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Brigid glanced at it for a second. “Aztec,” she corrected him.
Trailing behind them, Grant cast his eyes across all the curiosities in the vast room. “So, what was this Flag guy?” he rumbled, his voice echoing in the room. “Some kind of collector of junk?”
“He was an adventurer, like us,” Brigid explained, leading them past the cabinet with the bullet inside, checking her portable scanner with a furrowed brow.
They stepped out of the room of curiosities and found themselves on a balcony containing an old-fashioned radio receiver. The balcony overlooked a huge area that stretched farther than they could readily make out. The area contained two desks and several comfortable seats, but the vast majority of it was dedicated to what appeared to be a scientific laboratory. The lab was stocked to an almost obsessive degree, featuring equipment whose nature Kane couldn’t even begin to guess. Above and to the sides, the walls and ceiling appeared to be made of pure ice, twinkling in place as the light played over its smooth surface.
“This is nothing like the schematics,” Brigid said as she consulted the palm-size tracker screen.
“Schematics can be wrong,” Kane reminded her with a shrug, his eyes still fixed on the level below them.
“Not these,” Brigid told him, tapping at the portable screen with her fingernail. “This is a portable sonar unit. It should be able to give us an accurate representation of where we are.”
“And…?” Kane encouraged warily.
“According to this,” Brigid said, showing Grant and Kane the display, “we’re standing in a wall. I mean, right inside a wall.”
Kane felt decidedly uncomfortable when he heard that, a jab of fear running through his spine. Irritated, he calmed himself, demanding that he behave rationally. “It’s just an empty, forgotten redoubt, same as dozens of others we’ve visited,” Kane stated firmly, making his way along the balcony toward a stairwell. The stairwell was built in a subtle curve that doubled back on itself, forming a double helix.
“What does it mean?” Grant asked. “Is your dohickey on the fritz?”
“It’s tracking us just fine,” Brigid assured them. “No, this is something far more subtle. I think that this place, this Laboratory of the Incredible, has stealth technology that can confuse tracking systems, so that it cannot be spied upon.”
Pushing back his hood, Grant ran a hand over his cropped hair and whistled. “When did you say this place was built?”
“I’d say 1920-something,” Brigid replied. “Nobody’s quite sure. Flag would disappear for months at a time, and there’s every possibility that he built this place in sections as he required it. Likely, I’d say.”
“Any idea how?” Grant asked.
“He used some kind of sonic drill, I think,” Brigid said. “A pretty powerful one.”
Kane looked around at the glasslike walls. “Stealth technology,” he said. “For a building. In 1920. You have got to be kidding.”
“Professor Flag was a scientist of exceptional ability,” Brigid reminded him as she followed down the stairwell with Grant at her side. “Years—perhaps decades—ahead of any of his peers.”
“So the guy was a genius,” Grant said.
Brigid considered Grant’s statement for a few seconds before she responded. “That term might actually be construed as an insult,” she said. “The man was extraordinarily intelligent. ‘Genius’ doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”
Stepping from the curved stairwell, Kane walked a few paces across the laboratory and looked all around. “Any idea what this Flag guy looked like?” he asked as Brigid and Grant came over to join him.
“I’ve examined the photographs in the Cerberus database,” Brigid began.
“Let me guess,” Kane interrupted. “Six foot six, square jaw, short dark hair—military style?”
Brigid nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“Because he’s standing right behind you,” Kane said.
Chapter 4
Brigid and Grant spun, turning to face the stranger who stood where Kane was indicating. Grant’s Sin Eater handgun snapped into his hand, propelled from its hiding place at his wrist holster.
The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them from their days as Mags in Cobaltville. An automatic handblaster, the Sin Eater was less than fourteen inches in length at full extension and fired 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, which powered the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard, as any kind of safety features for the weapon had been ruled redundant. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing without delay.
Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste’s hand whipped down to the hip holster where she stored her trusted TP-9 tactical pistol, a bulky, automatic handblaster in dull black finish. The butt was almost central to the unit, making it appear almost like a square block finished by the wielder’s hand.
Although Brigid’s training was recent, all three Cerberus warriors were schooled in numerous forms of combat, from hand-to-hand martial arts to the use of knives, pistols, rifles and antitank weaponry. Furthermore, all three had the honed, lightning-fast reflexes that familiarity, muscle memory and combat awareness brought. In short, Brigid, Grant and Kane could more than adequately acquit themselves in any given combat scenario.
