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KANE MEANWHILE HAD his own problems. Two ragtag-looking soldiers came hurrying into the partially hidden area where he was hiding out with Mariah and Brigid, their backs to the Cerberus team. The two looked like brothers. Both were young men with dark hair and beards and scuffed uniforms that had seen better days. They each carried an AK-47 automatic rifle smeared with the pale dust of the whipped-up sand.
Kane subvocalized a warning to Brigid where she knelt working on the broken interphaser. Thanks to its remarkable mechanics, the Commtact could pick up such a gesture and amplify it for Brigid’s ear canal, turning Kane’s subvocalized “company” into a whisper.
By the time Brigid looked up, Kane had stepped silently forward, bringing the nose of his Sin Eater up until it was pressed against the side of the head of the closest soldier.
“One wrong move and I blow your brain all over your companion—capisce?”
Whether the foreign soldier did or did not “capisce”—and chances were he hadn’t comprehended a word Kane had just said—he certainly understood what a blaster pressed against his face meant. Kane smiled as the man lowered his own gun, saying something in his own tongue that the Commtact automatically translated as “No, no, not shoot.”
But even as the soldier spoke, his companion spun, alerted by his partner, raising his automatic rifle and squeezing the trigger in a heartbeat.
Kane saw the move coming, that fabled point-man sense of his kicking in like clairvoyance, leaping aside as the trigger clicked and a stream of 9 mm slugs spit in his direction, cutting down the other hapless soldier before the man could even acknowledge what was happening.
Kane dived to one side. This was not the first time his point-man sense had saved his life. He had been renowned for it, all the way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate many years before. It seemed to be an almost uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened, alerting Kane to the threat with just enough time to avoid it. There was nothing uncanny about it, however; it was merely the combination of his standard five senses, honed to an incredible degree, making him utterly aware of his surroundings. A change in wind, the noise of a scuffing boot—a hundred telltale clues gave Kane the advantage in combat, an advantage that could be the difference between life and death.
Kane hit the ground with a whuff of expelled breath, rolling his body even as a stream of 9 mm slugs chased after him across the dirt, always just a handful of inches behind him. As he rolled, Kane brought up the Sin Eater, nudging the trigger and sending his own triple burst of bullets at his attacker.
The first soldier had sunk to his knees as Kane’s bullets struck his companion, a choking noise coming from his throat. His trigger-happy companion dropped in a swirl of unguided limbs, the AK-47 swiveling up into the sky and sending off another half dozen shots before it finally quieted. Then the man lay on his back in the dirt, absolutely still, blood blooming on his chest, the automatic pointed upward like a grave marker.
“Poor sap,” Kane growled as he picked himself up and brushed dirt from his clothes. “Shouldn’t mess with an ex-Mag.”
Across from the dead soldiers, Mariah Falk was cowering beside the pillar, her face pale with exhaustion. “You—you killed them,” she said.
“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged with a solemn nod. But experience nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that something wasn’t right here. The excitable soldier who had shot at him and his partner didn’t seem to have much in the way of aim. Kane had leaped aside and stayed out of the path of his bullets as much by the man’s inability as his own improbable luck. Furthermore, he had shot his own colleague, which could be put down to inexperience or panic, but it still reeked of something closer to stupidity—and Kane didn’t have these two pegged as stupid, just unfortunate enough to find a fully trained hard-contact Magistrate had materialized from a wormhole in space in the spot where they hoped to hide from the battle. No, there was something else to these soldiers and their recklessness, something he wasn’t seeing yet. And, whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_4c19252e-d510-57d5-bf74-b4a029ff0e3f)
Grant raced up the last of the stone steps, the sound of his footsteps masked by the cacophony of the tripod cannon as it continued its deadly opera.
He waited a moment at the topmost step, crouching down and peering warily around the edge of the arched wall where it ended. There was a sort of balcony beyond, wide as a Sandcat wag and made of solid stone. There were cracks in the stone, ancient gouges where rocks had been forced together and held in place by tension. There were two operators working the turret, with a third man visible beside them. The third figure had been hidden before by his low-angled view of the balcony, but now Grant could see him and fingered him for a guard or sentry of some kind because of a stub-nosed pistol resting between his hands. The man was sitting on a box of ammunition and surrounded by almost a dozen more.
