Mariah had been with Cerberus a long time, ever since being awakened from a cryogenic suspension facility she had been placed in back in the twenty-first century. It had been her idea to travel to India, using the teleportation system that the Cerberus team relied on.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Mariah said, staring across the wide expanse of river where locals were washing clothes, hefting buckets of water for private use, and where the local holy men had come to wash the soles of their feet.
Brigid watched, too, as a clutch of children ran past them on the stone steps and leaped into the water, giggling as they splashed one another. All human life was here, she realized, going about its business, oblivious to the great war that had been fought just a few days before, a war that had been for their very souls.
The water itself was brown with silt where movements churned up the riverbed, and it had that smell to it, Brigid recognized, the smell of muddy puddles after a hard rainfall.
“Clem brought me here once,” Mariah continued enthusiastically. “He said that the Hindus believe the Ganges is the source of all life and that bathing in it will wash away a person’s sins.” She turned to Brigid then, smiling her bright, hopeful smile.
Brigid just stared, watching the water the way one might watch an insect bat against the outside of a windowpane, with distracted disinterest.
“Brigid, I don’t know what happened to you,” Mariah said gently, “but I like to think that Clem would have said to bring you here, if he’d still been alive.”
Mariah had lost Clem Bryant in the God War, never having had the chance to tell him that she was in love with him.
Slowly Brigid dipped her head in the faintest of nods. “Clem was a good man,” she said quietly.
“He was,” Mariah agreed. “I really miss him. We all lost something in the war, Brigid. I lost...hope for a while.”
Brigid looked at the geologist, saw the worry lines on her face and around her eyes. She looked older than Brigid remembered. The war had placed a strain on everyone.
“Do you want a dip?” Mariah asked, inclining her head encouragingly toward the river. “Wash away your sins, once-in-a-lifetime offer.”
Brigid shook her head. “You go,” she said. “I’ll wait right here.”
There, on the sandy stone steps that lined the riverbank, Mariah stripped off the white jumpsuit, revealing a modest swimsuit underneath. “Whether the river really does wash away people’s sins or not, you can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened,” she told Brigid.
Brigid just looked at the rushing water, leaning down until she was sitting on one of the wide steps, her legs stretched out before her.
Mariah didn’t bother saying anything else. She had thought a trip to India might pull Brigid out of her blue funk. The Cerberus team was still engaged with the massive cleanup of their redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana. The redoubt had been infiltrated and overwhelmed by Ullikummis and his army, but Brigid had seemed distant, emotionally disengaged, unable to be of any help. Yet the trip hadn’t seemed to do anything for her mood. She remained withdrawn, as if in mourning.
Brigid watched as Mariah waded into the river, waters lapping at her ankles and then her knees, then higher until she was in it past her hips. The geologist crouched, letting the cool waters lap against her skin, smiling as it tickled.
It would take more than water to wash away her sins, Brigid knew. In her guise as Brigid Haight, she had been a part of the campaign to betray and cage humankind. To cleanse her of her sins would take a miracle, something with the power of a nuke. She watched in silence as Mariah ducked under the water, letting it run through her hair as all around her the locals continued going about their business seemingly without a care in the world. It was as if nothing had happened at all.
* * *
CERBERUS WAS A MESS. The familiar operations room that sat at the hub of the redoubt complex looked as if a bomb had hit it. No, not a bomb, Lakesh corrected himself—an avalanche.
Lakesh was in his mid-fifties, with dusky skin, clear blue eyes and an aquiline nose over his refined mouth. His black hair was swept back in a tidy design, hints of gray showing at the temples. His full name was Mohandas Lakesh Singh and he had run the Cerberus operation since its inception. In fact, he had been at this redoubt, off and on, for the best part of 250 years, dating back to before the nuclear holocaust that had so dramatically changed the world at the end of the twentieth century. A physicist and cyberneticist of some renown in his day, Lakesh had worked on the original mat-trans system at this very redoubt. Cryogenic freezing and a program of organ replacement had kept Lakesh alive far longer than his natural years. In short, Lakesh had seen a lot in his life, and a lot of it had been in this very room in the heart of a mountain.
The room featured two aisles of computer desks, and one wall was dominated by a Mercator relief map showing Earth covered in lighted pathways that traced the routes available to the matter-transfer system at any given time. The mat-trans units were designed for military use back in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cerberus mat-trans unit was located in its own chamber in the far corner of the room. Tinted brown armaglass walls encompassed its powerful machinery. With just the flick of a switch, the mat-trans could hurl a person across the quantum ether to a similar unit many miles away. Though primarily concentrated in mainland America, the mat-trans units stretched across all continents and even as far as the moon.
The operations room was staffed around the clock, with people checking the live feeds and liaising with field agents in their self-appointed role of protecting humankind. Right now, however, the room was mostly populated by a cleanup crew that was using a combination of ultrasonic generators and good old-fashioned brute force to remove the strange infestation that had threatened to consume the redoubt.
The Cerberus redoubt was initially a military facility located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, where it had remained largely forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.
Hidden away as it was, the redoubt had required few active measures to discourage visitors, so when it had been attacked by Ullikummis and his forces the personnel had been both surprised and dumbfounded. With a force of just fifty troops, Ullikummis had taken control of the redoubt, altering its interior dimensions and changing the very shape of the rooms themselves as he transformed it into a brutal Life Camp.
Ullikummis himself was the shamed scion of the Annunaki bloodline, and had been medically altered to look like a monster carved from stone. Among other genetic enhancements, Ullikummis exhibited a psionic control over rock, and had employed this to radically alter the whole of the redoubt, covering everything in a fresh skin of stone. Ullikummis had other powers, too, including his so-called obedience stones, semisentient shards of rock that could influence and control a person’s thoughts. Ullikummis and his agents had secretly placed these obedience stones in several of the Cerberus personnel prior to the attack on the redoubt, and it had been these hidden allies within who had allowed the great stone Annunaki to take over the complex with such ease.
When the redoubt had come back under Cerberus’s control, the personnel had begun the slow process of cleaning away the stone and replacing the damaged stock beneath. It had
