make her the commander of the fabled samurai of the Tigers of Heaven.
She turned with effortless grace, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes stood out in the premorning gray that crept through the rice-paper wall panels of Shizuka’s Spartan abode. Concern had creased her brow and Grant’s frown followed the downward curve of his gunfighter’s mustache.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
“I felt your turmoil when you first stepped from the mat-trans,” Shizuka answered. Her slender but rope-muscled arm reached up, looping around his neck, and Grant winced as he realized that his deltoids were drawn taut with tension. “We managed to put it away for a while, but it’s returned strong enough to wake me.”
“Can’t even take a full night’s sleep.” Grant folded his arm, putting his hand under his head as a pillow between his head and the futon, fighting down the regret that weighed heavily on his broad, powerful shoulders. His eyes met Shizuka’s, drawn into the dark pools, succumbing to the depths as he peered through the windows of her soul.
Grant had loved Shizuka almost from first sight, and while the attraction to an athletic, confident and beautiful woman was hardly a mystery, there was something in her that seemed a sort of anchor, a bond that immediately formed between the two warriors. He cupped his free hand at the nape of her neck, black silk cascading over his fingers like cool water, and pulled her gently to him, meeting her halfway in a kiss. It was a cleansing of his mind, driving away his doubts, regrets and worries as he sheltered himself in her loving embrace.
Shizuka’s delicate fingers caressed his cheek as the kiss broke. “It’s time for me to wake up anyway.”
Grant sighed. Shizuka was disciplined, and as much as he would have enjoyed having her in his arms again, she would do her exercises, the regimented katas that honed her into one of the finest samurai warriors on the planet. For his sake, however, Shizuka forwent putting on her robe. Her muscles glided under her tanned skin like sinuous serpents writhing beneath a blanket as she moved. Each motion was precise, intended to insure limberness, not an actual movement to counter an enemy’s attack. Her daily training was designed to keep her muscles supple and joints flexible, able to respond to any threat.
Grant looked down at his own body. There was no doubt that he was a powerful man, his lifestyle keeping the tone of his arms and shoulders prominent as he was active, often serving as pack mule for the Cerberus explorers as he was reluctant to go anywhere underprepared. Still, his frame was not lean and taut. He was too old for his waist to slim down to hard-packed abdominal muscles, his torso becoming a sculpted V. While everyone else who knew him saw a slight thickening of his waist since his years as a Cobaltville Magistrate, he hadn’t tried to fit into the perfectly tailored polycarbonate armor that served as the uniform of the Magistrates, or enforcers of the villes. No longer young, Grant was indisputably powerful and menacing, and he could arm wrestle any two of his fellow Cerberus allies with one arm, except for Edwards. But even then his strength was an edge higher.
Grant had even been powerful enough to go hand to hand with Maccan and Marduk. The former was the last of the pure-blooded Tuatha de Danaan princes on Earth, while the latter was an Annunaki lord standing a full seven feet of perfectly sculpted muscle and otherworldly strength. The battles had been inconclusive, to be honest, but they had been tests of might that showed Grant’s guile and his brawn. He was capable of holding his own with nearly any opponent on the planet. That was before the arrival of the stone-bodied son of Enlil, a towering eight-foot creature with limbs as thick as small trees and eyes that glowed like magma.
Ullikummis was nominally an Annunaki, but the son of their mortal enemy had been genetically modified, his body augmented with materials that had allowed him to survive the cold vacuum of deep space for four-and-a-half millennia and repair bodily damage, even after being dropped in a furnace after being pelted by volleys of hand grenades.
Such a monster gave even Grant pause. Grant knew that he wasn’t the most physically powerful being on Earth. However, among the triad of heroes who had formed the core of the Cerberus resistance, he was the man who provided the muscle. Since few weapons could harm Ullikummis, it would take either the scientific genius of Brigid Baptiste or the skill and determination of Kane to bring down the mountain that walked as a man.
Grant let his head drop back down to the futon, rolled onto his back, and looked at the plain wooden boards of the ceiling. Their dark stain provided a sharp contrast to the white rice-paper windows that made it seem inky-black, even on the most moonlit of nights, giving him a focus on which to meditate. With the growing light of dawn, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the empty space to clear his mind of his doubts.
His clothes lay folded in the corner, the external component of his Commtact placed with them. Normally, the device was unobtrusive as it adhered to the pintels subcutaneously installed along his mastoid bone, but Grant was loath to have it on during his quiet intimacy with Shizuka. There were multiple threats in the world, and Cerberus would not hesitate to summon him in the event of an emergency. It was his first night here in New Edo, and he thought that he could get at least one evening of peace.
Reluctantly, he rose from the futon, folded their light blanket and went to get dressed. He held up the Commtact as if it were a dead rat, looking at it for a moment, hesitant to put it back on. Grant slipped it into place, and keyed it to call the redoubt. Given the time difference between Montana and New Edo, in the island chain of the remains of California, there was a good chance that he’d get in touch with Bry on his morning duty.
“Reporting in,” Grant said. “Everything quiet on the home front?”
“Boring as any other day.” Bry’s voice reverberated through his skull. “Well, most other days. Why? Afraid we’d call you back home?”
“Yeah,” Grant answered.
“Both Lakesh and Kane have threatened me in their usual manners if I pull you from home too soon,” Bry answered.
Home, Grant thought. That’s what this tiny island remnant of the sunken West Coast of the United States had become to him. New Edo and its neighbor, Thunder Isle, were among the new archipelago that had formed in the wake of the nuclear holocaust that nearly drove humankind into extinction on January 21, 2001. Powerful earthshaker bombs had shattered California, dumping entire cities into the Pacific Ocean, utilizing the instability of the San Andreas Fault to wreak havoc. While the nuclear war was primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union, the conflict had been touched off by an incarnation of the Annunaki god-king Enlil, then disguised as Colonel Thrush.
How many billions had been scoured from the face of the Earth, literally by the hand of their greatest enemy? With the arming of a bomb placed in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Thrush/Enlil had ushered in an age where the hidden and sleeping Annunaki overlords could awaken and recast the planet as their renewed jewel, as it had been millennia past.
This was history that had been drummed into Grant, so much that it came unbidden just as he thought of the island where his true love resided. A turmoil of those memories could flood unbidden if he couldn’t pre occupy himself. Right now, though, even the splendor of his unclad lover, flexing her taut, beautiful body in the near-poetic dance of martial arts katas, wasn’t enough of a distraction.
“Grant?” Bry asked. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” Grant answered. He regretted using Shizuka as an excuse, but there was no other way to explain his inattention. “Just admiring the view this morning….”
“Say hi to Shizuka for me,” Bry said. “I’d say give her a kiss…”
“But
