barrel and, at some point in its history, someone had painted a naked, openmouthed woman reclining along that length.
“You’re a maniac,” Salt snarled as he freed the Comanche from its holster.
Black John smiled as he brought his own pistol to bear on the mutinous pirate. “Mr. Salt, surely you cannot be serious—”
Salt pulled the trigger, blasting a volley of .357 bullets into Black John’s chest. Several missed, cutting splinters from the deck in furious bursts of wood, but three bullets hit, striking the captain with force enough to shake his whole body. Black John’s pistol blasted, too, but he was a fraction of a second slower in getting that first shot in. His shots went wild, clipping Salt only once in the hard muscle of his upper left arm.
Salt bellowed in pain as the bullet winged him, jabbing with his Comanche and blasting another burst of fire at his captain. Black John lay writhing on the deck, blossoms of blood appearing on his clothes like opening poppies, a dark wound in each one’s center.
“Bastard,” Salt spit as his weapon finally clicked on Empty.
Standing there, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed heavily, Salt became aware of his seven colleagues around him. They had boarded with him and Black John to take whatever cargo the ship might have.
“What happened, Fern?” Six asked, still hefting the crate of stones.
Salt became suddenly very aware that Six had a gun trained on him under the base of the box he held, a little snub-nosed thing, its finish the color of storm clouds.
“Cap’n’s out of control,” Salt muttered, shaking his head. “You seen it. You all seen it.”
For a moment, Six and his companions stood in silence, each man poised with his own blaster. Then Six nodded and clicked the safety back on his pistol, the others following suit a moment later.
“Killed the girl an’ the baby, just to make sure,” Salt continued. “The unborn fucking baby. No witnesses, my eye, he just went kill crazy. It’s sick, man.”
Six took a step away, motioning for the others to follow with a tilt of his head. “Let’s get back to La Discordia and get out of here. Time’s ticking and the clock’s never kind.”
Xia looked Captain Black John Jefferson up and down for a moment, the man’s blood pooling around him where he lay sprawled on the deck. “You want we should take him with us, Six?”
Six shook his head without looking back. “Screw him,” he said. “Salt’s right—he always was a sick bastard.”
“Yeah,” Xia agreed, plucking the Colt Anaconda from the dying man’s grip. “An’ he cheated at cards.” With that, he blasted off a single shot into Black John’s skull, finishing the job that Fern Salt had started.
Two minutes later, the graceful dartlike form of La Discordia was sailing away, cutting through the sea at some speed. Behind it, the little fishing vessel known as La Segunda Montaña lurched toward the water, its prow sinking beneath the waves. The pirate crew whooped as they departed the scene of the crime. They had gained only a few trinkets, a box of stones that had been washed in blood, but there had been women on the ship, and the men had been satisfied. Piracy was not always about goods; frequently it was simply an exercise in staving off boredom. The ability to live free, away from the baronies and their oppressive rules in the north, was something every crewman treasured.
Which was ironic, in that the passengers aboard La Segunda Montaña had also come in search of freedom. They were refugees, escaping a madness that seemed to engulf the northern territory of America. The villes had fallen but something had risen briefly in its place, a religion based on stone. Alfredo, the late captain of La Segunda Montaña, had lived the past few months of his life under the name of Alfredo Stone, in acknowledgment of his new faith. The people aboard his boat had come south in search of freedom, trying to escape the insanity that swept across the north after the fall of the baronies, trying to find somewhere to live. Instead they had merely found somewhere new to die.
Chapter 2
Brigid Baptiste was sick of the questions. A member of the resistance group known as the Cerberus organization, Brigid had been deeply involved in a war between two would-be gods, Ullikummis and Enlil, who were in fact part of an ancient race of aliens called the Annunaki. With her Cerberus colleagues, Brigid had been battling the Annunaki for several years, striving to prevent their takeover of planet Earth and the absolute subjugation of the human spirit. But during the most recent skirmish with the insidious aliens, Brigid had been taken prisoner by Ullikummis, rogue upstart of the Annunaki. The stone god had turned her mind against her, brainwashed her into servitude. For a time she had taken the name of Brigid Haight and acted as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness, helping to manipulate events so that Ullikummis could breathe new life into the reincarnated form of his mother and seize control of Earth and her peoples.
Gifted with an eidetic memory that granted her perfect recall, Brigid had used a mind trick to hide her own personality in a meditative trance, leaving her body to function solely as a shell controlled by the wicked purpose of Ullikummis. But she had become lost in the trance, and when her mind had finally been reawakened, Brigid found that her body had wrought terrible atrocities, killing innocents and betraying her closest friends.
The war itself was over. Less than a week earlier, Ullikummis had led his million-strong army in a final push on Enlil’s stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates. Ultimately, the attack had failed, with enormous casualties on both sides. Cerberus had been in the thick of things, striving to the very limits of their abilities to halt the incredible God War that had erupted, twisting it from within. And for a while, almost to the very end of that final, cataclysmic battle, Brigid had stood with Ullikummis, opposed to the forces of man. She had a woman to thank for her final change of heart, a Cerberus fighter called Rosalia who had managed to break the meditative spell and free Brigid’s mind from its hiding place beyond time.
Ever since then, Brigid had been plagued by questions. Her colleagues had been concerned for her, which was not only natural but touching—something so very human that it encompassed everything that the Cerberus organization represented. But Brigid didn’t have any answers; she was still trying to put the pieces together herself. It was like waking from some horrible nightmare, only to be told that the nightmare had been real after all.
Now Brigid stood on the wide stone steps that led down to the River Ganges in India, the morning sun beating on her back. She was a tall and slender woman in her late twenties, with emerald eyes and flame-red hair that cascaded down her back in an elegant sweep of curls. Her skin was pale and she showed a wide expanse of forehead that suggested intelligence, along with full lips that suggested passion. In truth, Brigid could be defined by both of those aspects, and many more besides. She wore a white one-piece suit, the standard uniform of the Cerberus organization, and she had augmented this with a light jacket that was already making her feel too warm even before the sun had properly reached its full intensity.
Beside Brigid stood another woman dressed in similar clothes, enthusiastically gazing out at the rushing waters of the Ganges. This was Mariah Falk, a thin woman in her early forties, with short dark hair that showed flecks of white running through it. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an engaging smile and a genial nature that put most people at ease. A geologist, 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,
