In five seconds, Kane’s Manta was gone, and the only evidence of its passing was the smoking shell of the identical craft it had apparently brought down.
Chapter 5
Strapped tightly into the acceleration couch of the felled Manta, Grant strained to peer out of the viewport and into the skies above. He watched for a moment as Kane’s aircraft hurried away from the scene, the imaging software in the heads-up display picking out highlights and focusing on the air trail it left long after the craft itself had disappeared from view.
“I hope you caught all that, bad guys,” Grant said, settling back down into the pilot’s seat. “Because I’d hate to have to put on an evening show, having already used up all our best tricks for the matinee.”
Grant pushed back the helmet and took a breath of unfiltered air before adjusting the straps that held him in place. There was nothing out there now, just the trees—which he had deftly managed to avoid in his faked crash—and the empty, cloudless sky hanging above him like a brushstroke of blue paint. He could be here awhile, he knew, and he had come prepared.
First, however, he checked the hand weapons he had brought with him. There was his Sin Eater pistol, which clipped neatly into a holster that attached to Grant’s wrist. The weapon retracted out of sight while not in use, its butt folding over the top of the barrel to reduce its stored length to just ten inches.
The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, a compact 9 mm automatic that both Grant and Kane favored from their days as Magistrates. The holster operated by a specific flinch of the wrist tendon, powering the blaster straight into the user’s hand.
The weapon’s trigger had no guard; the necessity for one had never been foreseen since the Magistrates were believed to be infallible. Hence, if the wielder’s index finger was bent at the time the weapon reached it, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The blaster was a reminder of who Grant had been, and its weight felt natural on his wrist the same way a wristwatch seems natural to the wearer.
His other weapon of choice was a Copperhead assault rifle, an abbreviated subgun that was less than two feet in length. The Copperhead’s extended magazine contained thirty-five 4.85 mm rounds that could be fired—or perhaps
unleashed
was a better term—at a rate of 700 rounds per minute.
The grip and trigger were set in front of the breech in a bullpup design, allowing for one-handed use, and the weapon’s low recoil permitted devastating full-auto bursts, chewing up anything that came into its path. A scope with laser autotarget facility was mounted on the top of the gun, but Grant’s hand-eye coordination was refined enough to operate the weapon without the autotarget feature.
Grant slipped the Copperhead down beside the pilot’s seat, the safety on and grip within easy reach. If anyone tried to pry open the cockpit without warning, they’d get a face full of lead for their troubles.
Certain that his weapons were primed, Grant reached into the storage pouch at his left and pulled out the book that his girlfriend, Shizuka, had loaned him. It was an ancient and well-thumbed copy of
Family Traditions on the Art of War
by Yagyu Munenori, a samurai treatise from the sixteenth century. He could be in for a long wait.
* * *
F
OUR
HOURS
PASSED
without incident. Kane had taken his Manta away to the north, settling down by a clump of trees in the densely forested Serra do Norte three miles from where Grant had set down. He left his engines powered down but idling, ready to reignite at any moment, should Grant patch an alert to him.
“This is taking too long,” Kane grumbled as the clock ticked into the start of their fifth hour hiding in the forest. “I’m going to call Grant and let him know it’s a bust.”
“Don’t,” Brigid replied from the seat behind his. She sounded sleepy, as if she had been dozing when she had first heard him speak. “Give it time.”
“How much time?” Kane asked, a note of challenge in his voice. “We’re going to start getting old if these twerps don’t show up soon. More to the point, my stomach tells me it’s lunchtime.”
“Then eat,” Brigid told him calmly. “You have ration bars there, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Kane grumbled and he reached into a storage pouch located beside his right knee and pulled out one of the foil-wrapped bars. He unwrapped it and took a bite, his nose wrinkling in disgust as he was reminded why he hadn’t eaten them earlier. “This ain’t food. These things look like cardboard, smell like cardboard and taste like cardboard.”
“Quit complaining and eat your lunch,” Brigid chided, closing her eyes again as she settled back into a light doze.
