste, Kane had known Lakesh for a long time and he recognized when the formidable scientist sounded worried. Behind Lakesh, Brigid and Grant waited along with several other personnel who were prepping the mat-trans for use. The mat-trans chamber was located in an antechamber at the far corner of the large room, well away from the entry doors. The unit itself was situated within a small, eight-foot-high cubicle surrounded by armaglass walls tinted a brown hue. The door to the unit operated using a numeric key code, and the use of the unit was monitored by a computer terminal located just to the side of its entry door. Right now, Lakesh’s deputy, the copper-haired Donald Bry, sat at the mat-trans terminal, a look of deep concern on his features. Normally, Kane would not take Bry’s expression as a reliable indicator of the situation. The man was a compulsive worrier and Kane struggled to recall an instance when his brow wasn’t furrowed beneath his untamed mop of copper curls. However, the atmosphere in the room was such that Kane knew immediately that he had entered a serious situation.

  “Well, I aim to please,” Kane replied as Cerberus weaponsmith Henny Johnson rushed over to arm the ex-Mag for the field. “What’s going on?”

  Briefly, Lakesh outlined the situation regarding the intrusion alert at Redoubt Mike and how the Louisiana redoubt potentially contained any number of decommissioned weapons along with its outdated mat-trans unit.

  “This may be a simple glitch in our system, or in Mike’s,” Lakesh concluded, “but there’s an adage that I think applies here—it is better to be safe than sorry.”

  “I quite agree,” Kane said as he strapped a familiar wrist holster to his right arm and checked that the Sin Eater pistol that Henny handed him was fully loaded.

  Henny glared at Kane as he checked the pistol, as if offended that he would, for even a moment, believe she might send him out into the field with equipment that wasn’t fully prepared. She was a small woman, five foot five with blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below her ears.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked as Kane placed the compact pistol snugly in its wrist holster and shrugged the sleeve of his black denim jacket over it to conceal it. “Don’t trust me anymore, cowpoke?”

  Kane glanced up at the armorer. “I trust you, Johnson,” he said, “but I’d also expect you to double-check my work if your life was about to depend on it.”

  “Thanks… I think,” Henny said as she passed Kane a handful of spare ammo cartridges and flash-bang globes for use in the field.

  “Well, then.” Grant’s voice rumbled from where he sat, perched on the edge of one of the computer desks. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Grant was a huge man, well over six feet in height and broad like an oak door. A little older than Kane, he was a solid wall of muscle, with skin like polished ebony and a gunslinger’s mustache curling down from his top lip. Grant wore his hair cropped so close to his skull that he seemed almost bald, and he had placed a dark woollen cap over his head now, pulled low so that it met with his thick eyebrows, enhancing his permanent scowl.

  Like Kane, Grant had dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits beneath his long, Kevlar-weave black coat. Though they appeared to be made of the thinnest of material, the tight-fitting one-piece shadow suits acted as artificially controlled environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

  Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.

  Kane peered around the room for a moment, his eyes searching before he turned back to his partners where they waited at the desks. “Was I meant to bring the interphaser?” he asked.

  “No interphaser this time, buddy,” Grant advised in his deep voice.

  Lakesh gestured to the doorway in the far corner of the room. “Ah, yes, you weren’t here when I explained this, old friend,” he told Kane. “We’ve used our remote access to power the receiver unit at Redoubt Mike,” he stated briefly.

  Kane felt a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

  Brigid smiled brightly as she looked over her shoulder, encouraging Kane to follow her toward the armaglass cubicle that dominated a corner of the operations room. “Oh, yes. We’re going via mat-trans for this one,” she told him. “Old school.”

  “Oh, great,” Kane muttered sarcastically as he followed his two companions through the doorway into the ancient mat-trans unit. “If there’s one thing I miss, it’s doing things the really shitty way.”

  “We’ll briefly activate the outdated system by remote,” Lakesh told Kane as he peered through the open doorway. “It’s risky, but every second counts, so the closer we can get you to the site of infraction, the better.”

  “Right blindly into the thick of it, huh?” Kane said, shaking his head. “Yeah, that plan can’t go wrong.”

  “For our security, the mat-trans will power down immediately after you’ve materialized at Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh said to assure him. “Which means you’ll need to comm us when you’re ready to return.”

  Kane nodded irritably. “Got it.”

  Kane closed the door, locking the three companions in the ancient mat-trans chamber and enabling the jump sequence. Donald Bry’s fingers worked the computer keyboard and the trio were reduced to their component atoms, digitized and sent across the quantum ether to the receiver unit in far-off Louisiana.

  At least it’s quick, Kane reasoned as his substance ceased to exist.

  Chapter 3

  Traveling via mat-trans was a little like waking in the middle of the night to the awful realization that you had contracted food poisoning. A moment earlier, one’s life was a restful dream, then suddenly it had turned into a bewildering nightmare, colored only by one’s need to vomit.

