by James Axler
Pellerito edged closer to Grant, speaking in a low whisper. “You don’t want to do that,” he said. “Kane’s got issues, but you—there’s still money to be made here. An ex-Magistrate like Kane can’t see that.”
Grant fixed the unscrupulous trader with his grim, no-nonsense look. “I’m an ex-Magistrate,” he said.
Pellerito backed away, cursing both men and the red-haired woman who had accompanied them. Ten minutes later, he and his sec team watched helplessly as Kane’s team departed in their Chinook helicopter, the factory burning behind them.
Chapter 7
“They’re on the move,” Beth Delaney advised as she watched the map update on her monitor screen.
Lakesh peered up from his own desk, putting aside the initial breakdown report that Reba DeFore had handed him just five minutes earlier. Though incomplete, the report gave the first feedback data on the strange visitor who had arrived via the facility’s mat-trans less than ninety minutes before. If nothing else, Lakesh was always well served by his efficient staff.
“Who?” he inquired as he caught Delaney’s attention.
“Kane’s team—CAT Alpha,” Delaney told him. “Looks as if they’re heading back to their mat-trans. And they’re moving at a fast clip.”
Delaney was able to confirm this from the real-time updates that were fed to her computer from transponder units worn by each member of Kane’s team. The transponder featured global positioning technology that could be tracked via satellite, providing information concerning an operative’s current health status. Subcutaneously embedded, the transponders made tracking personnel across the globe an easy and painless task.
“I imagine they’re back in the helicopter,” Lakesh mused. “Have they been in touch?”
“Not yet,” Delaney told him. “Do you want me to raise them?”
After a moment’s consideration, Lakesh nodded. “There may well be good reason they’ve not contacted us, but in this instance I feel it is prudent to break protocol. We need to warn them about the mat-trans glitch before they access the one in Panamint.”
Turning back to her desk, Delaney began hailing Kane and his team. While she did so, Lakesh’s eyes flicked over DeFore’s report again, checking through the figures she had provided. Besides the nylon and Nomex content in the sample, DeFore had found traces of polytetrafluoroethylene, spandex, Mylar and Kevlar, as well as the expected biological remains. The presence of Nomex and Kevlar worried at Lakesh’s sharp mind; it suggested that the mystery woman had been wearing a protective suit of some sort, one designed to survive a harsh environment.
As Lakesh continued to ponder the report, Delaney turned to him and he saw that her brow was furrowed. “No answer,” she elaborated, indicating the Commtact.
Stroking his chin in concern, Lakesh placed the report back on his desk. With the Commtact’s capacity to pick up subvocalized commands, there was no reason that one of Kane’s team could not send a response of some form, even if it was the most basic, veiled acknowledgment.
“Keep trying,” Lakesh instructed, but he wasn’t looking at the comms op anymore. Instead, his gaze had been drawn back to the mat-trans chamber in the corner of the busy room—the chamber from which the mysterious oil-spill woman had emerged.
* * *
“STRANGE,” BRIGID MUTTERED as the Chinook dipped low over the Panamint range.
Grant sat at the controls, working the chopper across the snow-dappled mountains toward the hidden military redoubt they had accessed before to reach Pellerito’s people.
Strapped in the copilot seat, Kane was peering out the cockpit windows through the cool mist emanating from those mountain peaks when he heard Brigid speak, the word cutting through the regular drumming of the rotor blades. “What’s that, Baptiste?” he asked.
Brigid was tilting her head slightly, one hand pressed against her left ear. “I can’t seem to raise Cerberus,” she elaborated. “Commtact’s not responding.”
Without further ado, Kane tried his own Commtact, engaging the unit embedded in his skull and calling on the Cerberus monitoring team. The frequency was dead. In fact, all the frequencies were dead.
“Pellerito had that signal scrambler in his office,” Kane reminded Brigid. “It took a hit during the firefight, sent a jolt through my head when it went off.”
