Chapter 1
Serra do Norte, Brazil, July 2204
It was always hot in Brazil, and in July it was hotter, Domi reflected as she took another sip from her water bottle.
“Careful with that,” Mariah Falk recommended, peering up from her equipment. “Controlled sips, or you’ll start to feel bloated.”
“I’ve done this before,” Domi replied irritably and made a show of smacking her lips. Dammit, that woman has the hearing of a bat, Domi cursed to herself. Mariah’s warning was sound advice, and reminding even a seasoned field agent like Domi was never something to regret. But it annoyed the heck out of Domi because Mariah tended to speak to her as if she were a child.
It was understandable that she did, however. Domi was waiflike in appearance, her small frame more like that of a teenage girl than a grown woman. Furthermore, she dressed like a child, as well, favoring short, sleeveless tops that barely covered her small, pert breasts and cutoffs that left her thin legs bare. While slim, her legs and arms were still muscular, her physique reminiscent of an acrobat or a ballet dancer, all coiled sinew waiting to spring. Domi also preferred to go barefoot, whatever the terrain she found herself in; right now she was especially enjoying the way the tufts of grass that grew tenaciously from the sandy soil of the riverbank tickled her pale toes.
“Pale” being the operative word, of course; Domi was an albino, skin chalk-white with hair to match, cut in a pixie-ish bob that framed her sharp features. Within that sharp face it was the eyes that drew attention—two pools of ruby-redness like congealing blood. In a simpler time she might have been mistaken for a devil or sprite and burned at the stake.
Domi was a field agent for the Cerberus operation, a set-up based in North America that had dedicated itself to the protection of mankind from the dangerous forces that threatened it. The reason that sounded like a pretty weighty remit was because it was—Cerberus had fought with alien races bent on the destruction of humanity, battled creatures in other dimensions and even fought with world machines that had been programmed to bring forth Armageddon.
Domi had grown up far away from the technological hub that was the Cerberus headquarters, a military redoubt built in the twentieth century that had been secured by her lover, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the contentious leader of the Cerberus team. Domi had, instead, been born in the Outlands beyond the reach of the walled villes that dominated the North American landscape, and while she had witnessed and been a part of a great many lifestyles since then, she remained an outlander at heart, a wild free spirit with a quick temper and a keen survival instinct.
Domi wore the bare minimum of clothing for decency and she wore something else, too—two weapons that she did not leave the Cerberus redoubt without. The first was a combat knife with a cruel, nine-inch serrated edge, cinched to her ankle in an undecorated sleeve. She had once used this blade on her ex-master, Guana Teague, when she had been indoctrinated into his cruel regime as a sex slave, and its value to her was incalculable.
The second item, unholstered but slipped through her belt at the small of her back, was a Detonics Combat Master .45 pistol with a dull finish. While Domi might get more personal satisfaction from using the blade on an enemy, she was also a crack shot and wouldn’t hesitate to use the weapon if danger called.
Domi’s companion was unlike her in almost every way. Mariah Falk had been born in the twentieth century and had trained to be a geologist before enlisting in a government research project that had placed her on the moon. While there, Mariah had been put into suspended animation and had missed the most significant event of the twenty-first century—the nuclear holocaust that had rewritten the maps and left civilized society as little more than a memory smoldering in the ashes.
That was two hundred years ago, and since then, the world had moved on quite a bit. Mariah had been awakened in the twenty-third century, along with a number of fellow experts, when a Cerberus exploratory team had ventured to the Manitius Base on the moon, and she had soon been invited to lend her services to Cerberus for the betterment of mankind.
Mariah was a woman in her late forties, relatively speaking, with a narrow frame and a thin face. Her short, chestnut hair was streaked with white here and there, and there were lines around her eyes that spoke of her easy nature and ready smile. Though perhaps not conventionally pretty, Mariah was genial and a natural at putting people at ease.