* * *
B
Y
THE
SIXTH
HOUR
,
Grant was more familiar with the philosophical musings of Yagyu Munenori than he would have wanted to get in one sitting, and the straps of the pilot’s couch were chafing him no matter which way he sat. His Manta had long since cooled down, and the plume of smoke that might have acted as a location marker to any passing scavengers or cosmic tow trucks had long since faded.
Putting the book down, folded open and resting on one knee, Grant leaned forward and glanced through the canopy once more. The skies remained clear. The trees were swaying with the breeze and, as he watched, tiny, brightly colored birds flitted between branches, dining on berries or aphids, whatever it was that they were finding up there that was good enough to eat. Watching them, Grant remembered the ration bars he had in one of the storage pouches in the cockpit and pulled a face. “May as well eat cardboard,” he muttered, recalling their taste.
As he leaned forward, the book began to slip from Grant’s leg and he reached for it in a rush of limbs, bashing his right elbow against the side of the cockpit as he tried to stop the book from disappearing into the foot well. He snared it with two fingers, pressing it against the lower part of his leg to stop it dropping until he could get a better grip.
“Dang!”
Knowing Shizuka, Grant guessed the book had been in her family since her great-great-great grandfather—some all-wise samurai or other—had gone to a book signing in 1640. He could just imagine what she’d say if he managed to step on it while it rattled around in the crashed Manta’s foot well. “You stepped on the most precious and most sacred tome, which has guided my family for a thousand years, Grant-san. You have dishonored my ancestors with your big feet.”
“My big feet won’t be dishonoring anyone’s ancestors today,” Grant muttered as he brought the book back from the brink. As he did so, something whipped past the corner of his eye, and he looked up, peering into the cockpit viewport.
Blue sky. Empty.
Grant kept watching, folding Shizuka’s book closed as he scanned the skies. He couldn’t see anything different—but he could hear something. It sounded like a distant stampede.
“What is that?” Grant muttered, eyeing the sky.
Blue. Empty.
The noise was growing louder, which usually meant whatever was making it was getting closer. Grant took a moment to return the book to the storage webbing by his leg before pulling the flight helmet back over his head. The heads-up display automatically reengaged, sensors scanning where he looked, picking out details of the trees and the birds as they tracked into view.
“Come on, twitchy,” Grant muttered to himself.
Blue. Empty.
Then came that irritating moment of self-doubt, when Grant felt sure he had seen something but started to wonder if he had just imagined it. He ran his tongue along his teeth, counting the seconds, waiting for something to happen.
The Manta’s sensors caught it first, circling and highlighting it on the multicolored heads-up display. It appeared from the edge of the tree cover, traveling high and fast. Grant focused automatically, and the display focused with him, zooming in on the speck of light as it shot across the sky like a streak of lightning. The image magnified, magnified, magnified—and then whatever it was had passed, leaving only a ghost image in its wake. Specifications ran down the side of the display, giving Grant an estimation of its velocity and a bearing on its direction.
A moment later it was back, and the thundering horse hooves were suddenly much louder in his ears. This time, the Manta’s software caught it, bringing up a close-up still overlay image of the aircraft—and it
was
an aircraft—alongside the real-time moving speck, running down the full specifications including an analysis of its armor shielding.
It was light on armor, Grant saw, which made it fast. That was the classic trade-off with fighter jets—the more armor you carried, the more weight you needed to propel and the slower you became.
Grant reached forward for the control panel, his fingers drumming against it as he pondered whether or not to start up his engine.
Then a second craft appeared in the sky, this one much, much closer and accompanied by the deafening noise of galloping horses. Grant watched as it circled overhead before plummeting toward him, its shell gleaming like liquid gold. Before Grant could think, the Manta began to shake around him, and he felt himself being drawn up into the air.
Chapter 6
Kane was sitting in the cockpit of his own vehicle watching the skies, three miles from where the twin golden craft were circling the crashed Manta.
“Hey, Baptiste? You see that?”
When Brigid didn’t answer, Kane raised his voice and tried again.
