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“We just call her Boss Bitch…not to her face, though.”
Kane’s eyes narrowed, recalling the last time they had questioned a couple of millennialists. They had referred to a female section chief, too.
“How did she know?” Brigid asked.
“She took over from another chief…Mr. Breech. He laid the groundwork.”
“And where is he now?” Grant inquired.
Gray hesitated before saying in a low tone, “A lot of us would like to know that.”
Edwards edged closer. “What about Philboyd?”
Mr. Gray blinked up at him curiously. “What about him?”
Edwards bared his teeth in a silent snarl. “Where the fuck is he?”
“I don’t know. He was taken away to be questioned. But he was alive.” Gray coughed and asked, “Could I have a drink? That pill is stuck in my throat.”
Kane nodded to Edwards. “Give him your canteen.”
The big ex-Mag scowled, but he didn’t object. Kane glanced meaningfully toward Brigid and Grant and jerked his head. The three people walked away, out of earshot of the consortium man.
Kane asked softly. “Do we believe him?”
Brigid sighed, running a hand through her hair. “I don’t see why not. If the consortium is out here, something big has attracted their attention.”
“I don’t mean that,” Kane retorted impatiently.
“He could be giving us wrong directions.”
Grant narrowed his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. “Even so, we’ve got to check out his story, no matter what.”
Brigid smiled wryly. “Unfortunately.”
Kane worked his shoulder up and down, wincing in pain. “Dammit.”
Brigid eyed him questioningly. “What?”
“That son of a bitch shot me. Didn’t get penetration, but it hurts like hell.”
“Let’s make sure,” Brigid suggested.
Kane shucked out of his field jacket and opened a magnetic seal in the upper half of his bodysuit, peeling it down over his right shoulder. His upper torso still burned where the bullet had punched him.
A livid red-and-purple bruise spread in a star-shaped pattern around the impact point.
Brigid probed with gentle fingers at the injury. “I think you’ll be all right, but your arm will be probably be very stiff in a couple of hours. When we get back to Cerberus, have DeFore look at it.”
Kane resealed the seam, setting his teeth against a groan of pain. Brigid and Grant wore identical midnight-colored garments under their BDUs. Although the material of the formfitting coveralls resembled black doeskin and didn’t seem as if it would offer protection from flea bites, the suits were impervious to most wavelengths of radiation.
Upon finding the one-piece garments in the Operation Chronos facility on Thunder Isle several years earlier, Kane had christened them shadow suits. Later they learned that a manufacturing technique known in predark days as electrospin lacing had electrically charged polymer particles to form a single-crystal metallic microfiber with a dense molecular structure.
Kane maintained the shadow suits were superior to the polycarbonate Magistrate armor chiefly for their internal subsystems. Also, they were almost impossible to tear or pierce with a knife, but a heavy-caliber bullet could penetrate them. And unlike the Mag body armor, the shadow suit wouldn’t redistribute the kinetic shock.
Turning, Kane called to Edwards. The man strode toward him swiftly. “Sir?”
“Me, Baptiste and Grant will scout out ahead.”
An uneasy expression settled over Edwards’s face. “With our comm signals being jammed, you could walk into a trap and we’d be none the wiser.”
“The jamming umbrella works both ways,” Grant pointed out. “Gray couldn’t have transmitted a warning, so the consortium is just as much in the dark about us as we are about them.”
“Unless Brewster talked,” Edwards said.
Brigid’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Brewster is accident prone and he’s pretty bad mannered even by ex-Mag standards, but he wouldn’t betray us.”
Edwards nodded contritely. “No, ma’am, I guess he wouldn’t.”
Kane said, “We’ll only go a little way…just to get the lay of the land. Worst-case scenario is that we run into trouble and fire off a couple of shots to let you know.”
Edwards didn’t seem comforted. “Yes, sir.”
Kane, Grant and Brigid moved away from the perimeter of the settlement and followed a scattering of footprints up along the face of a dune. The wind made the sand hiss around their feet.