Most people, that was—she and Domi had a little history dating back to when Domi had been forced to shoot her in the leg to prevent her from moving. While the shot had saved Mariah’s life, it still rankled that Domi hadn’t found a less aggressive way to save her skin. When it was cold—which, thankfully, Brazil wasn’t just now—the ghost of that bullet still caused her leg to ache as if the devil himself was inside it, strumming on the bone like it was a tea-chest bass in one of those old skiffle bands her dad had liked to listen to.
Unlike Domi, Mariah was dressed conservatively in a white jumpsuit twinned with a simple jacket, the latter doubling as a hold-all with voluminous pockets across the chest and arms. Mariah carried no weapons; she had been trained in basic firearm use like all Cerberus personnel, but she remained uncomfortable around guns and considered them very definitely a last resort. Which was why Domi was here with her—while Mariah employed her expertise as a geologist to scrutinize the immediate area, Domi assumed the role of bodyguard.
Domi was an odd choice, perhaps, to an outsider, but her keen senses, determination and combat prowess, not to mention a somewhat fiery temper, made her every bit as protective and dangerous as a well-trained bullmastiff.
Mariah was here—“here” being a secluded delta of the Juruena River a good seventy miles from the nearest human habitation—taking rock samples and testing the soil composition via a portable spectroscope attached to her laptop computer. The Cerberus mainframe, a database tuned to numerous remote sensors and satellite relays, had detected something out of the ordinary in the radiation content of the region.
“Find anything?” Domi asked, her shrill voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts.
“It’s too soon to say,” Mariah responded automatically. She had always been methodical rather than prone to great leaps of intuition—her would-be lover, Clem Bryant, had been the intuitive one, and all that had ultimately gotten him was killed. “Radioactivity is certainly higher than we’d expect for this kind of area,” she confirmed, gesturing vaguely around her.
The area was overgrown, with trees bending down toward the river under the weight of their leaves, and mossy grass vying for space along the banks. Colorful birds flitted between the trees, small as a child’s hand, their shrill calls joining the incessant insect buzz that hummed in the air.
The area was the very definition of remote. If there had once been human habitation anywhere nearby it had almost certainly been exterminated by the nuclear exchange that had almost destroyed the northern part of the American continent. South America had, by contrast, gotten off lightly, but still the population had been culled to perhaps fifteen percent of what it had once been, and the rise in base-level radioactivity had left many people sterile, resulting in a fall in the birthrate and a concurrent rise in the appearance of “mutie” babies, creatures who had perhaps started life as human but whose DNA had become so mangled that they now resembled nothing short of monsters. They had been strange days indeed, those that had followed the nukecaust.
Despite its remoteness, Domi and Mariah had had little trouble getting here from their base in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana in North America. They had traveled via an instrument called the interphaser, a portable teleportation device that tapped the quantum pathways between spaces to move people and objects instantaneously all over the world and beyond. The interphaser relied on fixed-point locations to transmit its passengers, utilizing an ancient connected web that underlay the structure of Earth itself. These locations were called parallax points and many of them had become sites of worship to primitive cultures, when men were more in tune with the planet and aware of the vortices that flowed around these strange places.
“‘Hot’ or ‘hot hot’?” Domi asked, taking in the forest with her gaze.
“Welllll...” Mariah said, stretching out the word. “The plant life is certainly flourishing. As are the birds and whatever passes for the other local fauna, too.”
“‘Fauna’?” Domi queried before Mariah could continue. Mariah had forgotten that Domi was a child of the Outlands, and that sometimes she didn’t know what their colleagues might call the ten-dollar words for things.
“Animals,” Mariah clarified. “The strange part is, while the soil is showing a lot of radioactivity, it’s not leaked into the rocks.”
“Meaning?” Domi prodded. The albino was a woman of few words.
“Whatever caused this is most likely a recent phenomenon,” Mariah mused, “which may also explain why it didn’t appear on our previous sweeps of the area. My computer is doing a spectral analysis, which should bring us closer to an answer.”
“How long?” Domi asked, eyeing the area warily.
Mariah checked the flip-open screen of the laptop where she had placed it on a large, flat rock at the edge of the river bank. “Eight minutes.”
“Hah,” Domi sneered. “Computers don’t know everything.” With that, she padded barefoot into the forest, brushing a low-hanging branch aside.
