Kane looked pensive as he nodded. “Threw me for a loop,” he murmured. “No question about that. A whole other world made up from my subconscious.”
“I’ll check your blood and the cultures in your breathing passages,” DeFore told him as she labeled the samples, “but my inclination is to say you’re fine now. Take it easy for the next few hours and let me know if you feel anything you oughtn’t to, okay?”
“Sure,” Kane assented, pulling himself up off the couch where DeFore had been looking him over. “Rest for a few hours. Gotcha.”
“Kane?” DeFore said as he walked toward her office door.
Kane stopped and turned back to look at her.
“I said
rest,
” the medic explained, “and I mean it. No blasting targets at the firing range or kickboxing a mannequin into submission.”
The corner of Kane’s mouth rose in a sly grin. “What? Trust me.”
DeFore smiled, shaking her head. “I know you too well for that, Kane. Someone stubs their toe on a desk and you’ll go in, guns blazing, to make sure that desk never attacks anyone ever again.”
Kane laughed, and DeFore watched him leave, closing the door behind him.
* * *
G
RANT
FELT
RAW
.
His teeth were chattering.
He was freezing cold. He woke up without remembering falling asleep, and it felt as if there was an elephant resting on his rib cage. He was lying on his back, the weight pressing against his chest, and he could feel his heart pounding like an old water pump straining to draw the last drops of water from a dried-up well.
What hit me? he asked himself as he opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the burned-out husk of a jeep, tires flat, the frame blackened to a charcoal skeleton. He was still in the garage area of the bombed armaments factory. His teeth kept biting together with the cold.
He moved his head, gazing down his body, bringing his shaking hands over to press tentatively against his chest. The black fabric of the shadow suit was visible where his coat had fallen open, and so he touched himself there with icy fingertips.
“Arrgh!” Grant shrieked, a sort of gasp and scream in one, his hands flinching back as if shocked.
He remembered the strangely dressed quartet as they had grouped around him like circling wolves. Whatever they had used on him, it had packed a hell of a wallop. A blaster, wasn’t it? A strange-looking handgun that fired a beam of orange-red light. A heat beam.
They weren’t here now. Maybe they were nearby, just waiting to pounce. Couldn’t worry about that now, needed to keep moving, get himself up off the floor.
His hands trembled, not from shock but from the cold. Grant reached down again, touching his chest once more, wincing at the pain. It was like sunburn. Sunburn and cold. A strange combination.
With determination, Grant pushed himself up to a sitting position, searching around himself with a head so heavy it felt like it was carved from rock. “What...happened?” he muttered through chattering teeth.
Shizuka lay nearby, sprawled in a mound of ash, still clutching her
katana.
She looked asleep. Grant was relieved—her clothes were dirty, but otherwise she looked unmolested, and she was here. Her body was shaking slightly, trembling where she lay on the bed of soot. He pushed himself up, moved over to Shizuka on hands and knees, unable to make himself stand upright thanks to that pain in his chest.
“Shizuka?” Grant said quietly. “Babe? You okay?”
She didn’t answer.
Swiftly, Grant checked her over, confirmed she was still breathing. When he drew back her eyelids, he could see the whites of her eyes and her dark, chocolate-colored iris was flickering back and forth like Jell-O on a plate. REM state maybe
.
Grant didn’t know for certain.
He was still cold, and couldn’t figure out why. The shadow suit was designed to regulate his personal environment, keeping his body at a comfortable temperature even in the harshest of conditions. Then he realized—he’d been struck with the heat beam, and it had evidently fried his shadow suit’s workings, causing the miraculous weave to overcompensate. Probably saved my life, Grant realized. Without it, he’d be nothing but a sloppy pool of braised meat right now. No wonder he was so cold.
“Shizuka, I need you to wake up,” Grant said, warily scanning the vast room as he spoke. “Those people could come back at any time. We need to get out of here right now.”
Shizuka didn’t hear him; instead she just lay there trembling slightly in her sleep.
“Okay,” Grant told himself, “you can do this. Get Shizuka. Get to the Manta. Get back home. Come on.”
He heard the words, but his body strained at the effort. Simply standing took Herculean willpower, his body ached so much. He pushed his shaking arms beneath Shizuka’s frame, drew her toward him and lifted her from the rubble. Normally, Shizuka weighed almost nothing, so lithe was her frame. But now, with the pressure burning against his chest, with the feeling of icy numbness in his limbs, it seemed to Grant that she weighed as much as he did, maybe more. He walked slowly across the ruined garage area.
It took four minutes. Grant carried Shizuka’s unconscious form through the abandoned factory ruin, wary of his foes being nearby, keeping his body tense, his mind on high alert. But nothing came for him. Wherever the dandified quartet had disappeared to, they didn’t seem to be coming back here anytime soon.