“Hey, wake up, Baptiste!”
“I wasn’t asleep,” Brigid insisted, brushing a stray lock of red-gold hair from her eyes. “Just resting my eyes.”
“I hope you rested them good,” Kane snapped, “because I’m going to need a second opinion. You see that?”
He pointed through the viewport and Brigid looked where he was indicating.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
“A flash in the sky, some kind of light or something,” Kane told her, reaching for his flight helmet.
“You think it’s...?” Brigid began.
“Let me see if I can get a better visual,” Kane cut in. If the force that had abducted Domi was here, Kane didn’t want to move too soon and scare it away. He slipped the flight helmet over his head. Its bronze-colored faceplate covered his features entirely, granting him complete access to the Manta’s sensor technology in its colorful heads-up display. Numbers raced before his eyes as he searched for the flash he had seen a moment ago.
* * *
G
RANT
FELT
AS
if something was tugging at his whole body, like a magnet lifting the bones through his skin.
Around him, the Manta shuddered as it was lifted from the ground by some invisible force. There was no hook that Grant could see, no beam showing in the visible spectrum.
He screwed up his eyes for a moment, forcing himself to look beyond the sensation. When he opened them again, he saw the trees appear to descend around him as he rose gently in the cockpit of the ascending Manta. Up above, two bright gold aircraft were poised in place roughly a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The vehicles were ovoid and looked smooth all over, like a pebble washed by the sea. They glimmered a brilliant gold, bright as the sun’s rays, which they reflected. But Grant could see something else within that gold—dark patches forming lines and shapes across the flawless shells. They hadn’t moved for the last thirty seconds, just waited there as Grant’s Manta was gradually drawn up toward them.
With a mental command, Grant ordered the sensor array to give him a full analysis of the hovering craft. There was no further data than that he had already seen, so he blinked rapidly, commanding a full spectral analysis, jumping from gamma to X-rays before slipping over to the other side of visibility: infrared, terahertz, microwaves. The rapidly changing views on his HUD were gaudy as an old black-light picture, but only the ultraviolet scan gave any notable information. The ultraviolet spectrum is where electromagnetic radiation is visible, and the display showed an inverted pyramid, its walls insubstantial, the points of the base corresponding with the two golden aircraft that hovered above.
The Manta was the third corner of the triangle, Grant realized, picturing it in two dimensions in his mind’s eye. He was in some kind of magnetic beam, he concluded, and it was pulling his craft up into the sky as if it were a great claw. The beam was being projected somehow from the two golden aircraft hovering above him, but how they were doing it and what interaction was necessary to create the beam itself he couldn’t know.
As he ascended above the level of the highest tree branch, Grant leaned back in his pilot’s seat and continued playing possum. Let them think he had died in the crash—it might be the only way to find out where they had taken Domi.
* * *
G
RANT
’
S
M
ANTA
WAS
automatically tagged on Kane’s display and Kane watched as it ascended above the tree line, a yellow reticle identifying it as friendly. Kane’s eyes were narrowed as he observed through the magnifying software of the Manta’s sensors. The mysterious visitors hovered in place as Grant’s Manta was lifted into the air.
“Looks like we hooked our fish,” Kane said, bringing the Manta back to life. “Or maybe they hooked Grant.”
“Kane, wait,” Brigid instructed, slapping her palm against the back of his pilot’s seat.
“What?” Kane responded irritably, still holding the joystick as he got ready to leave their hiding place amidst the trees.
“Don’t move too soon,” Brigid reminded. “You’ll scare them off.”
“Grant’s in danger,” Kane snapped.
“And aren’t you the one who told me that that was his favorite place to be?” Brigid snapped back.
Kane snarled something incomprehensible in reply, but he eased his grip on the stick. Brigid was right. “If he gets killed and haunts me, I’m telling him this was your idea,” he growled.
“Let’s just see where they’re going first,” Brigid said, ignoring Kane’s jibe. “We don’t want to blow our chance to get Domi back.”