“Mine, too,” Brigid said, and Grant added his own agreement with a grunt.
“But I switched the jammer off,” Kane said, mystified.
“Could be it shorted our comms,” Brigid reasoned. “As soon as we’re back at Cerberus we’ll run a subroutine to check for a bug. No big deal.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed as the chopper skipped over a pocket of turbulence, snow crystals fluttering past its reinforced windows.
A moment later, the hidden military redoubt came into view in a gorge between mountains, its rusting metal door still beautifully camouflaged against the rock-and-soil background.
“Bringing her down in five,” Grant advised, raising his voice a moment over the thrumming rotor blades. Then, with marked efficiency, Grant brought the vehicle straight down to the ground in a rapid drop, touching down in a smooth landing.
“Nice touch,” Kane complimented him as Grant powered the chopper down.
“I aim to please,” Grant told him
Moments later, the three Cerberus warriors were out of the helicopter and making their way into the redoubt. Abandoned for two centuries, the subterranean military complex smelled of damp, with brownish stains running up its concrete walls. The lights were no longer operational, their bulbs long since burned out, so Kane pulled out his xenon-beam flashlight to light their way. The team had used this redoubt’s mat-trans to get here six hours earlier, and had trekked some distance to the initial meeting with Buchs and the sec men, keeping its location hidden.
Their footsteps echoed from the hard walls, sounding like hammer blows in the grim, warrenlike tunnels. Vast store rooms and living quarters waited beyond the darkness’s edge, their ghostly spaces like half-finished paintings, empty and forgotten.
It took three minutes for Brigid to lead the team back to the mat-trans chamber located on a lower level of the subterranean complex, her eidetic memory more convenient and efficient than any map.
The mat-trans chamber took up a dedicated room far below ground level, the unit itself protected by armaglass tinted cherry-red. With their identical hexagonal designs, each mat-trans included armaglass of a different color to make identification easier when one traveled to a new locale. The cherry-colored armaglass shone for a moment under the powerful beam of Kane’s xenon flashlight, transparent red like a laser wall.
Kane, Grant and Brigid took a few moments to check around the immediate area until they were happy nothing had been altered since they were last here a few hours earlier. Engaging the mat-trans involved willingly allowing the discorporation of one’s physical form; it paid to be certain that nothing had been tampered with.
“All clear,” Grant confirmed as his partners returned from their own checks.
Kane tried his Commtact once more before the three of them entered the mat-trans chamber, but still he received no response from Cerberus headquarters. Irritated more than concerned, Kane joined his partners in the teleportation room, mentally preparing himself for the forthcoming journey through the quantum ether as Brigid set things in motion.
“Cerberus, here we come,” Brigid said as she confirmed their destination coordinates.
The exterior door locked, and Kane switched off and pocketed the flashlight as the mat-trans powered up. The three Cerberus warriors stood in darkness as hidden mechanisms whirred into action, charging the mat-trans in preparation to send its occupants across a fold in quantum space.
“Kind of scary, ain’t it?” Grant joked as the mechanical pitch grew higher in the darkness, a dee
p vibration shaking their bodies.
Before either Kane or Brigid could answer, the mat-trans chamber came alive with streaks of lightning and an incredible burst of color seemed to overpower their senses.
An instant later, the three warriors found themselves standing in another location. But they did not see the familiar, sleek walls of the mat-trans chamber in the Cerberus redoubt with its brown-tinted armaglass. Instead, the armaglass was honeycombed like an insect’s eye, its color a smoky black. And the floor and wall tiles were black, too, with dirty streaks across them the rusty color of dried blood. There was a distinctive smell here, like week-old flowers, their fragrance turned cloying and heavy.
Kane was alert immediately. “Where are we, Baptiste?” he spat, eyes on the chamber door, Sin Eater pistol materializing in his hand.
“I...I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, raising her shotgun.
