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Grant sniggered for a moment at that, before Brigid pierced him with her emerald glare.
“The pair of you seem to have mistaken diplomacy for insanity,” she snarled.
Grant held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, despite the automatic pistol in his right hand. “Whoa there,” he muttered. “This is strictly Kane’s insanity. I just follow the leader.”
Brigid’s green eyes were narrowed slits and she bit back a curse at the huge, dark-skinned man before turning to address Kane once more. “So you plan to bluff your way inside, and then what?”
Even in the semidarkness, a mischievous twinkle seemed to play in Kane’s eyes, just for a second. “I’ll insist they all leave or I’ll set off the bomb.”
“What bomb?” Brigid snapped. “You’re holding a flask.”
“They don’t need to know that,” Kane said.
Grant agreed. “I’d say it’s preferable if they don’t know it,” he muttered.
“Scared by the loco bomber,” Kane continued, “they all wait outside a safe distance and we get the place to ourselves. You find what you need, then we head back to Lakesh and Cerberus.”
Brigid reached a hand up and fidgeted with the white scarf that covered her hair as she let loose a frustrated sigh. “Brilliant. And what, pray tell, is your plan for getting out again? You know, with maybe fifteen armed and now very much antagonized millennialists waiting for us at the end of a bottleneck.”
Kane’s smile was bright in the darkness. “This used to be a military base, right, Baptiste? We’ll use their mat-trans. Simple. And yet, genius.”
The mat-trans chamber was found in many of the prenukecaust military bases, and offered a quick way to move from one to the other by the almost instantaneous transfer of particles. Having been originally constructed as a military installation, the Cerberus redoubt, the headquarters of Kane’s field team, had a mat-trans chamber. However, they had traveled to Grand Forks via two Manta flyers, which acted as both transatmospheric and subspace aircraft. It would be a simple matter, Kane reasoned, to collect the hidden Mantas once the heat had died down.
The Cerberus exiles had a variety of ways to transport people, the Manta aircraft and the mat-trans network were just two. In the past few years they had come to rely increasingly on another form of teleportation called the interphaser, which exploited naturally occurring centers of energy both around the world and on the Moon and other planets. The interphaser was ideal for traveling between known locations but, like the mat-trans, could be dangerous when gating into the unknown. There were other limitations on the interphaser, as well, but for the right mission it was ideal.
Keeping pace with Kane, Brigid eyed him for a few moments before she spoke. “Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”
“Not unless he drinks the bomb by mistake.” Grant grinned.
Kane led the way along the ill-lit tunnel, assuming the role of point man. Taking point was an unconscious habit for Kane, dating back to his days as a Magistrate. He exhibited an uncanny knack for sniffing out danger, a sixth sense in some respect, though it was really an incredible combination of the natural five he possessed, honed to an acute sharpness. Walking point, his eyes darting right and left, his hearing seeking changes in sound at an almost infinitesimal level, Kane felt electric, tuned in to his surroundings at a near Zenlike level. Walking point in the danger zone, Kane felt alive.
They met another pair of guards as they worked their way down the incline into the underground base, and each time they played the same bluff, with Kane insisting that anyone who disagreed with his proposal would end up picking his entrails off the tunnel walls.
By the time they reached the concrete exterior of the base itself, even Brigid was feeling quietly confident.
At the end of the shaft, a huge circular hole had been bored through the thick concrete wall of the old military base, taller than Grant and wide enough for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.
“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.
The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.
“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.
“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”
As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Kane announced as he entered the computer room, his hand holding the gunmetal flask prominently out before him.
Inside it was gloomy, with smoke damage on the walls. Three guards spun to face the intruders, reaching for their sidearms. Two other men were in the room, and they looked up from their work at the stripped-down computer banks.
“I’d like to introduce you to my friend,” Kane said, “the dead man’s switch. Some of you look like scientific types so I’ll put this in terms you’re all familiar with—get out of here or I will blow us all up. Any questions?”
One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”
The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.
Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.
“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”
One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”
Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”
Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.
The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”
Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”
Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.
Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”
“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.
Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”
“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”
She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.
Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”
Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”
Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”
Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.
“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.
“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.
“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.
Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”
Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”
Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”
O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.
Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.
Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.
If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.
Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.
As he moved forward, holding the Sin Eater before him with his left hand steadying his grip, Grant spotted movement in the dark. Someone was approaching, walking along the corridor toward him. Grant was suddenly very conscious that, despite the poor lighting, he was still dressed in white jacket and hat for the snow. He sank into a crouch, holding the pistol steady as he dropped out of the stranger’s potential eye line.
Silhouetted against the flickering light for an instant was a tall, bulky figure reaching for a rifle that was slung from a shoulder strap across his chest. “Who’s there?” the newcomer asked, his voice deep but cracking with fear. “I can see you’re there.”
