“Wake up,” Brigid urged herself as the sky began losing coherence and the ocean fragmented into great glitching blocks of color and reverberating sound. “Wake up now.”
The sky went dark one final time and Brigid peered through the windshield as a series of lit dots stuttered across the blank canvas.
+++ Data feed down +++
+++ Program aborted +++
* * *
A
ND
THEN
SHE
was awake.
She lay on a cot in the dream factory, beneath the depending wires of the engine feed, the stink of sweat assaulting her nostrils as a wake-up call. Around her, the other five participants of the dream were coming around, trembling in place as their dreams broke down, legs kicking in myoclonic twitch. Sitting up, Brigid looked at them, left and right, as she brushed the gummed thinkpads from her forehead. They didn’t know what had happened, couldn’t process it yet.
Brigid leaned over the side of the cot, placing her booted feet on the floor. It hurt. Her head was abuzz with glist, the trace of disorientation echoing through her mind as the dream reality—the
traum wirklichkeit
—faded.
Automatically, she checked for movement, alert for enemies, for the people who ran this joint. No one moved. Brigid peered about more slowly, her eyes struggling to take everything in, as if she had been violently awoken from a deep sleep. In a way, she had.
The room was dimly lit just like she recalled, a azure glow emanating from beneath the benches where the dreamers lay, the strip of jade flecks in a ring above her where the dream engine slinked into the ceiling. Beside her, the other dream engine remained intact, its half dozen users still fast asleep enjoying the interactive motion play they found themselves in, oblivious to the real world just an eyelid’s width away.
Brigid wore a ragged poncho over her shadow suit, its frayed edges stained with dirt, a rip in one side coming down from around her right elbow. The rip looked haphazard, but it was deliberate, leaving her freedom of movement in her gun hand. She had no weapon, though. She could not have infiltrated this op posing as a refugee if she’d tried to walk in here armed. Besides the poncho, she wore skintight black gloves and boots whose heels hid tiny explosive charges behind a secret panel, similar to the one Kane had used against the back door to this facility.
She had been awake thirty seconds before she spotted Kane’s naked body lying before the illuminated counter that glowed along one wall of the room.
“Kane,” Brigid gasped, forcing herself to stand.
He was lying on the floor in a fetal position, resting on his right flank, a dark bruise showing down his left. He had a Sin Eater pistol resting in his hand, his palm open where he had held it.
Brigid scanned the area as she ran to him, making certain she wasn’t about to be ambushed. There was no one else about, only the dreamers who were still locked into the two towering dream engines. Even the waiting patrons had left, no doubt alarmed by the firefight that had exploded through the room between Kane and the others.
A moment later Brigid was crouching at Kane’s side, checking the dark patch beneath his rib cage. It was just a bruise where something had hit him with some force. But he was breathing, the rise and fall of his chest visible even in the poor light of the room.
They had history, these two, not just as field partners but something much deeper. It was called
anam-charas,
or “soul friends,” a spiritual bond that existed between them outside the bounds of time, drawing them back together again and again with each turn of the cosmic wheel. Whatever incarnation they found themselves in, Brigid and Kane always came together, always watching out for one another, protecting one another and forming something greater than the sum of their parts. It was love of a sort, though they were not lovers. Their bond was deeper than that, a synergy of souls entwined. Whatever the bond was, however it manifested, it made them a formidable pairing in this incarnation, this roll of the cosmic dice.
Brigid heard a noise then, alerting her to a movement off to her right. She looked, saw a door there like the lid on a metal canister. The door creaked back and a figure came through, swaying woozily as if disoriented.
“Red Mama, I got clocked outside by some...” the man began before stopping and looking around the room in bewilderment. “Red?”
Brigid reached for Kane’s blaster and rolled, scrambling for cover. The man in the doorway spotted the movement, called out.
“Hey, what the fuck happened in here? Where’s Red?”
Brigid crouched down, her back to one of the dream engines, checking the Sin Eater.
Blast,
the thing was empty. Wasn’t that just typical of Kane, to fall asleep before he could reload his pistol?
“Who is that?” the stranger was demanding as he strode into the room. His voice had a nasal quality and he sniffed wetly between each sentence. “What happened to Red? Alana, honey?”
