the end of the Cerberus facility as Kane knew it.
He became aware of other gunshots behind him, and he turned to see Grant vaulting over a nearby desk and meeting one of the hooded strangers with both feet, knocking the creep backward.
“We were out in the field,” Kane explained. “No one alerted us to—”
Domi cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “There was no time,” she explained. “These weirdos seemed to come from nowhere. Screwed with the power, screwed with our comms.”
“How did they get in?” Kane asked, mystified. The mountaintop redoubt was well protected from intruders, so a force the size Domi’s words implied should not have been able to waltz in easily.
She glared back at him, a snarl appearing on her alabaster lips. “What am I, the answer girl?”
“Hold that thought,” Kane instructed as he spotted one of the strange robed figures scrambling toward him from the other side of the desk. Kane leaped from cover, blasting off a stream of shots at the approaching intruder, felling him. The stranger toppled as the bullets struck, crashing over a desk before landing in a heap. A little way along, Kane saw Domi reappear from her own hiding spot and snap off three quick shots at another of their foes, while behind them both, Brigid Baptiste was putting up her own defense with her TP-9 semiautomatic.
“Any idea who they are?” Kane asked.
“No, no and no,” Domi snapped, as if guessing his next questions. Then she did the strangest thing—leaped over the desk before her, the Detonics Combat Master spitting fire at her target even as he fell.
“He’s down,” Kane called as he ran to join her, leaping over the fallen body of a Cerberus tech. “No need to expose yourself.”
“No, Kane, you not know,” Domi explained, slipping into her strange, clipped Outlander patois as she glared at him over her shoulder.
But he did. In that moment, he saw the man Domi had felled in a volley of bullets get up, and brush himself off as if her shots had meant nothing. Instantly, a feeling of dread gripping him, Kane turned to see his own foe—the one he had shot and presumably killed—struggle back up off the desk, return to a standing position, the spent bullets dropping from his robe like snowflakes.
“What are they—armored or undead?” Kane asked as he drilled the figure again with 9 mm bullets. “’Cause I have had my fill of undead for one day.”
“Not undead,” Domi told him. “But dead inside. Nothing hurts them.”
Kane spun as another shower of stones hurtled toward him, and he saw now that their enemies were using simple slingshots to launch the projectiles at exceptional speed. It was almost as if the stones themselves could gather speed as they cut through the air. Sharp edges slapped at the protective weave of the shadow suit Kane wore beneath his torn denim jacket as he held his arm up to protect his face. The stones ripped his sleeve, sending pale blue threads flying like seeds blown from a dandelion. Kane pulled the remains away, tossing them aside. When he drew his arm back, he saw that the superstrong fiber of the shadow suit beneath it was torn, and needle-thin streaks of blood ran through it where his bare skin had been exposed. The weave of his suit was akin to armor, so whatever these people were throwing was exceptionally tough.
Kane ran at the hooded stranger who had just thrown the wad of stones at him, vaulting over a desk and bringing his Sin Eater to bear on the woman as she reloaded her catapult from a small pouch tied to her belt. He snapped off another shot as she placed the ammunition in the sling she held poised, and her own shot went wide.
Across the room, Grant was involved in his own scrap with one of the intruders, shoving the hooded man’s fist aside before blasting him in the face with his Sin Eater. His opponent collapsed, a plume of dark smoke pouring from beneath his hood.
“You hit them close enough,” Grant announced, “and they’ll go down.” He didn’t need to shout. Instead, he had automatically engaged the hidden subdermal Commtact unit that was connected to his mastoid bone.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. Grant, Kane and the other members of the Cerberus field teams had Commtacts surgically embedded beneath their skin, a relatively minor operation that allowed them to keep in real-time contact in any given situation.
Kane picked up on Grant’s advice, jumping over the nearest desk as another volley of stones whizzed across the room at him. He was on the slingshot bearer in an instant, high kicking the guy in the face. It felt like kicking a wall, and Kane staggered back with a grunt.
The man stared at him, eyes burning from beneath his hood. “This is the future,” he stated, his voice eerily calm. “Submit.”
Kane thrust his right fist forward, slamming it up into the stranger’s gut. “Sorry, that ain’t going to work for me, buckaroo,” he growled as he unleashed a burst of bullets into him.
The man keeled over as the blast took him, dropping to the floor like a discarded bag of compost even as the woman Kane had just shot clambered to a standing position behind him.
“Point-blank them,” Kane instructed, looking about him to catch the attention of the other Cerberus personnel in the room. “It’s the best way.”
Then he was back facing the woman who had tossed stones at him just a half minute before, the one he’d thought he had dispatched. Kane whipped the Sin Eater up, driving it toward her face, but she moved fast in the flickering overhead lights, slapping the muzzle of the blaster aside even as Kane squeezed the trigger.
His shots went wide and she drove a powerful fist at his jaw, connecting with such force that his ears rang. When Kane looked up, the woman’s hood had dropped back and he saw her face for the first time. She was older than he had expected, with lined skin and crow’s feet around her eyes—probably in her late forties or early fifties. There was a blister dead center on her forehead, and Kane found his attention drawn to its ugliness for a distracting instant.
The woman grabbed a small lamp off the nearest desk, its cable sparking as she wrenched it from the socket and swung it at Kane’s head. He regained his composure just in time, using the muzzle of his Sin Eater to deflect the projectile. Then he drove the pistol forward and blasted a stream of bullets into the woman’s throat and upward, peppering her face. He did not like doing this, but there was something eerily wrong with these interlopers, who acted with such single-mindedness that they seemed to be automatons.
Somewhere behind Kane, Brigid Baptiste had found herself trapped between two of the slingshot-wielding strangers. As the one to her left flung a handful of tiny stones at her face, she dropped to her knees, feeling them pull at her hair as she managed to duck just in time. The stones struck the other attacker like buckshot, knocking him to the floor. Then Brigid kicked out, striking the first man behind the ankle and bringing him to the ground. As he fell, Brigid whipped up her semiautomatic, blasting a stuttering burst of bullets into his torso.
Behind her, a third assailant had grabbed something from one of the debris-strewed desks, and she turned just in time to
