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“And where would these Sandcats be?” Kane asked.
“Back at the base,” Rosalia said lightly, gesturing toward the depths of the shantytown labyrinth. “If we went there, we could—”
Kane held up a finger to stop her. “No. Nice try, but we won’t be walking into any traps tonight. Now, let’s get moving.”
Kane and Grant urged their charges on as Brigid sank back to cover the rear of the party. What Kane hadn’t told Smarts and Rosalia was that he had his own special transport located outside the ville. They weren’t safe here, and he had feared being overheard, but soon enough the group would be traveling a whole lot faster than the two street thieves could imagine.
IT WAS THREE in the morning by the time the group stopped. The ville was long since behind them, now just a speckling of lighted dots on the far horizon. Ahead and all around, Death Valley and the empty California desert stretched relentlessly onward. Stars twinkled in the night sky, and the cool air seemed to drill through their bones as the group strode across the open sand. Rosalia shook, cold and miserable, hugging herself as she pulled Smarts’s bright frock coat over her shoulders. Smarts himself was cold, too, but he prided himself on being nothing if not a gentleman.
“Where are we heading, señor?” Smarts asked, looking at the distant rock formations, the endless swathe of sand around them.
“We’re almost there,” Kane assured him.
“It has been a long day,” Smarts told Kane. “We could stop. If not for ourselves, perhaps we should consider the ladies?”
“We’re not going much farther,” Kane told him.
Then he raised his voice. “Baptiste?”
Brigid had drifted a little farther behind the others, and she was looking around carefully as they crossed the bleak desert. “It’s just over there,” she called back, pointing with the muzzle of her handgun toward a rising sand dune.
Kane held a hand to stop Smarts and the rest of the party, while Brigid ran toward the dune that she had indicated.
“Be a minute, people,” Kane explained, ignoring the quizzical looks of his captives.
Exhausted, Rosalia sat on the dry sand and shook her head. “Magistrate clowns,” she muttered under her breath.
Hearing this, Grant smiled and caught her eye, shaking his own head in chastisement. “Oh, you are in for such a sweet surprise,” he told her.
Smarts’s head twitched like a bird’s as he watched Brigid disappear behind the dune. “What is going on?” he demanded.
Deciding that there was nowhere his prisoners could run to, Kane placed his handgun back in his low-slung hip holster before addressing the small Mexican. “It’s time we traveled in style,” he said.
Smarts narrowed his eyes, peering at the dune, his head jutting forward, until Brigid reappeared carrying a small case. The case was caked with sand, which Brigid brushed away with her hand as she approached. Smarts realized immediately that this item had been hidden out here, buried somewhere in the empty, featureless desert.
Brigid stopped before them and knelt, placing the case on the ground. Then she began to work at its twin catches. The carrying case folded open and a squat, broad-based pyramid-shaped object was revealed. Made of a dull metal that shimmered with the blurred reflections of the bright stars, the pyramid’s base was barely one foot square, and its peak was about twelve inches above the ground. This was the interphaser.
“What is this thing?” Smarts inquired.
Kane smiled tightly. “A little shortcut,” he said enigmatically.
Smarts gestured around them at the featureless desert. “You left this thing here, yes?” he asked. “How could you possibly find it? It is a—what you call it?—needle in the haystack.”
“Brigid’s our needle finder,” Kane said as Grant helped Rosalia to her feet behind him.
Smarts looked baffled as he assessed the beautiful woman with the shimmering red-gold hair.
Brigid smiled and tapped the side of her head. “I remember things,” she told him.
The Cerberus team had opted to bury the interphaser in its protective carrying case close to where they had first appeared in the desert. This was, on reflection, much safer than carrying the astonishing piece of technology into a covert meeting with Carnack’s merciless thieves and brigands. They had needed no marker for the location. One of the advantages of Brigid’s phenomenal memory was her ability to recall the smallest details of anything she had seen. While the desert appeared featureless and largely unchanging to most people, Brigid would recall the tiniest details, a ridge here, a dead tree stump there. Finding the burial spot for this particular treasure chest was as easy to Brigid as finding the toes on the end of her feet.
The interphaser interacted with naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices to create an instantaneous teleportation system. In simple terms, the little pyramid opened dimensional rifts through which one could travel from point A to point B, despite the two points being dozens, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.
The Parallax Points Program provided a map of these naturally occurring vortices, which could be found around the world and even on other planets.