The man was dressed in rags with a kerchief over his face that left only his eyes visible. The kerchief was stained with blood, dark and wet where Kane had broken his nose. Brigid saw him reach for something beneath his ragged cloak, pull loose a blaster with an eighteen-inch barrel.
“What?” the man asked, anger filling his voice. “You think I can’t see you?”
An instant later the man shot, sending a bullet rocketing toward Brigid. It struck the dream engine, ricocheting from it in a burst of sparks. Beside her, one of the waking dreamers brought his hands up to protect his face. “Am I... Is this still the dream?” he asked.
Brigid ignored him, leaping to her feet and casting the Sin Eater aside. She had no chance of reloading the weapon here, couldn’t begin to guess where Kane’s belongings had wound up. Instead she ran, using the nearest dream engine for cover as the alleyway guard took potshots at her. The bullets cut through the blue-lit air in sapphire trails, glinting as they crossed through the light before embedding themselves in the far wall with determined thumps.
Brigid whipped across the low-lit room, her poncho billowing out behind her as she weaved between the dream engines to the rhythm of discharging bullets.
“Keep still, you bitch,” the triggerman snarled as he tracked Brigid between the water-lily-like constructs.
There was just one dream engine between them now, the dreamers still fast asleep and locked in their private pleasures. Brigid raised her leg high and stepped up onto the nearest stretcherlike cot before vaulting into the air. She reached out as she sprang, grabbing the jutting base of the power unit above her, the thing that drove the dream engine. Her black-gloved hands held tight, lifting her through the air like a gymnast on the bars even as the startled gunman sent a barrage of bullets toward her.
Brigid swung, her lithe body whipping through the air like a thrown knife, legs stretched out, booted feet pointed. In a moment she had brought herself around the ceiling unit of the dream engine to face her attacker before letting go and racing toward him like an arrow, feetfirst.
The gunman blasted again, sending a bullet past Brigid’s thigh and up into the rafters of the room as she struck him full force in the center of his chest. The gunman fell back with all the grace of a tossed stone, dropping down and back and striking both wall and floor at the same time, his legs bent under him. Brigid went, too, tucking and rolling off the body as they landed in a heap. She was on her feet again within a second, and she turned with arms poised in a fighting stance, facing her would-be killer. He lay in a heap against the wall, disoriented, his nose bleeding once more where the wound had reopened.
“Wha—? What happen—?” the gunman asked, his eyes wandering as he tried to focus.
Leaning down, Brigid palm-slapped the man’s forehead, driving his head against the wall in a resounding thump. “Back to sleep for you, bugaboo,” she told him. “And remember to dream nice.”
Still catching her breath, Brigid made a swift circuit of the room and the building beyond, confirming there were no more surprises lurking the way the alleyway gunman had appeared from the back room. She found the three dead bodies of the people who ran the dream factory, and the room of muties in cages. The guard from the alleyway had come through this way, but he had had the good sense to pull the door closed behind him, which meant that while the lock had been ruined by Kane’s explosive charge, at least the place looked secure from a cursory glance. The surprised dreamers remained disoriented, and Brigid assured them that medical attention would be arriving shortly.
Assured that she was safe, Brigid activated her Commtact and hailed Cerberus headquarters. “Cerberus, this is Brigid,” she began. The Commtact was a radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin of most Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, courtesy of the Commtact device.
The Commtact blurted to life beneath Brigid’s skin, the familiar voice of Brewster Philboyd echoing through her ear canal. “Go ahead, Brigid.”
“Operation Dream Thief is a success,” Brigid said, “but the place is unsecured. Can you get our team over here ASAP?”
“Copy that, Brigid,” Brewster assured her. “Will do.”
“We’ll also need a medical team here, if possible, Brew,” Brigid added.
“You have casualties?” Brewster asked with concern in his voice.
“Some of the dreamers are a little shaken up,” Brigid explained, “and Kane’s tripping on something, probably a lungful of glist.”
“He okay?”
Brigid’s glance turned to the naked figure sprawled on the floor. “He’ll live,” she concluded. He would. There were no bullet holes and he was still breathing normally. He would be fine.
Close by, hidden in one of the tumbledown shacks that made up Hope’s refugee village, a Cerberus mop-up team was waiting to go into action. Brigid guessed they would have just a few hours to clean this place of tech before other scavengers arrived, eager to take possession of the old military computers and acquire this location for their own outfit. It was dog-eat-dog out there right now, and the only way for Cerberus to survive was to be a smarter dog than all the others. Of course, according to myth, Cerberus was a dog with multiple heads—it seemed only fitting that its agents were celebrating a triumph here.
