by James Axler
The Montana mountain range once known as the Bitterroots but now known as the Darks was technically within Cobaltville's territorial jurisdiction, but the wilderness area was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was roughly a hundred miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne. They held in superstitious regard the mountain range, believing ferocious storms and evil spirits lurked in the mountain passes, ready to devour body and soul.
Although it could not be noticed from the road, the air or even from the plateau itself, an elaborate system of heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision scopes, vid cameras and motion sensors surrounded the perimeter of the mountain peak in triple depth. Planted within rocky clefts and concealed by camouflage netting were the uplinks with an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and a Comsat.
Brigid was no longer impressed by the predark tech to which Cerberus had access. She had already learned its limitations. In the three days since returning from California, neither she, Bry nor Lakesh had found a mat-trans destination code that corresponded to the sequence written on Pollard's arm.
Although Lakesh reassured her that was not particularly unusual given the number of unindexed modular gateway units that were shipped all over the world, Brigid wondered if her own memory was the true culprit. She had not spoken of her fear that her memory might be failing her after the concussion she suffered, not even to DeFore. But the fact she had to be reminded of Cotta's bloody death, which had occurred right before her eyes, scared her. She tried to convince herself she had been so traumatized that her conscious mind blanked out the memory, but that explanation did not sit well.
Another gust of icy wind caused her to shiver. Although it was still autumn in the flatlands, winter came early to such high altitudes. Still, she preferred to be outside, rather than spending another futile five hours planted before a computer terminal, staring at columns of scrolling numbers.
Brigid heard a clanking, rumbling sound and she turned to see the sec door opening. The massive, multiton vanadium alloy sec gate was one of only two ways to enter the redoubt. Operated by a punched-in code and a hidden lever control, the gate opened like an accordion, one monstrously dense section folding over another.
She was slightly surprised to see Lakesh step through the door and cross the tarmac toward her. His head was hunched between the padded shoulders of the long coat flapping around his skinny shanks, his hands thrust deep into the pockets. He had been born in the tropical climate of Kashmir, India, more than two hundred years before, and he claimed his internal thermostat was still stuck there. He had been a scientist fben, with a doctorate in cybernetics and quantum mechanics at age nineteen. He had worked for premiere institutions before being recruited to work at the Project Cerberus site in Dulce, New Mexico, eventually achieving the post of project overseer.
In early January of 2001, most of the Cerberus staff was evacuated to the Anthill complex. After a year or so there, Lakesh elected to spend a century and a half in cryonic stasis, and though he conceded it made no real scientific sense, he had been very vulnerable to cold ever since.
Upon his revival from stasis, he had undergone several operations in order to prolong his life and his usefulness to the Program of Unification. His brown, glaucoma-afflicted eyes were replaced with new blue ones, his malfunctioning old heart exchanged for a sound new one and his lungs changed out. Although his wrinkled, liver-spotted skin made him look exceptionally old, his physiology was that of a fifty-year-old man's.
Calcified arthritic joints in his shoulders and legs were removed and built with ones made of polyethylene. None of the reconstructive surgeries or physiological enhancements had been performed out of sa-maritan impulses. His life and health had been prolonged so he could serve the Program of Unification and the baronies.
As Lakesh struggled up the slope toward her, the breeze tousled his thin hair, the color and texture of ash. He took a misstep and stumbled. He uttered a breathless curse as he paused to adjust the thick-lensed eyeglasses with the hearing aid attached to the right eyepiece, seating them firmly on his long nose.
By the time Lakesh reached her, he was panting, his breath pluming in front of his face and fogging his glasses. "Dearest Brigid," he wheezed, "I thought I might find you out here."
"Were you looking for me?"
"In a way, yes. I thought we might continue the destination-code search with an ancillary database."
Brigid sighed. "Yes, we might But I'm starting to wonder just how important this is. It might be more of a long-ran benefit to translate the coordinates Ki-yomasa gave me to find New Edo."
Lakesh regarded her keenly over the rims of his spectacles. "If Baron Cobalt is embarking upon his own personal organ harvest by making an incursion into another baron's territory, it means he's leaving himself vulnerable for dire repercussions…providing we can discover where he's sending the merchandise."
Brigid winced at his use of the term. "And then what do we do? Rat him out to his brother barons? For all we know, he's colluding with others."
"As you said, for all we know. We need to know exactly what he's up to. And why." When she did not respond, he continued, "I've reconsidered our approach to this problem. Instead of fixating on the wheat, we should concentrate more on the chaff."
Brigid frowned at him. "A process of elimination?"
"Precisely."
"In other words, we should focus on where the individual unit isn't."
Lakesh bobbed his head on his wattled neck. "Yes. If nothing else, we would narrow the search parameters and save ourselves time. Even though we don't have records of where all the modular gateway units were shipped, we know there are only a finite number of places they can be…at least in this hemisphere."
Thoughtfully, Brigid replied, "Makes sense. We've already exhausted all of the Totality Concept-Delated redoubts and the indexed Cerberus network."
