Brigid tsked. “It’s always a competition with you, isn’t it?”
“It’s kept me alive so far,” Kane responded. “So, what about it?”
Without a word, Brigid turned her back on Kane and kicked off, intentionally splashing him as she did so. “See you at the other side, slowpoke!” she taunted.
Kane took a moment to watch the red-haired woman as she began to swim toward the distant side of the pool. Despite their outward antagonism, they had shared a lot, the two of them, adventures and downtime, becoming as close as siblings and maybe even lovers, though their relationship remained purely platonic.
She was beautiful, Kane thought; there was no question of that. But as he watched, his keen eye noticed something as Brigid retreated: a white scar that ran between her shoulder blades at the top of her spine. Usually that scar was covered by her long hair, he guessed, but just now her wet hair had fallen to one side. The scar had come from an assault Brigid had suffered at the hands of Ullikummis, who had reached inside her and disrupted the transponder that ran inside her bloodstream. The transponder had since been reengaged, but for a while Brigid—his friend, his
anam chara—
had been lost.
“Never again,” Kane muttered, as he dived into the pool.
* * *
T
HE
REDOUBT
’
S
OPERATIONS
room was a vast space dominated on one wall by a Mercator map that showed Earth crisscrossed with colored lines and illuminated spots. A little like a flight map, the spots represented the known mat-trans points across the globe, while the lines that joined them showed the various paths one could travel when using them. The Cerberus redoubt had been dedicated to propagating and exploring the limits of the then-nascent teleportation network, and to a certain extent it was still involved in that endeavor, albeit with an emphasis shift to the Parallax Points Program discovered in an ancient military database.
The room itself featured twin aisles of computer terminals where a number of personnel took shifts monitoring the input from sensor equipment and satellite feeds, scanning for new discoveries and potential new threats.
The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, fifty in total, the vast majority of whom were cryogenic “freezies” from the twentieth century who, like Mariah, had been discovered in suspended animation in the Manitius Moon Base and many of whom were experts in their chosen fields of study.
Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus analysis software. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Now, the Cerberus staff could draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat at any hour of the day. This arrangement gave the resident staff an almost limitless stream of data about the surface of Earth, as well as providing near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe.
Mariah and Lakesh had taken up a position at his desk, set at the back of the room and overlooking the twin aisles of computers. There, Mariah had connected her compact video camera to the computer monitor and played back the recording she made of the buried spaceship and its subsequent disappearance so that Lakesh and his team could watch.
The recording was crude, often out of focus and slipping into a blur of incomprehensible colors as each new event caught Mariah by surprise when she was wielding the camera. But she had secured a good visual record of the original starcraft that had been buried close to the river and had caught several respectable shots of the twin lights that moved above in the sky, including an extended view of them leaving with the fully revealed spacecraft.
There were eight staff working the desks during that shift, and each one came over to view the footage, watching as Lakesh and Mariah paused and rewound the pertinent sections relating to Domi’s kidnapping. Everybody had ideas about what could have happened, but of course no one knew for sure.
“What we may conclude,” Lakesh proclaimed as he studied the footage in slow motion for the umpteenth time, “is that the golden lights are craft of some description. They may be spacecraft or merely aircraft, and we cannot rule out the possibility that they had no prior connection to the buried artifact that you and Domi uncovered this morning.” He paused the image with a keystroke, leaving it locked on blue sky where the two golden lights hovered in the heavens.
“So, you think they didn’t come to tow it back home,” Mariah clarified, “but maybe just to steal it?”
Lakesh nodded. “That’s a distinct possibility,” he said. “The designs of the two visitors’ ships—at least, from what we can make out—are quite different. There’s no obvious uniformity there.
“The item you initially found looks distinctly Annunaki in form, but these two—” Lakesh tapped the screen where the golden craft were framed in midair, bright specks on blue “—are sleeker in style.”
“Could they be older versions of the same craft?” Donald Bry suggested from where he had perched on the edge of Lakesh’s desk. He was a nervous-looking man with an unruly mop of copper-colored curls and the fretful appearance of a nocturnal animal caught outside its burrow in the daytime. Bry acted as Lakesh’s lieutenant and right-hand man, taking the unofficial role of second in command of the Cerberus organization. “Or newer?”