Arranged in a loose triangular formation, the two ovoid vehicles turned northward, pulling Grant’s Manta along behind them. All three aircraft began to accelerate and then, without warning, disappeared entirely from Kane’s scopes.
“What the—?” Kane growled.
In the seat behind him, Brigid felt her stomach sink. Please don’t lose him, she thought.
* * *
W
ITHIN
THE
TIGHT
cockpit of his Manta, Grant found himself jostled around as his aircraft was yanked away at high speed from the crash site. His muscles and flesh seemed to be pulled back as he was slammed against the acceleration couch, and it felt as it his bones were being yanked through his skin. He had never known such speed—certainly not in an atmospheric vehicle.
The sensor displays in his helmet were going wild, colored symbols flashing in quick succession as the Manta warned its pilot that they were out of control with the engines still powered down.
“I know,” Grant growled as his head slammed into the starboard viewport. He cursed as he tasted blood in his mouth. His eyes teared and he blinked the tears away, struggling to see through the blur. Then he realized it wasn’t the tears that were making his vision blurry—through the viewport all that could be see was a green-again, blue-again blur where the trees and sky rolled past at incredible speed. The Manta was spinning, Grant realized, rapidly rotating on its y-axis so that it went upside down and right-side up, over and over. Grant cursed again, wishing he could check on Kane, speak to him via their Commtacts.
Up ahead, Grant saw the two fixed spots where the golden aircraft towed him through the air on their magnetic beam. For now, he was at their mercy.
“I only hope Kane’s keeping up,” he muttered.
* * *
K
ANE
WAS
NOT
keeping up. His heart was drumming against his chest as he fed full power to the Manta, speeding to the site of their last visual. The air was clear, and a quick run-through of the sensor feeds showed no evidence of where the three aircraft had disappeared to.
“He’s gone,” Kane spat. “No energy signature, no trail. We’ve lost him.”
Brigid eyed the empty sky from the rear seat. “There has to be some way to track him,” she insisted. “Think...think...”
“Cerberus!” Brigid and Kane exclaimed together.
Brigid started running a full-scope analysis on the data the Manta had amassed, while Kane hailed Cerberus over his Commtact. He was relieved when Lakesh’s eager tones filled his ears.
“We’ve lost Grant,” Kane explained, cutting to the chase.
Lakesh sounded astonished. “Lost how?” he asked.
“His Manta was there and then it wasn’t,” Kane summarized. “Last visual, he was being towed by two aircraft that matched the description Falk gave us. Headed on a northeast bearing and just disappeared before my eyes.”
“And you didn’t go with him?” Lakesh began, then corrected himself. “Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t be contacting us if you had. What do you need me to do, my friend?”
“Sensors picked up some data that Baptiste is running through as fast as she can,” Kane explained. “But we need a position for Grant’s transponder. Plus anything you can add from the Keyhole sat.”
“The instruments are showing a significant cation trail, positively charged,” Brigid added.
* * *
S
ITTING
AT
A
DESK
in the Cerberus ops room, Lakesh listened over the earpiece as Kane read out the specific figures relating to the cation trail. Domi had been missing for thirty-two hours now and Lakesh had enlisted most of the Cerberus personnel to cover for this sting op, placing himself at the heart of the communications network so that he could field any messages that came through.
“You heard Baptiste. That all mean anything to you?” Kane finished.
Lakesh nodded, concern etched on his face. He had been a physicist of significant renown in his day. He could already visualize the data in his mind’s eye and see how it related to what had happened in the skies over Brazil. “Kane, what you’ve recorded there is an ion transfer,” Lakesh stated.
“Say again?” Kane requested. “In English.”
“An ion transfer,” Lakesh explained, “is the process wherein electrostatic acceleration of charged positive ions is generated to release incredible amounts of energy. In the twentieth century, rocket engines employed this system to achieve liftoff.”
“So, we’re looking at a rocket trail?” Kane asked.
“The application of an ion engine would suggest as much,” Lakesh confirmed. “Did you see anything take off?”