Another gust of wind blew swirling snowflakes in front of Lakesh's face. He flinched, shivered and asked through chattering teeth, "Then may we get back to it?"
The two people left the slope, went across the plateau and entered the partially open sec door. Lakesh pulled down the green lever on the wall to close it completely. Just below the control, rendered in garish primary colors, was a large illustration of a froth-mouthed black hound. Three snarling heads grew out of a single, exaggeratedly muscled neck, their jaws spewing flame and blood between great fangs. Three pairs of crimson eyes blazed malevolently. Underneath the image, in an ornate Gothic script, was written the single word Cerberus.
The mythological guardian of the gateway to Hades was an appropriate totem for the installation that was dedicated to ripping open gateways in the quantum stream.
The Cerberus redoubt was a subterranean labyrinth of corridors, offices, laboratories and chambers that had been built within the mountain. The main corridor, twenty feet wide, was made of softly gleaming vanadium alloy and shaped like a square with an arch on top. Great curving ribs of metal and massive girders supported the high rock roof.
From the main corridor, side passages and elevators led to a well-equipped armory, bunk rooms, a cafe-teria, a decontamination center, an infirmary, a gymnasium with a pool, and a detention area.
The redoubt had been constructed to provide a comfortable home for well over a hundred people. There were far, far fewer than that now, and for most of the dozen permanent residents who labored there, time was measured by the controlled dimming and brightening of lights to simulate sunrise and sunset.
When Lakesh had reactivated the installation some thirty years before, the repairs he made had been primarily cosmetic in nature. He had been forced to work in secret and completely alone, so the upgrades had taken several years to complete. Still a masterpiece of impenetrability even after two centuries, the Cerberus redoubt had weathered the nukecaust and skydark, and all the subsequent changes. Its radiation shielding was still intact, and its nuc
lear generators on the bottom level still provided an almost eternal source of power.
The nerve center of the installation was the central operations complex. A long room with high, vaulted ceilings, it was lined by consoles of dials and switches, and divided by an aisle of computer stations. A huge Mercator relief map of the world spanned one wall. Pinpoints of light shone steadily in almost every country and were connected by a thin pattern of glowing lines. They represented the Cerberus network, the locations of all indexed functioning gateway units across the planet
On the far side of the center was an anteroom, and on the far side of that stood a mat-trans unit, the first fully functional, debugged gateway in the Project Cerberus network. The jump chamber was enclosed on all sides by eight-foot-high slabs of translucent, brown-tinted armaglass.
Bry and Wegmann stood beside the biolink tele-metric monitor, making adjustments on it. Bry nodded his copper-curled head in a greeting. A round-shouldered man of small stature, his white bodysuit bagged on him. He served as something of Lakesh's apprentice.
Wegmann paid no attention to Brigid and Lakesh at all as they passed by, which was not unusual. In his mid-thirties, he was no more than five and a half feet tall, weighing maybe 140 pounds, which made him the smallest exile, except for Domi.
Brigid knew despite his unprepossessing physical appearance he was a scrapper and a mechanical genius. He also was something of a misanthrope, preferring the company of the nuke generators to his fellow exiles. But no one took his loner traits seriously, not after the way he risked his life to expose and to thwart a conspiracy to kill Brigid, Grant and Kane.
The biolink medical monitor they worked on was tied into the subcutaneous transponders every person in the redoubt carried within their bodies. The transponders were nonharmful radioactive chemicals that fit themselves into the human body, and allowed the monitoring^ of heart rates, brain-wave patterns and blood counts. Lakesh had ordered all of the Cerberus redoubt personnel to be injected with them. Based on organic nanotechnology developed by Overproject Excalibur, the transponders fed information through the Comsat relay satellite when personnel were out in the field.
The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it to the redoubt's hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetry, and the digital data stream was then routed to the console before which Wegmann and Bry stood. The data was then run through the locational program to precisely isolate the team's present position in time and space.
Shrugging out of her coat and draping it over the back of her chair, Brigid sat at the master ops console, turning on the comp. It juiced up quickly, the big VGA monitor screen flashing to life. The central control complex had five dedicated and eight shared sub-processors, all linked to the mainframe behind the far wall. Two hundred years ago, it had been the most advanced model ever built, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed in its construction, using protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.
The information contained in the main database may not have been the sum total of all humankind's knowledge, but not for lack of trying. Any bit, byte or shred of information that had ever been digitized was only a few keystrokes and mouse clicks away.
As an archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division, Brigid Baptiste knew the primary duty of archivists was not to record predark history, but to revise, rewrite and often times completely disguise it. The Cerberus memory banks contained unedited and unexpurgated data, and having access to it was one of the few perks Brigid found in her life as an exile.
As she enabled the search-and-collation program, she heard Kane's voice murmuring a monosyllabic greeting to Bry and Wegmann. Brigid felt his presence behind her chair, and she said irritably, "You know how I hate it when you hover behind me like that."
