He stepped back then, turning his head and placing his fingers in his ears as the charge went off. There came a boom like a bass drum and the bright flash of propellant as the explosive went off. Hope was the kind of place where shit happened, which meant no one took much notice of explosions or blasterfire or the screams of women.
“Gotta love hell on Earth,” Kane muttered when no one came to investigate the noise. He turned back to the door and strode through the cloud of black smoke that was churning through the tight alley. Then he was at the door. It was still standing, though a gaping hole now rested where the lock had been, cutting all the way through the door and into the interior. Kane reached for it, felt the heat simmering from the hole and thought better of it. He drew back and kicked at the door where his charge had hit, kicking away the red-hot debris with a few swift blows. Then he reached his whole arm through the door, using his jacket sleeve to protect him from the worst of the hot metal and concrete, and pulled the door toward him from the inside.
It was dark within and it took a moment for Kane to adjust his eyes. The only lighting came from red-orange strips laid almost at ground level, casting the room in a vermillion gloom. The pungent scent of the explosive was dissipating already, leaving another scent behind it, one that hung heavy in the air. It was the smell of glist—that oddly familiar scent of children’s candy; only, not the candy itself but the scent that lingered in your nostrils like an aftertaste when you ate too much, that smell that came when you tried to stifle a candy burp.
There was noise, too, a kind of whimpering as if someone—no, lots of someones—were afraid. It was the sound of fear and it sent a shiver up and down Kane’s spine. He recognized it all too well from his days as a hard-contact magistrate.
Kane’s vision was adjusting now, and he could make out the room better. It was a box of a room, windowless with stacked crates that made it feel smaller than it really was.
Warily, Kane took another step down the center aisle, pulling the ruined door closed behind him. They weren’t crates, he saw now, but cages, with wire grills across their fronts and sides, stacked one atop the other like at a vet’s or a research lab. Each crate contained a human-looking mutie.
“Help me,” one pleaded from a wire crate too close to Kane’s left.
“Free us,” another called from a few feet overhead.
Yeah, gotta love hell on Earth, Kane thought bitterly.
Chapter 3
“How can you resist a sight as beautiful as that?” Grant asked, his thunder-deep voice echoing inside the helmet he wore.
Sitting behind him, Shizuka—samurai warrior and Grant’s lover for the past few years—craned her neck to peer past his shoulder and through the cockpit displays of the Manta craft that he was piloting toward their destination. The sun was just appearing through the peaks of the Panamint range on the west side of Death Valley, a glowing ball of yellow-whiteness in the clear blue sky. Shizuka looked for a moment before
tsking
loudly and settling back into her seat.
“What?” Grant asked through the muffling visor of his command helmet. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that’s
not
an impressive sight? Seeing something like that is what keeps me going when we’re struggling to repel the latest alien invasion from Enlil and his cronies.”
Shizuka thrust out her bottom lip and sighed again. She was a beautiful woman, petite framed with skin a luscious golden hue accented with peaches and milk. Her casual clothes of light cotton blouse and pants were colored pale to better offset her golden skin. Her luxuriant blue-black hair brushed the tops of her shoulders and framed her oval face with the precision of a razorblade, and she had full, petaled lips beneath a snub of nose while her eyes held the pleasing upturned lilt of her Asian ancestry. Shizuka was not a member of Cerberus like Grant, but rather she led their frequent allies, the Tigers of Heaven, from their base in New Edo. A small woman, Shizuka looked comfortable in the rear seat of the Manta where another might seem crushed in. “Yes, it is most satisfying,” she allowed, her voice drained of all emotion, “but it does little to make up for the duplicity with which you brought me here.”
Grant turned his head as if to look at her from his position in the pilot seat before her. He could not meet her eyes, however, because right now his whole head was encased in the bulbous bronze-hued tactical helmet that entirely encompassed a pilot’s skull during operation of the Manta.
Like the pilot’s helmet, the Manta aircraft was a metallic bronze in color with the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays. Flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from its body, while an elongated hump in the center of the craft provided the only evidence of a cockpit. The craft’s wingspan was twenty yards with a body length of only fifteen feet, and the beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in their gleaming burnt-gold finish. The entire surface of the craft was decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. The Manta was alien in design, a transatmospheric and subspace vehicle that had been acquired by the Cerberus team for long-range missions after being discovered by Kane and Grant during one of their exploratory missions. The adaptable vehicles were used mostly for long-range and atmospheric work, but they could also be employed for stealth operations where a significant amount of rapid movement was foreseen.
“I promised we’d spend dawn watching the sunrise over the mountains,” Grant reminded defensively. “Far as I can see...”
