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“You lied when you said there weren’t any other ex-Mags,” Lombard complained.
“And you were dumb enough to not recognize me,” Grant countered. “Your bandits were plain and simple outsmarted. We had the communication, we had the knowledge, and now you’re just a footnote. Twenty marauders with big trucks and big guns, taken down by three people, two of them who you’d disarmed.”
Lombard grimaced, then noted that Kane was disassembling the surrendered Sin Eater, handing magazines and the holster to Grant. They looked distracted by the menial task as they whispered softly to each other, probably discussing plans. Lombard reached down to his boot, coming up with a gleaming little pistol in his hand.
The deposed bandit leader pulled the trigger, but his gunshot jerked into the sky as Brigid pumped a single Copperhead round into Lombard’s chest.
“Fool,” Brigid muttered. “So busy concentrating on you two, he forgot all about me.”
“Well, that solves the problem of what to do with the asshole,” Grant said with a sigh.
Kane smirked. “A self-resolving problem, most likely. Thanks, Baptiste.”
“What thanks?” Brigid asked. “I need one of you two to grab that last wheelbarrow full of meds. I’m not busting my back for it.”
Kane chuckled, kicking the gun out of Lombard’s dead fingers. “I love you, too, Baptiste.”
Brigid returned the smile. There was an uncomfortable pause, but she regained her composure. “Let’s go. We should get back to Cerberus to see if anything new has come up.”
Kane nodded. “No rest for the wicked.”
Chapter 4
Mohandas Lakesh Singh stood just outside the anteroom of the mat trans chamber as Kane, Brigid and Grant returned from their sojourn to Cobaltville. He waited alongside an impatient Domi, who paced like an anxious panther in a cage.
Kane looked the two people over and knew that whatever was going on, it couldn’t be good. “Who showed up? Erica? Sindri?”
“Why would it be them?” Lakesh asked.
“Because Cerberus is still standing, but you’re chomping at the bit to let us know some shit’s up,” Grant answered for Kane.
“Neither Erica or Sindri,” Domi answered, her voice quick and clipped. “Ran into a millennial guy crawling around our back door.”
Kane sneered. “Millennial Consortium? They found us here?”
“I know that they said they have extensive files on us, but I’m surprised that they know the location of Cerberus,” Brigid stated.
“Why not? Erica knows. So do Sindri and the overlords. And the consortium has done business with each of them in the past,” Kane said. “In fact, Erica’s calling them allies now, after that blowout in China.”
Brigid frowned. “And you let him in?”
“He wasn’t in uniform,” Domi replied. “No coverall. No button. No Calico. But he’s consortium. I feel it.”
Brigid glanced at Lakesh. “Any corroboration?”
Lakesh shrugged. “Nothing definitive. However, he’s hale and healthy, with evidence of having received professional medical treatment. A recent scar on his arm confirms to DeFore that a real doctor stitched it up.”
Reba DeFore was the redoubt’s chief medical officer. With the influx of staff from the Manitius Moon Base, the position didn’t weigh on her skills as much as it used to, but in the years preceding it, she’d gained a sharp eye toward medical treatment. The stranger’s apparent access to such treatment left few options open as to his affiliation. The Millennial Consortium was a budding technocracy, seeking to rebuild America in its own image. Those in charge of the consortium paid lip service to the creation of a utopian society, but their ruthlessness in the pursuit of that goal had brought them into savage conflict with the Cerberus warriors on multiple occasions.
The consortium wanted a utopia, and its representatives were willing to kill every person who stood in the path to that objective. Unarmed foes were just as open to murder as the Cerberus personnel.
“I also inspected the stranger’s gear,” Lakesh told the others as he led them toward the briefing room. “His kit includes a leather bullwhip that appears to have bloodstains.”
“He also couldn’t stop buttering all of us up,” Domi added as they entered a room where Sela Sinclair and Edwards, members of the Cerberus away teams, stood guard over a bored man.
“Worse than Lakesh in the beginning?” Kane asked, slipping into a faux Indian accent, trying to dispel his habitual unease with Balam’s old stomping grounds. “‘Friend Kane, beloved Brigid…’”
Lakesh rolled his eyes but chuckled at Kane’s antics. “Not the same, but the man knows how to get his nose browned.”
“What’s his name?” Brigid asked. Looking him over, she seemed to be turning over a memory in her mind, not quite believing it.
“Austin Fargo,” Lakesh answered. Fargo sat, dressed in a white shirt, brown pants and a battered old leather jacket. A wide-brimmed hat sat on the table in front of the man. “And yes…he’s dressed almost note for note like the old movie archaeologist.”
Kane tilted his head. “Has he gotten the earful from Sinclair about that?”
Grant rolled his eyes. “Yeah, she only made me sit through those movies three times.”
