of white thread against the sun-bronzed, clean-shaved skin of his left cheek.
A pair of Bren Ten autopistols were snugged in shoulder holsters, and he cradled a Copperhead subgun identical to Grant’s. A canvas rucksack at his feet held spare ammunition clips and other equipment.
Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder subcutaneously embedded in the bone.
Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, a Commtact would still provide a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.
Touching a tiny stud, he opened the channel to Brigid, but only a crackling hash of static filled his head. Scowling, he reached inside the rucksack and brought out a compact set of night-vision binoculars. Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.
Craning his neck, Kane looked toward Captain Saragayn’s treasure ship, the Juabal Hadiah, the Mountain of Wealth. Even at over a mile away, the ship looked monstrous. The vessel was less of a less of a seagoing vehicle than a huge anchored pavilion, sprawling across several acres of harbor water.
The Juabal Hadiah rose to exaggerated heights at stern and bow. The stern was built up in several housed decks, one atop the other. The hull crawled with intricate designs carved everywhere above the waterline, from Asian ideograms to representations of fish and dragons. The prow carried a huge figurehead painted, like the balance of the ship, in gaudy hues of red, yellow and gold. The effigy was of a naked red-haired woman, at least fifteen feet long, with an eighty-eight-inch bust.
Cupping his hands around the lenses of the binoculars to shield them from the rain, Kane tried to find movement on the decks. He saw nothing, whether due to the distance or the rain, he wasn’t sure. However, he could make out the huge flag emblazoned with the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle.
“Pirates,” he muttered.
“What?” Grant asked, raising his voice a trifle to be heard over the drumming of the rain.
“Pirates of the goddamn South China Sea,” Kane said loudly. “Who would have figured?”
A gust of wind blew streamers of water into his face. Swallowing a curse, Kane rose and went to stand beside the big man.
“We should’ve figured,” Grant commented sourly. “Who better?”
Kane assumed the query was rhetorical and so didn’t respond. In the world he and Grant shared, the impossible happened often enough to seem commonplace. They had encountered pirates before, like those who prowled the waters off the Western Isles and controlled the island of Autarkic. That term was a catchall to describe a region in the Pacific Ocean of old and new landmasses.
Back during the nuclear holocaust, bombs known as earthshakers had been triggered, seeded months before by submarines along the fault and fracture lines of the Pacific Ocean. ICBM missiles had pounded the Cascades and the region from western Canada down to California. The concentrated destructive force had ripped that part of the Earth to pieces.
The tectonic shifts and undersea quakes triggered by the atomic megacull raised new volcanic islands. Because the soil was scraped up from the seabed, most the islands became fertile very quickly, except for those in the Blight Belt—islands that were still dangerously irradiated. Pandakar wasn’t one of those.
Arriving on a small island in the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia and finding Pandakar to be a stronghold of twenty-third-century pirates was one thing, but landing barely two hours before a bloody insurrection staged by a rival faction was something neither Grant nor Kane could have anticipated. They had been running and hiding along the sprawling waterfront for the past thirty minutes.
Pandakar’s population was a surprisingly mixed lot of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos and quite a few Chinese. Unsurprisingly, the little island stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. Mud-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Still, Brigid, Kane and Grant had been entranced by the people of all colors with monkeys and parrots for sale. There were vendors of magical charms for the healing of wounds and curing of scurvy. There were sellers of maps who offered charts of submerged predark cities and their treasures.
But at night, the waterfront looked quite different, particularly during a rainstorm, than it had during the daytime. When the Cerberus warriors arrived on Pandakar, they had only caught a glimpse of its stilt-legged huts, plank walkways and piers crammed with sampans and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats. In the rainy darkness, the flickering glow of yellow lanterns cast an unearthly aurora over its byways.
A flash of lightning showed only the faint outlines of two figures creeping between a pair of thick wooden pilings draped with fishnets. With the long streamers of rain falling onto them, they resembled life-size mannequins attached to puppet strings.
“Looking for us?” Kane whispered.
“I don’t think it matters much,” Grant replied lowly. “Both sides will probably shoot us on sight.”
Kane sighed heavily. “Why does this shit always happen when we’re making diplomatic overtures?”
Grant uttered a derisive snort. “You’re asking me?”
Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the Overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.
Over the past several years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Grant and Kane had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.
Another crash of thunder exploded overhead, blasting a shock wave ahead of it, concussing with great force against the roof of the structure. A split roof timber shifted with a creak, and wood splinters mixed with dirty water pattered down.
Grant eyed it apprehensively. “We’re going to have to get out of here pretty soon, no matter what.”
A staccato drumroll wove its way around and through the roar of the storm. Kane and Grant knew the noise wasn’t thunder. They ducked, falling almost prone on either side of the cavity in the wall, and peered into the night.
Illuminated by a lightning stroke arcing overhead, they saw a man lying on the ground near one of the pilings, rain slamming into him. Dark liquid ribbons inched away from his body.
A figure slid away from the shadows, and a stab of orange flame spit from between a stack of wooden crates. Shot after shot cracked in the darkness as the subgun sprayed the gloom with bullets. The muzzle flashes strobed.
A crooked spear of lightning spread a curtain of blue-white radiance across the sky. The figures moved swiftly,