Lakesh rubbed at his tired eyes, trying to make sense out of the static image on-screen. “We could speculate, Donald, but it would be just that—speculation. What we need is a plan of action, a way to locate and retrieve our dear Domi.” Lakesh raised his voice and called over to the redoubt physician. “Reba? Has there been any reappearance of the transponder?”
Reba DeFore, a buxom woman with tanned bronze skin and ash-blond hair that she had weaved in an elaborate braid, shook her head sorrowfully from where she sat at a monitoring desk. “Donald might be able to tease something out of the computer tracking, but I certainly can’t. Just now, the system’s showing nothing for Domi whatsoever.”
“And with no transponder signal,” Donald added, “we have no way to track her.”
“Would you be so good as to look into this, my friend?” Lakesh asked distractedly.
Bry nodded. “Brewster’s been trying to recalibrate the unit remotely with no success, but I’ll see if I can add anything.”
Lakesh nodded in gratitude, the fierce fires of determination burning behind his clear blue eyes. “Call Kane, Brigid and Grant—assemble CAT Team Alpha,” he said. “If we can’t do anything here, then we’ll do something there.”
So Donald Bry sent out a request on the internal communications system for the three members of the CAT Alpha field team, and by the time Brigid and Kane appeared in the operations room less than ten minutes later, Grant was already waiting for them.
“What took you two so long?” Grant asked. He was a huge man with skin like polished mahogany and bulging muscles across his mighty frame that strained at the blue T-shirt and olive combat pants he wore. His head was shaved and he had recently affected a goatee-style beard that circled his mouth in a narrow black line. A little older than Kane, Grant had partnered the man back when they were both Magistrates in Cobaltville, and the two shared a connection that made them seem like brothers, despite their physical differences. Grant’s voice was a rumble like thunder when he spoke, but despite how threatening he seemed, Kane knew when he was just kidding.
Kane brushed back his tousled hair, which was still a little damp from swimming. “Nothing,” he assured his friend with a wicked smile. “I was just showing Baptiste here what a magnanimous winner I could be.”
Brigid shot Kane a look, her eyes narrowed in annoyance. “I think you’ll find I was faster than you in every length we raced.”
“Faster, yes, but look at you,” Kane teased. “You’re exhausted.”
He was wrong, of course. Both of them were at the peak of physical fitness, and a few lengths of the swimming pool were hardly enough to get Brigid warmed up. In fact, had Bry’s request not come through she would have spent the rest of the afternoon there, challenging herself to be faster, to swim farther and to hold her breath longer. You never knew when such endurance would come in handy.
Brigid had dressed in a loose shirt over a sleeveless black top and dark pants. The shirt went some way to hide the curves of her figure, but she had still turned heads in the operations room when she entered. Without the time to dry her long hair, Brigid had tied it in a scarf for now.
Kane had dressed in a pale shirt that was open at the collar and casual pants tucked into a pair of scuffed combat boots. The boots were a carryover from his days as a Magistrate, similar to the ones he had worn when on patrol.
“It’s good of you all to come so swiftly,” Lakesh said, beckoning the three of them over to his desk. The video camera was still attached there, and Mariah took a few minutes bringing them up to speed on what had happened out near the Juruena River before Lakesh outlined what he had in mind.
“Working on the assumption that the golden aircraft arrived to acquire the buried spaceship,” Lakesh said, “I propose we put something out there that will encourage them to come back.”
“You mean bait?” Grant asked.
Lakesh smiled. “Precisely! We have several alien vehicles in our possession. If we can leave one on show, perhaps drawing attention to it, our scavengers—if that’s what they are—might come to take a look.”
“That’s a big ‘if,’” Kane groused. “How were you thinking we might draw attention to this if we were to follow through on your plan?”
“Well, I’ll leave the mechanics up to you,” Lakesh admitted drily. “But my thought was we could stage some kind of elaborate—I don’t know—crash-landing spectacle that might draw the attention of the kind of people who come to pluck buried Annunaki spaceships out of the ground.”
“Crash landing, huh?” Grant asked dubiously. “We try to avoid those.”
“Hence
elaborately staged,
” Lakesh reminded the larger man.
“And if we do bring your golden visitors back?” Brigid asked. “What then?”