“Ah, but while those indeed were your words,” Shizuka said, cutting Grant off with the same precision with which she handled her sword, “your meaning was deliberately hidden amid suggestions of romance. Instead, we’re here to look at a bomb site.”
“
Bombs
site,” Grant corrected in his rumbling basso. “Plural. Kane, Brigid and I set off quite a few.”
Behind him, Shizuka crossed her arms in irritation as Grant guided the sleek aircraft toward a valley between the mountain peaks. A dark smear could be seen down there in the lee of the mountains, three hundred feet long and still smoldering with dark smoke that wisped from the debris.
“Which is hardly my—or anyone’s—idea of romance,” Shizuka hissed. “Searching through the rubble of a bomb site. Really.”
“We trashed an armaments factory here a couple of weeks back,” Grant explained, ignoring his girlfriend’s complaints, “and Lakesh asked that someone double-check on the wreckage to make sure no one’s come back to try to get things up and running again. These people had blueprints not just for blasters but also some antitank weapons and a nuke. Don’t kid me that you actually want a new batch of illegal weapons out there on the streets, Shizuka. You’re not that hard. Besides, Lakesh volunteered me to check it out and you’re the best person I could think of to cover my back.”
“Since Kane and Brigid are busy on another mission,” Shizuka pointed out, but she had a smile on her face.
“Could have asked Edwards,” Grant muttered, his voice lost beneath the noise of the engines. “Coulda, shoulda.”
Grant brought the Manta down in a vertical landing, cutting the engines with the familiar whir of the air-spike propulsion units powering down. As the Manta settled, Grant pushed back his flight helmet and peered back at Shizuka, catching the smile on her pretty face. “What?” he asked, his dark brow furrowing in confusion.
“It is admittedly kind of sweet, you asking me to come along,” Shizuka told him, “even if it’s just a recon mission. We get barely enough time together as it is, and how could I not be flattered to know I’m your number-one choice for backup. Besides, the sunrise was pretty magical.”
Grant smiled back, his white teeth bright in his ebony-hued face. “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?” He was a huge man in his mid-thirties, with an impressive bulk that mimicked the mountains that surrounded them right now. The hair on his head had been shaved to stubble and he sported a black goatee-style beard. While he may look intimidating, there was something undeniably soft about Grant; his chocolate-colored eyes contained a wealth of understanding and patience in each fleeting glance.
Grant slid back the cockpit cover and pulled himself out of the pilot’s seat and onto one of the wings. Out of his seat, he looked even bigger, with the broad shoulders and long reach of a champion heavyweight. His body was encased in a formfitting shadow suit over which he had added pants and his old magistrate boots. Grant had been a magistrate once like his partner Kane, the two of them working the beat together in Cobaltville until the day they became caught up in a conspiracy whose tentacles reached into every aspect of human history. On that day, Grant had relinquished his position and joined Kane as an outlander, a man with no ville allegiance. Together, the two men had joined the nascent Cerberus organization in their quest to set right the wrongs that were being done to humankind. Alongside their colleague Brigid Baptiste, they had proved unconquerable to any number of foes intent on enslaving the human race.
Crouched on the wing, Grant reached back into the cockpit for Shizuka, helping the dainty samurai woman from her seat before delving into the cockpit once again to retrieve his coat. Grant favored a black leather-style duster coat that reached almost to his ankles. While the coat appeared to be made from leather, it was in fact woven from Kevlar, making it heavier than normal and able to dull the impact of a bullet. In Grant’s line of work one could never be too sure when stopping a bullet might become necessary, and the coat had helped save his life more than once.
Grant had settled the Manta on a flat expanse of ground and, together, he and Shizuka made their way down its sloping wing and onto the rough ground below that stood at the edge of the smoldering remains of the armaments factory. The factory was a blackened mess now. A big section was caved in down to the foundations, while other parts remained standing but merely as blackened shells, the walls torn and ragged, struts protruding at odd angles where once they had marked production lines, storage rooms and conveyor-belt units. To the far side, a whole section remained largely intact, its walls charred black from where the fire had raged. And naturally the entire place stank of burning, so much so that Grant put his hand over his nose as he stifled a cough. Grant had been here less than two weeks before, when he and his teammates had put paid to the schemes of one Jerod Pellerito, an arms dealer who was profiting from the turmoil wrought by the recent chaos in the villes.
Located out here between the mountain peaks, the factory had been inaccessible to all but the most determined. That was the way Pellerito had wanted it, ensuring none of his competitors in the illegal arms trade could sneak up on him and make a smash-and-grab. Almost every transaction had been conducted by helicopter, creating a kind of natural buffer zone from sneaky approaches. It had also meant that when the place had burned, no one had much wanted to stick around to wait for the fires to go out.