Beside them, Grant had brought his own Sin Eater up, watching the door.
The lights of the mat-trans flickered for a moment before fading out, leaving just the burning line of their filaments glowing red in the darkness.
The three of them watched as something moved past the fractured panes of the armaglass, its shadowy silhouette doubling, tripling, quadrupling in a stuttering motion as it filtered past their fractured aspects.
It had taken just a split second to arrive here, to enter the unknown.
Chapter 8
“You brought us here, Baptiste,” Kane whispered as the shadow thing passed behind the pebblelike armaglass. “Where did you send us?”
Brigid held her shotgun in a two-handed grip, steadily targeted on the chamber door. Short of breaking through the reinforced armaglass, the door was the only way in and she reasoned that, as such, it was the only entrance an attacker could use. “I programmed the mat-trans for Cerberus,” she assured Kane in a harsh whisper. “I’m sure of it.”
“Brigid never makes mistakes,” Grant reminded Kane, keeping his own voice low as the shape continued to flutter beyond the ridges of the glass, obscured from view. “You know that.”
“This ain’t Cerberus,” Kane stated softly. “So something, somewhere, is out of whack.”
Brigid hissed through her teeth with annoyance. “I’d need to check the equipment to find out, run through the logs here. Which means going—out there.” She indicated the chamber door.
Warily Kane and his colleagues eyed the dark figured rippling past the armaglass, moving slowly from right to left. They could not hear anything through the soundproof wall of the armaglass; the only noise in the chamber came from the mat-trans unit itself as it ran through its power-down cycle. It didn’t sound like the familiar winding down of a mat-trans; instead it sounded rough, like an old smoker clearing his lungs.
Hesitantly, Kane moved closer to the door. Grant and Brigid followed, covering Kane and the door as he reached for it.
“I don’t like this,” Grant hissed.
Kane turned back to him. “Me, either,” he agreed in a whisper. He watched the shadowy form move outside the chamber, trying to make sense of it from the fractured glimpses the pebbled glass offered.
There was no way to know what was out there. All they knew for sure was that nothing had responded to their arrival—so far, at least. Which meant, moving fast may just be the only advantage they had. Getting out of there, getting their backs out of this corner with its lone exit—that was the only option open to them.
Kane held his free hand up, the fingers outstretched. Then he silently counted down from three, closing his hand into a fist that the others could just barely see silhouetted in the faint glow from outside. On zero, Kane reached for the chamber door, tapping the exit code. It opened, not with the usual sigh of compressed air, but with the mournful whine of old metal on runners.
Even before the door had slid back to its full extent, Kane was moving, hurrying out of the mat-trans chamber, gun raised, his head ducked low to his body. It was cold out here, icy wind howling through the room with such force that it buffeted Kane and his companions. A narrow strip of light poured into the room from the far side, where the exterior wall was entirely missing, leaving the room open to the elements, just a few struts of rubble where the brickwork had once stood. The light was silver and gray, and outside Kane could see it was overcast.
The room itself was a shambles, like something a bomb had struck, just a few pieces of furniture scattered around, all of it worn and broken. A line of beaten-up locker-style cabinets ran along one wall, and there were holes in the floor where exposed copper piping gleamed. The shadow that Kane and his allies had seen moving across the pebbled glass of the mat-trans chamber was just a sheet, grimy with dirt, streaks of soil and blood marring its already dark surface. The sheet clung to a metal strut, flapping around it in the wind. It dawned on Kane that perhaps it had been cinched there by someone, like the curtained-off area of Pellerito’s factory, better to obscure the fierce outburst of the mat-trans when it functioned. There were other metal posts dotted around the twelve-by-ten room, and they appeared to be riveted in place to hold the ceiling up. The ceiling was low, and it bowed in the center, black mold stretching across it.
Kane padded across the room, eyeing everything with disdain, breathing shallowly to relieve the threat of nausea that the room’s damp stench brought. It was abandoned, empty, dead. “We’re alone,” Kane confirmed, trusting his two partners to follow.