Right now, however, combat was not required. Grant and Brigid relaxed as they saw the man now standing before them. It was Abraham Flag, all right, although to describe him as “standing” was not entirely accurate. He was held upright inside what appeared to be a glass cylinder. The clear glass of the cylinder was somewhat obscured by a bluish, misty gas that floated within, through which they could see that the man inside was naked. His eyes were closed and, despite standing upright, he seemed almost relaxed, as though in a deep, dreamless sleep. Large metal pipes fed the cylinder, and Brigid noticed a control podium off to the right. No noise exuded from the strange construct, but the misty gas drifted in languid, faltering curlicues within the tube.
Kane’s laughter came to their ears, as Brigid and Grant relaxed. “Boy, you two can really move when you want to,” he said when they glared at him, still chuckling as he spoke.
Grant holstered his Sin Eater with a casual flick of his wrist, while Brigid made her way across to the control podium that was attached to the strange cylinder by a series of wires and copper pipes. There were controls integrated into the flat surface of the desk itself, like paintings on the reverse of a glass pane, and a foolscap notebook rested atop the unit. Brigid brushed dust from the glass work top and looked at the information displayed there. A series of dials was set beneath the glass of the unit, their needles held steady at about the three-quarters mark on their respective gauges. Beside them, a seven-digit analog counter slowly turned, and Brigid watched for a few seconds as the wheel to the farthest right ticked past 3 and rolled on toward 4. Then she picked up the notebook and flicked through its pages, finding that it was full of calculations written in blue ink with an elaborate hand.
“What do we have?” Grant asked as he and Kane strode over to join Brigid at the podium.
“He’s a freezie,” she said. “Cryogenically frozen and held in stasis here since—” she ran her finger along the index page of the notebook before flicking through several pages and finding the information “—November 1, 1930.”
Kane whistled in amazement and paced over to the glass cylinder to take a closer look at the man inside. He was a muscular individual, well-built and broad shouldered, with a firm jaw and high brow. “He doesn’t look much more than—what?—thirty-five, maybe forty.”
“This is cryogenic research,” Brigid said, indicating the book, “far in advance of anything Professor Flag’s contemporaries would have been working on.”
“The guy’s a supergenius, remember,” Grant stated.
“Supergenius or not, this is really quite remarkable,” Brigid told them both. She closed the notebook and placed it back on the glass work top. “You can be the smartest Neanderthal in the cave, but it still won’t do you much good to design a computer until someone develops the microchip. Flag’s notes here indicate that he bypassed so many hurdles with regards to the limitations of the technology around him. I mean, look at him. He’s a 250-year-old man, and he has been perfectly cryogenically preserved.”
Kane looked at the impressive man standing before him in the glass cabinet. “Kind of vain, though, isn’t it?”
“What?” Brigid asked.
“Why freeze yourself?” Kane asked. “Dead is dead—why prolong it any more than you need to?”
“I don’t think he died, Kane,” Brigid considered. “I think maybe something terrible happened back in 1930, and this was his way of keeping out of its path.”
Kane knocked the cylinder with the edge of his fist. “Yeah, great job. Happy 250th, Sleepy.”
Kane stepped away from the cylinder and headed back into the vast laboratory area, peering this way and that. “Anyway, let’s go see if we can find this knife thing,” he said. “Hopefully there’s a map somewhere. I don’t want to be wandering around this place forever.”
Brigid and Grant followed, spreading out so that the three of them could scope out the vast Laboratory of the Incredible as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working swiftly and methodically, they checked work surfaces and desks, opened cabinets and looked beneath wipe-clean work tops, pushing aside notebooks and Bunsen burners, beakers and glass tubes. There were bottles and jars full of strange concoctions, and many of them appeared to hold crystals or small deposits of salt. Kane presumed these had once been liquid, too, but had evaporated over the vast passage of time since anyone had last walked through this strange and startling laboratory.
“You think he’ll ever wake up?” Grant asked, calling across the room to Brigid as he peered behind a rudimentary spectrograph.
“I only glanced at his notes,” she admitted, scanning the shelves of a freestanding cabinet, “but it looked like he couldn’t finalize the wake-up protocols in time.”
Leafing through some loose papers at a desk, Kane stopped what he was doing and looked over at Brigid warily. “In time for what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Brigid said. “Do you want me to read the notebook, or do you want me to look for the knife?”
“Well, let’s start by…” Kane began and then his words tailed off. Suddenly, like an anxious rabbit, he stood to his full height and looked off to the far end of the room. “You hear that?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“What?” Grant asked, keeping his own voice low.
Silently, Kane indicated ahead of them to where a brightly lit doorway waited. With a swift hand gesture, he stalked toward the doorway, encouraging his partners to follow.
