considered redundant; a Magistrate could never be wrong.
Though schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, both Kane and Grant still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a comfortable and familiar wristwatch.
Kane’s partners drew their own weapons as the trio exited the armaglass room and made their way to the corridor at a slow, wary pace. As they entered the corridor, banks of overhead lights stuttered into operation, bathing its walls in their brilliant glow. Although they had traveled here on what was ostensibly a peace mission, they had too much experience to enter any new situation unarmed.
They proceeded through the windowless military bunker at a steady pace. Although the facility was deserted, the lights came on automatically as they found their way along the corridors toward the exit. A bank of powerful generators located in the underground complex had begun channeling power through the redoubt automatically as soon as the old sensor units had detected that the mat-trans had been activated; it was standard protocol for these old military facilities.
Brigid took the lead as they jogged to a staircase and up into the main reception hall of the redoubt. Brigid Baptiste was blessed with an eidetic—or photographic—memory, and she had scrutinized the plans of this facility in preparation for their mat-trans jump here. Now she could recall every detail of its construction from those blueprints merely by calling them to mind.
In less than three minutes, the group stood shoulder to shoulder at a huge door leading to the outside world.
“Everyone ready?” Kane asked, his voice echoing in the empty, gray-walled reception chamber of the redoubt. To one side, a dusty old desk stood behind a pane of armaglass with a grille in its center. A computer sat atop the desk, long since inactive, its monitor stained with the greasy black charring of smoke.
Brigid nodded while Grant just put a finger to his nose in silent acknowledgment of Kane’s question. Brigid typed the code into the old push-button pad to unlock the door. They heard the magnetic lock click, and Grant, having holstered his Sin Eater, worked the large lever on the front of the huge door to move the heavy slab of metal on its ancient rollers. The door creaked a little, juddering on the tracks after so many years locked in one position. But with a little effort, Grant got it moving enough that a three-foot-wide gap appeared at the far right side.
Kane stepped forward, gun held in the ready position, his old point-man sense alert as he peered through the gap and into the Tennessee morning sunshine. “Welcome to Beausoleil, people,” he announced. “Let’s try to keep things friendly out there.” With that, Kane edged sideways and made his way out of the redoubt and up the dirt bank that he found immediately outside.
They had journeyed to Tennessee at the request of Reba DeFore on what could loosely be described as a mercy mission. During her recent inventory, Reba had noticed that supplies of their standard immunization boosters were falling low. With the devastating radiation storms that had accompanied the nukecaust, the whole landscape had become a near-lethal hot zone. Even now, more than two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, there were still dangerous pollutants in the air and pockets of radiation scattered across the globe. While the atmosphere was far cleaner than it had been, the use of immunization boosters remained standard procedure for anyone involved in fieldwork.
Many of the medications in use by Cerberus had actually been produced in the villes of the nine barons who had ruled over America until very recently. Black marketers with connections to the villes remained a convenient source of immunization boosters when necessity demanded it.
A few months earlier, the barony of Beausoleil in the Tennessee River Valley had fallen in a devastating air attack orchestrated by Lilitu, a would-be goddess whose ambition was matched only by her unquenchable blood thirst. Beausoleil had been razed, leaving a vast number of refugees and a blossoming secondary market in salvage. Just a few weeks earlier, Kane, Grant and Brigid had been involved in tracking genetic material that had been stolen from its ashes and had fallen into the hands of a criminal gang on the Pacific coast.
Now, once more, the three Cerberus warriors found themselves tracking down material taken from the devastated ville, only this time it promised to be a far simpler mission—or so the Cerberus desk jockeys would have them believe.
Brigid glanced up at the sun and checked her wrist chron before pointing to her right up the bank of the muddy slope. There were shallow puddles all around, and the air smelled fresh and crisp. It had been raining here less than an hour before, she concluded.
“Ohio’s people said she’d meet us about two klicks to the north,” Brigid explained as she strode up the muddy incline and made her way toward a rusty chain-link iron fence that surrounded the redoubt’s hidden entrance.
“Lead on, Baptiste,” Kane muttered as he watched the beautiful woman duck through a gap in the fence and make her way across the puddle-dotted fields beyond.
Kane and Grant followed, their boots sinking into the sodden ground as they trekked toward the fence.
Grant pulled at the gap in the fence, lifting the chain link a little to provide Kane with more clearance. “She knows what she’s doing,” he reminded his friend.
“I know,” Kane allowed. “I just don’t like dealing with these bandit types. It never ends well.”
Grant agreed as he pulled himself through the gap in the fence after Kane. They found themselves on a grassy hill that sloped gently toward the distant Tennessee River.
“Way I see it, what it really comes down to is you can’t trust anyone,” Grant said. “First rule of survival.”
Kane glanced at him, the trace of a sarcastic smile crossing his lips. “You’re still thinking like a Magistrate.” He laughed.
“It’s kept me alive so far,” Grant retorted.
Kane snorted. “That and having me at your back.”
Grant shook his head in mock disbelief as the pair of ex-Mags made their way across the soft, muddy ground after the svelte figure of Brigid Baptiste.
OHIO BLUE WAS a tall, slender woman in her midthirties with thick, long blond hair that was styled to fall over her right eye. She wore a shimmering sapphire dress that reached almost to her ankles, with an enticing slit revealing almost the entire length of her left leg. She sat, legs crossed, on a crimson-cushioned recliner set in the middle of a vast boathouse located on the banks of the Tennessee, in an area that had once been called Knoxville. Surrounding Ohio Blue and the recliner were approximately fifty large crates and twenty well-armed guards.
The boathouse was solid on three sides, while the fourth was open to the mighty river itself. There was a sunken area in the large structure where boats could be docked, with the dark river waters lapping against the sides with a constant swishing that echoed throughout the vast, high-ceilinged building.
With a graceful shrug, Ohio swept her luxuriant hair over her shoulders and stood up, offering her hand to Brigid. The hand was sheathed in a silk glove that stretched all the way past the elbow in a shade of blue that precisely matched the color of her shimmering dress. “You must be Miss Baptist,” Blue said, her voice wonderfully musical.
“Baptiste,” Brigid corrected as she clutched the woman’s gloved hand and briefly shook it.
Kane and Grant stood a few paces behind Brigid, flanking her with arms crossed, their Sin Eaters