Chapter 7
Grant looked up as he heard the noise, his preternatural hearing honed from long years as a hard-contact mag, where such alertness meant the difference between life and death.
“Shizuka?” he hissed. “You hear something?”
The samurai woman Shizuka was working through a pile of blackened rubble, clambering over it with perfect balance despite its unsteady nature. She turned back to Grant and smiled ever so slightly. “Should I have, Grant-san?” she asked. “Did you prepare a candlelit dinner after all?”
But Grant shook his head briefly, cutting her words to silence. They were in a wide corridor that had once been used as a garage for storing the newly built choppers and armored wags that Jerod Pellerito and his team had been constructing here on an assembly line. The burned-out husks of several road vehicles remained, their windshields strewed across the stone-tiled floor in tiny shards of shattered glass.
Grant’s right hand was already tensing with anticipation, threatening to draw out the Sin Eater pistol that he wore beneath the sleeve of his jacket. Shizuka saw the movement, placed her hand on the pommel of the sword she wore at her hip. Her eyes met Grant’s, an unvoiced query clear in her expression.
Grant shook his head, still listening. He had heard something just then, a high trilling like a woman’s laughter. The laughter was quiet, as though it was distant...or from someone trying and failing to muffle the noise.
“Who’s there?” Grant called, the Sin Eater powering into his hand.
Behind him, Shizuka drew the
katana
from its sheath, twenty-five inches of tooled steel like a mirrored scar in the air. She raced down the pile of rubble in a light-footed scamper to join Grant, the sword raised protectively. “I don’t see anyone,” she whispered as she took up a position beside him, standing back to back.
“Me, either,” Grant told her. His body was tense now, muscles ready, and he had adopted a bent-legged stance, better to absorb any impact should they be attacked.
This factory had been built and run by an illicit arms-dealing cartel. If one of their number had come back, it wouldn’t take much for them to recognize Grant and seek revenge on him.
“Come nearer, nearer yet.” A woman’s voice echoed through the ruined factory wing. “I have a story for your ear.”
Grant spun on his heel, locating the source as the woman stepped through a blackened wall with a hole burned in its center. “So come and sit beside me,” she sang.
Grant stared at her, not knowing what to make of this vision. The woman wore strange clothes, beautiful but ancient, like a debutante at a Victorian-era ball. She had blond hair that trailed down her back and she wore a long dress that seemed to switch between pink and blue with every step she took into the wide corridor. Grant held her determinedly in his sights, the Sin Eater poised in a two-handed grip. She was twenty feet from where he stood with Shizuka.
“You want to tell me who the fuck you are?” Grant demanded.
“...come and listen, mother dear,” the blonde woman finished, before looking at Grant as if for the first time. Her eyebrows rose in surprise and she waggled one exquisitely gloved finger at him. “Such language,” she said, “will never do.” Her accent was cut-glass English, and the way she said things made it sound as though she was chastising a child.
“Hands where I can see them,” Grant ordered, gesturing with the gun. “Up high, over your head.”
Smiling, the woman raised her hands very slowly above her head. The way she did it felt more like a strip tease than a surrender; it was all Grant could do to stop his mind wandering.
“So tell me—” the woman began.
“I’ll ask the questions here,” Grant told her.
“Do you like girls or do you like boys?” the woman finished, ignoring him. “It’s so confusing oftentimes.”
Grant ignored her question, pacing warily forward and keeping the blaster aimed at her chest. “Have you been waiting here all this time? Watching us? Where did you come from?”
The woman smiled with all the warmth of a shark’s grin. “I asked first,” she stated. Grant stared at her, and when he didn’t answer she went on. “Your skin’s so dark—does it hurt?”
“What the—?” Grant began.
But Shizuka cut him off. “Grant-san—we have a second, at your six. Male, Caucasian, six foot plus, blond hair.”
Grant continued to watch the woman. “How’s...how’s he dressed?”
“Oddly,” Shizuka admitted. “Like something out of an old play.”
“What is it?” Grant asked the blonde woman, raising his voice to address her. “A boyfriend-girlfriend thing? You come here and dress up to get your kicks?”
