Grant did not know what he and Shizuka had walked into here. He couldn’t really make any sense of these people and their strange clothes and their odd accents and mannerisms. The situation had spun out of his control in just a minute, going from odd to decidedly threatening. The woman in the pink-and-blue dress had been hit by the bullet, he felt sure. If she hadn’t, she would not have been able to pick it up from the spot where she had fallen. Was she wearing armor maybe? Could the bullet have struck that before dropping to the floor? From her speech, it seemed there were theatrics involved. Grant just couldn’t see where they came in—not yet anyway.
“Stand firm,” Grant told Shizuka as the well-spoken strangers paced slowly toward them, cutting off all routes of escape.
Now he and Shizuka were forced to stand their ground, Grant knew, and he could only hope that these people didn’t have reinforcements waiting in another part of the ruined factory. Enough bullets, less theatrics, and maybe they would get through this without too much trouble. But after what the blonde had done, that seemed suddenly like a very big maybe.
The two women were charging at Grant. Behind him, Grant heard Shizuka issue an irritated grunt as her own foe, the blond-haired Algernon, met with her.
Grant ducked as the first woman threw a straight-handed punch at his head. The woman’s open palm cut through the air with a
whoosh,
blurring with the incredible speed of the movement.
Grant kicked out, driving his right foot sideward and into the blonde woman’s left knee. It was not by chance that he had aimed his blow at the same spot where he had shot her, and he felt a grim satisfaction as she cried out and fell backward.
“He’s strong, this one,” Cecily announced proudly. “Is he one of us, after all? His skin is so dark.”
Already the other woman, the brunette Antonia, had set upon Grant, her arms stretching out to either side before bringing the blades of her hands together on either side of his skull.
Grant staggered back with the blow, shook his head to force the pain away. Antonia’s blow had been brutal, and it left his ears ringing.
Behind him, Shizuka found herself facing Algernon, whose leaf-green coat hid a polelike blade that extended in the manner of a car antenna.
“Are you seeking employment?” Algernon asked as he parried Shizuka’s swishing blade with his own. “I imagine that with the right makeup you could be quite pretty. The theater, perhaps?”
Fencing his blade away, Shizuka whipped her elbow up and drove it into the man’s smug face. “I already have a job,” she told him as he toppled backward.
“That’s delightful,” Algernon told her as he brought his strange sticklike blade up in a ready position once more. He used it like an épée, his stance like that of an old-fashioned fencer. “One should always have an occupation. I hear that smoking is a popular occupation in London, but I myself could never quite get to grips with the pipe.”
Shizuka ignored his words, batting aside his silver blade and forcing him back to the ashy pile of waste that lay behind him. Algernon stepped onto it, discovered it was rather less stable than he had expected.
“My own fault,” Algernon continued as he balanced on the teetering trash. “The doctor always emphasized how I never did apply myself. Of course, he wouldn’t say that now—not after I killed him.”
Shizuka’s
katana
cut through the air in a chest-high swoop, but her well-attired foe moved faster, leaning just clear of the blade’s arc before stepping forward once more. Shizuka was on the unstable pile of ruins now, too, and she found it harder to get power into her blows as she struggled to keep her balance.
From behind her, shocking Shizuka, a thick beam of red light cut the air with the sound of an erupting volcano. The beam passed by just a foot from Shizuka’s shoulder and she felt its crippling heat even then. Shizuka leaped and spun to find the source of the heat beam, saw the dark-haired Hugh holding his blaster at her with effete indifference. When she caught his eye, he smiled and nodded. “Just adding to the fun,” he called to her over the sounds of battle.
The lance of the heat beam had momentarily distracted Shizuka. Algernon grabbed the advantage, lunging his épéelike blade at Shizuka’s chest, striking a fierce blow against her ribs.
Shizuka’s sense of balance was flawless, but even a warrior born needed something stable to push against to get power into their strikes. Algernon, by contrast, seemed to need no such stability with his more elastic weapon. His weapon flexed like a cord as he whipped it toward Shizuka’s face, cutting the air with a high-pitched hum. Shizuka felt the flexible blade slap against her left cheek, flinched as a line of pain instantly began to throb there.
