Читать книгу Janus Trap - James Axler - Страница 11

At the back of the cave, the assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently as Decimal River’s fingers played across the laptop’s glowing keyboard. At the other side of the low-ceilinged cave, Cloud Singer’s eyes flicked to the ghost woman, still wary of her despite all that had happened in the month since she had found her way back to the Original Tribe.

The woman, the assassin whose warrior name was Broken Ghost, had such an air of stillness about her, of utter calm despite the tenseness of the situation, that it made Cloud Singer uncomfortable. The woman’s flesh seemed almost washed-out compared to the café-au-lait complexions of the other members of the tribe. Her braided black hair and dark eyes gave Broken Ghost a striking appearance unlike anyone else in the tribe. She had painted her face with subtle blends, adding the illusion of shadow, intensifying her cheekbones, making her sharp-angled face appear almost skeletal, and she had weaved bits of glass and small, sharp chips of rock into her thick hair. She wore a loose undershirt that left her lean arms bare, their tight, corded muscles visible. Her skirt was really just two strips of material—one in front and one in back—that dangled to her knees and left her firm legs unencumbered.

Cloud Singer looked down at her own body, perversely unable to stop comparing herself to the magnificent warrior. By contrast, Cloud Singer was just a girl. Sixteen years old, with all the energy and suppleness that that granted, but none of the raw power of the formidable woman at the back of the cave. She wore her warrior’s garb, as she had done ever since returning home to the outback: a tight strip of material stretched across her small breasts like a bandage, with more strips across her groin and legs, wrapped around her arms and encasing her scarred knuckles. Once upon a time, those strips of material had been the pure white of the clouds for whom she sang. After the massacre in Georgia, of which she was the only survivor, the strips had been washed with the blood of a squealing boar while Cloud Singer slit its neck, squeezing its life out of it, until the material was dyed red. After that, despite protests from the elders of the tribe, Cloud Singer had refused to remove her warrior clothes, to the point of even bathing in them in the underground pool that the tribe used. Only alone, in her few moments of absolute solitude, had she stripped out of the strange uniform, and then only to be naked. Until the mission was complete, she would never wear anything other than her warrior’s garb. She had promised that much to Neverwalk as he lay there, head lolled at that dreadful angle, the dried blood splashed all about him in the underground bunker in the Caucasus Mountains.

“They’ve used their slicer,” Decimal River stated, his head turning right then left as he addressed the two women on opposite sides of the cave. He was a young man, just a few years older than Cloud Singer, and his left arm was decorated with tattoos of circuitry. He wore baggy shorts and a loose shirt, open to the waist. The shirt was dark with sweat, and clung to his dark skin where its folds touched him. His hair was braided, like Broken Ghost’s, and his face showed a nasty scar from a burn across the left cheek, stopping just shy of his eye.

“Not slicer,” Broken Ghost corrected, her voice low, eyes closed in meditation. “Mat-trans. They call it a mat-trans.”

Decimal River pulled up a window of scrolling information on the laptop’s screen, flicking his hand before the motion sensor to run quickly through the pages of information displayed there. “Fifty-seven minutes ago,” he continued, “they activated the mat-trans, crossing from their home in the Montana mountains to…here.” He pointed to a paper map that was stretched across the wall of the cave. The map showed North America, and a red cross marked the Bitterroot Mountains. His finger tapped at an area close to the bottom right, but it meant nothing to Cloud Singer.

Broken Ghost took a single pace forward, and she seemed suddenly much more imposing as Decimal River looked up at her from his seated position. “Prime the trap,” she said, her words the barest whisper as they left her mouth.

Cloud Singer smiled. Soon the Original Tribe would get its due. Soon they would have their revenge on Cerberus and its accursed leader. And then Lakesh would die.

“IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME with these bottom-feeders,” Kane growled as he mentally assessed the immediate area around the crates where the three Cerberus warriors had taken cover. The exit door was ten paces ahead of them, and there was certainly enough cover to escape the boathouse if they wanted to.

“What do you see out there, Kane?” Grant asked.

Another hail of bullets hammered into the crates beside them, splintering the wood and kicking up puffs of sawdust, and they heard the sounds of guards running all about them between the stacked crates.