The blond-haired woman snorted and showed her perfect teeth once more. “Oh, Algie and I are not boyfriend and girlfriend. Lovers, frequently—but never boyfriend and girlfriend. How frightfully plebeian.”
As the mesmerizing woman spoke, something caught Grant’s eye from above them, and he glanced that way. There was a broken catwalk up there that had, at one time, led to some offices where the accounts and organizational side of the operation had been located. There was a figure up there now, a woman, wearing a dress like the blonde’s. Only, hers was cream, her hair long and dark. She made no effort to hide, standing at the edge of the catwalk and peering over.
“Shizuka,” Grant whispered. “We have another—high up at your nine.”
Shizuka’s hair swished around as she glanced where Grant had indicated, sword never wavering. “I see her.”
“I like both,” the blonde woman continued, and Grant’s eyes flicked back to her. “Girls and boys, that is. There are so many combinations, aren’t there?”
“What are you people doing here?” Grant demanded.
“Here?” It was a man’s voice, and not the one whom Shizuka faced, no. This one came from over to Grant’s left, striding through the ruined archway of the garage door in a swirl of wine-red coat that fell about him almost like a cape. “Why, do you own this place? Are we intruders?” he asked. The accent was polished English again. Just where the hell did these people come from?
Grant eyed the man warily. In less than two minutes, he and Shizuka had been surrounded, boxed in within the wide garage space of the abandoned factory. He shifted his aim for a moment, bringing the gun over to cover the man in the red coat.
“Hands up in the air,” Grant ordered.
“And why would I do that?” the man asked, raising his hands only high enough to gesture, waving them before him as if brushing something aside. He was tall, Grant saw, with wavy dark hair that trailed down past the collar of the high-buttoned white shirt he wore beneath the satinlike coat.
“Because I’ll put a bullet in your head if you don’t,” Grant told him. “Final warning.”
“I’m Cecily,” the blonde woman announced, her voice loud in the enclosed space.
“Yes.” The dark-maned man nodded. “We have rather been overlooking our manners. I’m Hugh. My friends—Algernon, Antonia and Cecily—you know.” He still had not put his hands over his head, but they remained on show at least.
“Grant,” Grant said, “and Shizuka. Now, this here is off-limits. Used to be a munitions factory until it got shut down a coupla weeks ago.” He made no mention of his part in that termination; until he knew what these people were doing here, he would rather keep that aspect secret. “Place got blown up but there’s still a lot of dangerous junk hanging around. You need to watch your step.”
“You make it sound frightfully more interesting than it is,” the man called Hugh stated. “Would you perhaps have a role to play here?”
“No role,” Grant said. “Just don’t like seeing people get hurt.”
“Ah.” Hugh sighed, raising one hand to his brow and brushing away a rogue lock of hair. “But, you see, there must always be suffering to create art. Isn’t that so, Antonia?”
From up above, the dark-haired woman voiced agreement. “Suffering is the fuel of the great artist,” she said. “The greater the suffering, the greater the art.”
Grant didn’t like where this was going. These people showed no fear of his blaster, and the way they spoke was strange, supercilious, as if they were mocking him. “I’m going to ask you all to leave,” he said. “There may still be radioactive material around....”
“Really?” Hugh interrupted, clearly intrigued now, where he had been barely enduring the conversation before. “And would you happen to know where such material might be? It seems we require such for a little project I’m...considering.”
Grant held his gun steady, watching the dandy through narrowed eyes. “I’m politely asking you and your friends here to leave,
Hugh,
” he said, emphasizing the name almost as if it was a curse. “I didn’t see any vehicles out there, so I don’t know if you had some way of getting here, but trust me, it’s in your interests to leave. This place is marked for demolition—today.”
“Oh,” Cecily groaned, “how tedious. I thought new people would be interesting, but this one’s so tense he’s no fun.”
“No fun at all,” Antonia agreed from the catwalk.
“Silly’s right, Hugh,” the blond-haired man opined, his voice echoing from the far end of the high-ceilinged room. “We’ve been out for far too long to just stand around and converse with simpletons.”
Shizuka bristled. “Simpletons? Did he just call us...?”
Hugh began laughing loudly at that. “You speak English,” he said between loud guffaws. “Oh, how very splendid. That makes it all so much easier.”