Her foe did not hesitate. Algernon brought the cordlike blade around again, whipping in a full circle until it struck Shizuka low in the legs. Its tensile strength was akin to a steel girder, and the strike snagged Shizuka’s legs up into the air even as she toppled forward.
Shizuka reached out with her free hand, planting it hard against the mound of ash and soot and rolling over into a ball with her
katana
close to her side. Algernon leaped from the mound, his strange blade-cum-whip drawing a circle in the air as he bounded toward Shizuka’s fallen form. “I do so hope your profession does not involve swordplay, dear lady,” he taunted, “for I fear you have been found lacking.”
With those words, the heel of Algie’s tooled shoe struck Shizuka’s fallen form high in the chest, sinking his whole weight upon her and forcing the breath from her lungs.
Shizuka shrieked in agony, gnashing her teeth together as her cruel foe sprang away.
Close by, Grant was receiving similar treatment at the hands of the two women. Antonia struck multiple times and with such speed that Grant had no opportunity to recover, let alone fight back. From an observer’s point of view, the engagement didn’t even look like a fight. Instead it appeared more like a school bully attacking the class wimp, forcing the smaller boy to hit himself again and again in the face.
Grant felt himself go down, but in his dizziness he could not figure out how. The other woman was upon him now, while the man with the blaster paced closer to watch. Grant was hit from all sides, the Sin Eater useless in such close quarters. Grant was strong, but these people were relentless, and their speed, coupled with their strength, made it impossible for him to get a blow in. He sank into the ash amid a flurry of beautiful skirts, lay disoriented, gazing up at the sooty ceiling as the women watched him.
“Now, then,” Hugh began, “what art shall we make of him?”
Grant saw the man’s strange blaster enter his field of vision.
“What about inside-art?” Antonia proposed. “Red things, the color of life.”
Hugh pressed his weapon to Grant’s gut and pulled the trigger. With a hum, the odd-looking blaster emitted an orange beam of heat, which Grant could feel even through his shadow suit.
“Nyaaaaaaagggghhh!” Grant screamed as the pain racked through his body, vibrating his very atoms as he juddered in place, quivering on the floor like a jumping jack. The scream passed in a moment, and after that he just strained to cling to consciousness as the pain pressed against his chest. For a moment he lay there, feeling that heat against his belly until finally he passed out.
Grant was unconscious when it finally stopped as Hugh switched off the heat beam. “It doesn’t work, Algie,” Hugh declared. “Your heat brush doesn’t work.”
“It repelled his bullet, didn’t it?” Algernon called from where he stood before the fallen figure of Shizuka. She was barely conscious, looking up at him from her position sprawled on the floor.
While Algernon examined Hugh’s blaster, the two women peered at Shizuka.
“Oh, she’s pretty,” Cecily said.
“I like her eyes—they remind me of a cat’s,” Antonia observed. “A Siamese cat. The type that hiss.”
Cecily closed her eyes as if in thought. Down on the floor, Shizuka felt something press against her thoughts, as if a blade had been sunk into the crown of her skull. “What...are y—?” she muttered, but the words wouldn’t form properly and her thoughts seemed to jumble even as she tried to grasp them.
“I like her mind,” Cecily said, opening her eyes once more. “It’s fresh and exotic. I like its flavor. You should taste it.”
Antonia closed her eyes, too, and Shizuka felt the uncanny sensation again as something rummaged through her thoughts, sieving through her brain. Shizuka whimpered at the feeling of irritation. It felt like a cut in her gum, only the gum was inside her skull, and the cut was very, very large. Her teeth clenched as she tried to repel the mental intruder, and runnels of blood began to stream slowly from her ears. Shizuka felt the heat of the blood down her face, felt tears mixed with blood weep from her eyes, but still the pain would not stop. In a moment, she had blacked out, her face streaked with her own blood.
“Come now,” Hugh instructed as he paced over to where the women stood amid the soot and rubble.
“Her mind is so sweet and different,” Cecily said.
“Isn’t it just,” Antonia agreed, her eyes flicking open again as she disconnected from Shizuka’s thoughts.
“Can I take it?” Cecily asked with girlish glee.
“No, leave the foreigner with it,” Hugh advised. “She means nothing by her strange ways.”
