who had put him here and why? No, those questions weren’t important, not yet. Those were questions that Kane could address when he needed to. Right now, he needed to find the answer to a far more fundamental question—how had they put him here? Because if he could figure that out he might have a chance to escape.
The room was sealed, and more than that, it was solid. The walls reached all the way around with no signs of a break, he discovered as he ran his fingers slowly along them, high and low. But his captors had managed to place him inside, so there must be a way out; there had to be.
Kane peered up then, the thought occurring to him with slow inevitability. An oubliette—that could be it. A dungeon with its access point in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner. He had seen them before and admired the simplicity of the design, imprisoning a man merely by removing the ladder that led to his freedom.
But no. As far as he could see in the gloom of the cavern, there was nothing up there, just more rock running across the ceiling, like clouds on an overcast day. He reached up, found that if he stretched he could just scrape the tips of his fingers against the stone. It seemed solid enough, not a hologram or an optical illusion. Bending his knees, Kane sprang into the air, slapping his palm against the ceiling. It was solid, giving back no echo to suggest any hollowness beyond.
For the moment, at least, he was trapped.
Kane moved to a corner of the room, unzipped his fly and relieved himself, the pressure in his bladder finally insisting upon release. The stench of his own urine came to him, stronger than he expected. After he was done, he covered the puddle of urine with sand like a cat. He wondered if he was being foolish, if this was the only liquid he would get here, and that, no matter how repellent the thought, he would need to salvage it to combat dehydration.
No, Kane told himself. If they wanted to kill me they would have done so. I’m alive because someone wanted me to stay alive.
But the thought didn’t ring entirely true. To end up here, he had been defeated, and it was possible that his foe, whoever that was, had such a callous disregard of his opponents that he had locked Kane here to starve, a slow ordeal that would lead to madness and death.
Kane’s nose wrinkled at the acrid stench of urine, and he sat as far from the damp sand as he could, resting his back against the cold rock wall. With no way in or out, he let his thoughts drift, struggling to recall what had happened, to piece together how he had ended up in this pitiful predicament.
They had returned from Louisiana, he remembered that much….
THE FOG AROUND THEM was beginning to clear, and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops center in Montana, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling transport mist.
“Good to be home,” Kane said, brushing back his wet hair.
Brigid Baptiste nodded as she tapped in the code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. The Cerberus redoubt had served as the hub of teleportation research and development for over two hundred years.
Brigid’s hair clung to her face, still damp from her encounter with the queen of all things dead in the Louisiana redoubt. “I need a shower,” she told Kane as the door slid open before her. “A warm one this time, with soap.”
“Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed his aching shoulder.
A few years older than Kane, Grant was a behemoth of a man, tall with wide shoulders and ebony skin. His muscles strained at the weave of his shadow suit. A Kevlar trench coat hugged his shoulders and draped down like a bat’s wings over his legs. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp and he wore a gunslinger’s drooping mustache over his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville. In fact, he had been Kane’s partner in the Magistrate Division, and over the years the two had fallen into an uncanny simpatico relationship during combat. Grant had been recruited into the Cerberus operation along with Kane when the two of them had gone rogue from the barony, after learning it threatened the well-being and natural progression of humankind. They seemed to be somehow closer than just combat partners or friends—they were more like brothers.
Grant rolled his shoulder as he followed Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room with its huge Mercator map dominating the far wall. What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.
Something had paid Cerberus a visit.
Something bad.
The room was a mess. The overhead lighting flickered and flashed. The two neat aisles of computer terminals were wrecked, and Kane saw the glass of monitor screens littering the floor as he dodged beneath a hail of bullets launched at him and his companions. No, not bullets, he realized as they rattled against the desk he had dodged behind—they were tiny chips of rock flying through the air.
Already Kane was moving, his hand preparing to receive the Sin Eater pistol he wore in a wrist rig on his right arm. The fabled sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the compact pistol elongated to its full length of eighteen inches as it was powered into his waiting palm. Once it was there, Kane’s index finger met the gun’s guardless trigger, reeling off a swift burst of fire at the hooded interlopers in the room. A storm of 9 mm titanium-coated bullets sped across the ops room as Kane darted for cover, trusting his colleagues to do the same. His attack was met with another hail of stones.
When the rain of tiny rocks ceased, he popped his head up over the side of the desk and began assessing his targets systematically. Kane counted eight strangers in an eye blink, all of them dressed in dirty cowls that covered their heads like a monk’s habit. They were hurrying through the room, striking out at the last few Cerberus personnel who opposed them as they smashed the remaining computer terminals, using clubs or just their fists. Even as Kane watched, the blond-haired comms op, Beth Delaney, was knocked to the floor by a savage, backhanded slap from one of the strangers. She toppled over with a loud crack of breaking bones.
Through the chaos, Kane spotted his colleague Domi leaping for cover, her agile, alabaster form flying through the air like some crazed jack-in-the-box.
“Domi, what’s going on?” he demanded.
Ten feet ahead of him, the albino girl looked down the aisle, pinpointing Kane by his voice. A true child of the Outlands, she was a strange-looking individual, barely five feet tall with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair. Her tiny frame was more like a teenage girl’s than a woman’s, her small, pert breasts pushing against her maroon crop top. Besides the top, Domi had on a pair of abbreviated shorts pulled high at the hip and leaving the full length of her dazzling white legs exposed. As was her habit, she was barefoot. The albino woman’s weird, crimson eyes flashed as they met Kane’s down the length of the computer aisle. “Took your sweet time getting here, Kane,” she shouted. “We’re under attack! They took Lakesh.”
“Dammit!” Kane spit.
Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, known to his friends as Lakesh, was Domi’s lover, and the founder of the Cerberus operation. A fabled physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh was a freezie—which was to say, he had been born over two hundred years ago, in the twentieth century, bringing his incredible knowledge of the mat-trans system, along with a sense of freedom almost forgotten by humankind, here to the twenty-third century. Lakesh had helped establish the Cerberus operation, and had been there with Kane at the start. While their relationship had not always been one of absolute trust, Kane respected the man and knew they needed to have him in command. Moreover, Lakesh’s exceptional knowledge