Eventually, he made it to the Manta where it rested on the flat ground outside the factory’s ruins. The aircraft looked just as he had left it—heaven knew what he would have done had it been destroyed or tampered with in some way.
Still shivering, Grant clambered over the sloping wing with Shizuka in his arms, brought her over to the cockpit and placed her gently inside. There was a small first-aid kit beside the pilot’s seat, and Grant used it to clean the samurai woman’s wounds and spray them with antiseptic. It didn’t rouse her; it seemed as if nothing would.
Once he was done, Grant eased himself into the pilot’s seat and drew the lid of the cockpit down over him, sealing its protective dome.
“Cerberus,” Grant said, and his hidden Commtact automatically engaged, “this is Grant. Come in, Cerberus.”
There was a pause while Grant waited for a response. The silence seemed to last forever, and Grant felt his stomach try to claw its way into his throat as he sat there waiting, shivering.
Finally, Brewster Philboyd’s voice came loud and clear over the medium of the hidden radio receiver in Grant’s skull. “Receiving you, Grant—how’s it going?”
“Not good,” Grant said through lips thick with cold. “We got ambushed.”
“Pellerito?” Brewster asked.
“No,” Grant said, “not this time. Shizuka’s down. I’m bringing her in.”
“Grant, is she...?” Brewster began.
Grant cut him off. “I don’t know,” he growled. “Just have the medical bay ready. Tell DeFore to be there when I arrive. I’ll be home in—” he checked his wrist chron “—forty minutes. Less, if I can navigate out of this valley quickly.”
“Take care,” Brewster advised. “Grant? What about you? Did they hurt you?”
Grant ignored the man, flipping the switches to start the launch sequence for the Manta. A moment later the bronze-hued wing was lifting off, casting debris in its wake as its air-pulse jets surged to life. Whatever Grant felt could wait until Shizuka was safe.
Chapter 9
An hour later, Grant found himself in one of the research laboratories in the Cerberus mountain redoubt as Lakesh and a ballistics expert called Roy Cataman checked over the damage to his coat and shadow suit. The Kevlar weave of the coat had melted across the front panels where it had been buttoned up, leaving a black coating on the fabric that looked like smeared butter.
“Touched by something very hot,” Cataman said in a detached, emotionless tone. He was a pale man with salt-and-pepper hair brushed back from the sides of his head in two extravagant wings. It gave him the air of an addled professor, an impression his singed lab coat only served to enhance.
Grant had changed out of the coat and his shadow suit and sat now wearing camo pants and a gray shirt with sneakers. Still feeling the effects of the shadow suit’s cold setting, he had buttoned the shirt up tight and kept his arms folded over his chest, rubbing them occasionally to stimulate warmth. A lab assistant called Gus brought Grant a mug of coffee as he sat shivering. Gus was a handsome young man barely into his twenties, with unruly locks of russet-brown hair. “Drink this,” he said quietly as the lab jockeys continued examining the artifacts that Grant had brought back from the Panamint encounter.
Cataman was running a current through the shadow suit, testing its status. “This was hit by the weapon’s beam, as well?” he queried.
Grant nodded. “Went cold while I was wearing it.”
“Artificially so?” Cataman asked, and Grant nodded again. “Probably saved your life, then,” he said. “Whatever that weapon was, it sent a jolt of heat at approximately five hundred degrees Celsius. It would need to be that high to create any degradation in Kevlar and, as you can see from your coat, some degradation has occurred.”
“Five hundred degrees,” Grant muttered, shaking his head.
“You’re lucky it didn’t flash-fry your face clean off the bone,” Cataman explained.
As they spoke, Kane came striding into the laboratory. He had showered and changed and his hair was still damp, clinging to his head in unruly clumps. “Hey, I heard you were back,” he said to Grant. “What happened?”
“Went to make sure Pellerito’s op was dead and buried,” Grant summarized. His eyes flicked to the melted front of the Kevlar duster where it hung from a hanger. “Ran into some trouble.”
“Pellerito again?” Kane asked.
“No,” Grant told him. “Someone new. Didn’t know us.”
Kane examined the coat, brushing idly at his damp hair. “What did I tell you?” he mocked. “This is what happens when you go out there without me to guard your back.”
Grant nodded. “Well, I’ll live. Shizuka’s still with the doc, though.”
Kane looked querulously at his friend but Grant shook his head just slightly. “She was unconscious when I brought her in. Don’t know anything more just now.”
Grant and Kane had a long history together, first as magistrates, where they had been partnered to protect the sanctity of Cobaltville, then later as Cerberus field agents after they left the magistrates and ville life behind them. They had an awareness that went deeper than words, a closeness akin to brothers. They relied on one another in combat and out of it, trusting their lives to each other without question. Kane had come to find Grant as soon as he had heard that he was back.