Cecily pouted. “But she thinks she’s a warrior. They both do.”
“Antonia once thought she was a poet, do you remember?” Algernon said archly.
“‘My love, alack—alack, my love. Your kisses rain from heav’n above,’” Cecily recited, and they all laughed, while Antonia had the good grace to blush delightfully.
“Enough of this,” Hugh said as the laughter faded. “This world is so broken, it shames me to be a part of it.”
“We came here for a reason, old man,” Algernon reminded him. “The craft is ready, finished it not an hour ago.”
Hugh accepted this with a nod. “I found something, too. Plans for a device that creates a mushroom of smoke.”
“That sounds enchanting, Hugh, dear,” Cecily squealed.
“Let’s take your craft on a test flight,” Hugh told Algernon, leading the way from the burned-out garage. “We have a new empire to build. A great empire, steeped in finery and frivolity, the only things that matter. We shall be an example to every country on Earth. Let them follow where we lead.”
Together the foursome left, an empire just waiting to be constructed from their mind’s eye.
Chapter 8
Kane had recovered both his clothes and his senses and he had returned with Brigid Baptiste to their base in the Bitterroot Mountains while the mop-up team came in and stripped the Hope dream factory of its assets.
“If I never see this place again, it’ll be too soon,” Kane told Baptiste as they took one last look at the refugee camp that had overtaken Hope.
“Seconded,” Brigid agreed as she recovered the interphaser unit that would teleport them back home to the Cerberus redoubt.
The Cerberus installation was built into one of the mountains in the Montana range, hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military redoubt high in the Bitterroot Range, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their dark foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, the vast many of whom were cryogenic “freezies” from the twentieth century who had been discovered in suspended animation in the Manitius Moon Base, and many of whom were experts in their chosen field 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 data for the Cerberus personnel. Gaining access to the satellites had taken countless man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Now the Cerberus staff could, at any time of the day or night, draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. This arrangement supplied a near-limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe.
“Steady, Kane,” Brigid warned as she and Kane materialized in the redoubt’s mat-trans unit, which was a glass-walled structure in an antechamber to the Cerberus operations hub. “You look awfully green.”
Although they had materialized in the mat-trans chamber, the two Cerberus field agents had traveled here via a similar but different system of matter transfer—utilizing a device called an interphaser. Standing twelve inches tall and pyramidical in shape with glossy, metallic sides, the interphaser utilized alien technology that could tap into naturally occurring energy pathways and move people through space to specific locations. While more amenable than the human-designed mat-trans, the esoteric technology of the interphaser was not fully understood. The full gamut of those limitations had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful hidden lines stretching across the globe and beyond, called parallax points. This network followed old ley lines and formed a powerful technology so far beyond ancient human comprehension as to appear magical. In some ways, the interphaser operated along the same principles as the mat-trans, but its logic was more ethereal to modern eyes. Though fixed, the interphaser’s destination points were often located in temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious value. On Thunder Isle, the Cerberus personnel had discovered the Parallax Points Program, which documented these points around the globe. That data had been manually input into the interphaser unit, thus affording the Cerberus field teams access to points around the globe and even in outer space.
Cerberus personnel’s access to an operational interphaser was the combined work of Brigid Baptiste and Cerberus scientist Brewster Philboyd, and had taken many months of trial and error to achieve.
Kane brushed away Brigid’s concerns with a brisk movement of his hand. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just still a little...out of it. I’ll be okay.”
The door to the hexagonal chamber opened with a hiss of released air. Like the walls of the chamber, the door featured a see-through armaglass panel colored a tan-brown. The antechamber opened immediately into the Cerberus operations room, busy as ever with staff who hurried about their business.
Well lit, the ops room featured twin rows of computer desks with a central walkway between them, at the back of which sat a supervisor’s area where Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh was, even now, getting to his feet to greet them. Besides the double rows of computer desks and the mat-trans chamber, the room held one item that caught the eye—a vast Mercator map that dominated the back wall over the exit doors, traceries of colored lights dotted across its surface like the flight paths of a busy airline. These dots represented the locations of active mat-trans units, which the Cerberus redoubt had originally been tasked with monitoring back in the latter part of the twentieth century, before nuclear devastation had set humankind back hundreds of years.