“I don’t know if firing off some signal shots is a good idea,” Brigid commented. “Remember what Gray said about noise attracting ghosts.”
Grant snorted in derision but said nothing.
The sand bogged around their ankles as they climbed. When they reached the crest of the dune, Kane studied the massive thrust of dark rock Gray called Phantom Mesa. It stood like a giant sentinel of the desert.
Brigid tested her Commtact and grimaced in frustration when she heard only static. Quietly but with a hint of reproach underscoring her tone, she said to Kane, “You never should have let Brewster go out alone.”
“I didn’t ‘let’ him,” Kane answered. “And you know it. He waited until my back was turned and took off with the power analyzer. He thought he could trace down the origin of the jamming.”
Brigid nodded, her emerald eyes clouded by worry. “Brewster is far too headstrong for a scientist.”
“I don’t know about that…but he’s sure as hell clumsy.”
Grant suddenly halted, indicating with a hand wave for his partners to do the same. He leaned forward, head cocked to the right, his expression intent. “Hear something,” he whispered.
Kane strained his hearing, but only the sigh of the breeze touched his ears. Then he heard a faint groan, seasoned with garbled words. Through narrowed eyes, he scanned the ridge of the dune thirty feet ahead but saw nothing. At the very edge of audibility he heard panting, hard and labored.
Then a figure suddenly lurched over the top of the dune and fell awkwardly, his body digging a trench through the sand. Long legs thrashed. The shape rolled to the bottom and lay there, struggling feebly.
The Cerberus warriors scrambled down the dune and surrounded the figure, whose wrists were bound behind his back. Terrified and pain-filled gasps burst from split and bloody lips.
Kane clutched the man by the shoulders and said, “Take it easy. You’re safe now.”
Kneeling, Kane carefully eased the limp body over. He saw the man’s face in the fading light and winced. It was Brewster Philboyd.
Chapter 4
Philboyd’s face was contorted with feral terror, but when he recognized Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant, his tense muscles relaxed in relief. In a slurred voice, he said, “About time.”
In his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a little over six feet tall, long limbed and lanky. Blond-white hair was swept back from a receding hairline. Normally he wore black-rimmed eyeglasses. Like CAT Alpha, he wore desert-camouflage BDUs.
Brigid pulled him up and held him in a sitting position while Grant cut through the ropes binding his wrists. Philboyd’s face was bruised, his left eye all but swollen shut. Dry blood caked the area around his nose and mouth. Though unsightly, his injuries were superficial.
“Are you all right?” Brigid asked.
“They just slapped me around some,” Philboyd answered, striving for a tone of indifference.
“Who is ‘they’?” Kane inquired, offering Philboyd his canteen.
“Four men jumped me about three-quarters of a mile from here. They tied me up.”
Philboyd paused to take a sip of water, rinse out his mouth and then spit. “They asked me some questions and all I told them was my name. I thought I heard a woman’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure. After that, they started asking me about Cerberus, how many of us were out here and if you three specifically were in the vicinity.”
“How’d they know about us?” Brigid asked, dismayed.
Philboyd took another drink of water before replying, “Beats the hell out of me.”
Grant uttered a weary sigh but said nothing. Both Kane and Brigid could guess his thoughts. Brewster Philboyd was one of many expatriates from the Manitius Moonbase who had chosen to forge new lives for themselves with the Cerberus warriors.
Although the majority of the former lunar colonists were academics, they had proved their inherent courage and resourcefulness and wanted to get out into the world and make a difference in the struggle to reclaim the planet of their birth.
Nearly twenty of them were permanently stationed on Thunder Isle in the Cific, working to refurbish the sprawling complex that had housed Operation Chronos two centuries before and make it a viable alternative to the Cerberus redoubt.
The other Manitius expatriates remained in the redoubt concealed within a Montana mountain peak as part of the Cerberus resistance movement. For three years, Kane, Brigid and Grant had struggled to dismantle the machine of baronial tyranny in America. Victory over the nine barons, if not precisely within their grasp, did not seem a completely unreachable goal—but then unexpectedly, nearly two years before, the entire dynamic of the struggle against the nine barons changed.
