in the carpet of flowing water, until she reached the collapsed building that she had seen Grant thrown through. Her hearing was coming back now, after the colossal crashing of the huge wave had briefly deafened her, and she could hear screaming and crying coming from all around. The burned beggar was gone; he and his bowl had presumably been washed away. Children were running around in the street, a naked toddler wailing as he stumbled through the road, looking for a friendly face.
Brigid leaned down and scooped up the unclothed toddler, lifting him to shoulder height and looking to make sure that he wasn’t wounded. “There, there,” she told him quietly, “it’s okay now. It’s okay. Hush now.”
Carrying the child over one shoulder, Brigid kicked rubble aside and made her way into the remains of the collapsed hut. “Grant?” she called, raising her voice. “It’s Brigid. Are you here?”
She listened for a moment, watching the rubble for signs of her partner. Grant’s familiar voice came rumbling from across to the right, and Brigid saw the wreckage move and his hand appear above the mess. She rushed across the rubble, taking care not to trip as she balanced the toddler close to her chest, and leaned down to help shift the debris.
A moment later, Grant was struggling out of the shattered remains of the building, water pouring from his coat and his skin caked with pale dust. He wiped a hand over his face and smiled at Brigid. “What the freak just happened?” he asked her, a snarl replacing his smile.
Brigid shook her head, rocking the toddler in her arms. “I don’t know,” she told Grant. “Felt like maybe a bomb blast, but I didn’t hear the explosion. Earthquake maybe?”
“You think?” Grant asked.
Brigid shrugged. “The San Andreas Fault runs through here,” she speculated. “If you look at the old maps, you’ll see that it pretty much wiped out most of the West Coast a couple of centuries back, after the nukes fell.”
Grant nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see if I can raise Lakesh and get some intel,” he told her. Then the huge ex-Mag looked around. “Where’s Kane?” he asked.
“He was on the pier when it dropped into the sea,” Brigid said, clambering over the rubble and back onto the waterlogged street.
Grant shook his head angrily as he followed her. “This day just keeps getting worse,” he growled. With that, he activated the Commtact that was embedded subcutaneously behind his right ear and patched through to Cerberus headquarters.
“This is Grant in the field, Lakesh, Donald? Are you guys receiving me?”
There was a brief pause and then Donald Bry’s friendly voice came to Grant, uplinked to a satellite from the operations room in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. “Hey, Grant, how are things? Mission accomplished?”
The Commtact units were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered in a military installation called Redoubt Yankee several years before, and they had become standard equipment for the Cerberus field operatives. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded against the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the user’s skull casing. Theoretically, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be capable of hearing, after a fashion, by using the Commtact.
Permanent usage of the Commtact would involve a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably reticent to submit to, and so their use had stalled, for the moment, at field-test stage. Besides radio communications, the Commtacts could be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of spoken foreign language on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks.
The Commtacts could be uplinked to the Keyhole satellite, allowing communication with the field teams, which was a considerable improvement on the original design parameters of the communications technology.
“Mission parameters may have changed,” Grant responded. “We think we were just hit by an earthquake. At least, we’re hoping it was an earthquake. You have any info at your end?”
“I’m bringing up the feed data now, Grant,” Bry’s voice came back crisply over the Commtact.
At the Cerberus redoubt in Montana, Donald Bry had access to a wealth of scrolling data from satellites and ground sensors. In his mind’s eye, Grant could almost see the man working to bring up all the available data and extrapolate a logical conclusion.
“No evidence of any aerial bombing raid, Grant, but it might be an underground test, of course,” Bry suggested after a moment’s thought.
“Of course,” Grant replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
Ahead of him, Brigid was standing at the edge of the damaged pier, looking over the side at the roiling waters below. People were rushing about, their clothes soaked through, desperately searching for their friends and families.
Bry’s voice piped over the Commtact once more. “Grant? I’m going to speak with Lakesh and Dr. Falk, see if they have any insights into the data we’re receiving. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Cool,” Grant replied laconically as the transmission ended.
Brigid was scanning the water, the toddler clambering over her shoulder, his face still red where he had been crying. “What did Cerberus say?” she asked, not bothering to turn to Grant.
“They’re not sure yet,” Grant told her as he took in the mass of frightened faces that bobbed in the water. “Bry says there’s no evidence of aerial bombing. Beyond that he’s as in the dark as we are.”
“Earthquake,” Brigid said. “I’ll bet you.”
The water poured between their feet as the Cerberus teammates scanned the water for their missing colleague. Parts of the pier bobbed about amid the people that had been caught up in the enormous wave; almost the whole structure had been reduced to worthless driftwood in the space of five seconds. A strut of the pier still stood at an angle, no longer connected to the shore. As Grant’s eyes brushed over it he spotted the familiar lean figure of Kane clambering up its leg and securing himself against it with one arm before reaching with his free hand into the water and pulling a woman up by the arm. He was fifty yards from them, surrounded by water.
Grant tapped Brigid on the shoulder and pointed to the figure. “Kane,” he stated.
“Got him.” She smiled. There was a special bond between Brigid Baptiste and Kane, something more fundamental than a mere emotional connection. They were anam-charas, soul friends destined to be together no matter what configuration they found themselves in, friends throughout eternity.
Still holding the TP-9, Brigid rubbed a reassuring hand over the toddler she was cradling over her left shoulder before she turned to face Grant. “Whatever happened, there’s a lot of hurt and frightened people out here, Grant,” she told him. “We need to start helping them, set up some kind of program for medical treatment.”
“What about the mission?” he asked, and then he checked himself. “No, skip it—you’re right. Let’s take the slope down to the beach and start hauling people out of the water.”
Brigid agreed and together they made their way to the waterfront, which