Kane glanced toward his partner. “I thought you liked ’em.”
“After the third time, with Sela saying all of Dr. Jones’s dialogue line for line, it got tiring,” Grant responded. He glanced nervously toward Brigid. “Not that memorizing things is annoying, mind you.”
Brigid winked at Grant. “No offense taken.”
Kane examined the heavy revolver, the machete and the curled bullwhip. He picked up the whip, examining its light tan leather bandings. “You think you found blood?”
DeFore knocked on the door, interrupting Kane’s thoughts. The medic, a stocky, buxom woman with bronze skin and ash-blond hair, brightened from a dour mood, seeing that Kane and the others were back from their trip to Cobaltville. Despite this, she remained businesslike. “I brought some chemicals to run a test on the whip.”
“It wouldn’t mean much. He could have used it in self-defense, or the blood could have been from an animal,” Brigid suggested. “Or the chemical could luminesce in the presence of copper, horseradish, even bleach.”
Kane handed the whip to DeFore. “So, how many times have you seen someone flay a horseradish root with a bullwhip?”
“All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best,” Brigid returned.
Kane nodded. “And you say I never learn.”
Brigid managed a smile. In the darkened observation deck, DeFore sprayed the whip, and iron traces left behind by blood illuminated the last four feet of the wicked lash, glowing brightly. She pulled some tweezers, digging into a seam between two strips of leather.
“What did you find?” Lakesh asked.
DeFore turned on a small lamp, and the two scientists inspected the scrap trapped between the tweezer’s points. “Looks like skin. Dried out and desiccated, but skin. And this was just one clump of many that the chemicals exposed.”
Kane glanced through the one-way mirror toward Fargo. “No fur?”
DeFore shook her head. “None on closer examination.”
Kane looked at his friends. “And what does Fargo want with us?”
Lakesh looked at the whip as if it were a coiled cobra. “He said that he had discovered a cache of military technology in the Kashmir province of the subcontinent. A place between what used to be Pakistan and India. Both nations claimed the land before skydark, but it was always hotly contested, with terrorists and minor border skirmishes constantly erupting.”
“So he came to us? We’ve got all the gear we could ever need here at Cerberus,” Grant interjected. “And if not just here, there’s also stuff at Cobaltville. Even the most dedicated army of looters couldn’t take all of the equipment stored in a ville.”
“There’s got to be something more. Especially if he came to us, instead of returning to the Millennial Consortium,” Brigid said.
“You think he’s consortium now?” Kane asked.
Brigid nodded. “Your instincts are rarely wrong.”
“What do you think?” Kane asked her.
Brigid regarded Fargo through the glass. “We’ve had troubles in India before.”
“Scorpia Prime and her doomsday cultists,” Kane noted. “Nagas, right?”
Brigid confirmed Kane’s guess. “We might have solved the problem of Scorpia Prime, but the cult we dealt with may only have been a splinter of a much larger group.”
“He claims to have encountered a much more dangerous group than just a few snake worshipers,” Lakesh stated.
“They were savage enough,” Grant said, remembering his horrific stay and the suffering he endured at the hands of torturers.
“No doubt, Grant,” Lakesh returned. “My apologies.”
“It wasn’t you,” Grant said, ending that branch of the conversation.
“He claims to have encountered a new party?” Kane asked.
“Different from the overlords. He even referenced the genetically augmented soldiers of England. I wanted you to get a look at him, figure out what he actually was before we all talked with him,” Lakesh explained. “And if necessary…”
“Loosen his tongue,” Kane concluded.
“Shall we?” Lakesh asked.
Kane picked up Fargo’s gear, hefting the bullwhip thoughtfully. “We shall.”
SELA SINCLAIR HEARD Kane’s voice over her Commtact as she sat in the interrogation room with self-proclaimed archaeologist Austin Fargo.
“Talk to him,” Kane said. “Make it seem like you give a shit what he’s all about.”
Sela grunted an affirmative. “So, are you a freezie, or did someone show you the movies?”
“Excuse me?” Fargo asked.
“The hat. The jacket. The bullwhip we relieved you of,” Sela said. “Fairly iconic figure you copied your style from.”
“Only her favorite vid hero,” Edwards added. Obviously he’d received the same message from Kane on the Commtact. “If she wasn’t going to ask, I would’ve.”
Fargo sighed. “A traveling show passed through my town when I was little. It was a wag with its own generator and a wide-screen monitor. When I saw him, I knew what I wanted to be.”
Sela nodded. “This doesn’t mean we’ll be holding hands in the shower and taking midnight walks on the beach, so don’t get too friendly.”
“I’m not,” Fargo answered. “I’m just an archaeologist, looking for what’s still useful from the past.”
“With skydark’s destruction and the Program of Unification, I wouldn’t think there would be much left to archaeolog,” Edwards noted.
