over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.
Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”
“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”
Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”
Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”
Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”
Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.
“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.
Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.
Grant crouched beneath the computer desk and began unplugging connections, including the jury-rigged power that the millennialists had attached to get it running in the first place. “Insane or not,” he told Brigid, “would you trust your life in anyone else’s hands?”
Brigid didn’t even need to think about it. A dozen images jockeyed for position in her mind’s eye, situations where Kane had covered her back, taken care of her and saved her life. A hundred further instances were rushing through her head as she helped Grant unwire the base of the computer. Photographic memory could be a double-edged sword when you wanted to be mad at someone, she decided.
“Any idea how we’re getting out of here?” she asked as they discarded leads and Grant pulled the blocky computer from the desk.
“None at all,” he told her, smiling broadly, “but I’m not worried. Kane’ll do something. He always does.”
Brigid grabbed the TP-9 pistol from where she had placed it beside her on the desk, and she and Grant walked briskly across the room to the double doors and out into the corridor.
Kane was waiting for them just by the door, the gunmetal flask back in his hand. Grant took one look at the flask and shook his head. “That’ll never work,” he warned his friend as the lights flickered above them.
Kane started off toward the hole in the wall at a fast trot, trusting the others to keep up. “Oh, I’ve added a little something-something this time,” he said, grinning maliciously as he stepped over the unconscious gunman on the floor and headed for the large gap in the wall that led into the boxed tunnel.
Grant was right behind him, hefting the computer under his left arm. The black, metal-covered unit stretched from beneath his armpit right down to the curled tips of his gripping fingers, and he was forced to keep his arm straight to carry it. They had left the monitor and keyboard behind, knowing they could substitute these items when they reached their headquarters at the Cerberus redoubt. “This thing is going to throw my aim off,” Grant advised the others. “I can keep you covered, but I don’t think I can do much pinpoint work.”
“Won’t be necessary,” Kane assured him, still clutching the flask. “Baptiste and I will handle things, won’t we?”
Brigid sight-checked the chamber of her TP-9 before answering. “Can’t wait,” she said grimly.
With that, the three-person reconnaissance team began to jog along the shaft, making good speed without exhausting themselves as they worked their way up the muddy incline.
They didn’t meet anyone along the shaft, but as they turned a slight corner close to the exit, they suddenly found themselves assaulted by a volley of bullets. Kane urged his companions backward, and the Cerberus trio waited just around the corner as a stream of bullets peppered the wall across from them.
“Told you,” Grant said quietly as the stream of bullets slapped the wall.
Taking point, Kane edged forward to the turn in the shaft, answering Grant without looking back. “They’ll get bored in a minute.”
Kane drew his right arm back and stepped two paces forward before tossing the gunmetal flask ahead of him like a baseball pitcher. The flask hurtled through the air toward the entrance to the mine shaft. Still tucked behind the curve in the shaft, Brigid and Grant heard the astonished cries of Millennial Consortium guards as they saw the projectile fly toward them.
Kane ducked behind cover as a stream of steel-jacketed bullets poured into the shaft. “Look away,” he instructed Brigid and Grant. “Close your eyes and look away!”
All three of them turned to face the underground lair that they had just come from. A second later an almighty noise assaulted their ears, and even from behind lidded eyes they could see the bright flash of an explosion.
Moments later, Grant and Brigid were chasing after Kane as he led the way, Sin Eater in hand, up the last part of the shaft and into the open air.
“What the hell did you just do?” Grant asked, incredulous.
Kane snapped off a shot from his pistol, and the bullet swept the legs out from under a millennialist guardsman who was rubbing at his eyes, his own pistol forgotten in his limp hand. “I stuffed the flask with flash-bangs,” Kane explained as he darted out of the entrance and continued running, head low, across the snow-carpeted ground.
Once outside, they could see that the millennialists had arranged themselves in a crescent shape across the open entrance in a determined bid to trap the Cerberus exiles inside the shaft and, presumably, contain the expected explosion when the dead man’s switch was detonated.
Brigid loosed three shots from her TP-9, catching two of the dazzled millennialists in the chest and clipping the gun hand of a third. A few paces ahead of her, Kane was firing 9 mm bursts from his Sin Eater, mostly as warning shots rather than aiming at specific targets. The way he saw it, they were pretty much home free with the opposition blinded by the flash-bangs; it didn’t warrant unnecessary deaths now.
The flash-bang was a little explosive charge that provided exactly what its name implied: a big flash and a loud bang. Kane and Grant carried various different types of the little capsules, some able to generate copious amounts of smoke or a foul stench upon breaking, and they used them for distraction in favor of actually hurting an enemy. The bright glare of the flash-bangs could temporarily blind an unsuspecting