“No, we were still a couple of miles out when it happened,” Kane clarified. “Didn’t wanna spook them. Looked to me like Grant and his new friends just—pop!—winked out of existence.”
Two desks away from Lakesh, staff physician Reba DeFore tilted her computer monitor toward him and called for his attention.
“One moment, my friend,” Lakesh told Kane before examining DeFore’s screen. “Yes, Reba—what do we have?”
“Grant’s transponder data,” Reba explained, indicating one of three sets of data that showed on her screen. There, three lines were glowing in different colors alongside a numerical display for his blood pressure. The numbers looked normal enough, but as Lakesh watched, they cut abruptly before reappearing a second or two later. The other two displays remained rock solid.
“What is that?” Lakesh asked her. “What’s happening?”
“We’re losing the data in a fixed three-quarter-time pattern,” DeFore said. “Kane and Brigid are still in place—” she indicated the other two data feeds “—but Grant’s has been glitching like this for the past fifty seconds.”
“As though our equipment can’t fix on the transponder signal,” Lakesh mused. He was already turning to Donald Bry, where the copper-headed man sat at another terminal analyzing geographic data. “Donald? What do you have for me?”
“We can still pinpoint Grant’s position,” Bry said with his usual concerned expression. “But the transponder signal is getting weaker. He’s moving fast—by my estimate he’s traveling at six hundred miles per hour, although I’d need to run through the figures properly to...”
“Yes, yes,” Lakesh quieted the man. “Kane, we have a fix on Grant and he’s moving fast.”
* * *
“H
OW
FAST
?” K
ANE
ASKED
, sweat-slick grip still locked on the Manta’s joystick.
“Six hundred miles per hour on a bearing of north-northeast,” Lakesh replied. “He’s showing as twenty-four miles from your position with the distance increasing rapidly.”
“On it,” Kane snapped back, adjusting the trajectory of his Manta and kicking in full power. Engines roared as Kane ramped up the acceleration.
“Distance now is twenty-five miles,” Lakesh confirmed.
Kane’s Manta swooped over the trees, speeding on a north-northeast bearing.
Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact again. “Twenty-six.”
Brigid gasped. “Kane—we’ll never catch him at this rate. It’s not possible.”
Kane shook his head, the bulky bronze helmet shaking. “Gotta be a way,” he muttered, peering through the sensors at empty sky. He wasn’t going to lose his partner, no way.
“Twenty-seven,” Lakesh’s voice chimed emotionlessly.
In that instant, Kane made a decision, pulling back on the joystick and tipping the Manta up on its tail. “Hang on to something,” he told Brigid somewhat belatedly as the g-forces drove them both back into their seats.
Mantas were capable of operating inside the atmosphere and outside of it, Kane recalled, but space travel required a whole different set of principles for its execution—which meant that the Manta utilized an entirely different system to achieve it. He checked the altimeter as his craft climbed to thirty-four thousand feet in ninety seconds. A little higher and they would move out of the troposphere and the pressure would drop. The Manta’s air pulse engines roared as it hurtled straight up in a vertical climb to the very limits of the atmosphere.
Brigid felt herself being dragged back in her seat as the incredible craft hit Mach 1.
* * *
G
RANT
’
S
SENSES
WERE
reeling but he was beginning to get the hang of things again. He was being pulled at incredible speed toward their mystery destination.
The sensors informed Grant that he had moved thirty-two miles already, and there was no sign of slowing down. The twin golden craft continued hurtling ahead of him, visible in the viewport as they dragged him onward. They were moving so fast that Grant wondered if they would leave Brazilian air space before much longer.
Then something caught Grant’s eye, shining in the distance like a golden aberration in the cloudless blue blanket of the sky. It shimmered into place like a rising flame splitting from a fire, ebbing and sparkling as he tried to see just what it was.
Below, trees were hurtling past as all three vehicles continued to speed toward that distant speck in the sky. It hovered a mile and a half above the ground, static and serene, with a strange waver to its appearance that reminded him of heat haze. As if it was not fully there, Grant realized, like a hologram or an object seen in those confused seconds between dreaming and full wakefulness.