The place must have burned for days. For days and days and days, the heat so fierce that none could approach. Even now, the ruins smoldered, dark patches of smoke clinging close to the ground, fluttering away like birds on the wing.
It was little surprise that the factory had crumbled like a house of cards. The place had been built hastily to cheap specifications. Grant’s field team had done a swift and effective job of exploding the bomb store within before they departed, leaving Pellerito and his crew high and dry, alive but out of the illegal arms trade—at least until they could secure a new source of product.
There had been a lot of little battles like this lately. In fact, they had been part and parcel of the Cerberus op for as long as Grant could remember, bringing an end to profiteers in misery, be it Billy-boy Porpoise down on the Florida coast or Papa Hurbon and his psychotic voodoo madness out in the Louisiana marshlands. Whatever alien plots might arise from outside the atmosphere, it seemed man remained quite capable of devising new and devilish ways to hurt his brethren.
The wind channeled up the valley with a banshee howl, churning up flecks of ash and making them dance on the air in elaborate swirling patterns. It resembled a swarm of insects hovering just a few feet above the ground, as if pollinating the bomb site; the macabre pollinators of destruction.
Grant led the way toward one of the standing structures, remaining alert to the possible presence of others.
“You really did a number on this place, huh, Grant-san?” Shizuka said as she waded through the ankle-deep ashes of the north edge of the factory.
“Blame Kane,” Grant told her. “It was his idea.”
Shizuka looked around, making a show of admiring the wanton destruction that had leveled a vast chunk of the factory and left the rest uninhabitable. “Yup, that’s what the evidence indicates,” she teased. “Kane sure does like to be subtle, doesn’t he?”
Grant didn’t respond. He was busy thinking about Kane, wondering how his brother-in-arms was getting along in Hope without him.
The thing about setting off a bomb in a munitions factory is that it sets off everything it touches, which in turn sets off everything that
that
touches, and so on. Before you know it, you have a raging fire with explosions going off left, right and center. Looking around, Grant figured that at its peak the fire had probably topped one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. As such, it was a surprise to see that a good third of the factory appeared to have survived, though there was smoke damage running up its walls.
Grant slogged through the knee-deep ash, making his way toward the remaining section. Behind him, Shizuka was kicking her way through the mounds of ash, searching for evidence of anything that hadn’t been damaged, anything worth taking. There were a few shards of metal, the metal skeleton of a swivel chair, a couple of handblasters that had survived the explosions intact, albeit with their tooling melted to an amorphous mess across their surfaces. It was reassuring, finding the blasters here like that—it suggested that no one had been back to check the place over for whatever they could scavenge.
Kicking soot over one of the pistols, Shizuka looked up, admiring Grant’s impressive form as he strode into the section of the factory that was still standing. Despite his size, Grant moved like a jungle cat, silent, his muscles in a sleek, almost liquid flow. He stepped through the charred remains of a doorway, and she watched him go before following moments later.
The remaining area was made up of a few walled sections, and a cursory glance suggested to Grant that it was largely a storage area for the various products that the factory had been producing. The rooms were arranged a little like a honeycomb, small containment areas each holding their own product type. Grant stepped into one at random, picking up a box containing newly minted pistols, flipping through the box’s contents with swift disinterest. It was strictly professional, his being here, just like his days as a magistrate. The explosions had done too much damage to leave anything worth the effort of recovering for Cerberus—even guns like these were valueless without ammunition.
Grant tossed the box back on its shelf and stepped back out of the room. Shizuka was waiting a little way down what remained of the smoke-damaged corridor, a sooty streak across her nose, a smile on her lips.
“Find anything?” she asked.
“Blasters, a stash of knives, some other crap,” Grant told her. “Nothing we need. But maybe someone else does, so I’m tending toward the opinion that we should set a new round of charges here before we leave.”
“Could have just bombed it from the air,” Shizuka reasoned.
“And hit some family hiding out here for shelter from the cold desert nights? Leave some kid an orphan?” Grant shook his head. “No. It’s a pain in the ass, but we have to check these things.”
Shizuka nodded, and she skipped the remaining steps to meet him, reaching for Grant as he turned to check what the next area held. Grant turned back and found Shizuka looking up into his eyes, admiration in her eyes. “That’s why I love you, Grant-san,” she said. “That’s why I love you.”
* * *
O
NE
FLOOR
ABOVE
,
three people were standing around a computer terminal, illuminated by its jury-rigged screen. The computer was blackened with smoke damage and the terminal had melted along one side, leaving the plastic in a smear. From the way the melting droplets had solidified, at a glance they appeared to be still dripping.