“Ah,” Lakesh said, “I was rather hoping you’d be able to...um...work on the fly at that point and see where the situation takes you.”
“You want us to follow them?” Kane asked.
“Just to get Domi back,” Lakesh told him. “I don’t want you to put yourselves in unnecessary jeopardy.”
“Fake a crash landing,” Kane grumbled, ticking off the points on his fingers, “deceive the well-armed strangers, and free the companion we don’t know for sure has been kidnapped.”
“Nobody said they were well armed,” Lakesh complained.
“Nobody said they weren’t!” Kane, Brigid and Grant responded in unison.
Chapter 4
Serra do Norte, Brazil
Eighteen hours later, two slope-winged aircraft shot across the skies over the Juruena River, vying for position in the cloudless sky.
Identical in appearance, the aircraft were constructed from a bronze-hued metal that glimmered in the early-morning sunlight. Their graceful designs consisted of flattened wedges with swooping wings curving out to either side in mimicry of the seagoing manta ray, which was why they were called Mantas. Each Manta’s wingspan was twenty yards, and its body length was almost fifteen feet. The entire surface of each vehicle was decorated with curious geometric designs: elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. Aerodynamically flat in design, each vehicle featured an elongated hump in the center of the body, which provided the only indication of a cockpit.
Graceful as they appeared, right now the two craft were involved in what appeared to be deadly combat. The lead vehicle swept dangerously low over the canopy of trees, kicking up leaves in its wake. Its trailing companion followed it move for move, nose cannon spitting a steady stream of bullets as its pilot sought to knock it out of the skies.
Inside the lead vehicle, Grant jerked the joystick to the left, sending his craft away to port in a turn so sharp that the Manta appeared to stand on one wing for a moment. He wore an all-encompassing helmet, colored bronze like the craft and locked into the back of the pilot’s seat. A small oxygen supply was attached to it.
Grant was also dressed in a shadow suit, a body glove made from an incredibly durable fabric that acted as armor without hindering movement in the slightest. The shadow suit could deflect knife blades and redistribute kinetic impact. Microfilaments in the weave regulated the wearer’s body temperature to keep the wearer comfortable in extremes of temperature, and the shadow suit also offered protection from environmental threats. Grant had augmented the shadow suit with camo pants and he had also brought a long duster coat, which was folded on the backseat in the two-man cockpit.
With a growl, Grant yanked at the joystick again, reeling as a series of bullets from his pursuer kicked against the back fins with a rattle like dice on a craps table.
“Son of a...” he spat out. “Give me some space to climb already.”
Grant’s pursuer didn’t hear the instruction, though if he had there was a reasonable chance he would have ignored him. Evidently, he was set on bringing Grant’s craft down, preferably as a fireball.
Grant urged more power to the engine as he pulled back on the stick, sending his Manta up in a near-vertical climb, grimacing at the sudden increase in g-forces inside the cockpit. Internal gravity compensators would kick in in a moment, he knew, but for the next few seconds he would feel as if he weighed as much as a blue whale.
“The next time Shizuka tells me she’s worried about her weight,” Grant muttered to himself, “she’s going up in one of these things.”
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
TRAILING
VEHICLE
,
Kane tapped something on the control board, cutting his speed to a whisker below 100 miles per hour, allowing Grant breathing space to gain a little extra distance as he stood his Manta on its tail.
“You go for it, pal,” Kane muttered. “Keep running—let’s make it look good.”
Kane was also dressed in a shadow suit, to which he had added a simple denim jacket and camo pants.
The Mantas were very ancient and they had been in use when the Annunaki had first invaded Earth many millennia ago. The two that now flew in an elaborate game of cat and mouse over the Brazilian countryside had been acquired by the Cerberus team for long-range missions after being discovered where they had been left discarded on Earth thousands of years before. They’d be found by CAT Team Alpha during one of their exploratory missions. Capable of both transatmospheric and subspace flight, the adaptable vehicles were largely employed for long-range and specific edge-of-atmosphere work, including satellite maintenance.
Like Grant, Kane also wore a bulbous pilot’s helmet, which entirely covered his skull. The helmets had come as a part of the recovered vehicles and were wired into the cockpits, operating on a swivel system that plugged them into the back of each pilot’s seat.
