an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. In theory, even someone completely deaf could still hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. As well as radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign languages on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks. Loss of communication through them, while not unheard of, was exceedingly rare.
“Grant?” Kane asked in a low voice, and he listened for a moment for any indication of his partner from the Commtact. “Grant, you read me?”
Beside Kane, Ohio Blue was just coming back to her senses, her thick blond hair in disarray as she struggled up from the floor. Swaying a little, she looked around the room at the scene of devastation. “Kane, my sweet, sweet prince,” she said, urgency in her voice, “I think it’s time we were leaving.”
Kane turned at Ohio’s voice, but his attention was distracted by the people appearing behind her. Two new figures pushed through the doorway, and Kane saw immediately that there was something wrong with them. They were tall and emaciated and they walked with a shambling gait. When Kane saw the way that their eyelids flickered over unfocused orbs, he concluded that they were either drugged or something worse. The word zombie flashed through the ex-Mag’s mind.
Kane spoke into the Commtact again. “Grant? Do you read me? Please respond.” After a moment’s silence, he tried patching his signal to home base. “Cerberus? This is Kane. Do you copy? Please respond, Cerberus.”
And still the only response from the Commtact was a deafening silence.
Chapter 3
Grant stood well over six feet tall, with impressively wide shoulders, deep chest and a solid mass of hard, taut muscle. His dark skin was a rich shade of mahogany, and he wore his black hair close-cropped to his skull, with a drooping gunslinger’s mustache curving down from his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate, and their partnership went all the way back to their time together in Cobaltville, years before the formation of the Cerberus operation. Grant was several years older than Kane, and the trust between them was absolute. They had seen combat across the globe, saved each other’s lives on countless occasions and there was an unspoken understanding between them that went as deep as the bond between brothers.
Right now, Grant waited in the mouldering marshes of the Louisiana swamps, hunkering down between the low branches of a tree. Clad in camouflaged greens and browns, Grant peered through the sniper’s scope of his SSG-550 rifle where it rested high on its bipod legs. He kept his voice to a low whisper as he spoke into the hidden pickup of his Commtact. “Kane? Please repeat, I didn’t copy.” He waited a moment, listening for any signal from his Commtact over the humming, squawking and chirping of the swamp fauna. “Kane?” he repeated, his voice just a little louder. “Brigid?”
There was still no answer.
Eye locked on the eyepiece of the sniper scope, Grant watched for movement at the entryway to the dilapidated shack. The wooden structure was just one story high yet covered almost 4,000 square feet. Despite its size, the low roof and rotting nature of the building made it appear cramped and unwelcoming.
Grant had seen Kane and Brigid enter the building in the company of the independent trader, Ohio Blue, about fifteen minutes before. They had arrived here via airboat, transported across the marshland by a dark-skinned woman with a toned body and a scarred face, her left leg missing below the knee. Grant had tracked the airboat via the transponder units that were embedded beneath his partners’ skins, using his own uplink to Cerberus headquarters to keep track of his friends as they traveled through the maze of swamps. This had allowed him—unseen—to keep to a roughly parallel route on his own airboat, its huge fan whirling as it carved a new pathway through the dense shrubbery of the sweltering marshes.
“Cerberus, this is Grant out in the field,” Grant spoke to his Commtact once more. “Appear to have lost radio contact with Kane and Brigid. Please advise.”
Grant listened intently, hearing the humming, squawking, chirruping sounds all around him, but the Commtact itself only offered dead air by way of response.
“Cerberus?” Grant repeated. “Anyone there reading me?”
Yet again, there was no response.
Anxious, Grant turned away from the rifle’s scope and reached for the handheld unit he had used to track his partners’ transponders. Its tiny screen was functioning, but it showed no evidence of the transponders—not even his own, Grant realized with a start. He wiped the screen with his fingertip, and then pressed the reset button, causing the little portable unit to run through a ten-second reboot sequence.
“What the hell is going on?” Grant muttered as he watched the tracker unit reboot. Comms were down and now the transponders seemed to have gone offline, as well. Not good. Not good at all.
After ten seconds, the tracker unit returned to full functionality, but still showed no evidence of any transponders in the area—not even Grant’s.
Concerned, Grant bent down to the rifle’s scope once more and focused his attention on the shadowy doorway to the shack, waiting to see what would emerge.
THE HEADQUARTERS for the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. A military redoubt, it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains themselves. The wilds around the three-story concrete redoubt were virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, where a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians had settled, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. For the brief years of its first life, like all prewar redoubts, it had been named Redoubt Bravo after a phonetic letter of the alphabet used in standard military radio communications. In the twentieth century, Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed mat-trans network of instantaneous teleportation. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a garish rendition of the fabled three-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the Underworld. The artist—whose signature identified him only as Mooney—was long since dead, but his work had inspired the sixty or so people who had taken up residence in the facility, acting as their lucky—and unquestionably fearsome—mascot.
Tucked within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the redoubt, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of empirical data for the Cerberus operatives within. These links were the source of field communications through the Commtacts, as well as routing the feeds from the subcutaneous transponders that monitored the health of the personnel, and it was these that Grant had used to track his partners in the field. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. Today, the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Comsat satellite. Or, at least, that was the theory.
Within the operations center, however, a far different story was being played out. Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh leaped out of a seat that overlooked the vast control room, his swivel chair whirling off behind him on its little plastic wheels. Lakesh had dusky