Cataman continued his report, bringing Kane up to speed as he outlined his findings to Grant. “Your ally here was lucky to escape with his life,” he said with no sense of hyperbole. “The heat beam that struck him was enough to melt a man’s flesh from his bones.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Kane deadpanned.
“Lucky for Grant, his shadow suit kicked in and provided a freezing environment for his skin—the upshot of which was to keep him at a survivable temperature. When he handed it to me, the suit was at an almost cryogenic level of coldness—long term, it would have slowed Grant’s heartbeat and other bodily functions to such an extent that he would, effectively, have gone into hibernation.”
Kane turned from Roy to Grant. “What was this weapon they used? Who were these people?”
Grant outlined to Kane everything he could remember about his encounter with the four strangely garbed individuals.
“The speed these guys moved at,” Grant concluded, “they might not be human. Could be robots or something like that.”
“Annunaki?” Kane asked, a warning in his tone.
“No,” Grant confirmed with a shake of his head. “If they’re otherworldly, they are a new otherworldly to what we’ve faced before.”
Peering up from the ballistics report, Lakesh shot Grant a warning glance. “You say that as if you expect to face them again,” he said.
Grant nodded. “I do,” he said, pushing himself up from his seat. Lakesh, Kane and Roy watched as the broad-shouldered ex-magistrate strode over to the doors of the laboratory and left without another word.
After the doors had closed, Kane looked at Lakesh accusingly. “Way to go, Lakesh.”
“What?”
“Shizuka’s hurt. You think Grant’s just going to let that lie?”
“Making it personal won’t help...” Lakesh began.
But Kane stopped him. “These people sound like trouble” was all he said before leaving the room to find Grant.
* * *
I
T
HAD
NOT
TAKEN
a great detective’s insight to locate Grant. Kane caught up with him in the patient observation room of the medical suite, where redoubt physician Reba DeFore had placed the sleeping Shizuka on a drip feed in a clinically clean bed. Shizuka had been stripped of her dirty clothes and placed into a simple cotton nightgown, a thin sheet draped over her resting body. DeFore was taking inventory in her office when Kane walked in, and he spied Grant and Shizuka through the glass pane that looked into the observation unit.
“He just got here,” DeFore said without bothering to look up.
“Yeah, figures,” Kane acknowledged. “How is Shizuka?”
DeFore looked up, her fierce eyes meeting with Kane’s. “Between you and me—not good. From what Grant told me, she took quite a physical beating out there. But that’s not all of it. She’s comatose right now, Kane. I don’t mean unconscious or sleeping—her body’s just shut down.”
“How long for?” Kane asked.
“You mean, how long will it last?” DeFore clarified. “I can’t say. She could wake up in an hour, or she might never wake up at all.”
“It’s that serious?” Kane asked, surprised.
DeFore nodded solemnly. “I don’t know what she went through to trigger such an extreme reaction—it’s certainly not from the physical assault. She’s a strong woman, she wouldn’t go like this from the wounds that are apparent.”
“Grant told me a little about them, the people who attacked him and Shizuka,” Kane explained. “One of them had a heat beam, handheld like a blaster. Its beam was strong enough to melt Kevlar.”
“You think they used something like that on Shizuka? There’s no evidence of that.”
Kane looked thoughtful. “I think they used something,” he said finally. “Don’t know what it was, but there’s a good chance it’s like nothing we ever saw before.”
With those words, Kane made his way to the connecting door that led into the observation room. DeFore caught his arm as he reached for the door. “Kane,” she said, “be gentle. He’s hurting.”
“I know he is,” Kane said. “He’s my partner.”
Kane pushed the door open and walked into the observation room, nudging the door closed with a dull click. Grant looked up from his vigil as Kane entered, and Kane saw the barely restrained fury in the bigger man’s eyes.
Kane eyed the figure between them as she lay there, her eyes closed, a pulse monitor taped to her finger, a drip running into her vein just above her left wrist. “She looks peaceful, lying there like that,” he said. “You wouldn’t take her for a deadly samurai warrior.”
“She tried to fight them,” Grant began warningly.
“I know,” Kane said. “She would. She’s Shizuka.”
“Then what—?” Grant began.
“We’ll motivate the forces, get things started,” Kane said, “see what we can find out about these oddballs you tussled with. Lakesh will back us—don’t you worry about that.”
Kane saw the anger in Grant’s expression.
“He didn’t mean anything by it, you know,” Kane told him. “Shizuka will be fine. She’s a fighter. What she’s doing right now is some samurai whamma jamma on whatever shit has got her lying down like this. You know that.”
Grant snorted and smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“We’ll find these people,” Kane told him. “All of us, all together. We’ll deal with it.”
Kane turned and left his friend to wait at his lover’s bedside. Grant would be out in his own time, Kane knew. By that time Kane planned to have some idea about who it was that had done this to his partner and his girl.