The Cerberus warriors learned that the fragile hybrid barons, despite being close to a century old, were only in a larval stage of their development. Overnight the barons changed. When that happened, the war against the baronies themselves ended, but a new one, far greater in scope, began.
The baronies had not fallen in the conventional sense through attrition, war or organized internal revolts. The barons had simply walked away from their villes, their territories and their subjects. When they reached the final stage in their development, they saw no need for the trappings of semidivinity, nor were they content to rule such minor kingdoms. When they evolved into their true forms, incarnations of the ancient Annunaki overlords, their avaricious scope expanded to encompass the entire world and every thinking creature on it.
Even two-plus years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a daily basis.
A number of former Magistrates, weary of fighting for one transitory ruling faction or another that tried to fill the power vacuum in the villes, responded to the outreach efforts of Cerberus.
Once the Magistrates joined Cerberus, Kane and Grant had seen to the formation of Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta.
“Do you have any idea of what the Millennial Consortium is looking for out here?” Brigid asked.
Brewster Philboyd waved to the desert at large. “I think we’ll have to find our own answers.”
“Nothing new about that,” Kane said sarcastically. “How did you escape?”
“To be honest, I don’t really know. About half an hour ago, I realized I was alone. Everybody had just left me.”
He paused, high forehead furrowed in thought. “I sort of got the impression that the consortium had a bigger problem to deal with than just me.”
“Something to do with ghosts?” Brigid ventured.
Philboyd swung his head toward her, his one good eye widening in surprise. “You know, I thought I heard one of the millennialists say something about ghosts, but I thought I misheard him. Figured he was talking about something else.”
“Do you at least know if the consortium has found a base out here?” Grant demanded impatiently.
“Logically, I’d have to say yes,” Philboyd retorted. “But I haven’t seen it. But the energy emissions were strongest in the direction of that big mesa over there.”
“How are they getting to and from the place?” Brigid inquired.
Philboyd opened his mouth to answer, then his shoulders stiffened. Grant looked at him quizzically, then tilted his head back to scan the darkening sky. “Everybody down.”
They huddled into the shadow cast by the dune. In the distance, they heard the thumping beat of helicopter rotors. Craning his neck, Kane glimpsed a big transport chopper angling in from the south. Red-and-yellow navigation lights glowed along its undercarriage.
“An MH-6 transport…not a common piece of ordnance nowadays,” Grant murmured.
He spoke very truly. After the atmospheric havoc wreaked by the nukecaust, air travel of any sort had been very slow to make a comeback.
The machine did not fly over them, but instead inscribed a half circle around Phantom Mesa and sank from view. The sound of its vanes faded away.
Kane straightened up, brushing sand from his clothes. “Brewster, do you think you can make it back to the settlement on your own?”
Philboyd frowned and slowly climbed to his feet, massaging his wrists. “I think so.”
“Good,” Grant said. “Tell Edwards to bring the team and follow our tracks. We’ll head out toward the mesa.”
“What about me?” Philboyd inquired.
“You’ll stay behind and guard our prisoner.”
“Prisoner?”
“Yeah, a guy named Gray,” Kane replied. “He’s hurt pretty badly, so he won’t give you any trouble. Doesn’t look like you can handle much more.”
Wincing, Philboyd touched his bruised face. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to go with you.”
“It’s not the same to me,” Kane declared harshly.
“You took off against my express orders to stay put. You got jumped and beat to hell and now you’re no good to us.”
Resentfully, Philboyd snapped, “Yeah, but the energy readings I picked up are localized in the area of that mesa. That’s where the jamming umbrella is transmitting the white noise.”
“We figured that out without being captured and having the crap kicked out of us,” Grant retorted unsympathetically.
Kane pointed in the direction of the village. “Do as I say for once. Go back and stay put.”
Philboyd looked to be on the verge of arguing, but then his shoulders slumped in resignation. Without another word or a backward glance, he began trudging up the face of the sand dune.