“This had better not be another joke,” Brigid muttered as she pulled the TP-9 from its holster once more.
Kane hurried forward, his body low as he made his way to the doorway. Peering inside, he observed that it opened into a short corridor that led to another doorway just a dozen paces ahead. The noises were coming from beyond the second doorway.
Grant edged up beside Kane, giving his partner a concerned look. “What have we got?” he whispered. Grant had known Kane for years, and he knew that his partner had remarkable instincts, what Kane would call his “point-man sense.” In reality, the point-man sense was a combination of spatial awareness and the refined use of Kane’s other senses to become almost spiritually at one with his surroundings. In their days as Cobaltville Magistrates, Kane’s point-man sense had saved Grant’s life on more than one potentially lethal occasion.
Kane made a face before he stepped into the brightly lit corridor. His face said it all: whatever it was, it was probably trouble.
Grant held his hands loose at his sides as he followed Kane along the walkway, walking on the balls of his feet so as to make as little noise as possible. From the far end, where the vast laboratory stood, Brigid waited, TP-9 in hand, scanning the corridor and the doorway that led to the room beyond.
Reaching the doorway, Kane held up his hand, instructing the others to wait but to hold their positions. There were definitely noises coming from the next room, people’s voices and the sounds of movement. Warily, Kane eased forward on silent tread and peered through the open doorway.
The room beyond was roughly hexagonal in shape, approximately fifteen feet across, and with a ceiling that was much lower than the laboratory area, just ten feet above the flooring. Like the rest of the strange headquarters, the walls to the room appeared to be constructed of ice, but it was much darker than the other areas that Kane and his companions had visited, reminding Kane of snow turned to slush. Light came from overhead in a single beam that lit the center of the room. There, standing in the center on a pedestal, stood a glass cabinet, similar in construction to those that the Cerberus team had encountered in the room they had originally broken into. This one, however, had reinforced wooden struts along its edges. The cabinet held a single item—a knife. Kane guessed that the knife was fifteen inches in length, including the handle, and it appeared to be carved from stone. Even from this distance, Kane could see the writing along its blade, though he didn’t recognize the language itself. To one side of the blade, trapped within the glass cabinet like a fly in amber, a streak of darkness like a smear of paint seemed to hover in the air. As Kane moved his head, he saw the darkness glitter, like stars in the night sky.
There were people in the room, too, a dozen of them. Although none of them wore a specific uniform, they all seemed to be of a type to Kane’s eyes. There were eight men and four women milling hurriedly about the room. One man was running a handheld scanning device over the glass display case, and several people were consulting laptop displays, running diagnostics as the information was fed to them. A tall woman was pacing the room impatiently, barking orders, while a broad-shouldered man watched her, shaking his head. Several armed guards stood to the edges of the room, looking uninterested in the whole affair, doubtless having already scanned the buried headquarters and found no one within.
Kane realized with a start that these people had arrived here before the Cerberus team, and had either used or created a different entrance. Given the size of the Laboratory of the Incredible, and the snowstorm raging outside, it would have been easy to remain utterly unaware of any other intruders unless they actually crossed paths.
“What about if we just break the cabinet, then?” the woman was saying, an irritated edge to her voice. She was tall—exceptionally so for a woman, almost certainly over six feet in height—with dark hair cut to fall just below her shoulders. She wore a formfitting outfit finished in matte-black leather, with red piping that accentuated her lithe frame. Kane could see a small pistol held in a holster at the rounded swell of her hip.
“We’ll unlock it, Simona,” the broad-shouldered man said in a placating tone. He was dressed in a similar black outfit, and sported a holstered gun hanging low to his hip. His hair was almost entirely shaved, with just the dark hint of stubble across his scalp along with two plaits that trailed down behind his right ear, falling over his shoulder where their ends were clamped with two metal beads. “Calm yourself, there’s no rush.”
“I just want to get out of here, Carver,” she said, stopping before him with her back to Kane and the doorway. “This place is…abnormal.”
Standing this close, Kane saw that, like many tall women, Simona was strangely shapeless, with small breasts and only a slight curvature at her hips in the otherwise flat line leading from shoulder to ankle. It made her seem that much taller, and somehow more graceful as she moved, like a person designed by aeronautic engineers to reduce drag.
“Heck, I didn’t think you’d scare so easy,” Carver said, his voice now rumbling with a cheerful tone. “Don’t tell me that wacky mirror freaked you out.”
“It’s not fear,” Simona snapped. “Just a healthy desire for efficiency. The sooner we wrap up this op and get back to the Millennial Consortium HQ, the sooner we get paid, fed and off this fucking iceberg.”