The success of the interphaser was the combined work of Brigid Baptiste and a Cerberus scientist called Brewster Philboyd, and had taken many months of trial and error to achieve. While a useful device, their interphaser still depended on the location of a parallax point, as opposed to the mat-trans units, which had been installed in military redoubts. As Grant had put it when they had arrived in Death Valley with an eight-mile walk still ahead of them, “What good’s having a personal mat-trans if we still have to walk halfway?”
While Brigid readied the pyramid-shaped device, Kane probed the sand around them with the toe of his boot until he found what he was looking for. He kicked at the sand and used his instep to brush it away until he had uncovered a flat, stone disk. The stone disk was approximately two feet square and showed cuneiform carvings around its outer ring. Brigid stepped across and carefully placed the interphaser unit in the center of the stone ring.
“What is that?” Smarts asked once more, absolutely out of his depth with the progression of events before his eyes.
“We think it was some kind of grave marker.” Kane shrugged. “Probably Navaho or Apache.”
“Or whatever those peoples called themselves way back when,” Brigid added, mostly to herself.
Rosalia took a step closer and peered at the stone circle with the pyramid now protruding from it. Then she looked at Smarts, a quizzical frown on her beautiful brow. “What is all this?” she asked him.
“I admit,” Smarts responded, “to being mystified. Seems the Magistrates don’t want to share their secrets today.”
Kane confirmed with Brigid that the interphaser was ready for use, then he turned to address Smarts and Rosalia. “Okay, here’s the skinny,” he began. “What we have here is a transport network like you folks can only dream of. The whole thing is instantaneous—”
“Like a mat-trans only portable,” Smarts broke into Kane’s explanation with a knowing smile.
“You’ve used a mat-trans?” Kane asked him, intrigued. The mat-trans units were mostly the realm of Cerberus and similar covert outfits who had penetrated the secret military redoubts to access the hidden technology there; their existence was hardly common knowledge.
“I have seen them in action once or twice,” Smarts confirmed.
“Good,” Kane affirmed. “That makes it easier for all of us. Rosie?” he asked, turning to the dancing girl.
She nodded, her face solemn. “I am aware of the mat-trans machines,” she said quietly, “though only through anecdotal evidence.”
“These are smaller,” Kane explained, “and there’s no chamber to enter. But they function in much the same way.”
He encouraged the pair to step forward, closer to the foot-high pyramid resting on the stone circle on the ground. The stone circle was a parallax point, and would work as a secure entry point for their jump.
Grant stepped across from the others, so that the team now formed a rough circle around the interphaser as the stars twinkled in the sky above.
Still kneeling, Brigid tapped out a brief sequence on the interphaser’s miniature keypad. As she stood, a waxy, illuminated cone fanned up from the metal apex of the foot-high pyramid. It had the appearance of mist, with flashes of light swirling within its depths.
Smarts’s jaw opened in astonishment as the cone of light grew larger, taking over not just more geographical space, but, in some way, swamping his mind like the onrush of a migraine, blurring everything around him to insignificance as it overwhelmed his comprehension. A glowing lotus flower blossomed from the base of the pyramid. The radiance stretched into the night sky, filled with sparks of lightning witch fire.
“Just walk into the light,” Kane’s calm voice came to his ears, and Smarts turned from the cone of brilliance to look at the hard face of the ex-Mag. The light was dancing in Kane’s gray-blue eyes, playing across the stubbled chin and sharp planes of his face.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Señor Kane,” Smarts admitted, rising fear in his voice.
Then Grant’s bearlike arm whipped behind Smarts, slapping so hard across his back that the little Mexican stumbled forward. “Man up,” he heard the dark-skinned man say, “you’re going first.”
There was a rush of sensation, energy crackling all around him, colors so bright and vibrant that Smarts didn’t have names for all of them. And then his senses rebelled at the unfamiliarity of the situation, and the next thing Smarts saw was his shadow grow as he stepped out of the cone of light behind him. Then he was joined by his four companions.
They had arrived.
“Did we do it?” Rosalia asked, her voice breathless with wonder.
“Sixty, seventy miles in a footstep,” Kane assured her. “We did it.”
“Sixty-eight miles,” Brigid confirmed as the interphaser powered down, its lotus blossom of colors sucked back inside the unit like liquid swirling down a drain. She crouched beside the device, which now rested on an otherwise unremarkable section of sand, and placed the carrying case beside it, undoing the catches. There was another circle of stone there, almost entirely buried in the sand, its cuneiform markings long since worn away.
Having packed up the interphaser in its carrying case, Brigid scanned the sky around them, looking at the constellations and assessing their position in her head.
Kane triggered the Commtact and spoke in a subdued tone, “Domi, we are on-site. Please respond.”