“Where do these psychos get all their ammo from?” Grant muttered to himself with a disbelieving shake of his head.
Grant brought his Sin Eater around the arch, edging it silently along the wall until the sentry was in his sights.
Pop!
The sentry keeled over as the bullet drilled through his hand, slumping forward where he sat as his right hand was reduced to a bloody smear.
Even as the man slumped forward, Grant stepped out from his hiding place, shooting again. His next bullet ripped through the arm of one of the two gunners, striking the man with such force that he went careening from his position and danced himself straight over the edge of the parapet.
The second gunner said something that Grant’s Commtact translated as “Who’s there?”
“Hands in the air where I can see them!” Grant snarled in a voice like rumbling thunder, raising the Sin Eater so that the man could see he was in the center of its sights.
Only, the man couldn’t see it, Grant realized. He was blind.
* * *
“HOW’S THAT INTERPHASER coming along, Baptiste?” Kane asked, nervously pacing back and forth as he watched the battlefield. Grant had disappeared from view up the stairwell and the general hubbub that they had walked into seemed to have moved on, for it was now playing out fifty yards away from the ruined barracks itself.
“I can’t work miracles, Kane,” Brigid told him, irritated. “Just let me work.”
“I don’t like being somewhere without a way out,” Kane growled.
“That explains your inability to hold down a relationship, then,” Brigid snapped back at him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Brigid glared at Kane for a few seconds, an unspoken challenge flickering between them. They were anam-charas, these two, soul friends whose relationship reached back through the folds of time, beyond their current bodies. Kane would always be watching over Brigid and she over him, the two souls entwined in a dance that stretched beyond the lines of eternity.
Mariah saw the look Brigid shot Kane from her hiding place, wondered what was going on between the two of them.
“What?” Kane asked Brigid. “You getting broody all of a sudden?”
“No,” Brigid told him. “Just wondering why we keep fighting these abominable wars for humanity when our whole lives are geared to nothing but the fight. I’ve lost everyone I cared about—Daryl, others. And look at us—we’re meant to be anam-charas, soul friends, but sole friends is about the sum of that. I just wonder how we can keep fighting for humanity when we’re so out of touch with what humanity really is.”
Kane began to respond when Grant’s voice came over the Commtact frequency, interrupting the discussion. “You wanna know why the cannon team are firing blind?” he asked. “Because they are blind!”
Automatically, Kane looked across to where the cannon was located, realizing that its seemingly incessant sputter had finally halted. “Say again?”
* * *
GRANT WAS STANDING beside the tripod cannon, holding its operator’s arm behind his back with such force that the man was bent over until he almost kissed the deck.
“I said they’re blind,” Grant elaborated. “Both operators, I think, plus their guards.”
Grant’s captive squirmed in his arms, spitting saliva on the floor as he issued a cruel curse on Grant and his family. The man’s eyes were unfocused, darting wildly in their sockets.
“The Commtact’s not doing a great job with their language,” Grant continued. “Whatever it is they’re speaking seems to be a combination of Bantu, French, slang and some local patois it can’t decipher. But from what I can tell, they’re either blind or only partially sighted.”
“And they’re operating big guns,” Kane responded, with a clear edge to his voice.
“Maybe by luck,” Grant said.
* * *
BRIGID SPOKE UP without taking her eyes from the repair work she was doing on the interphaser. “Shoot off enough bullets and you’re bound to get a few lucky shots, right?”
Kane shook his head, not disagreeing but just trying to piece everything together. The two soldiers he had dealt with had seemed—well, not real aware of their surroundings, that was for sure. Could they be blind, too?
Kane scanned the area beyond the little enclave, counting the trickle of soldiers still bumbling about amid the fortress ruin. At first glance they seemed normal enough, the usual fretful stalking of people on the edge of stress. But look again, and Kane thought he detected more of an aimlessness to their progress, as though they perhaps couldn’t see where it was they were headed, were just drawn to the noise of battle.
Kane scampered forward, reached for one of the two soldiers he had dealt swift justice to mere moments earlier. They looked normal, and even their eyes looked normal. How do you know a man’s blind?
“Baptiste, protect the civilian,” Kane instructed, referring to Mariah.
Before Brigid could so much as look up, Kane was off, hurrying into the wreck of the fortress, head down and blaster in his hand.
