by James Axler
Kane emitted a bitter bark of laughter at that. There was always reason to suspect duplicity with Ohio Blue, he knew—she was a trader working outside of ville law, where the motto was “anything goes.”
“Ms. Blue gave CAT Beta a lead,” Philboyd continued, “which directed them to Redoubt Mike, the scene of Lilitu’s incarceration almost two years ago.”
Lakesh took up the story. “Following that lead,” he explained, “CAT Beta requested a mat-trans jump directly to Redoubt Mike to investigate. Brewster provided said jump. They have not been heard from since.”
Kane nodded, realizing how much Lakesh was not saying. He took the welfare of all of his team personally, and would naturally be concerned that CAT Beta had been out of touch for so long. Furthermore, Lakesh had been in a romantic relationship with CAT Beta’s Domi for several years now, and it would no doubt be eating him up to think she might have jumped headlong into danger. “What was the lead?” he asked.
“As we understand it, a member of Papa Hurbon’s société brought evidence to suggest that something was happening in Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh stated. “Something relating to the trouble Hurbon had been a part of two years ago.”
“Trouble we had to sort out,” Grant rumbled dourly.
“And they definitely made the jump?” Brigid confirmed.
“Yes, their biolinks confirmed the movement before they winked out,” Lakesh stated.
“It may be nothing,” Kane said, trying to sound reassuring. “The Commtacts don’t always work underground. We had trouble in Redoubt Mike, couldn’t get a signal out.”
“Five hours, Kane,” Lakesh replied. “That’s too long not to have someone reach the surface and report in. I fear we have sent them into the lion’s den.”
Grant sighed heavily. “And now you want to send us, too, I take it?” he said.
Lakesh nodded grimly. “If you...if you are recovered,” he said pathetically. It was clear what he really meant—that he needed them to go, that they were the best hope for recovering the missing away team.
Kane was thoughtful. “Could be they walked right into a trap,” he suggested. “Likely, even, from the circumstantial evidence. But a trap has to be sprung.”
Brigid looked at Kane, cockeyed. “What are you thinking?”
“We approach from another angle,” Kane said. “Use the Mantas—they have firepower and they’ll allow us to survey the landscape despite the vegetation. We’ll go in low, check out the redoubt and see if someone’s hiding, I dunno, an army amid the trees. After that, we can enter, recover Beta and find out what the shit is going on.”
“You make it sound easy,” Lakesh acknowledged.
Kane placed one hand on Lakesh’s arm. “Domi’s alive,” he said. “Her, Edwards, Sinclair—they’re all alive. They’re too smart and too tough to die. Trust me, when all of this is over you’ll realize this weren’t nothing but a taxi mission.”
Lakesh nodded, the worrisome expression still evident on his face. “Thank you, my friend,” he said. “It’s been a long time we’ve worked this beat, and I’ve asked you—all three of you—to take some strange diversions along the way. But I do appreciate how much you have invested in Cerberus as a team.”
“We’re not a team,” Kane told him with a smile. “We’re a family. And families watch out for each other, especially when one of their number gets lost in the woods.”
With that, the three-person team of CAT Alpha exited the ops room and made their way to the hangar bay via the basement armory. It was time to find out what was going on at Redoubt Mike.
Chapter 21
“On-site,” Kane said, speaking via Commtact to the Cerberus ops room from inside the cockpit of his Manta craft. His was one of two such craft that now cut through the skies over the Louisiana bayou, close to a settlement called Amox in the late-afternoon sunlight.
The Mantas were slope-winged aircraft constructed from a bronze-hued metal that seemed to shine where it caught the sunlight. Their graceful designs consisted of flattened wedges with swooping wings curving out to either side in mimicry of the seagoing manta, and it was this similarity that had spawned their popularized name of Manta Craft. Each Manta’s wingspan was twenty yards and its body length was almost fifteen. The entire surface of each vehicle was decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. Aerodynamic, flat in design, each vehicle featured an elongated hump in the center of the body that provided the only indication of a cockpit.