“You’re not really a winter person, are you?” Carver chided.
“I’ve wasted three months in that damned tent, searching for this hole in the ground,” Simona growled. “I just want it to be over. Don’t you?”
Reluctantly, Carver agreed.
Standing a little way back from the doorway, Grant looked at Kane and raised his eyebrows as they watched the scene unfold.
“Millennial Consortium,” Kane mouthed in response to his partner’s unasked question.
Kane, Grant and Brigid had crossed paths with the millennialists on a number of occasions. Twenty-third-century scavengers, they were pirates who profited by salvaging old technology and either selling it to the highest bidder or using it to their own ends. Often, the millennialists would attempt to do both at once. The Millennium Consortium was a vast organization, with branches in several locations and the technology and resources to back up impressive operations the world over. In theory, the millennialists had noble aims: the furthering of humankind and a recovery from the sick days that had followed the downfall of humanity at the end of the nuclear ravages of the twenty-first century. However, in practice, Kane knew, they were a selfish organization, whose only true goal was power, a goal they would readily achieve no matter what—or who—stood in their way.
Reluctantly, Kane stepped away from the doorway and, walking backward, made his way silently along the corridor, leaving Grant in place. At the far end of the corridor, Brigid looked up at Kane hopefully.
“We’ve located the knife,” Kane told her, his voice low, “but there’s one hell of a complication.”
Brigid raised one perfectly shaped, red-gold eyebrow.
“Millennialists got here first,” Kane explained.
“Damn,” Brigid spit. “How many?”
Kane shrugged noncommittally. “How important is this thing? Be honest now, Baptiste.”
“Why? Do you think you have a chance to snatch it?” Brigid asked.
“I think they’re crap odds and we’re better off making a tactical withdrawal,” Kane growled, “but I’m willing to listen to counterarguments if you have any.”
Brigid nodded toward the doorway at the far end of the corridor. “How many?” she asked again.
“Twelve,” Kane said, “all of them armed.”
Kane watched Brigid for a moment as the slightest crease appeared on her pale forehead while she thought. Then her eyes widened and she reached out to grab his arm, pulling him toward her.
“I think counterarguments will have to wait,” Brigid said as the familiar sounds of gunfire shattered the quiet of the laboratory.
Kane turned and looked over his shoulder. Grant was rushing toward him at full sprint, and the Sin Eater had materialized once again in the big man’s hand.
“We’ve been spotted,” Grant shouted as he ran from the corridor amid a hail of bullets.
Chapter 5
October 31, 1930
Isle Terandoa Naval Base, the South Pacific
“Godkiller.” Abraham Flag repeated the word slowly, as though feeling its sharp edges with his tongue. “An ominous name for a weapon.”
“Seems pretty weird to me, Professor,” Barnaby B. Barnaby said in his cultured New Haven accent.
“It is hardly unprecedented to name a weapon,” Flag reminded his archaeologist friend. “Think of Excalibur, or Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer. There is a great symbolism to the naming of an item. Ancient people often believed that names were sources of immense power.”
Little Ant was still poring over his notes. “But Godkiller, Chief,” he chimed in. “Well, it ain’t exactly subtle, is it?”
“Nor, I imagine, is being stabbed with a twelve-inch blade of carved stone,” Flag pointed out, but there was no hint of malice or superiority in his tone. He turned the knife over once more in his white-gloved hands. “Do you have a workable translation of the text, Little Ant?” he asked.
“I got most of it,” Little Ant assured him, “though it ain’t nothin’ pleasant. There’s a lot of lamentations, the destruction of an enemy’s family tree and some stuff about being returned to Tiamat.”
“Tiamat,” Flag repeated, placing the strange stone knife back on the desk. “She was the great mother of the Annunaki, the family of gods from Mesopotamian and Sumerian mythology. Some myth fragments suggest that she kept her squabbling children in line as they waged their endless battles across heaven and Earth.”
“Sounds like a tough old broad,” Little Ant remarked jovially as he replaced his modest notebook into his breast pocket.
Abraham Flag’s amethyst eyes took on an eerie, distant quality as he turned to look out of the small window of the office. Sunlight streamed through the pane, its golden rays playing along the length of the odd stone knife. Out there, beyond the wire fence that surrounded the naval base, a lush jungle stood poised, brimming with the colorful plant life of Isle Terandoa. “If the stories are accurate,” Flag said finally, his voice low, “the Annunaki were beings of immense power, the likes of which have never been seen before or since.”