  Almost doubled over, Kane took deep breaths as he stood in the mat-trans chamber that he and his companions had materialized in an instant before. His heart was pounding, his stomach was doing some crazy kind of acrobatics and he could taste bile at the back of his throat. For a moment he stood hunched over, staring at the white-tiled floor as he tried to bring himself back to a state of calm.

  The tiled floor at Kane’s feet was familiar, exactly the same as the one that the companions had left in Montana just an instant earlier, dusty white tiles glinting beneath harsh overhead lighting. White mist floated in the air like fog, slowly dissipating as extractor fans began their designated task of clearing the glass-walled chamber.

  While mat-trans travel was possible for humans, it had not initially been designed with people in mind. Rather, it was intended for the movement of matériel, and its application to transporting the human form could be traumatic. Despite the churning of his stomach, Kane was fairly used to this ghastly system of travel, and had made his peace with it years before. Grant, by contrast, had never liked traveling via mat-trans, and he endured it with a determined mixture of bitterness and hostility, even after all these years with Cerberus.

  “Everyone arrive in one piece?” Kane asked, straightening to check on his two companions.

  They stood behind him, one over each shoulder in the manner of a fighter pilot’s wingmen. Brigid Baptiste had her hand to her mouth and was biting down on her knuckle, her skin visibly paler than even its usual near-alabaster hue.

 
Realizing that Kane was looking at her for an answer, Brigid nodded, still biting down on her knuckle.

  Across from the red-haired former archivist, Grant had his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed up tight, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts.

  “Grant?” Kane urged, reaching for his other companion.

  “Present,” Grant muttered, his eyes still closed.

  Kane felt his own stomach lurch then, and he gagged for a moment, holding down its contents with considerable effort. “You okay?” he asked once he had got himself back under control.

  Grant opened his eyes, the dark orbs looking bloodshot, focused on some far distant point. “That was…that was really something,” he said through gasping breaths.

  “Lakesh said this was a prototype unit,” Brigid reminded them both. She had removed her hand from her mouth now, but she still seemed unsteady on her feet as she staggered forward, the chunky heels of her cowboy boots clacking loudly against the white tiles. “I guess they didn’t iron out all the kinks on this one.”

  “Guess not,” Kane agreed as he recovered himself.

  The pale transportation gas had almost disappeared now, the extractor fans whirring loudly above the companions’ heads, and Kane turned to face the door. The door was offset from center in a bank of tinted armaglass, its panes colored a golden yellow. When traveling via mat-trans, the differently colored armaglass was one rudimentary way to recognize that a person had actually been shunted to a new location. In the direct manner of the military mind, each location had differently colored glass, a coded sequence that identified each mat-trans and its location. Presumably, when the system was still in its earliest days and the number of units was small, one might say, “I’m going to gold,” which meant the individual was traveling to Redoubt Mike in Louisiana. As a general rule, what a military force seemed to lack in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness. The speed and ease of identification could often be crucial in such situations, where goods and personnel were effectively being shoved through the unknown.

  Still a little woozy, Kane stilled his mind and went into the near trancelike state that put him on high alert, powering his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a flinch of his wrist tendons as he stepped over to the sealed door. The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, and both Kane and Grant had kept them when they had fled from the barony of Cobaltville that they had been tasked to protect years before. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist, in Kane’s case one tucked beneath the unbuttoned sleeve of his darkly colored denim jacket. The holsters reacted to a specific flinch movement of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety feature for the weapon would ever be required, for a Magistrate’s judgment was considered infallible.

  Kane and Grant were schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old and trusted companion, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a wristwatch.

  Kane worked the electronic lock, ordering the others to stay alert as the door slid open. Grant still looked decidedly uncomfortable, but Kane knew that they didn’t have the luxury to wait around if there were intruders on site. “You ready?” Kane asked his old Magistrate partner.

  Slowly, Grant nodded, ordering his own Sin Eater blaster into his hand with a well-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. “Yeah, let’s go crash this party.”

  Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste unfastened her own pistol from its position at her hip, the bulky block of the TP-9 looking large in her delicate, feminine hands. Unlike the two ex-Magistrates, Brigid had not grown up being schooled in the application of weaponry. However, she had learned swiftly as an adult, her eidetic memory allowing her to perfect the techniques of combat far quicker than an average person. Her TP-9 was a compact semiautomatic, a large hand pistol with the grip set just off center beneath the barrel and a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. With its grip so close to the center, it looked a little like a square block, the bottom edge of that square completed by the holder’s forearm. Weapon now in hand, Brigid nodded her own silent agreement.