Mariah eyed the computer screen again before watching Domi trudge through the trees. A countdown on the screen assured her that the spectral analysis would be complete in seven minutes and forty-nine seconds, which to a geologist used to dealing with rocks that may have been formed over thousands or even millions of years, didn’t seem a very long time to wait. But Domi was impatient, and Mariah couldn’t help but admire her blind determination to make something happen, even if she was one hundred percent certain that nothing would.
“Hold up,” Mariah called to Domi. “I’m coming with you.”
Domi turned her head and slowed for a moment, granting Mariah an eerie smile, white teeth gleaming between white lips. It was the most unsettling thing the geologist had seen today.
Pushing her sweat-damp hair from her face, Mariah walked deeper into the forest after Domi. It took just fifteen paces to completely lose sight of the river, such was the density of the foliage here. Up ahead, however, Domi was always visible, a streak of white amid the green.
A few steps farther and Domi stopped. She stood there, in the space between the trees, her nose twitching as she sniffed the air.
“What are you looking for?” Mariah asked as she came alongside her colleague.
“Something’s not right,” Domi said, pitching her voice low.
Mariah knew better than to argue with the albino warrior. While Domi may seem primitive in her outlook, and more than a little eccentric, she was notoriously in tune with her senses.
After a moment, Domi reached forward and grasped the leaves of a fern that had grown to waist height. “The plants,” she said, studying the leaves. “They’re not...”
Mariah waited for the other woman to finish the statement, and when she didn’t she looked at her with furrowed brow. “Not what?” she asked.
Mariah watched Domi lean down and pull the plant stem closer, sniffing at its leaves. After a moment the albino girl shook her head.
“Well?” Mariah prompted, not bothering to hide her irritability.
“They don’t come from here,” Domi replied, letting go of the fern and reaching up for a strange-looking fruit dangling from a nearby tree.
Mariah wasn’t sure what the fruit was, but its glossy skin was a purple so dark it was almost blue-black. “What is that?” she asked.
Domi looked up, fixing Mariah with her eerie stare. “Was hoping you’d know. Not from around here, either.”
Mariah was a geologist not a horticulturalist, but she knew enough about plants to recognize more than just the basic types. That knowledge could be invaluable sometimes when she was looking at certain land types, and it had acted as a pointer to discovery on more than one field trip. “Yes, you’re right,” she said, nodding gently. “I don’t recognize that...”
“Recognize any?” Domi asked. Her words were clipped now, syntax fractured, the way the Outlanders spoke. The woman would slip into this dialect now and again in times of anxiety.
Mariah peered around warily, looking at the leaves on the trees, the fronds that stood out from the bushes close to her hips. “I...don’t.” Suddenly, Mariah was feeling decidedly unsettled. “Do you think...?
What
do you think?” she finally managed to ask.
“Alien,” Domi replied matter-of-factly.
“This area,” Domi indicated. “Twenty feet square. Everything here doesn’t belong.”
“Then we tell Cerberus,” Mariah insisted, but Domi was moving once again. This time the chalk-skinned warrior was reaching for the roots of a tree, plucking at them as if to reach beneath. “Domi? What are you doing?”
“Investigating,” Domi replied, and she produced her knife from its sheath at her ankle. In another second she was working the knife at the tree roots where they protruded from the soil, scoring the earth beneath. “Something down here,” she said.
Mariah watched with a sense of foreboding as the smaller woman went to work on the ground with her knife. “Do you really think it’s alien?” she heard herself ask. She had experienced alien things before, most significantly when she had been indoctrinated into the prototype version of a cult led by Ullikummis; the deranged monster who had killed her love. That was when Domi had had to shoot her in the leg. Mariah didn’t like alien stuff one bit; she would much rather leave that aspect of Cerberus’s work to her colleagues.
Domi worked her hands into the soil, scraping now and then with the knife as she worked stones loose. She didn’t seem like a woman in those moments; she was more like an animal burying food.
“Domi?”
Clink!
The noise came from the tip of Domi’s knife as it struck something hard under the ground. It was right beneath the surface.