It was as if that was a cue. The four oddly dressed strangers were suddenly moving, closing in toward Grant and Shizuka, the woman who had been on the catwalk leaping down with pantherlike grace. Grant estimated that the drop was twelve feet or more, yet the woman landed with uncommon ease, barely bending her legs beneath the billowing skirts of her dress. Such a move spoke of exceptional muscular discipline and power.
“I don’t like how this is developing,” Grant said in a warning tone, “so I’m going to ask you all to back off and keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Why?” Cecily asked as she paced toward him. “So that you may shoot us?”
“I’d just as soon not,” Grant began, but the beautiful figure of Cecily took another step, her allies doing likewise.
The four wended toward Grant and Shizuka, walking not straight but in a circling pattern, hemming them in where they stood. Grant watched as the dark-haired man called Hugh reached for something inside his jacket pocket.
“Don’t do that,” Grant warned.
But Hugh Danner did it anyway. A moment later he had produced a gun from his pocket, a gun like nothing Grant had ever seen before. It was the length of a pistol, but it was shaped in a crescent, designed so that the wielder’s hand held it at one end, a little like a banana. The weapon was constructed of metal with a single wide barrel. The sides, however, were not sleek—rather, they featured vents and pipe work that seemed to be employed in the weapon’s discharge, presumably to filter the heat that it generated away from the user. “Let us do the dance of war and beauty, shall we?” the man asked in his accent.
Grant was a crack shot, and he aimed his own blaster on the weapon, snapping off a quick shot. His bullet pinged from the weapon’s frame as Hugh raised it, almost as if he was using the weapon as a shield. Grant saw something shimmer in the air as the bullet struck, a circle of shimmering sparks like the explosion of a distant firework.
There was no time to process what he had seen, however. An instant after the bullet was flicked out of the air, the two women came upon Grant, their skirts fluttering around them in a sea of silks.
That was it, Grant reasoned—he had given more than enough warnings and offered more than enough chances for these people to retreat. In a split second, Grant squeezed the trigger of his Sin Eater, sending a second 9 mm bullet whipping through the air and striking the charging blonde woman just below her left kneecap.
The woman called Cecily tumbled to the ground with the impact, and her companions froze like children playing a game of statues. Cecily lay there, facedown on the ground, her layers of petticoats and skirts arrayed around her like an explosion.
“Sorry ’bout that,” Grant said aloud. “That’ll be a flesh wound, nothing she won’t recover from. Now, maybe when I ask you to leave...”
Behind him, Algernon began to laugh, and the other two joined in. The laughter had a false ring to it, as if done as performance, something produced on cue out of politeness.
“Come now, Cecily,” the other woman—Antonia—said as she strode toward her fallen colleague, “stop playacting.”
Grant felt something cold and hard in the pit of his stomach as he watched the blonde girl roll over and begin to laugh.
“Did you see?” the blonde asked, clearly delighted. “Did I appear hurt? Were you convinced? Oh, tell me you were, Antonia. I don’t think I could bear another failed performance after flubbing my lines in Hugh’s darling
Night Versus Day.
”
The two men, Hugh and Algernon, began to applaud, Hugh still clutching the weird blaster he had produced. The sound of their clapping was loud and eerie in the abandoned factory.
“Bravo,” Hugh said. “A bravura performance, Cecily, dear.”
From her spot on the ground, Cecily plucked something from the floor and held it aloft. “Look,” she said, “the beastly man threw this at me.” It was the bullet from Grant’s gun.
Antonia shrugged, the flawless skin of her bare shoulders moving like ripples across cream. “Well, perhaps you should return it to the beastly man,” she proposed.
“Oh, yes,” Cecily agreed. “Yes, I shall. I so very shall.”
Still standing his ground, Grant reared back a little as the woman called Cecily skewered him with her sapphire-blue eyes, a thin smile on her lips. Then she raised her gloved hand and flicked the bullet back to Grant with such velocity that he almost didn’t see it, just a single glint of light catching the bullet’s silver shell. The bullet raced past not much higher than Grant’s ankle, at the exact same height that it had struck Cecily.
“You missed him,” Antonia said with amused surprise. “He’s a very large target—there’s really no excuse.”
“Then help me,” Cecily said with a sort of casual disinterest.