“People in diving suits,” Kane said. “Frogmen armed to the teeth. They were rushing in from the open dock.”

Grant nodded toward the door to the boathouse. “You want to get out of here?”

Kane thought for a moment, glancing across at Brigid for confirmation. “Nah,” he decided. “Let’s go make friends, cause mayhem.” With that, Kane stood, reached up and pulled himself up the stack of crates beside him, clambering to the top in a series of quick, economical movements.

Raising the Sin Eater before him, Grant hunkered down and stalked off into the shadows, his black duster helping him blend into the darkness. Brigid took a different route toward the opposite side of the boathouse, weaving through the crates at a fast trot as bullets zipped all around, the TP-9 held high. As she ran, she rooted around in her satchel with her free hand, producing three small metallic spheres, like ball bearings, from its hidden depths.

As Kane pulled himself to the top of the stacked crates, he saw one of Ohio Blue’s men up there stagger backward toward him, an oozing red stain across his chest where he had been riddled with bullets from below. The man cried as he misstepped, falling from the high stack and plummeting past Kane to the solid floor almost fifteen feet below. Across from him, on a nearby tower of crates, another guard was falling over his own feet, a gout of red gushing from a large wound in what was left of his skull. Whoever the newcomers were, they were well-trained, Kane realized—it took some nice pinpoint work to take out the high guards so quickly.

He pulled himself over the lip of the crates and, keeping his body low, stalked across the towers as flashes of gunfire continued to light the floor below. The body of another security guard lay sprawled on his back close to the far side of the crate tower, a single red-rimmed wound between his staring eyes. In an automatic gesture, Kane’s left hand reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes as he passed.

Kane dropped, lying flat on his stomach, and crawled the last few yards to the edge of the tall tower. His head popped forward, and he peeked over the side as the gunfire continued below him. It looked as though a miniature war had erupted down there. In heavy helmets and diving gear, a dozen men were working as a team, using long-nosed pistols to take out Ohio Blue’s guards as they approached the beautiful trader where she cowered behind her crimson recliner, bullets flying all around.

As Kane watched, the tall blond trader reached beneath the bullet-riddled recliner and produced a long-barreled revolver from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the couch. It was a Ruger Security Six, a silver six-shooter with enough stopping power to drill through a wag door. Blue hadn’t been cowering, Kane realized; she was using the recliner as cover while she armed herself.

In a flash, Ohio Blue raised the Ruger, steadying the butt with her free hand, and blasted a shot at the lead frogman. The bullet took him full in the chest and the masked man staggered for a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the frogman shook his head and continued walking toward Ohio Blue, almost as though nothing had happened.

Ohio’s guards were also having little success, and Kane now saw why. The divers were wearing bulletproof vests over their diving suits.

Ohio Blue continued firing at the lead frogman, her shots going wild as she started to panic. A moment later, the six-shooter was out of bullets, but it took several pulls of the trigger before the beautiful woman realized. She tossed aside the useless weapon and ducked behind her crimson recliner as bullets zipped all around her.

“We want her alive,” one of the frogmen reminded his team as the group got closer.

On the crates above, Kane sighted down the length of his Sin Eater, slowing his breathing and focusing on the rearmost man in scuba gear. After a moment, Kane’s finger stroked the trigger, unleashing a short burst. The 9 mm bullets raced to their target, hitting the diver’s faceplate and shattering the strengthened plastic mask in an explosion of hard splinters.

Kane watched as the man ducked and clawed at the mask, his companions turning to look at him. From up there, Kane couldn’t hear the man’s howls over the sounds of gunfire, but he assured himself that his victim was cursing their unseen attacker even now. A grim smile crossed Kane’s lips at the thought, and he pulled himself back from the edge of the crates, rolled to one side and made his way to a new location as a hail of bullets slapped against the edge of the uppermost crate.

On ground level between the towers of crates, Grant rushed back toward Ohio Blue, his dark eyes assessing the squad of men in scuba gear. Even as he watched, the rearmost man took Kane’s bullet to his face and dropped to his knees, clawing at the shattered remains of his faceplate.