The Mantas were alien in design and had been discovered by the Cerberus warriors during their many investigations into mythological artifacts and sites.
Inside, the transatmospheric vehicles, or TAVs, were as slick as their exteriors. The cockpit featured two seats, one behind the other, and a very basic control board featuring the bare minimum of indicators. In fact, most of the indicators were projected directly onto the pilot’s eye in a heads-up display, operated through a bulbous, spherical helmet fixed into the pilot seat and finished in the same bronze as the aircraft’s exterior.
Kane piloted the lead vehicle, with Brigid sitting behind him working a laptop running a minute-by-minute analysis of data beamed directly from Cerberus’s satellites. Beside Kane’s Manta flew an identical craft piloted by his wingman, Grant. The two had flown more missions in these vehicles than they cared to recall, taking them beneath the sea, outside of Earth’s atmosphere and even into a cosmic rift where alien technology flourished at a level unsuspected by the people of Earth. Right now they were weaving through the high clouds as they cut sky toward their destination, Redoubt Mike.
“Acknowledged,” came Brewster Philboyd’s response as Kane sent his brief report.
Kane juked the joystick, bringing his Manta lower in a first reconnaissance of the site.
From above, the redoubt looked like nothing more than a mound of dirt in the center of the swamp. It was buried beneath the earth, only one single overgrown dirt road giving any hint that there was anything out here at all, in fact.
“Looks clear,” Grant said as the Mantas made a north-south pass, crossing close to the body of the hidden redoubt.
“Picking up life readings,” Kane stated, eyeing his heads-up display. “Baptiste? You getting anything back there? People, vehicles, weapons?”
In the seat behind Kane, Brigid worked a laptop computer, running through a scan program. “Two vehicles,” Brigid said. “Land wags, armed. Just bringing up an analysis now.”
On the fold-up screen of the laptop, the diagnostics for two vehicles began to flash, scurrying up the page as the details filled in, including wire-frame models that highlighted fuel tanks and weaponry. They were large-wheeled land wags, each as big as a Magistrate Sandcat but with four wheels instead of caterpillar tracks. The vehicles ran on gasoline—an extravagance here in the Outlands—and featured roof-mounted gun turrets armed with double USMG-73s very similar to those mounted on the Magistrate Sandcats. Additionally, each vehicle had a second set of weapons located beneath the high-riding front grille, a Sidewinder missile launcher whose kick would surely make forward movement with the vehicles impossible—indicating to Brigid that they must only use those weapons while stationary.
“What have we got?” Kane asked, working the controls of the Manta to bring his vehicle back around in a long, graceful arc.
“Two land wags, heavily armed,” Brigid said, relaying the information over her Commtact to Grant at the same time. “Parked a half mile out from the redoubt entrance on the single road leading to it. I’d guess they’re guards.”
“Guards,” Kane muttered the word. “Yeah, well, we’ll bypass them, go straight over their heads.”
Over the Commtact frequency, Grant laughed. “Bet they never expected someone to approach by air, huh?”
He had a point. The Mantas were
unique vehicles in the modern world, used solely by the Cerberus organization and, by and large, considered a closely guarded secret. There were other air vehicles in use, Deathbird helicopters and a few other aircraft across the globe, but for the most part air travel was an occasional sight in the skies, a means of transportation reserved only for Magistrates and barony officials.
Flying in formation, Kane and Grant drew their Manta craft around and searched for a suitable spot to bring them down amid the wild foliage. The Mantas were VTOL—or vertical take off and landing—equipped, and could turn on a dime. Fast and nimble, they were ideal for reaching tight spots.
Kane searched through the view scan for a landing site, spotted a clearing amid the vegetation roughly five hundred yards from where he pegged the entry to the redoubt itself. “Ten degrees north of entrance,” Kane said via the Commtact, “about five hundred yards out.”
“I see it,” Grant agreed. “Looks ideal.”