Inside the helmet, the relatively simple cockpit controls were augmented by a detailed heads-up display that responded to the pilot’s eye movements. When Kane focused on the tail of Grant’s Manta, the display system automatically gave a detailed summary of the craft’s speed, trajectory and many other factors, including a full analysis of the vehicle’s armament. A slight movement of Kane’s pupils and the display would magnify the view of the vehicle, singling it out and running infrared, ultraviolet and various other analyses, all in the literal blink of an eye.
Anxiously, Kane kicked the Manta back to full speed once more, shooting upward, chasing the bronze tail of his partner’s vehicle.
Seated directly behind Kane in the tight cockpit of the Manta, Brigid Baptiste was watching everything through the hidden viewports of the craft. She, too, had dressed in a shadow suit, adding a lightweight jacket and belt, along with a pair of boots with low heels. The boots were unnecessary—the shadow suits had flexible soles built in, but Brigid preferred the added comfort the boots gave, plus they drew attention away from the strange glove-like fit of the suits themselves.
Brigid eyed the skies warily, scanning for signs of other vehicles.
“We have anything yet, Baptiste?” Kane asked, raising his voice over the noise of rushing wind streaking past the Manta’s cockpit.
“Negative,” Brigid replied. “Clear skies so far.”
Kane tapped the trigger controls again, sending another flurry of bullets at the aft of Grant’s rapidly retreating Manta. The bullets cut the air around the Manta, a handful striking the metal hull with another rattle of impacts. They were 9 mm bullets and wouldn’t hurt the Manta, Kane knew, not at this distance, anyway. The whole thing was just for show, trying to convince anyone who might be watching that they were engaged in a running battle in the sky.
* * *
W
HILE
TIME
WAS
of the essence with Domi missing, there were other considerations that had to be factored into a sting operation. That was why it had taken eighteen hours to move from theory, in the Cerberus ops room, to execution, here over the rushing waters of the Juruena.
Grant flip-flopped his Manta in a spiraling turn, spinning the giant bronze shape through its y-axis as another burst of bullets cut the air from behind.
The Juruena was below him now, a trailing silvery snake amid the green as he whipped high in the air over it, aircraft upside down, cockpit turned toward the ground. Behind him, Kane was bringing his own Manta in a banking turn, nose gun blazing.
Calmly, Grant moved the joystick fractionally, sending his Manta in a slow turn that would bring it around again, as well as setting it back to right side up.
“Come on, Kane,” he muttered. “Don’t make it look too easy.”
Kane’s Manta tracked the move, cutting across the wide arc of Grant’s craft and powering toward him at a sharp angle. Grant pitched and yawed, shaking his craft in place as Kane sent another burst of fire in his direction.
“Steady,” Grant reminded himself as bullets thudded against the armored hull. “Steady.”
There was a patch of open ground below them now, a small clearing set a little way back from the riverbank. It was maybe twenty-five yards at its longest side, half that at its shortest. At the speed they were traveling it would be a tight landing, but with the Manta’s Vertical Take Off and Landing, or VTOL, capacity, it shouldn’t be too hard to hit the target. Rather, it was just a question of whether they could convince an outsider that it was unintentional. Grant figured it was the best they were going to find at such notice, which meant it would have to do.
Grant waggled his wings for a second, rolling in place as Kane lined up another shot.
“I hope you saw that, Kane,” he muttered, inwardly cursing that they had been forced to maintain radio silence for the duration of the sting. It wouldn’t do for someone to overhear these two “enemies” sharing tactics over their Commtacts.
* * *
K
ANE
WAS
WATCHING
Grant’s Manta like a hawk, and so he saw the wing tips briefly waggle as the aircraft cut across the skies to the east of the river.
“It’s on,” Kane told Brigid, and he watched Grant swoop into a trajectory that would take him much lower. “We have an audience yet?”
“Still nothing,” Brigid replied, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “We’re putting Grant in a lot of danger with this plan,” she reminded Kane.
“Danger’s just a vacation spot to Grant,” Kane snapped back. “It’s his favorite place to visit.”
They were not far from where Mariah and Domi had found the starcraft, just four miles from the burial site. The idea was that they would stage this dogfight in the vicinity of the previous appearance of the golden ships. Hopefully those same people would track this activity, and when Grant’s Manta went down in an apparent crash landing, they would come out of the woodwork to investigate.
