Behind the gurney, Grant saw the twin Tigers of Heaven recovering. Both men were well trained in the arts of ninjitsu, and while Edwards’s attack had come as a surprise it had not been enough to render either man inoperative. They circled the gurney, warily approaching Edwards from above and behind his head.
“Kill you!” Edwards spit, mouth foaming, his hate-filled eyes fixed on Grant.
“Not this time, bucko,” Grant assured him as he grabbed Edwards’s kicking legs, fixing them a moment later in a two-handed grip.
“Kill you!” Edwards snarled again as he writhed in place, batting at the Tigers of Heaven as they tried to restrain him.
“Let’s get more sedation,” Grant instructed as he held on to those kicking legs. “Quickly now, I’ve got him.”
One of the warriors reached into the cloth bag he wore at his hip on a crosswise strap, producing a hypodermic syringe. In a half minute he had prepped it with sedative, flicking it to pop any bubbles that remained in the clear mixture. Grant continued to hold Edwards’s legs as the man kicked back and forth, his body tossing on the gurney like a struggling fish on a hook. The remaining guard tried to hold Edwards’s hands above his head and found himself almost knocked aside by several attempts by the ex-Mag.
Then the other guard approached Edwards with the hypo, and Edwards watched it with angry eyes.
“Just be a moment,” the Tigers of Heaven warrior promised, his voice calm despite how fraught the situation was.
“Fuck you,” Edwards growled, pulling both arms across his body and tossing the other guard across his chest as he hung on there. The guard tumbled over the gurney and slammed into his companion, head smashing against head with the brutal thump of bone on bone.
Grant watched as the two guards slumped to the floor, both of them dazed by the impact as the syringe rolled out of reach. Faster than thought, Edwards folded his body at the waist, aiming his forehead at Grant’s. Grant reared back, releasing his grip on Edwards’s legs.
“Utopia is upon you,” Edwards hissed, the madness burning behind his eyes as he flipped himself on the gurney.
“Yeah,” Grant snarled, taking a step toward the rocking gurney, his fist drawn back. “Well, let’s not get too excited about it just yet.”
With those words, Grant snapped out a solid punch at Edwards’s jaw. Grant’s fist connected with a crack, and Edwards shook on the gurney as he struggled to defend himself.
“Hate to do it, man,” Grant explained as he pulled his fist back for a second blow. But as he did so, Edwards’s own struggles proved the man’s downfall. The rocking gurney suddenly upended, and Edwards was thrown to the hard floor in a tumble of limbs. With his ankles still tied, the ex-Mag lay struggling there as the gurney crashed down beside him.
Grant watched as the gurney slammed against Edwards’s side, and the already sedated man slapped against the floor.
“You still got any fight left in you?” Grant asked as he stood over Edwards’s fallen form.
“Kill…” Edwards muttered, blood on his lips.
“Yeah,” Grant said as he picked up the hypodermic syringe, “that’s what I thought.”
A moment later Grant had pressed the needle into Edwards’s vein as the man struggled woozily from the blow he’d taken. Thirty seconds later, Edwards lay restrained on the futon, happily snoring as he drifted off to sleep.
Grant checked on the two guards who had accompanied him to house Edwards. Apart from a little wounded pride, they both seemed pretty much okay. “You need to watch this guy,” Grant reminded them both. “Used to be a Magistrate—he’s trained to turn impossible odds against you.”
The Tigers of Heaven genuflected appreciatively as Grant left the cell.
Chapter 2
For Grant, Edwards’s condition was something personal. He made his way through the Cerberus operations center, a temporary arrangement consisting of four laptop computers attached to a powerful server hub that hummed in one corner of the room. The room itself was originally a simple communal area, a sparsely decorated living room with several low tables and a wide mat covering the floor. The mat had been rolled back to allow for the wiring to trail across the room. Donald Bry, the ginger-haired assistant to Lakesh, was busily linking two of the laptop units together. He lay on his back with a screwdriver in one hand and a pen between his teeth, his mop of copper-colored curls in its usual disarray.
Beside him, Brewster Philboyd, another of the trusted Cerberus team, was running a diagnostics check on the expanding computer system. A tall man with a high forehead, dark hair and black-framed spectacles perched on his nose, Brewster was a trained astrophysicist who could generally turn his hand to most technical problems.
“How’s it going?” Grant asked as Philboyd caught his eye.
Philboyd held up his hands in mock despair. “It’s getting there,” he said begrudgingly. “Satellite feeds are scanning properly, but we’re still amassing the data.”
For years now Cerberus had relied on the data from two satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the equator, the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. The feeds from the two satellites provided empirical data from across the globe and also allowed for real-time communication via the Commtact units that many of the field operatives had had embedded beneath their skin. The task of monitoring these satellite feeds had been interrupted with the recent attack on Cerberus, and it was only now that Lakesh had begun to reassemble his team and initiate the arduous task of checking the information that had been stored in their absence.
Grant continued across the room, walking through the open doorway at its far end and making his way along a wooden-walled corridor that led the way through the building. He passed several doors, each one leading to private bed quarters that had been procured by Cerberus personnel for the duration of their tenancy. Grant arrowed toward one of these, pushing it gently open with a soft touch despite his imposing size.
Within, the drapes of the bedroom were closed, creating a cozy, dark atmosphere. A beautiful dark-haired woman sat in a chair beside the lone bed, her head lolling backward, a mangy-looking dog lying at her feet. As Grant walked in, the dog raised its head, ears pinned back to its head, and let loose a wary growl.
“It’s okay, boy,” Grant said, leaning down for a moment and offering the dog his empty hand to sniff. “Just me.”
The dog was some kind of mongrel, a scraggly-looking beast with more than a hint of coyote. It had the palest eyes that Grant had ever seen in a dog, orbs a white so pure they seemed faintly blue.
The woman in the chair had awoken, too, and she watched Grant through narrowed eyes. Her name was Rosalia, a stunningly attractive woman in her mid-twenties, with long dark hair that fell halfway down her back, olive skin and long, supple limbs. Rosalia wore a long skirt that trailed to her ankles, its flowering pattern scuffed with dirt, her dark top askew on her shoulders where she had slept in the chair. Working both sides of the law, Rosalia had recently found herself siding with the Cerberus team as they escaped the imprisonment of Life Camp Zero.
Grant took no notice of her. His dark eyes were fixed on the still figure lying alone in the bed. Kane had come to be