As Grant finished speaking, his voice was marred with sudden distortion. In their Manta, Kane and Brigid reacted with surprise—the Commtacts were largely infallible, offering crystal-clear broadcasts of such precision that one could easily be mistaken for being in the same room as the individual to whom one spoke.
“Grant, you okay—?” Kane began.
“Greetings, oh sweet prince,” a female voice spoke over the Commtact, cutting into the signal. Kane identified it instantly as the female trader called Ohio Blue. No one else ever called him sweet prince. “Is that you up there in the sky?”
“Ohio, get off this frequency,” Kane growled, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. The Commtact signals were encrypted and scrambled as a matter of course; it should not have been possible to tap into them like this, and certainly not to override a linked discussion as Ohio Blue had just done. But Ohio had some remarkably talented people in her organization, and she trod the wrong side of legality as a matter of course. Laws are only there for the masses, she had once told Kane, they are not for the likes of you or me.
* * *
IN THE CERBERUS operations room, sudden pandemonium seemed to break out. Stationed at the comms desk, Brewster Philboyd almost fell out of his seat where he had been monitoring CAT Alpha’s transmissions as the trader’s voice came abruptly over their encrypted frequency. Two desks over from him, Donald Bry saw something blip on his screen and realized they had a hack in the heart of their system, running directly into the Keyhole commsat.
“How the hell is she doing that?” Philboyd spit, flicking a switch on his console. “Kane, do you hear me? Cut transmission now, you’re compromised.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Cerberus,” Kane deadpanned in response. “Great job.”
Lakesh had leaped from his desk as soon as he had realized that something was wrong, and he stood now behind Bry’s desk, where the computer expert was churning through numerous lines of data to try to discover the tap. “Donald, Brewster—what is occurring?”
“We have a tap,” Bry said, “going directly into the commsat.”
“It’s that trader, Ohio Blue,” Philboyd explained. “She’s on CAT Alpha’s frequency, talking to Kane even now.”
Lakesh looked at both men, turning his attention rapidly from one to the other. “Let her,” he decided. “She has earned some leeway.”
“But she’s compromised our—” Bry began.
Lakesh hushed him with a gesture. “She has earned some leeway,” he repeated, making a two-inch gap between his thumb and crooked index finger. “Although only a very small amount of leeway. I want you both to come up with a workaround for the very second that we may need it. Understood?”
Bry and Philboyd nodded, turning back to their monitors and immediately running diagnostics programs that would locate the source and nature of the communications hack.
* * *
KANE, MEANWHILE, WAS still talking to Ohio Blue as he worked the pilot’s controls of his Manta.
“Might you reconsider, sweet prince?” Ohio broadcast as Kane prepped for landing. “I believe I have some information that would be of benefit to you, and a meeting would be to our mutual advantage.”
Kane gritted his teeth, expelling a breath of irritation between them. Ohio was a wily woman at the best of times, but she had proved a valuable ally when the chips were down, and she’d protected Cerberus personnel when it seemed that the rest of the world had been turned against them. “Okay, you have my attention. Two minutes,” Kane said, “start explaining.”
“Darling,” Ohio replied with a kind of mocking superiority, “you know me better than that, surely? A meeting is a meeting, not a chat over an open channel like this.”
Not that open, Kane thought sourly, but instead he said, “Where?”
“We are close. You can see us,” Ohio replied.
Brigid whispered in Kane’s ear from the seat behind him. “The land wags. Not guards—Ohio’s people, maybe?”
Kane nodded, the movement oddly unsettling while in the bulbous spherical helmet. “Gotcha.” Then he activated the Commtact link again, trusting Ohio’s miraculous hackers to pick up the signal. “Did you bring two wags to the meeting?”
“We did,” Ohio replied. “I knew you could see us if you looked.”
Even as the woman’s mellifluous voice trilled over the Commtact frequency, something flashed in the shadows of the vegetation, once, twice, thrice. On the third flash, Kane spotted the source—the headlights of one of those land wags that Brigid had identified on their first pass.