A few seconds passed before Domi’s enticing, husky voice was audible over the subcutaneous Commtacts.
“Hi, Kane. I’m with Decard’s team. We’re sending up a tracer on three.”
“Aten should be somewhere over that way,” Brigid decided, pointing off to the east.
Almost as soon as she said it, they saw a scarlet-colored firework whoosh into the sky, leaving a bright point high over their heads as the flare beacon floated on the wind currents.
“Guess that’s them.” Kane smiled.
IT TOOK ANOTHER fifteen minutes to cover the ground on foot, but Kane, Brigid, Grant and their two prisoners finally found their way to the temporary campsite that Decard’s crew had set up among the windswept dunes.
When she saw them approaching, Domi broke into a run and met the Cerberus team halfway.
“Madre de dios!” Smarts exclaimed as Domi raced toward them, startled by the woman’s unique appearance.
Though a fully grown woman, Domi still had the diminutive frame of a girl just entering her teens. Her limbs were thin and birdlike, yet she was a superb athlete and robust hand-to-hand combatant. Most significantly, however, Domi looked like no one else that Smarts had ever seen. She had the chalk-white skin and bone-white hair of an albino, and her eyes blazed a burning ruby-red like the flames of hell. She wore her hair in a short, pixieish style, enhancing her skeleton-like appearance, and she had chosen the briefest of clothes—a halter top and cutoff shorts—leaving her midriff, limbs and feet bare. Her clothing was beige, matching the sandy desert beneath the dark sky, its light color making her white skin seem somehow more pale than ever.
Like the other members of Kane’s field team, Cobaltville played a prominent part in Domi’s past. Domi had been forced into sexual servitude in the lowest echelons of the ville. She had grown up as a wild child of the Outlands, and her wits and decision making still had something of the instinctive to them.
“Kane,” she cried, running up to the ex-Mag and wrapping her arms around him. Kane hugged her back, looking like a giant holding a tiny, china doll. “I heard you ran into that quake over on the coast. You’re okay?”
As Domi let go of him, Kane nodded. “I think the quake really ran into us,” he told her with a smile. Kane and Domi had a strange history between them, but above all else they were bound by a mutual respect as warriors. “Brought some friends for you to meet,” Kane continued, gesturing to Señor Smarts and Rosalia, who stood beside Grant, her jaw jutting at a haughty angle as she observed the albino woman.
“This is Rosalia and the gentleman is called Smarts.”
Smarts took Domi’s hand and brushed it lightly with his lips. “Enchanted, señorita,” he said, his eyes meeting hers.
After the introductions had been made, the group headed back to the camp where Decard and his team were stationed. It was a simple affair, just a bivouac created from a couple of sheets of tarpaulin propped over a small area atop posts pushed into the sand. Once he was close enough, Kane recognized the posts that Decard’s crew had used. They were the slender silver rods that the security force of Aten used as their primary weapons. The long poles were tipped by V-shaped prongs, and they were capable of unleashing a charge of energy that could fell a man, knocking him into unconsciousness or worse, depending upon the setting employed by the user.
The makeshift nature of the camp reminded Kane of the shantytown that they had just left on the outskirts of Hope. Two armed guards nodded in acknowledgment as Domi passed, leading the group beneath the slanted roof sheets. The guards were Incarnates, and both came from similar stock. They were sturdy-looking individuals, their skin a shining coffee-bean brown from the sun. Their clothing was identical—naked but for loosely woven white linen kilts threaded with golden wire, coupled with glittering collars of hammered gold that embraced their necks. The only thing to differentiate them were the unique adornments on their faces. Both men wore masks that entirely covered their heads, remarkable helmets carved of painted and varnished wood. The mask of the sec man to the left bore a fierce caricature of a crocodile, its long snout pointing down to the ground, its rows of teeth highlighted in white paint. The man to the right wore the mask of a bug, an idealized version of a beetle, with large eyes and pincers that resembled the drooping lines of Grant’s gunslinger mustache.
As Domi led the way into the small, makeshift shelter, Decard got up from his resting position on the floor and called to them. The tent was lit by three small, oil-burning lamps that had been placed around the floor space. There were more guards inside, eight in all, and several had removed their helms and were dozing.
Decard was a fresh-faced young man, about twenty years old, and with close-cropped, sandy-blond hair. He wore the armor of a Magistrate, a familiar black polycarbonate exoskeleton, and it added a sense of authority to his five-foot-ten-inch frame.
Both Smarts and Rosalia backed away when they saw the Mag armor, but Grant was standing behind them, and Rosalia let out a quiet yelp as she bumped into his chest. “Nothing to get worked up about,” Grant told her quietly.
