pumping out loud, guitar-led music, filling the room with the strains of a long-forgotten rock and roll band.
One of the shooters was a muscular man with dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Like Grant, Kane was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville whose life in recent years had been intrinsically tied to the well-being of the Cerberus operation. He was built like a wolf, firm muscles across the upper half of his body, powerful legs holding him in a rock-steady stance as he reeled off a stream of bullets at the multiple targets that hurtled toward him from all sides of the room. He was dressed in casual clothes, a dark T-shirt and combat pants, and his eyes shifted from one target to the next as they appeared at various positions along the length of the firing range. His Sin Eater handgun blasted a continuous stream of 9 mm bullets as each item appeared, each bullet finding its target, not a single shot wasted.
Standing beside him, Kane’s companion was a tall woman with pale skin and dazzling red hair that fell in waves to almost halfway down her spine. The woman wore the standard white jumpsuit of the Cerberus redoubt’s staff, and it hugged her so tightly as to accentuate the curves of her trim, athletic body. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she scanned the room for new targets, the bulky TP-9 pistol held before her in a two-handed grip. Brigid Baptiste was an archivist-turned-warrior who excelled in both disciplines.
There was a clatter off to the left, its sound masked by the loud, pumping music, and a target dropped from the rails that ran the length and breadth of the ceiling. Kane and Brigid shifted their weapons toward the target in unison, their movements liquid smooth. Kane’s favored Sin Eater pistol spit bullets at the silhouette’s chest, scoring a hit dead center of the heart, while Brigid’s TP-9 semiautomatic pistol blasted a bullet through the silhouette’s forehead, leaving a craterlike wound in the upper half of the card target.
With a whir, the devastated target whipped back up into the ceiling while two others dropped from the right-hand side of the room. With an astonishing economy of movement, Kane and Brigid turned and sighted the new targets. As ever, Kane took the one that was farthest from the previous target while Brigid cut the other to pieces with a stream of 9 mm rounds.
Suddenly, a spinning red light flashed overhead, and a honking noise cut into the guitar chords blasting from the speakers. Fifteen minutes had passed; the gruelling training session was over.
Kane stood there, his gun still raised for a few seconds, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he brought his heart rate back to normal. After a moment, he turned to Brigid, openly admiring her as she steadied her own breathing, beads of sweat dripping down her nose, her red hair damp.
“You okay?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the saxophone solo that had interrupted the gritty voice of the singer from the wall speakers.
Brigid nodded, her eyes closed, a tentative smile on her lips. Then she turned to look at Kane, and her smile widened, showing two straight lines of perfect white teeth. “That was intense,” she said, her voice rich and husky. “What the heck setting did you use?”
“I got Hitch to rig up something with a little extra kick just for me and Grant,” Kane explained with a chuckle. “Too much for you, Baptiste?”
The redheaded woman checked the breech and holstered her semiautomatic at her hip before looking Kane directly in the eye. “I’ll let you know when it’s too much,” she told him, a definite challenge in her tone.
Kane couldn’t help but laugh at her bravado. “You know, you shape up pretty good for a bookworm,” he said, chuckling and reaching for the control panel and powering down the target-practice program as it waited on its standby setting. A moment later, he cut the music and followed his beautiful companion through the exit door and into the changing area.
A quick shower and they would be ready to face the day.
THE ANCIENT MILITARY redoubt that served as the headquarters of the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountain Range in Montana, where it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains. The wilderness surrounding the tri-level concrete structure was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, just a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended several of the Cerberus warriors over the years.
The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. Its official name was Redoubt Bravo, named, like all prewar redoubts, after a letter of the alphabet, as used in standard military radio communications. Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed matter-transfer network. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant rendition of the fabled, two-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the underworld. The artist was long since dead, but his work had inspired the people who had taken over the facility to call it the Cerberus redoubt.
Hidden within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the building, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of data for the Cerberus operatives within. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. The Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole communications satellite.
Despite its location high in the fresh air of the Bitterroot Mountains, the Cerberus facility was a self-contained unit. Its personnel had become accustomed to recirculated, filtered air as provided by vast air-conditioning units that continually churned and cleansed the facility’s air.
The Cerberus operation had been founded and staffed by a cryogenically displaced scientist called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who had dedicated the redoubt to the continued survival and freedom of humanity.
Kane, in his previous life as a Magistrate at Cobaltville, had come upon evidence of a vast conspiracy that threatened the autonomy of humankind. Kane had stumbled on the first clues to the existence of a hidden alien race called the Annunaki who had been dabbling in humankind’s affairs for longer than anyone could comprehend. Appearing as gods to early man, the Annunaki had, from the shadows, guided the course of human history over the subsequent millennia, with an ultimate agenda of utter subjugation. Recently, the Annunaki royal family had revealed themselves on Earth once more, and Kane and his colleagues now found themselves in a deadly war of attrition against this seemingly unstoppable foe.
The Cerberus warriors were one of humanity’s last bastions in the secret battle for the freedom of humankind.
GRANT’S THOUGHTS were suddenly interrupted by the buzzing of the transcomm at the side of his bed. He lay there another moment, just gazing up at the ceiling in the darkness as he felt Shizuka’s lithe body stir beside him. Then, with a reluctant sigh, he leaned over and activated the button to answer the call.
After a moment, a man’s face appeared in the tiny window display beside the little unit, smiling in a friendly manner. The man had dusky skin, an aquiline nose and a refined mouth. Lakesh appeared to be about fifty years of age, his sleek black hair displaying just the first hints of white at the temples and above the ears. In actuality, the expert physicist and cyberneticist was two hundred years older than that, having endured an extended period in suspended animation after the nukecaust in 2001. Until recently, Lakesh had physically appeared to be carrying every last one of his 250 years, until a would-be ally of the Cerberus exiles attempted to court their favor by reversing the aging process and giving the elderly scientist, literally, a new lease on life. However, in the months since that, Lakesh