The Mantas drew down amid the haze of vegetation, the whine of their jets mingling with the sounds of life emanating from that cesspool of moisture and green.
Kane, Grant and Brigid had visited Redoubt Mike before and seen horrors there that should never have been given life. Returning filled them with trepidation and something else—determination. They were warriors; they had to believe in their purpose, even out here amid the muck and grime of hell on earth.
Kane brought his Manta down to the landing spot he had identified, and Grant followed a few seconds later, bringing the golden-winged aircraft down with a gentle bump.
Kane was helping Brigid down from the sloped wing as Grant emerged from his vehicle’s cockpit. “Kane?” he asked, his brow furrowed with concern. “You sure about this? Ohio can be a tricky customer.”
Kane nodded. “She’s a law unto herself,” he agreed. “But I’ve started to realize, after all these years away from the system—the villes, the barons, the Magistrates—that it has always been this way. We never made the laws, Grant. We never even enforced them. All we did was hold chaos back from a tiny speck of earth that someone had built a wall around, deluding ourselves into thinking that somehow that tiny speck meant something.
“And you know what?” Kane asked rhetorically. “All it meant was that we had bought into all that shit the Annunaki had drummed into our ancestors all those thousands of years ago when they treated us as slaves. People like Ohio, they’re what we should have been fighting for all along, people who were actually trying to get humanity back on its feet and out of the villes and all the evil they perpetrated.”
Brigid looked solemn as she listened to Kane’s words. “We didn’t create the system, Kane,” she said.
“But we’ve always supported it, supported organization,” Kane said, “even when we thought we were breaking away.”
“It’s a dangerous world,” Grant said, checking the breech of his rifle to be certain that it was loaded. He had brought a Swiss-made SSG-550 sniper rifle from his cockpit, a good long-range weapon with a twenty-five-inch barrel that made up over half its length. The rifle also sported a magnification scope that attached to its top and could handle thirty shots without the need for reloading. “If it wasn’t, guys like us would be put out to pasture.”
“Sometimes pasture doesn’t sound
so bad after all we’ve been through,” Kane said sourly, checking his Sin Eater before flicking it back to its hidden wrist holster under his sleeve.
As Grant slipped off the safety on the SSG-550 and carried it under one arm, the three warriors took in the entryway to the redoubt where it loomed just a few hundred yards away. The dirt road ran directly into the redoubt, disappearing into a sloped tunnel that was sunk under the earth. When they had last been here, that entry was unobtrusive, a ditch beside a mound of dirt overgrown with lush vegetation. It had not changed much, but now there were things hanging before the entrance and to its sides, animal skulls and bones suspended from stakes and a cross bar that had been placed over the tunnel entrance. Feathers fluttered in the breeze, tied to a line of posts that had been cinched into the ground on the run up to the tunnel, more fluttering amid the propped bones and skulls.
“Looks like somebody’s had the decorators in,” Grant said sardonically.
“The trinkets are classic voodoo,” Brigid stated, her analytical mind always in motion. “There’s a lot of that around here.”
“Yeah, we both know,” Kane said, turning away from the shadowy entrance. “Let’s find Blue before we go exploring.”
* * *
KANE LED THE WAY from the redoubt entrance, along the dirt road to the meeting spot where Ohio and her people were waiting with their land wags.
Grant held back, finding a convenient bit of cover to the side of the road where he could hide without being seen. He pushed the leaves back and dropped down to his belly, resting the sniper rifle before him until its scope peered through the overhanging leaves. The ground was soft here and damp, feeling squidgy underfoot. Grant arranged himself into a comfortable position and lined up the scope until he could see Ohio Blue and her people. It didn’t pay to send everyone into a potential ambush.
Through the scope, Grant saw that the two land wags had been parked across the road in such a way that no other vehicle could pass, their front ends facing in opposite directions for all-around visibility. Armed men and women waited in the vehicles and along the road, eight of them in all that Grant could see, though he suspected more were hidden in the dense foliage of the swamp.
