for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.
“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.
The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.
“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.
“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”
As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Kane announced as he entered the computer room, his hand holding the gunmetal flask prominently out before him.
Inside it was gloomy, with smoke damage on the walls. Three guards spun to face the intruders, reaching for their sidearms. Two other men were in the room, and they looked up from their work at the stripped-down computer banks.
“I’d like to introduce you to my friend,” Kane said, “the dead man’s switch. Some of you look like scientific types so I’ll put this in terms you’re all familiar with—get out of here or I will blow us all up. Any questions?”
One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”
The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.
Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.
“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”
One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”
Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”
Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.
The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”
Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”
Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.
Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”
“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.
Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”
“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”
She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.
Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”
Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”
Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”
Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.
“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.
“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.
“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.
Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”
Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”
Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”
O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.
Leaning