On closer inspection, they saw that the Magistrate armor was lacking the red insignia that usually graced the left pectoral; it looked to have been torn from the outfit.
Decard himself bore a friendly expression as he walked across the tent to meet with his old comrades. The man walked with a slight limp, favoring his left leg as he came over to greet them.
“Hello, Kane,” Decard said, acknowledging the other Cerberus personnel briefly. “Glad you could all make it out here.”
“What’s going on, Decard?” Kane asked, not a man for small talk.
“I was on patrol three days ago,” Decard explained as he led the way to the back of the small shelter, “when I came across a group of Roamers. Just a family, refugees, I think, crossing the desert. They’d set up camp quite close to the city entrance, and I brought some men out here to shoo them away.” Decard looked at Kane as though hoping for approval.
Kane understood what the man meant. Decard, like himself and Grant, may have retired prematurely, but he still had the old Magistrate instincts. In Decard’s case, he had been accidentally caught up in a conspiracy involving the welfare of new hybrids, and had somehow found himself on the run. He had landed on his feet in the hidden city-kingdom of Aten, California, where he had gone native and married into royalty. Decard had found a better life than most Magistrates, and his world was generally far more sedate than that of Kane or Grant. Aten treasured its secrecy, a community hidden away from the harsh realities of the world, and Decard had become the de facto leader of the Incarnates, the guardians of the city. He still made patrols around the city-kingdom, though he used his skills as a diplomat far more often than his handgun these days.
Kane nodded, encouraging the man to continue.
“I was doing a surveillance swoop around dusk when I came across one of the same folks,” Decard told him. “Only this time she looked like this…”
Decard gestured to a figure crouching on the ground behind two standing, helmeted guards. As the guards parted, Kane saw a young woman with long blond hair, probably still in her teenage years, bearing the swollen belly of pregnancy. Her hair was damp with sweat, curtained over her eyes, and she rocked back and forth on her heels, her jaw slack. Drool oozed down her chin from her open mouth.
As Kane stepped closer, he felt something nudge him and saw that Decard was handing him a flashlight. “Go on,” Decard urged him, “she won’t bite.”
Kane leaned down and switched on the flashlight, pointing it away from the woman before turning it gradually to illuminate her clearly. She just crouched there, rocking back and forth, not reacting in the slightest to his approach. “You okay, ma’am?” he said.
The woman seemed to be ignoring him. She just rocked, back and forth repeatedly. Now that he was closer, Kane could detect a low humming, too, the noise coming from the woman, not her mouth but pushed from deep in her throat and out of her nose.
Kane reached forward with his free hand and made to tentatively touch the woman’s face. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all, and before Kane’s fingers met with her he turned back to Decard. “Do I need gloves?”
“Hell if I know.” Decard shrugged. He shook off one of his gloves and passed it to Kane. “Use this if you want.”
Kane took the Mag gauntlet and pulled it over his right hand before reaching for the young woman again. Crouching before her, Kane used the black fingers of the glove to stroke her hair gently from where it obscured her face. Beneath her mop of hair, as he had somehow suspected, her eyes were wide open.
Her eyes were blank, pure white orbs, white on white, all color drained away.
Chapter 5
After a moment, Kane turned away from the woman, removing his gloved hand and letting her blond bangs fall back over her face. He turned to Decard with a look of concern. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?” he asked.
Decard held up his hands. “No idea. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “She’s running a high temperature, just like the others we found.”
“There are others?” Brigid spoke up.
“There were eight in the original party that we chased off,” Decard told her, “and we found three of them running around out here at dusk. I say ‘running,’ but I don’t mean that literally, of course,” he added.
“‘Mindless, soulless wretches,’” Kane quoted from the report that Lakesh had passed on to him over the Commtact when they had received word back in Hope. “Isn’t that what you said?”
Decard took his glove back from Kane as he spoke. “It wasn’t intended as a medical diagnosis,” he said with good humor, “but it was about the best way I could think of to describe them.”
Brigid Baptiste produced a pair of thin polymer gloves from her jacket pocket and placed them over her hands. They were disposable gloves, transparent and reaching just past her wrists. Then she crouched before the pregnant woman and started speaking to her softly as she gently pushed back the woman’s hair. “You said there were others?” Brigid asked Decard, her voice calm.
“Two others. What you see here is pretty accurate to how they were,” Decard said. “We found the three of them wandering about the desert here, aimless as a leaf on the wind, just walking around in circles. I think they’re a family, or at least they were.”