Commonly known simply as “Lakesh,” Cerberus’s leader was a man of medium height and build with dusky skin and slicked-back black hair brushed through with a few lines of silvery gray. Lakesh’s fine mouth and aquiline nose suggested a regal upbringing, while his eyes were an unusual vibrant blue. He appeared to be a man in his middle fifties but the reality was far more convoluted. Lakesh was, in fact, a transplant from the twentieth century when this facility had first been built. Indeed, as an accomplished cyberneticist and theoretical physicist, Lakesh had been a part of the research team that operated at this very base back in its first incarnation. A combination of cryogenics, organ transplant and alien technology had kept his body at roughly fifty-five years of age. And his prodigious mind remained razor-sharp. Like most of the personnel in the room, Lakesh was dressed in a white jumpsuit, down the center of which was a vertical blue zipper—the uniform of the Cerberus operation.
“My friends,” Lakesh began as he strode through the desks toward the opening mat-trans door. “It is good to have you home. It has been lonely, especially with Domi off scouting a mission in Brazil.” A smile crossed Lakesh’s face at the thought of his lover, Domi, the reckless child of the Outlands and fearless Cerberus operative. “How are you two? Brewster informs me your mission was a success.”
“It was,” Brigid agreed, shrugging out of the dirty poncho she had worn as disguise to infiltrate O’Shumper’s dream factory. “A field team is out there right now securing the equipment we require along with distributing medical supplies to those who need it.”
“And in Hope, there’s a lot of people who need it,” Kane groused, rubbing his aching side with his hand.
Lakesh eyed the younger man with concern. “Kane, you look to be in pain. What happened?”
“Accidentally got myself shot,” Kane admitted. “Shadow suit took care of it. Mostly.”
“Of course, that was before he got pumped full of glist and wound up lying naked on the floor crying for his mother,” Brigid added with a mischievous grin. “Your move,” she added, staring at Kane, the pleasure clear on her face.
“Is this true, my friend?” Lakesh asked, clearly concerned for his top field agent.
Kane nodded. “Apart from the ‘crying for my mother’ part. Where do you pluck these things from, Baptiste?”
Lakesh fixed Kane with a no-nonsense look. “Kane, I want you to see Reba immediately to check out that bullet wound—”
“It’s not a wound,” Kane corrected with evident irritation.
“And I also want her to do a full check for any residue from the hallucinogens,” Lakesh continued, ignoring Kane’s complaint. The look he gave Kane made it clear he would not be talked down on this point and, after a moment, Kane nodded and made his way to the room’s double doors, assuring both Lakesh and Brigid that he would be going straight to the infirmary, where the facility’s physician, Reba DeFore, would check him over.
As he passed the communications desk, Kane rapped his fingers against the side of the computer terminal where Brewster Philboyd sat engrossed in his work. “Good support out there, Brewster,” Kane thanked the man. “Your timing was perfect—your team were there for us inside four minutes.”
Brewster, a gangly man with receding blond hair and square-framed glasses over his acne-scarred cheeks, gave Kane an old-fashioned thumbs-up. “
De nada,
my friend.”
As Kane strode from the room, Brigid joined Lakesh at his desk, passing familiar faces as she made her way there. Besides Brewster Philboyd at the comms rig, Donald Bry—Lakesh’s ever-fretful shock-haired assistant—was sitting at one of the computer desks, taking the unit apart. Circuit boards, resistors and screws were spread all about him.
“Our technology is wearing out,” Lakesh said when he saw Brigid peering at the debris-strewed table. “More and more we are feeling the pinch of its age and the devastation wrought by he who shall not be named.”
Ullikummis was the person to whom Lakesh referred, the alien prince with delusions of grandeur who had managed to infiltrate the Cerberus redoubt, wreaking havoc and shutting down much of its technology. Only now were all systems operative again, and even then many of them were in a sorry state. It was this event that had forced Cerberus to seek replacement parts from places like the skanky dream factory operation on the West Coast.
“Well, for all it’s worth,” Brigid said with a weary sigh, “today’s haul looked to be pretty impressive. I only got a peek at the processing core units that O’Shumper’s people used to run the dream engines, but they worked to high-grade military specifications. I’m sure Donald can scrabble together enough parts to at least repair some of the damaged equipment we have here right now.”