  Kane stepped into a large, ill-lit room that lay beyond the mat-trans chamber, his companions close behind. As Kane entered the main area of the room, a handful of fluorescent tubes flickered on from hidden recesses in the high ceiling. The lights were widely spaced, lighting the room while still leaving it in a gloomy sort of half light.

  Leading the way in a semicrouch, Kane took two swift paces to the right and dropped to the floor, scanning the room with his eyes, his gun held out in front of him in a steadying, two-handed grip. Behind Kane, Brigid had peeled off to the left, her head ducked down as she swept the room with her own weapon, searching for any targets. At the back of the group, Grant paused just inside the open doorway to the mat-trans chamber, his own Sin Eater held at shoulder height, ready to back up Kane or Brigid and blast any hostile intruders they might flush out.

  The room appeared empty, and after a moment Kane eased himself up from his crouch, never loosening his two-handed grip on the Sin Eater. The room was roughly square in shape, and Kane estimated it to be perhaps forty feet from wall to wall. Beneath the insubstantial illumination, Kane saw a long aisle of monitoring equipment facing the mat-trans cubicle. The aisle was split into two, a gap wide enough for a person to walk through at its center. Still alert, Kane stepped through the gap and peered at the dead equipment there. The aisle was made up of various computers and sensor arrays, including several rather old-fashioned banks of needles and dials alongside the digital monitors. Although the equipment had been shut down long ago, the low lighting would have been ideal for its users, Kane realized, as the majority of these monitors and sensor displays would have been backlit. In fact, other than a visible layer of dust, it looked as if they had been turned off just minutes before. It was kind of eerie, Kane thought, like walking through a graveyard at night.

  The rest of the room contained one single desk set back from the others. Six old dial telephones sat to one side, their wires trailing down into a circular port at the edge of the desk, along with what appeared to be twin computer terminals. Kane peered closely at them for a moment, and he realized that one was in fact some kind of television monitor, most likely used for security purposes back when the base was live. Now, both screens were blank, powered down two centuries earlier.

  To the rear of the large room were six tall banks of monitoring and recording equipment. Each of them towered above Kane to perhaps eight feet, their size and shape reminiscent of the cold-drinks machines common in hotel lobbies and schoolyards in the final years of the twentieth century. Kane glanced over them briefly, acknowledging the rows of long-unused lights and the ancient, rotten magnetic spools of tape that had presumably been used to store recordings of the mat-trans unit in operation. The banks of recording equipment ended off to the far right, where Kane spotted an open doorway that led from the room into darkness beyond.

  Over to the far left corner of the vast, windowless room, Brigid found the majestic unit that powered the mat-trans. The unit ran floor to ceiling, with rounded sides stretching wider than her arm span; it reminded Brigid a little of an old-fashioned pillbox sentry post. Thick pipes emerged from the sides and top of the unit, and a dust-caked monitoring display glowed at roughly head height. Presumably, this display was a failsafe backup as the main monitoring would be conducted via the powerful computers in this underground control room. A sealed steel door stood in the center of the cylinder, with rounded corners and a raised lip that reminde
d Brigid of the doors one would see inside a submarine.

  Tentatively, the titian-haired woman placed her hand against the metal sides of the unit, but even though it had just been activated, no vibration could be detected. Within that towering steel cylinder, the cold-fusion process for creating nuclear energy was in operation, Brigid knew, a product of the Manhattan Project research of the 1940s.

  After a moment Brigid stepped back, eyeing the manner in which the piping connected to the mat-trans chamber. Since the nukecaust, anything involving nuclear energy set off alarm bells as being dangerous or risky, and yet here was an artifact that predated that paranoia, from when nuclear power was still being explored as a viable source of energy. In many ways, this generator was as much a relic from another society as anything the Cerberus team had encountered in ancient civilizations like the Mayan and the Sumerian.

  With his gun held high, Kane used the weapon to gesture toward the open doorway. “We’re all clear here,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

  Following Kane from her position at the far wall, Brigid slowed for just a moment to examine the neat, unmarred desks that ran across the axis of the room. It was both curious and intriguing, seeing all this monitoring equipment for the mat-trans, reminding her that there was a point not so very long ago where the whole concept had been nothing more than a theory to be explored by brave physicists.

  “Come on, Brigid,” Grant urged as he sidled up beside her. “No point keeping the man waiting.”

  Brigid nodded and trotted off to where Kane waited at the open doorway leading into shadow. Grant followed, seemingly more himself now, the wave of nausea from the hard trip having mercifully passed.

  Kane crept out into the corridor beyond the open doorway, noticing that a heavy rollback door there had jammed halfway out of its wall recess. Presumably, the door should lock while the prototype mat-trans unit was fired, but Kane could see that the door was now caught where the cracked walls had moved just enough to lock it in place. Time, he realized, eventually wore down everything, not just animals and plants. Kane continued, entering the corridor with Brigid a few paces behind him and Grant warily bringing up the rear.