where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, but its full impact had been reduced thanks to the armor-strong weave of the protective suit.
There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his rangy, loping strides and his personality, for he could be both a loner and pack leader, depending on circumstance. Right now he was here as an operative of Cerberus, the outlawed organization that dealt in the esoteric, with a particular emphasis on protecting humankind from the hidden forces, human and alien, that seemed always arrayed against it. Together with Grant and Brigid, Kane formed one-third of Cerberus Away Team—or CAT—Alpha.
Between Kane and his partners was the interphaser, its square base and pyramidal sides now dotted with the impact of bullets so that it looked as if some carnivorous creature had sunk its teeth into it. Brigid was staring at it from her own hiding place behind a fallen obelisk of stone that lay close to the mighty rent in the ground.
“How do we get out of here now?” Brigid asked, reaching for the weapon holstered at her hip. She was dressed in a similar camouflage outfit to the others. Theirs was a noble pursuit, but sometimes it seemed that walking into a hail of bullets was a too-frequent part of the job. Almost as though to illustrate this, Brigid unholstered the TP-9 semiautomatic that she habitually wore at her hip, unlocked the safety and scanned their surroundings with alert eyes. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol finished in molded matte black with a covered targeting scope across the top. “Well?”
“Don’t ask me,” Kane spit, ducking his head down as another volley of bullets came hurtling past overhead. “I’m fresh out of ideas. Besides, I thought you were the brains of this outfit, Baptiste!”
Brigid glared at him. “Brains, yes. Miracle maker—that’s your department, I believe.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Belief will get you a miracle, all right.” As he spoke, he performed a long-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. The maneuver activated the catch on a holster located on the underside of Kane’s forearm, commanding a retractable blaster to his hand from its hiding place beneath his jacket’s sleeve. Kane’s weapon was a fourteen-inch-long automatic pistol called a Sin Eater, a compact hand blaster able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The weapon was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one, and a Mag’s judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch feels natural on a habitual wearer.
Back pressed tightly to the wall, Kane poked his head above the edge of the sand-colored bricks and scanned the area. There were people moving in all directions, some in groups, some alone, all of them armed. Some were dressed in semi-military uniforms, cobbled-together outfits that created a ragtag kind of uniformity. Others wore civilian clothing that looked like a cross between a long coat and a woman’s nightdress. All of them were scrambling through the ruins and blasting at one another with a wide variety of weapons. Someone must have seen the interphase window open and figured it for a bomb or a rocket launch or something—with the place full of hair-triggered nut balls the way it was, it was little wonder, Kane concluded, that someone had tried to blast the interphaser to smithereens.
Kane continued scanning the area beyond for a few moments, as another rush of bullets came rattling against the far side of his protective wall. Kane spotted a long-barreled machine gun on a tripod mount, hitched above one of the few remaining walls on the second level of the ruined fortress. It was unleashing serious damage on the fighters below in a continuous stream of 24 mm slugs. Four soldiers fell to its assault even as he watched.
Across from him, Grant and Brigid were scanning other sections of the collapsed fort, while Mariah just kept her head down, flinching at each new shout of a gun being blasted, each pee-ow of a bullet’s flight. They had appeared, it seemed, smack-dab in the middle of the ruined fort—which was smack-dab in the middle of what seemed to be a raging war zone.
“Nowhere to run,” Grant concluded, peering left and right, front and back. As he spoke, he pulled a Copperhead assault subgun—almost two feet of thick black pipe with mounted laser scope—from a hidden holster rig under his jacket and was already ducking back behind the cover of a fallen stone archway, scanning for targets.
The Copperhead was a favored field weapon of Grant’s. The grip and trigger were in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the long length of barrel to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant favored the Copperhead for its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.
“We can’t fight them all,” Brigid reasoned, even though she looked set to try.
“I don’t want to fight anyone,” Mariah added, ducking lower as a bullet clipped the archway six inches from her left shoulder.
Kane nodded in resignation. “Libya,” he muttered. “I think I hate the place already and I ain’t been here two minutes.”
Several hours earlier and a continent away, Mariah Falk had been running an analysis on some data she had received from her earthquake monitoring equipment when her interest was piqued.
A geologist for the Cerberus organization, Mariah was a twenty-first-century émigré who had found herself in the postnukecaust world after being cryogenically frozen, alongside a number of other top scientists and military personnel, on the Manitius Moon Base. The Moon Base had been rediscovered in the twenty-third century by Cerberus explorers, who had revived its residents and given them a new home on Earth in the Cerberus redoubt.
The redoubt was located in one of the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, North America, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog. The shaman had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago, and Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so keep his friends undisturbed.
Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom, like Mariah, had been cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.
Cerberus relied on two dedicated orbiting satellites—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humanity. Gaining access to the satellites had taken countless hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of
