aquiline nose. Though he appeared to be about fifty years of age, Lakesh was in fact a “freezie,” one of a number of military personnel who had been placed in cryogenic stasis when the outbreak of nuclear hostilities began, only to be revived some time after that cataclysmic conflict. As such, Lakesh was closer to 250 years old. A physicist and cybernetics expert, Lakesh was an exceptionally capable individual who served as the founder and was still the nucleus around which the Cerberus operation centered.
“What’s happened to the feed?” Lakesh demanded, his eyes flicking from his own computer terminal to those of his colleagues who sat all about him. Every monitor had cut to static in the same instant, their flow of live data lost.
Brewster Philboyd, a tall, sallow-faced, blond-haired man wearing black-framed glasses and the evidence of acne scars on his cheeks, yanked off the comm headset he had been wearing as a burst of static interference cut through the earphones. “Some kind of glitch,” he stated, gritting his teeth as he glared at the headset. “I’m not sure what it is.”
Lakesh ran over to Philboyd’s desk. “Find out,” he urged.
Philboyd had been monitoring the incoming communications when the link to Kane’s field team had gone down. Replacing his headset, he spoke into the pickup mic, calling to the other CAT teams who were out on assignment. “CAT Beta, do you read?” Receiving no response, Brewster’s fingers played rapidly across his computer keyboard before he tried for CAT Gamma. Then he turned to Lakesh, shaking his head. “Nothing. I’m receiving no response from anyone.”
Cerberus physician Reba DeFore, a stocky woman with ice-blond hair weaved into an elaborate plait atop her head, called to Lakesh from her own terminal where she had been monitoring the feeds from the transponders. “Everything’s gone dead here, too, Lakesh,” she stated, looking uncomfortable at her unfortunate choice of words.
“A massive equipment failure?” Lakesh murmured to himself incredulously, but even as he spoke, another dissenting voice was calling from one of the terminals in the vast operations room.
“Monitoring feed just went haywire,” said Henny Johnson, a young, petite woman dressed in the regulation white jumpsuit of the Cerberus team, her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended in line with her earlobes. “I can’t see anything. Just static.”
Lakesh looked around the ops room with frustration. The room had a high ceiling and housed two aisles of computer terminals dedicated to the monitoring of the outside world. A huge Mercator map stretched across one wall, displaying the globe patterned by a plethora of blinking lights and stretching lines showing the patterns and uses of the mat-trans system, the now-antique military teleportation network whose operation had been within the original remit of the base.
Tucked away in the far end of the room was an anteroom that housed the mat-trans unit, which was surrounded by tinted armaglass. This mat-trans unit was still operational and used frequently to transport Cerberus operatives all across the globe. The vast ops room itself was windowless and indirectly lit, allowing for better observation of the backlit terminal screens. Right now, the majority of those monitoring screens had devolved into static or dead feeds of data showing just the standard base-level defaults.
“What the devil is going on here?” Lakesh said, addressing the question to no one other than himself.
Reba DeFore spoke again from her terminal as a scrolling data readout raced across her screen. “My system is working,” she stated, “but it’s just not receiving any input data.”
“The satellite’s down,” Lakesh realized, the words leaving his mouth almost before he had acknowledged the thought.
Like fascinated meerkats, the people in the ops room peered up from their terminals, eyes on Lakesh as he outlined his thoughts. “We’ve lost the satellite relay,” he said, his voice more decisive now as a plan began to form in his mind. “I need to know why. Brewster, Henny—backtrack through the logs and locate when we lost contact, both sound and vision, and whether there was an indicator of its imminence.”
Lakesh whirled around, his gaze falling on Donald Bry, an operative with a mop of ginger hair and a permanently dour expression on his drawn face. Bry acted as Lakesh’s right-hand man, and had been known to run the Cerberus ops room when Lakesh himself was otherwise engaged. “Donald, let’s start checking meteorological activity, sunspots, magnetic glitches, anything we can find a record of.”
Donald Bry nodded as he reached across from his own terminal to switch on another vacant one that sat unused beside him. “Aye, sir.” As the spare terminal went through its boot-up procedure, Bry’s fingers began working furiously over his own keyboard, bringing up a stream of data covering the preceding hours leading to the loss of satellite feeds.
Lakesh, meanwhile, was standing in the center of the room, reeling off instructions to the other personnel there. “I want you to manually check our power supply,” he ordered Farrell. “See if anything’s happened to cause a breakdown in service. Get engineering to run a full systems check, both localized to the ops room and for the whole base itself.”
Farrell nodded, his gold hoop earring catching the light for a moment before he briskly walked through the doors and exited the ops room to check the generators.
“Reba,” Lakesh continued, turning to address the blonde physician, “I want you to bring up the final reports from the transponders, make sure everything’s in order and patch the reports through to my screen so that I can double-check them.”
DeFore shot Lakesh a fierce look. “You don’t need to double-check me,” she told him.
Lakesh offered her a concerned look. “We have three teams out in the field. Kane, Grant, Edwards, Morganstern, others. I’ll double-and triple-check everything if it means protecting the life of one person while they’re under my command.”
“Point taken,” Reba submitted. Chastised, she turned her attention back to her terminal and began to run a system history to the point where the live feeds had been interrupted.
Agitated, Lakesh paced across the room until he stood behind Henny Johnson at the satellite-monitoring feed. “What do we have, Henny?”
Henny replayed the feed sequence, watching the locator numbers as they scrolled along the side of the screen in a separate window to the feed images themselves. “They just seemed to pop, vanish,” she explained. “Like someone pulled the plug.”
“So,” Lakesh mused, “let’s figure out who or what pulled the plug, shall we?”
Henny nodded. “Time of signal break—15.37.08,” she began, and Brewster and Reba both agreed with the time from their desks.
“Complete shutdown on both satellites,” Lakesh said to himself as the other personnel continued comparing their data feeds. This could be something very big. Very big and very nasty.
PAPA HURBON was chuckling as Kane spun to face the two newcomers who had stepped through the doorway in their plodding, deliberate way. He watched the grim figures as they approached on heavy tread, their eyes flickering white slits.
“Grant,” Kane said, engaging his Commtact once more. “My Commtact’s not receiving your signal—”
The first zombie swung a vicious blow at Kane’s head, moving far faster than the ex-Mag had expected. Kane ducked the sweeping, meaty fist as the second zombie stepped toward him. Up close, both dead creatures stank, and Kane was reminded of the garbage area of the Cerberus redoubt.