Lakesh looked thoughtful. “Quite a strange thing, this dream-factory business,” he mused.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Brigid agreed. “The dream environment they put me in was called the Hoop, a kind of mythical city located somewhere in the Pacific region. It felt real but it was weird. The city functioned perfectly, clean and tidy with numerous road vehicles...and the roads to run them on. Strange, isn’t it?”
“How so?” Lakesh asked.
“The things people crave,” Brigid said. “We—humans, I mean—lost almost everything to the nukecaust and the hell on Earth that followed it. This dream ville was like something I read about from the beforedays, a kind of ideal civilization.”
Lakesh stifled a laugh. He had lived in the twentieth century—the “beforedays,” when the shadow of the nuclear holocaust was yet to be cast. It hadn’t seemed such a utopian world then, with starvation and poverty and financial bubbles bursting every few decades. Back then, people had thought of fantasy as an unspoiled environment with rolling hills and dragons swooping the air, magicians casting spells. But the nuclear war and all that had followed had left a great scar on the psyche of humankind. Brigid was right, he realized. “It is funny,” he agreed, “the things people crave that they can never have.”
* * *
K
ANE
TRUDGED
DOWN
the familiar corridor that formed the central artery of the Cerberus base toward the medical bay. The Cerberus redoubt had been carved directly into the heart of a mountain, and its main corridor had vanadium walls and a high, arched ceiling. The cool temperature still gave that sense of it being a mountain cave, and sometimes navigating the redoubt could feel more like spelunking.
Chief medical officer Reba DeFore was waiting for Kane when he arrived. A buxom woman in her early thirties, DeFore had bronzed skin and ash-blond hair that she wore in an elaborate braid to keep it from dangling onto her patients. She had known Kane a long time, and her concern for him was evident when he explained about getting blasted with a jolt of glist.
“How much glist?” DeFor asked as she gently checked Kane’s eyes with a light.
“I don’t know, Reba,” Kane admitted. “Less than a handful. The guy blew it in my face.”
“And what effects did you suffer?”
Kane thought back. “It took about a minute to really hit me,” he said. “At first I just felt woozy, and I made myself get up and finish things there....”
“Finish things?” DeFore asked.
“Execute the people who’d dosed me with it,” Kane clarified.
It was a hard thing to explain to DeFore, who was dedicated to the protection of life. But DeFore understood—she had been the main medical facilitator with the Cerberus operation for a long time now, and she knew the realities of their field missions, how Kane and his companions frequently found themselves in kill-or-be-killed situations where the stakes were higher than simply their own lives. They were soldiers in a war for humanity; their enemy had many names and many limbs.
“After that,” Kane continued, “I started to lose it. Saw stuff. Couldn’t quite tell what was real and what was just in my head. There were people standing in the shadows, with big grins, like their whole heads were just teeth. It’s hard to...remember.”
“How did that feel?” DeFore asked as she took a sample of Kane’s blood, pricking his arm with a needle.
“It felt...” Kane thought for a moment. “It felt real. Like it was a whole other world I was in. And I didn’t question it. The farther I got away from that moment when I’d breathed in a mouthful of glist, the more I believed what I was seeing was real. Does that make sense?”
The medic nodded. “That’s a typical hallucinogenic effect from a psychotropic drug. Your system metabolizes it and the effect on your brain is to go into a new state of awareness, open to its own subconscious. It’s a lot like dreaming, but while you’re still awake.
“It’s nothing to worry about, Kane,” she added gently after a moment. Kane was an ex-magistrate, she knew. Losing control was not something he endured well; it left him feeling vulnerable in a way that was hard to define. “Are you still seeing things?”
“No,” Kane said firmly. “I pretty much passed out when its full-blown effects kicked in. Baptiste had to come revive me.”
DeFore brought out a cotton bud and asked Kane to open his mouth before taking a swab from his tongue and, with another bud, his nostrils. “It’s one dose,” she reassured Kane, “and you’re at the peak of physical fitness. You’d shrug off any aftereffects quickly—seems like you’ve already done just that.”