With a laugh, Kane shifted position, stepping into her field of vision. Unlike the rest of the personnel, he wasn't wearing the white bodysuit that was the unofficial uniform of Cerberus. She saw he had dipped into the articles of predark clothing stored in the redoubt again. He wore a pair of baggy, unflattering warm-up pants, running shoes and a black T-shirt. The legend imprinted on it was nearly illegible, but she managed to make it out. It read I'm With Stupid.
"What's the status of the search?" he asked.
"Ongoing, friend Kane," Lakesh replied a bit stiffly.
A thin, slightly mocking smile lifted a corner of Kane's mouth. "Funny," he said with such a studied nonchalance Brigid knew sarcasm was sure to follow. "I was led to believe that computers were the great liberators of predark days. They did things human beings couldn't possibly accomplish on their own, far faster and a lot more efficiently."
As triple columns of digits appeared on the screen, Brigid slipped on her spectacles. "Don't be obtuse, Kane," she said coldly. "A computer is limited by the way data is stored in its memory. That doesn't mean the information isn't there. It means you have to know how to find it."
She raised her gaze, her emerald eyes narrowed and challenging. "If you think you can do it better, by all means take over. I'll be more than happy to step aside. My neck hurts like hell, and I'm developing carpal tunnel syndrome."
"Leave the experts to their field of expertise," La-kesh said sternly. "We don't tell you how to shoot someone."
Brigid instantly felt the electric tension spring up between the two men, a continuation of the conflict that went back to the day of Kane's arrival at the redoubt. Up until a few months ago, Lakesh made all the decisions in Cerberus, from policy to diet. Now decisions were no longer within his exclusive purview. The minicoup staged by Kane, Brigid and Grant a short time before had seen to that.
Lakesh had not been unseated from his position of authority, but he was now answerable to a more democratic process. At first he bitterly resented what he construed as the usurping of his power, but he had no choice but to come to terms with it since Kane, Grant and Brigid were privy to his secret recruitment program.
Almost every exile in the redoubt had arrived as a convicted criminal—after being framed by Lakesh for crimes against their respective villes. He had admitted it was a cruel, heartless plan with a barely acceptable risk factor, but it was the only way to spirit them out of their villes, turn them against the barons and make them feel indebted to him.
This bit of explosive and potentially fatal knowledge had not been shared with the other exiles in the redoubt. Now Brigid wondered if Lakesh's acceptance of the new democratic order was feigned, as resentment toward the sword they held over him grew.
However, much to her surprise and relief, Kane did not fire back with an insult or a veiled threat. He said wryly, "Reprimand accepted. But if I'm not tromping on your expert toes, I've been thinking about why you can't find the gateway that matches the code."
Without waiting for either Brigid or Lakesh to say whether they wanted to hear what he had to say, Kane declared, "If Baron Cobalt has found a new place to process genetic material that is already equipped with a mat-trans unit, more than likely it's within or not too far from his own sphere of influence."
Brigid raised a questioning eyebrow. "Why do you say that?"
"Simple psychology. The barons aren't conditioned to care about much beyond their own territorial borders. If we assume Baron Cobalt is engaged in his own secret search for a substitute for Dulce, I think he'd expand it out from Cobaltville, progressively going farther afield."
Sounding intrigued, Lakesh said, "A fairly reasonable hypothesis, friend Kane. But what would he use as his search resource?"
"What both of you used in the course of your jobs in the ville. The archives in the Historical Division."
A vast amount of predark historical information had survived the nukecaust, particularly documents stored in underground vaults. Tons of it, in fact, everything fro
m novels to encyclopedias, to magazines printed on coated stock, which survived just about anything. Much more data was digitized and stored on computer diskettes, usually government documents.
"So," Kane continued, "if you narrowed the search radius for any place in the Western and Southwestern states that might have had a use for a gateway unit in predark days—Totality Concept related or not—you might come across several possible sites. In the event you do, we can program Pollard's coordinates into our own gateway and see if we get an active jump line."
He pointed to the Mercator map. "If we do, it may be registered there. And that'll give us a good idea of the site's location and what it might be."
Brigid turned her head, exchanged a look with La-kesh, then shrugged. "It's worth a try."
As her fingers clattered over the keyboard, she murmured, "Not bad, Kane."
"I have my moments," he admitted.
"They're so few and far between," she replied, "I tend to forget you have any at all." She threw him a smile to let him know she was joking and no offense was meant.
For a long time at the beginning of their relationship, it was very difficult for Kane and Brigid not to give offense to each other. Both people had their gifts. Kane's strengths were his survival skills, his ability to prevail in the face of adversity and cunning against enemies. But he could also be reckless, high-strung to the point of instability and given to fits of rage.
Brigid, on the other hand, was compulsively tidy and ordered, with a brilliant analytical mind. However, her clinical nature, the cool scientific detachment upon which she prided herself, sometimes blocked an understanding of the obvious human factor in any given situation.
Regardless of their contrasting personalities, Kane and Brigid worked very well as a team, playing on each other's strengths rather than contributing to their individual weaknesses.