A tiny glint of light reflected from the muzzle of the rifle as it swung toward him, and Grant leaped forward, powering himself at the man in a driving rush of coiled muscles. In two steps, Grant was upon the gunman, his arms wide as he gripped the man’s shoulders, toppling the gunman backward onto the hard floor. The long barrel of the gunman’s rifle spit a half-dozen shots as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger, their report loud in the enclosed area of the corridor, but Grant was already inside the firing arc, his heavy body crushing the man beneath it. With a loud crack, the gunman’s head smacked into the floor tiles, splitting one across its center.
Grant pulled back his right hand, ready to shoot the guard with his pistol, but the man was already unconscious. Breathing heavily through his clenched teeth, Grant watched as a trickle of blood seeped across the cracked tile from the back of the gunman’s head. Grant got up and stepped away from the unconscious gunman, holstering his Sin Eater and kicking aside the man’s rifle.
“Mouse, meet cat,” Grant muttered as he turned from the fallen guard and headed back down the corridor to look at the map.
I NSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Brigid’s fingers were frantically racing across the keyboard as a stream of digits raced across the screen.
“I’m into the basic coding,” she told Kane without looking up, “but the whole thing is encrypted. Whatever’s in here is either very important or it’s the diary of a very paranoid teenager.”
Kane looked at her, brushing concrete dust from his short, dark hair. “Thinking of anyone in particular, Baptiste?”
“What?” she asked as her fingers sped across the keys. Then she looked up, seeing the sly grin on her colleague’s face. “Well, don’t look at me. Do you think I ever had time to keep a diary when we were in Cobaltville?”
Kane shrugged, laughing to himself as she went back to work on the computer code. As he did so, they both heard shots coming from a little way down the corridor, and Kane took two swift steps across the room to the closed double doors, the Sin Eater appearing in his hand.
There had been six shots, fired rapidly as if from an automatic. No further noise followed, and Kane risked opening one of the double doors, pushing his back against it as he raised the pistol in his hands.
“Grant?” he called tentatively. “Grant? You okay?”
Grant’s deep, rumbling voice echoed back along the corridor. “Just fine. Rodent problem, but I dealt with it.”
Kane stepped back into the room, his pistol returning to his sleeve as he walked across to stand behind Brigid.
She didn’t look up as she spoke. “I don’t feel safe here, Kane.”
“We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” he told her.
Just then, Grant came running through the double doors, clutching his Sin Eater. “We have got a problem,” he announced, a scowl across his dark brow.
“What now?” Brigid asked in exasperation.
“Unless I am very much mistaken,” Grant told them, “there is no mat-trans in this facility.”
Kane and Brigid looked at Grant, their eyes wide as they took in his statement.
“No back door, people,” Grant reiterated, shaking his head.
Brigid shook her head, as well, as she continued working the keys of the computer terminal. “Worst plan ever,” she growled without looking up at Kane.
Chapter 2
Kane was pacing the computer room like a caged tiger, head low as he tried to think through the situation. He had assumed that this installation would have a mat-trans, but there had been no guarantee of that. “There’s got to be a way out,” he assured the others. “A back door. Something.”
Brigid watched him over the rims of her glasses as she sat at the computer terminal. “This place has been buried for two hundred years, remember?” she told him. “Any back doors that might have existed are long since sealed. Essentially, we’re sitting in an archaeological dig.”
“Then we go out the same way we got here,” Kane decided. “We use the shaft.”
“We get the shaft, you mean,” Grant rumbled. “You heard what Brigid said when we came in. That route is a bottleneck with fifteen, maybe twenty armed millennialists just waiting to take a pop at us.”
Kane reached for the gunmetal flask that hung from his belt. “So we’ll use the same trick, the dead man’s switch.” He smiled. “They won’t shoot me while I’m holding the dead man’s switch.”
Grant shook his head. “Oh, yes, they will.” Kane shot a questioning look at the huge ex-Magistrate, and Grant began counting off points on the fingers of his free hand. “One, they know exactly where we’re coming from this time. Two, they’ve had time to think about it. Three, they’ve had time to set up sharpshooters.”
“Four,” Brigid chipped in, a sour smile on her face, “they’ll most likely shoot your arm off at the elbow.”
“What makes you so sure?” Kane asked, his tone abrupt as angry frustration bubbled to the surface.
“’Cause that’s what you’d do,” Grant told him, locking his gaze with Kane’s fierce stare.
After a moment, Kane looked away, shaking his head heavily. “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted.
Stepping over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.
Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”
“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”
Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”
Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”
Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”
Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.
“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.
Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.