Fargo and Sela both raised an eyebrow at Edwards’s newly invented verb. Fargo finally chuckled. “There is still presky-dark tech not assembled by the unification program or various other parties. Besides, when the barons abandoned their villes, they didn’t leave behind many of the keys to their kingdoms.”
“And you get paid well for finding stockpiles of weapons, vehicles and electronics,” Sela added.
Fargo nodded. “That’s right. But my main goal is to discover what we have lost as a race.”
Sela noticed that Fargo had allowed his voice to drop an octave, taking on a seductive tone. It hadn’t been lost on the archaeologist that Sela was a survivor from another time, preserved in suspended animation for centuries, safe from apocalyptic turmoil. The past that Fargo longed to discover lived in the woman. His attention to her lithe, athletic figure also showed that more than a little lust had influenced his sudden focus on her. Fargo was a tall, handsome man in his own right. If Lakesh’s and Domi’s instincts hadn’t been tripped by him, Sela wouldn’t have minded the attention. The suspicions about Fargo’s affiliations prevented any reciprocal appreciation.
The door quickly opened, jarring Fargo from his observation of Sela. Domi and Lakesh entered, moving with swiftness of purpose.
“My colleagues will be by shortly,” Lakesh informed Fargo, taking a seat across from him.
“Kane, Grant and Baptiste?” Fargo inquired.
“The same,” Lakesh answered brusquely. “The map you submitted is of interest. You claim to have encountered a hidden society in what used to be India. One in possession of twentieth-century military technology.”
“My expedition was wiped out, and when I made my escape, they pursued me with a helicopter,” Fargo explained. “I also have a feeling that they possess genetic reengineering technology.”
Lakesh frowned. “What did you say they called themselves again?”
“They called themselves Nagah, individually,” Fargo stated. “No relation to the Naga cultists both your people and mine had encountered farther to the south.”
Lakesh glared at Fargo. From a prior encounter, Lakesh knew that the millennialists had a penchant for trying to unsettle the Cerberus warriors by appearing astonishingly well-informed. “Interesting.”
The door opened again, pausing the conversation as three more people entered the room. As large as Edwards was, Grant was even taller, his shoulders even broader. By contrast, Kane was a lean, tightly muscled figure, his body as sleek and efficient as if he were a wolf recast in human form. Kane’s eyes held a predatory intensity as he glared at Fargo. The most interesting addition to the population of the interrogation room was Brigid Baptiste. Had her beauty been any less striking, she’d have been swallowed by the imposing ferocity of the two men she accompanied. However, even with her flame-tinted curls pulled back in a severe ponytail, and her voluptuous body wrapped in a plain redoubt bodysuit, Brigid was an explosion of beauty.
As the trio stared Fargo down, he could sense the flavors of their intellects. Grant emanated cynical distrust. Kane’s hard glare tore deep, formulating the most efficient means to kill the archaeologist if necessary. Brigid’s observations were cold and clinical, dissecting his every aspect like fibers underneath a microscope.
Without saying a word, the three companions had dispelled the chance that tales of their exploits were hyperbole. The trio had an energy to it that was unmistakable, a lethal mix of power and intellect. No wonder Fargo’s fellow millennialists had considered the three adventurers the greatest threat to their goals of world superiority.
“Do I meet with your approval?” Fargo asked, trying not to appear cowed by the force of personality standing before him.
The bullwhip clattered on the table in front of Fargo, thrown there by Kane. “That’s seen some hard use,” the ex-Magistrate said. “Found bits of human skin in there.”
“And despite the effort to disguise your allegiance, you possess considerable backing. Where else would you have received such competent medical treatment?” Brigid said, noting the line of the scar on his forearm. “Not to mention the quality of your clothing and other equipment.”
Fargo glanced at Grant. The big man merely shrugged. “I got nothin’ other than I do not trust strangers caught creeping around my back door.”
Lakesh cleared his throat. “We were just discussing his claims of a hidden society operating in northwestern India.”
“So the Millennial Consortium wants us to take a look where their own expedition failed?” Grant asked bluntly. Fargo raised an eyebrow at the sudden accusation, but Grant waved off the man’s reaction. “Sure, think of me as the dumb muscle, but Brigid’s implications only give me one real option. You’re not some mind-controlled toady, so you can’t be Erica von Sloan’s errand boy. The snake-face survivors are too disorganized, looking for their old toys to bother with hairless apes. All that’s left is the consortium.”
Fargo nodded. “I’ve worked for them, but this is not their call. They sent me to get a big, fat prize, and the force they supplied me with died. I left empty-handed and alone.”
“So, the millennialists don’t love you anymore,” Kane mentioned. “Even if I believed that, why not try to ask the dragon queen for help? She loves ancient artifacts, and she’d provide a good word to get you back into the graces of the consortium.”