“Dammit, Kane, do you always have to be so blasted impetuous?” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. Then she called over to Mariah, working the catch on her hip holster where she housed her TP-9 semiautomatic.
“Mariah, you know how to use a gun, right?”
Falk looked uncertain, her eyes fixed on the pistol in Brigid’s hand. “Um...kind of.”
Brigid handed the geologist the gun. “Point and shoot,” she summarized. “Anyone gets too close that you don’t like the look of, just blast them. Not Kane, though. He can be annoying sometimes, but he’ll only get more annoying if you put a hole in him.”
Then Brigid turned her attention back to the interphaser, hoping to be able to trigger a pathway out of this mess. Lakesh had programmed in a half dozen escape vectors if she could just get the wretched thing functioning.
* * *
KANE SCRAMBLED, GLANCING up at the mounted cannon and seeing Grant’s shaved head peeking up over the angle of the deck.
Five ramshackle soldiers were trekking over the ground, finding their way past the wreckage that littered the terrain. Kane dodged past them, spotting a straggler who had opted to stick to the shadows that ran alongside the walls. The young man’s rifle rocked in one hand as he felt his way along the wall with the other.
“Kane, that you down there?” Grant’s voice came over the Commtact.
“Gonna try something,” Kane explained without slowing his pace. “Cover me, okay?”
Kane reached the lone figure in a few loping strides, coming around and behind him to reduce the chances of the guy shooting him. The man was young and dressed in a loose, dirt-smeared top which billowed as the wind caught it. The AK-47 rifle in his hands was scuffed with dirt.
Sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket, Kane sprinted at the man before dropping low so that he connected with him in a long slide across the loose, dry sand. Kane’s legs caught the soldier’s, tripping him so that he caromed headfirst off the wall that he had been feeling his way along.
The soldier grunted sharply as he struck the wall.
Kane was on top of him in a flash, grabbing the barrel of the AK-47 and angling it away from him even as he pressed his weight onto the man’s torso.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?” the man spat in a foreign tongue, the real-time translation coming to Kane almost instantly. It sounded like French.
Kane shoved his free hand against the man’s jaw, pressing his hand across his opponent’s mouth. “Keep quiet and I’ll let you live,” he snarled, hoping the man knew enough English to follow his gist.
The man struggled beneath Kane, trying to bring the rifle into play. It was a poor weapon for such close combat, its 16-inch barrel too long and too unwieldy for close quarters. Kane fixed his grip on it and yanked hard, whipping it out of his opponent’s hand. He slung it to the side behind him, just far enough out of the man’s reach that he couldn’t grab it.
“Quiet,” Kane warned the man, checking around for possible attackers. No one was approaching—the group of soldiers Kane had spotted was close to the edge of the fort now, where the walls had tumbled away.
Kane looked back at the man beneath him, watching his eyes. They were hazel and they seemed normal enough, a little wide in panic maybe but otherwise normal. The man struggled, and Kane pressed his hand harder against his mouth in an effort to hold his head still.
Kane brought his right hand around, clenched it and extended just his index finger. He waved the index finger before the man’s eyes, running it swiftly to the left, then to the right across the man’s field of vision. The eyes did not follow Kane’s finger—not proof positive, but enough to make Kane suspect that Grant’s weren’t the only soldiers who had lost their sight.
“Can you see?” Kane snapped, using his Commtact’s translation mode to convert the words into stuttering French.
The man’s eyes remained wide and he refused to answer Kane’s question.
“You want me to kill you right here?” Kane snarled at the young soldier. “Answer the damn question. Can you see? Are you blind?”
“I can see,” the man replied in French with an edge to his voice that Kane noticed even if the translation program of the Commtact failed to pick up on it. “I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.”
Chapter 7 (#ulink_37388f40-8564-51b4-bb30-145e4b8abc9d)
“Blind men fighting a war,” Kane scoffed. “What part of that even makes sense?”
The battle had moved on. Now Kane, still standing over the soldier he had disarmed some minutes earlier, had been joined by Brigid—still tinkering with the interphaser as she tried to piece its internal mechanism back together—Mariah and Grant. Grant had brought the remaining gunner with him, held in his strong grip in such a way that he was forced to walk pigeon-toed as he was partly shoved and partly dragged across the stone-strewn battlefield.