Grant joined Kane in his search of the room, while Brigid spied what she was looking for—a control podium. Hesitantly, she lowered her shotgun as she made her way to the control terminal at the edge of the mat-trans chamber. The controls were set in a free-standing podium a few paces from the mat-trans door, but they were covered in debris that looked like shingle washed up by the ocean. Brigid brushed at it with her forearm. How long had it been since this thing was used? The controls were unlit and looked dead. Brigid’s heart sank when she saw that, and she searched around the unfamiliar design for an on switch of some kind. “Looks foreign,” she told Kane and Grant. “No design I’ve ever seen before.”
“Can you work it?” Kane asked. He was walking toward the open gap in the wall, eyeing the room’s low ceiling warily where the metal struts held it in place.
“Maybe,” Brigid said, “but it will take time.”
Kane had reached the end of the room and he peered out through the gap that had once been a wall. They were three stories above street level in the middle of some vast, empty city. “Looks like time may be something we have a lot of,” he told Brigid grimly.
Grant had found a door on the far side of the room. It was wide enough for two men, with a thick frame around it. Both door and frame were made of metal, reminding Grant of a bank safe door, and all of it was streaked with black grime. Grant tried the handle, confirming the door was locked. A keypad waited beside the door frame, molded into the wall. Grant flipped open its plastic cover door—cracked with a brittle hinge—revealing the pad itself. It looked something like a pocket calculator that had been mounted to the wall. Grant tapped a few combinations of buttons, but the device gave no response, not even a light.
“Power’s down,” he muttered, resealing the dust cover. The cover snapped as he closed it, the dried-out plastic breaking at the point where the hinge met the wall.
Brigid rested her shotgun down by her side as she stood before the control podium, tapping the raised keys there to bring up a display. Inset in the podium, the display was horizontal, like a tabletop, forcing Brigid to stoop forward to see it clearly. She ran her fingers over the keys, bringing the system to life. The display ran behind black glass, as if seen through smoke, and for a moment all she could see was a flashing number: 9. It reminded her of the rhyme she had thought of earlier, in Pellerito’s factory. “Hell-o, operator, give me number nine...”
Brigid watched as the system reacted lethargical
ly to her prodding, powering up with a stuttering reluctance. Finally the single digit faded and more information came across the screen, garbled and nonsensical.
When the system failed to provide an automatic locator on boot-up, Brigid typed a query on the strangely raised keys on the podium. The keys were oval, and their shape and size reminded Brigid of fingernails. Furthermore, although the letters were recognizable, they were not laid out in the classic QWERTY keyboard style. It took a few seconds for Brigid to find her way around the unfamiliar design so that she could enter her query: “Location?”
The screen flashed for a moment before bringing up a word Brigid didn’t recognize: “Quocruft.”
Brigid looked at the word flashing there on the dusty screen, her eyes running over it a second time to make sure she had read it correctly. “Either of you ever hear of Quocruft?” she asked aloud.
When neither Grant nor Kane answered, Brigid turned back to the screen with furrowed brow. Quocruft? Was that their location? She couldn’t place it. Foreign, maybe? Turkish? It didn’t even sound like any place on Earth.
Brigid tapped again at the keys, entering a more complex query. The naillike keys were brittle; two snapped off as Brigid tapped in her question to the database, after that she worked them more gently. With a little effort, she requested a locator map, which the system duly provided. It showed nothing, just a glowing spot in the center—presumably representing the mat-trans chamber. Written across the map in bold letters was that same word again: “Quocruft.”
Chapter 9
Brigid tried adjusting the map, striving to find a way to show more detail, but the system remained stubbornly intractable. With a huff of irritation, she attacked the question from a different angle, tapping into the details of the mat-trans unit itself. After a little trial and error, she brought up a settings log and began reading.
