figure of missing Cerberus operative Brigid Baptiste, her red-gold hair in sympathy with those glowing strands of lava that crisscrossed Ullikummis’s frame.
Distantly, Grant was aware of Bry’s words trailing off over the Commtact receiver and he engaged the microphone pickup. “Thanks for the heads-up, Donald,” he said. “We see it. And it ain’t pretty.”
Chapter 3
Some fifteen minutes earlier, the temporary Cerberus ops room had come to excited life as a communication was received from Kane. Accompanied by an old ally of the Cerberus team, Kane revealed that he had finally discovered the location of Bensalem, the fortress island that Ullikummis had designated his headquarters.
The Cerberus operation was connected to the external world via a web of communication and surveillance devices, the core of which was made up of two satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Cerberus employed concealed uplinks that chattered continuously with these orbiting satellites to provide much of the empirical data its operatives relied upon. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists at the original Cerberus redoubt. Now the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat.
Speaking in real time to Kane, Brewster Philboyd accessed the reconnaissance satellite to track his position. Aged somewhere in his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a long-serving Cerberus desk jockey. His lanky six-foot frame seemed hunched as he sat at the laptop and fed information to the satellite following Kane’s instruction. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles about two years earlier, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. His dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had helped reveal the operating secrets of the interphaser. While he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering problem.
As Brewster worked, Donald Bry took over the communication feed, discussing the situation with Kane. As he spoke, Lakesh walked into the sunny back room that had been transformed into the operations center.
Lakesh was not a tall man, but he stood with a regal bearing. He had dusky skin, thick black hair with slight hints of white at the temples and above the ears, and a refined mouth beneath an aquiline nose. He looked to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age, but in fact Lakesh was far older. Having spent more than a century in cryogenic suspension, Lakesh was truthfully a man of 250 years of age, and until quite recently he had looked to be exactly that. A contrivance of circumstances had served to allow Lakesh to renegotiate his age, bringing him back to a healthy fifty-something after a period of accelerated decrepitude. A physicist and cybernetics authority, Lakesh had been present when the U.S. military had first begun testing the mat-trans system. Not given to panic, Lakesh provided leadership that formed a calm center around which the Cerberus operation rotated.
“What has happened?” Lakesh asked, having heard the raised voices as he approached from the corridor outside.
“It’s Kane,” Bry explained.
“Put him on speaker,” Lakesh instructed. Though he seemed outwardly calm, a range of conflicting emotions vied for attention in Lakesh’s mind. Kane was a long-trusted member of the Cerberus team, one of the most gifted field operatives Lakesh had ever known. However, he was suffering some kind of infection that created a paralysis of his face and was affecting his vision, causing him agonizing moments of blindness. Right now Kane should be restricted to bed rest, but with personnel so thinly spread the brave ex-Magistrate had volunteered to check out an alert beacon detected coming from their old headquarters roughly six hours earlier. It was there that Kane had found their old ally Balam, with whom he now traveled.
“Kane?” Lakesh said, clipping a portable microphone pickup over one ear. The pickup angled before his mouth like a hard plastic straw, capturing his every utterance and relaying it to Kane. “This is Lakesh. Donald is just bringing me up to speed now.”
Hidden speakers on Donald Bry’s computer terminal resounded with Kane’s calm voice as the field agent replied, “Just tell me when you can see it,” he said.
There was a momentary discussion while Donald Bry explained to his mentor what was going on, and then the satellite feed on Brewster’s terminal screen centered on an overhead view of a vast island of slate-gray rock. The island was like an insect dropped into the ocean, hard, jutting planes reaching out at nightmarish angles, hooks and narrow channels dotting its brutal lines. Lakesh guessed that those channels would be almost impossible to navigate by boat.
“What is it?” Lakesh breathed, his words just about audible. “What have they found?”
“Do you see it?” Kane asked over the speakers, ignoring or not hearing Lakesh’s query.
“Yes,” Lakesh replied instantly, “but what is it?”
“Ullikummis’s home,” Kane stated matter-of-factly, his words somehow lacking the impossible gravity with which Lakesh expected they would be expressed.
Lakesh stared at the image from the satellite feed for a long moment, unaware that he was holding his breath. “Are you there now?” he asked finally.
* * *
SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES away, just off the coast of what had once been New England, two figures skulked through the throne room of Ullikummis. Crouching together in the shadows of the stone castle, the two figures could not have been more different.
The first was Kane, a powerfully built man in his early thirties, battle hardened with a tension in his body that came from years of combat readiness. A dark beard shaded his chin and jowls, while his dark hair had grown long, reaching past his collar in trailing curlicues like snakes’ tails. Kane was an ex-Magistrate turned warrior for the rebellious operation known as Cerberus. His clothes looked worn and dirty, and his denim jacket was frayed at the edges where the cuffs and hem had begun to unravel. There was something else about him, too, a bony protrusion that stabbed out from his left eye like a half-buried seashell on the beach, arcing down his cheek and marring his otherwise handsome features.
“Yeah, we’re here,” Kane said quietly, his voice picked up by the hidden Commtact implant he wore. He checked the open window as he spoke, peering out into the dark, uninviting waves that crashed through the narrow channels that cut their labyrinthine way through the island from the sea. Those would be hell to navigate, he realized.
Crouching beside Kane was the shorter figure of Balam, humanoid but not human, with a bulbous head and black eyes like limpid pools of water. Hairless, Balam’s skin was a pallid gray-white, the color a human might associate with seasickness. In contrast to Kane’s tattered combat clothes, Balam wore a long, shapeless robe that reached almost to his ankles. The robe was woven of a soft material and dyed the indigo color of a summer night’s sky. It had no pattern beyond the weave itself, but close to the collar, a darker patch showed around a frayed section where the robe had been torn during a scuffle. The dark stain was blood; Balam had been shot in the chest six days before when his charge, the foster girl known as Little Quav, had been taken from his protection by Brigid Haight.
Now Balam had joined Kane in his quest to find Quav and Brigid. The two of them had discovered this place utilizing an alien artifact in Balam’s possession, a chair that could navigate through space.
Balam watched Kane as the taller man walked warily through the empty throne room, discussing with his colleagues over the Commtact.
“We’re going to do a