“It doesn’t,” Grant confirmed, screwing up his face.
“Maybe it does,” Brigid said from where she sat in the shade with the ruined interphaser spread before her. “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask about their blindness, but concern ourselves instead with what they do see, or think they’re seeing.”
The others looked at her, bemused. Brigid had always been “the smart one” of the CAT Alpha field team, and sometimes her leaps of logic took a little bit of explaining before everyone caught up on the same page.
“You said that fish-face here said something about seeing the face of god,” Brigid reminded Kane as she worked a screw back in place on the interphaser with her thumbnail. It slipped. The chassis was cracked above and below its resting place where a bullet had struck.
“Yeah,” Kane acknowledged, “but I figure that’s—y’know—metaphorical. Religious zealot hokum.”
Grant nodded. “We’ve see a lot of religious zealots in our time.”
“And a lot of hokum,” Brigid accepted. “But what if what he said was meant literally? That he’s really seeing the face of god. Or, at least, something he thinks is a god.” She looked up at Kane and the others for approval. “You follow?”
Mariah Falk nodded. “But which god?” she asked. Though a geologist rather than a field agent, even she had met her share of beings who considered themselves gods during her time with Cerberus. One such being, the monstrous Ullikummis, had compelled her to commit fiery suicide, and she had only been stopped when one of her colleagues had shot her in the knee, preventing her from throwing herself into a crematorium oven.
Brigid smiled grimly. “That, Mariah, is a very insightful question.”
“Insights can wait till we’re somewhere secure,” Kane reminded everyone, his eyes fixed on the distant battle still under way just past the borders of the ruined fort. “Baptiste, have you got anywhere with getting the interphaser running?”
“I’ve made progress,” Brigid told him, “but it’s not responding to my commands yet. I need—”
“Sure,” Kane said with a wave of his hand, cutting her off. “Then let’s keep moving forward, locate the quake source we came here to check, and try to stay out of trouble.”
Grant laughed at that. “Staying out of trouble? You get bumped on the head or something, buddy?”
“I said try,” Kane clarified as he removed the ammo clip from his captive’s AK-47 and secreted it in a pocket, along with the other ammunition he had found on the man. “No one’s expecting the impossible.”
* * *
“HE SAID THAT he saw the face of god before everything,” Kane recalled as the four Cerberus warriors trekked away from the tumbledown fort, away from the ongoing skirmish between the mysterious factions of blind men.
They were following the path laid out by the crack in the earth, tracking along it as it widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed, searching for the source. Right now, the gap was still five feet across, and it was deep enough that you could not see down to its floor.
“He told me it lit every step he took,” Kane continued, “showing him the path of salvation. Like I say, normal religious fanaticism.”
“But if he meant it literally,” Brigid reasoned, “then here is a man who is seeing an entirely different view of reality. The way he described it, as lighting his path, it might be like neon arrows showing him where to move and what to do. I’m speculating, of course, but we’ve both seen different views on reality, Kane. You know that.”
He did. Kane had been drawn into a war with the Annunaki, which had seen him tap into their holistic view of the universe. He had fought in the bordering dimensions of string theory, which his brain had interpreted in the wildest ways, trying to provide input he could comprehend. It had barely worked; only Kane’s innate practicality had kept him grounded during—and after—the experience.
Brigid, too, had touched on different ways to view this fragile thing we call reality. She had been mindwiped by the Annunaki prince Ullikummis, and had her thinking rewired into the Annunaki way of seeing the world for a short period of time. She had become a different person then, just to process the new perspective she had been given on the world, and had taken the name of Brigid Haight. That new comprehension had allowed her to shift time itself, stepping outside of its confines long enough to undo the birth of a goddess. It had been traumatic, and Brigid loathed thinking back to those days, had done all she could to mentally distance herself from that dark other her.
“Men fighting wars in a reality that only they can see,” Kane mused. “That’s...not an easy thing to process.”
“I agree,” Brigid said. “Reality is a lot more fragile than most of us realize.” As she spoke, her mind went back to another occasion, when CAT Alpha had stumbled upon an ancient device designed to bring about a new genesis. Kane had died during that mission, truly died, but Brigid had stepped inside the machine and reworked things, forcing reality to reknit. In doing so, she had brought Kane back from the dead, though she had never told him.
