we’d be none the wiser.”
“The jamming umbrella works both ways,” Grant pointed out. “Gray couldn’t have transmitted a warning, so the consortium is just as much in the dark about us as we are about them.”
“Unless Brewster talked,” Edwards said.
Brigid’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Brewster is accident prone and he’s pretty bad mannered even by ex-Mag standards, but he wouldn’t betray us.”
Edwards nodded contritely. “No, ma’am, I guess he wouldn’t.”
Kane said, “We’ll only go a little way…just to get the lay of the land. Worst-case scenario is that we run into trouble and fire off a couple of shots to let you know.”
Edwards didn’t seem comforted. “Yes, sir.”
Kane, Grant and Brigid moved away from the perimeter of the settlement and followed a scattering of footprints up along the face of a dune. The wind made the sand hiss around their feet.
“I don’t know if firing off some signal shots is a good idea,” Brigid commented. “Remember what Gray said about noise attracting ghosts.”
Grant snorted in derision but said nothing.
The sand bogged around their ankles as they climbed. When they reached the crest of the dune, Kane studied the massive thrust of dark rock Gray called Phantom Mesa. It stood like a giant sentinel of the desert.
Brigid tested her Commtact and grimaced in frustration when she heard only static. Quietly but with a hint of reproach underscoring her tone, she said to Kane, “You never should have let Brewster go out alone.”
“I didn’t ‘let’ him,” Kane answered. “And you know it. He waited until my back was turned and took off with the power analyzer. He thought he could trace down the origin of the jamming.”
Brigid nodded, her emerald eyes clouded by worry. “Brewster is far too headstrong for a scientist.”
“I don’t know about that…but he’s sure as hell clumsy.”
Grant suddenly halted, indicating with a hand wave for his partners to do the same. He leaned forward, head cocked to the right, his expression intent. “Hear something,” he whispered.
Kane strained his hearing, but only the sigh of the breeze touched his ears. Then he heard a faint groan, seasoned with garbled words. Through narrowed eyes, he scanned the ridge of the dune thirty feet ahead but saw nothing. At the very edge of audibility he heard panting, hard and labored.
Then a figure suddenly lurched over the top of the dune and fell awkwardly, his body digging a trench through the sand. Long legs thrashed. The shape rolled to the bottom and lay there, struggling feebly.
The Cerberus warriors scrambled down the dune and surrounded the figure, whose wrists were bound behind his back. Terrified and pain-filled gasps burst from split and bloody lips.
Kane clutched the man by the shoulders and said, “Take it easy. You’re safe now.”
Kneeling, Kane carefully eased the limp body over. He saw the man’s face in the fading light and winced. It was Brewster Philboyd.
Chapter 4
Philboyd’s face was contorted with feral terror, but when he recognized Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant, his tense muscles relaxed in relief. In a slurred voice, he said, “About time.”
In his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a little over six feet tall, long limbed and lanky. Blond-white hair was swept back from a receding hairline. Normally he wore black-rimmed eyeglasses. Like CAT Alpha, he wore desert-camouflage BDUs.
Brigid pulled him up and held him in a sitting position while Grant cut through the ropes binding his wrists. Philboyd’s face was bruised, his left eye all but swollen shut. Dry blood caked the area around his nose and mouth. Though unsightly, his injuries were superficial.
“Are you all right?” Brigid asked.
“They just slapped me around some,” Philboyd answered, striving for a tone of indifference.
“Who is ‘they’?” Kane inquired, offering Philboyd his canteen.
“Four men jumped me about three-quarters of a mile from here. They tied me up.”
Philboyd paused to take a sip of water, rinse out his mouth and then spit. “They asked me some questions and all I told them was my name. I thought I heard a woman’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure. After that, they started asking me about Cerberus, how many of us were out here and if you three specifically were in the vicinity.”
“How’d they know about us?” Brigid asked, dismayed.
Philboyd took another drink of water before replying, “Beats the hell out of me.”
Grant uttered a weary sigh but said nothing. Both Kane and Brigid could guess his thoughts. Brewster Philboyd was one of many expatriates from the Manitius Moonbase who had chosen to forge new lives for themselves with the Cerberus warriors.
Although the majority of the former lunar colonists were academics, they had proved their inherent courage and resourcefulness and wanted to get out into the world and make a difference in the struggle to reclaim the planet of their birth.
Nearly twenty of them were permanently stationed on Thunder Isle in the Cific, working to refurbish the sprawling complex that had housed Operation Chronos two centuries before and make it a viable alternative to the Cerberus redoubt.
The other Manitius expatriates remained in the redoubt concealed within a Montana mountain peak as part of the Cerberus resistance movement. For three years, Kane, Brigid and Grant had struggled to dismantle the machine of baronial tyranny in America. Victory over the nine barons, if not precisely within their grasp, did not seem a completely unreachable goal—but then unexpectedly, nearly two years before, the entire dynamic of the struggle against the nine barons changed.
The Cerberus warriors learned that the fragile hybrid barons, despite being close to a century old, were only in a larval stage of their development. Overnight the barons changed. When that happened, the war against the baronies themselves ended, but a new one, far greater in scope, began.
The baronies had not fallen in the conventional sense through attrition, war or organized internal revolts. The barons had simply walked away from their villes, their territories and their subjects. When they reached the final stage in their development, they saw no need for the trappings of semidivinity, nor were they content to rule such minor kingdoms. When they evolved into their true forms, incarnations of the ancient Annunaki overlords, their avaricious scope expanded to encompass the entire world and every thinking creature on it.
Even two-plus years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a daily basis.
A number of former Magistrates, weary of fighting for one transitory ruling faction or another that tried to fill the power vacuum in the villes, responded to the outreach efforts of Cerberus.
Once the Magistrates joined Cerberus, Kane and Grant had seen to the formation of Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta
