and paced over to the glass cylinder to take a closer look at the man inside. He was a muscular individual, well-built and broad shouldered, with a firm jaw and high brow. “He doesn’t look much more than—what?—thirty-five, maybe forty.”
“This is cryogenic research,” Brigid said, indicating the book, “far in advance of anything Professor Flag’s contemporaries would have been working on.”
“The guy’s a supergenius, remember,” Grant stated.
“Supergenius or not, this is really quite remarkable,” Brigid told them both. She closed the notebook and placed it back on the glass work top. “You can be the smartest Neanderthal in the cave, but it still won’t do you much good to design a computer until someone develops the microchip. Flag’s notes here indicate that he bypassed so many hurdles with regards to the limitations of the technology around him. I mean, look at him. He’s a 250-year-old man, and he has been perfectly cryogenically preserved.”
Kane looked at the impressive man standing before him in the glass cabinet. “Kind of vain, though, isn’t it?”
“What?” Brigid asked.
“Why freeze yourself?” Kane asked. “Dead is dead—why prolong it any more than you need to?”
“I don’t think he died, Kane,” Brigid considered. “I think maybe something terrible happened back in 1930, and this was his way of keeping out of its path.”
Kane knocked the cylinder with the edge of his fist. “Yeah, great job. Happy 250th, Sleepy.”
Kane stepped away from the cylinder and headed back into the vast laboratory area, peering this way and that. “Anyway, let’s go see if we can find this knife thing,” he said. “Hopefully there’s a map somewhere. I don’t want to be wandering around this place forever.”
Brigid and Grant followed, spreading out so that the three of them could scope out the vast Laboratory of the Incredible as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working swiftly and methodically, they checked work surfaces and desks, opened cabinets and looked beneath wipe-clean work tops, pushing aside notebooks and Bunsen burners, beakers and glass tubes. There were bottles and jars full of strange concoctions, and many of them appeared to hold crystals or small deposits of salt. Kane presumed these had once been liquid, too, but had evaporated over the vast passage of time since anyone had last walked through this strange and startling laboratory.
“You think he’ll ever wake up?” Grant asked, calling across the room to Brigid as he peered behind a rudimentary spectrograph.
“I only glanced at his notes,” she admitted, scanning the shelves of a freestanding cabinet, “but it looked like he couldn’t finalize the wake-up protocols in time.”
Leafing through some loose papers at a desk, Kane stopped what he was doing and looked over at Brigid warily. “In time for what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Brigid said. “Do you want me to read the notebook, or do you want me to look for the knife?”
“Well, let’s start by…” Kane began and then his words tailed off. Suddenly, like an anxious rabbit, he stood to his full height and looked off to the far end of the room. “You hear that?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“What?” Grant asked, keeping his own voice low.
Silently, Kane indicated ahead of them to where a brightly lit doorway waited. With a swift hand gesture, he stalked toward the doorway, encouraging his partners to follow.
“This had better not be another joke,” Brigid muttered as she pulled the TP-9 from its holster once more.
Kane hurried forward, his body low as he made his way to the doorway. Peering inside, he observed that it opened into a short corridor that led to another doorway just a dozen paces ahead. The noises were coming from beyond the second doorway.
Grant edged up beside Kane, giving his partner a concerned look. “What have we got?” he whispered. Grant had known Kane for years, and he knew that his partner had remarkable instincts, what Kane would call his “point-man sense.” In reality, the point-man sense was a combination of spatial awareness and the refined use of Kane’s other senses to become almost spiritually at one with his surroundings. In their days as Cobaltville Magistrates, Kane’s point-man sense had saved Grant’s life on more than one potentially lethal occasion.
Kane made a face before he stepped into the brightly lit corridor. His face said it all: whatever it was, it was probably trouble.
Grant held his hands loose at his sides as he followed Kane along the walkway, walking on the balls of his feet so as to make as little noise as possible. From the far end, where the vast laboratory stood, Brigid waited, TP-9 in hand, scanning the corridor and the doorway that led to the room beyond.
Reaching the doorway, Kane held up his hand, instructing the others to wait but to hold their positions. There were definitely noises coming from the next room, people’s voices and the sounds of movement. Warily, Kane eased forward on silent tread and peered through the open doorway.
The room beyond was roughly hexagonal in shape, approximately fifteen feet across, and with a ceiling that was much lower than the laboratory area, just ten feet above the flooring. Like the rest of the strange headquarters, the walls to the room appeared to be constructed of ice, but it was much darker than the other areas that Kane and his companions had visited, reminding Kane of snow turned to slush. Light came from overhead in a single beam that lit the center of the room. There, standing in the center on a pedestal, stood a glass cabinet, similar in construction to those that the Cerberus team had encountered in the room they had originally broken into. This one, however, had reinforced wooden struts along its edges. The cabinet held a single item—a knife. Kane guessed that the knife was fifteen inches in length, including the handle, and it appeared to be carved from stone. Even from this distance, Kane could see the writing along its blade, though he didn’t recognize the language itself. To one side of the blade, trapped within the glass cabinet like a fly in amber, a streak of darkness like a smear of paint seemed to hover in the air. As Kane moved his head, he saw the darkness glitter, like stars in the night sky.
There were people in the room, too, a dozen of them. Although none of them wore a specific uniform, they all seemed to be of a type to Kane’s eyes. There were eight men and four women milling hurriedly about the room. One man was running a handheld scanning device over the glass display case, and several people were consulting laptop displays, running diagnostics as the information was fed to them. A tall woman was pacing the room impatiently, barking orders, while a broad-shouldered man watched her, shaking his head. Several armed guards stood to the edges of the room, looking uninterested in the whole affair, doubtless having already scanned the buried headquarters and found no one within.
Kane realized with a start that these people had arrived here before the Cerberus team, and had either used or created a different entrance. Given the size of the Laboratory of the Incredible, and the snowstorm raging outside, it would have been easy to remain utterly unaware of any other intruders unless they actually crossed paths.
“What about if we just break the cabinet, then?” the woman was saying, an irritated edge to her voice. She was tall—exceptionally so for a woman, almost certainly over six feet in height—with dark hair cut to fall just below her shoulders. She wore a formfitting outfit finished in matte-black leather, with red piping that accentuated her lithe frame. Kane could see a small pistol held in a holster at the rounded swell of her hip.
“We’ll