It was a long shot, but right now—with no way of tracing Domi and no indication of where she was being held—it was all they had.
Flipping a switch on the joystick, Kane engaged an incendiary missile. It locked in place in the firing bay, waiting for the command to launch. Up ahead, Grant was bringing his Manta around in a long arc that would ultimately place him in line with the open landing area he had identified. Kane urged more power from the air pulse engines of the Manta, waiting for the target reticle to switch from green to red on his heads-up display. The moment it did, his thumb stroked the trigger and the missile launched, whipping ahead of his Manta in a streak of white smoke.
Kane watched the missile go, trusting that those extra hours at the redoubt would pay off now. The tech boys there had retrofitted one of his missiles with a false charge, all noise and light but no explosive—which meant it wouldn’t do much more than dirty the shell of Grant’s Manta when it struck. To be doubly sure, the missile had been primed to go off a few feet before reaching the target, meaning that—to the naked eye, at least—it would still look as if all that fire and noise was coming from a point of impact at the rear of Grant’s wounded Manta.
“I hope if they’re watching, they ain’t watching too close,” Kane muttered to himself as the missile streaked away with a shriek of burning air.
* * *
G
RANT
’
S
TACTICAL
DISPLAY
had switched to alert mode, informing him that someone had his ship in a target lock, and furthermore, that there was a missile cutting its way toward his rear even as he continued on the path toward the clearing.
“Beginning evasive maneuvers,” Grant said lackadaisically, rolling the Manta over as the missile howled toward it.
The Manta flipped over twice as the missile neared, and the missile adjusted its course in response, getting closer with every passing microsecond.
Twenty feet.
Ten feet.
Five feet.
Now.
Grant’s left palm slapped against the newly added bulge on the side of the control board, feeling the button there depress. It was big so that he wouldn’t miss it, since most flying skill is instinct, and trying to add an extra feature to a fighter jet—especially an alien one like this—involved hours of training to get the pilot used to it.
Grant didn’t have the time for hours of training and so the Cerberus techs had settled on a very big, bright red button as the best chance of his hitting the right control when he was thinking at one hundred feet up while traveling at close to a hundred and eighty miles per hour over the rainforest.
There was a fraction of second’s delay—made infinitely longer in Grant’s mind as he worried about something going wrong. Then he felt the back of the Manta kick like a mule as the explosive charge hidden beneath the plating went off, sending a stream of thick black smoke and small debris up into the air behind him. At roughly the same moment, Kane’s missile detonated, sending a burst of light coupled with the sound of an explosion out in all directions, giving the illusion that the missile had hit.
“And after that apparent pain in the aft, boys and girls,” Grant said, “it’s time to crash this bird and crash it good.”
Grant eased back on the throttle and sent the hurtling Manta in a plummeting spiral toward the ground, keeping the tract of open land in his viewport as best as he could without making it too obvious that he was still in control. He was going too fast, he knew, could feel the air buffet his wings as the Manta rocketed earthward, the shriek of engine strain loud to his ears.
Grant’s heads-up display was going crazy, alerting him that he was moving toward the ground too fast and that he needed to pull up now.
“Yeah, I hear ya,” Grant growled to the navigation system. “I just don’t plan on paying any attention.”
A moment later, the tallest of the trees came rushing into view and Grant gritted his teeth. This was what it all came down to, audience or no audience.
* * *
K
ANE
WINCED
AS
Grant’s Manta dipped beneath the tree line, the trail of dark smoke marking its passage.
“I hope you’re okay in there, buddy,” he said as the Manta dropped out of view.
A moment later, the trees below shook and a flock of startled birds took to the sky, cawing angrily to one another as they hurried from the crash site.
“Still nothing, Kane,” Brigid confirmed before he had time to ask.
“Roger,” Kane acknowledged automatically. “Time we blew this mutie-chomp stand.”
With that, Kane engaged the full force of the pulse engine, sweeping over the crash site of Grant’s Manta as if to eyeball it before roaring away through the cerulean skies. His vehicle notched up to two hundred miles per hour in a second, was closer to three hundred by the time his shadow had crossed over the crash site below.