Placing his back flush to the crates, Grant scanned the area until he spotted Ohio Blue crouching behind her recliner, muzzle-flashes reflected in the sapphire blue of her dress. She was too far away and too out in the open for him to reach safely; he would need a distraction.

“Kane, Brigid,” Grant whispered as he activated his Commtact, a top-of-the-line communication device that had been recovered from Redoubt Yankee years before. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtact didn’t need sound to be activated; it could pick up and interpret subvocalized speech if necessary, making it an ideal device for sneak work. Permanent usage of the Commtact involved a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably squeamish about, and so their use remained at field-test stage for now. However, the communication device was considered an essential tool for Kane and other field teams.

“The trader’s in trouble,” Grant explained. “I can’t reach her. Any ideas?”

“Be careful,” Kane instructed over the linked transmission. “They’re wearing some kind of armor that deflects bullets.”

Brigid’s voice came over Grant’s auditory receiver after a moment. “I’m just getting in position now,” she said. “Going to give our guests a little light show.”

Grant knew what that meant, and he pulled a pair of sunglasses from the inside pocket of his coat as Brigid spoke, following up by inserting tiny earplugs into his ears.

“Count us in, Baptiste,” Kane said in a low voice over the Commtact as he got into place above them.

Brigid Baptiste was hunkered down in the shadows of the towering crates, close to one of the high walls of the boathouse. She had placed a pair of dark lenses over her own eyes and wore earplugs to muffle sound, just as Grant did. Her head was steady as she watched the group of frogmen swarming around the main area of the building, shooting the few remaining guards as they approached the recliner where Ohio Blue cowered. Swiftly, Brigid assessed the floorboards between her and her target—they were rough in places, and a little warped here and there with damp, but they were basically flat and smooth enough for her purpose.

She drew her arm back, rolling the three silver spheres in her hand for a moment, assessing their weight as she gave one last look at the scene. Then, her arm arced forward, low to the floor, and she released the three globes as her arm continued its fluid sweep ahead. Released, the tiny silver spheres rolled along the floorboards, bumping across the rough chinks in the wood as they rushed toward the recliner.

As the spheres rolled steadily across the floor, Brigid engaged her Commtact once again. “Three, two, one,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes and turning her head away from what she knew was about to happen.

For a moment, nothing did. The three spheres rolled to the open area beside the recliner, their momentum dwindling. Two of the intruders in scuba gear had spotted them, and one shouted a query as he stepped ahead and placed his foot in the path of the first sphere. “What the fu—”

His words were lost in the explosion of sound and light that followed as the flash-bangs detonated.

Atop the crate tower, Kane surged forward, his Sin Eater held low. Even through the polymer lenses of his darkened glasses, the dazzling explosive burned into his retinas, and he blinked the pattern away as he leaped from the high crate and out into the open.

A moment later, Kane dropped into the open area of the boathouse, the Sin Eater blasting a lethal arc of 9 mm steel before him. He landed amid the frogmen with a heavy thump of boot soles against wooden floorboards, then swiftly recovered into a fighter’s crouch as he began targeting the men in scuba gear. The sound of the Sin Eater seemed dulled by the ringing in his ears that the flash-bang had wrought, but his earplugs had helped protect him from the worst of it.

The flash-bang was a miniature explosive device, designed purely to shock and startle an opponent. The explosive was all sound and light, but the charge itself was so tiny as to be worthless as a demolition device. The flash-bang was standard equipment for Kane and his team, who often saw a benefit to using nonlethal force to restrain or completely halt an enemy.

The divers were all pulling at their masks in their sudden blindness, and several fired shots at random as they struggled to recover. To one side of the recliner, Ohio Blue was sitting on her backside, an enticing sweep of bare leg visible where her dress had fallen about her. Her blue-gloved hand was held over her eyes and her shoulders heaved as though she was crying.

Off to Kane’s left, Brigid was securing the area, her TP-9 raised as she checked every nook and cranny before moving closer to the main action. A few of Ohio’s guards were still alive, but they seemed to be wounded almost to a man. Tough to stand toe to toe with an enemy who could shrug off bullets, Kane realized.

Like a charging rhino, Grant joined Kane from his hiding place among the crates, fists swinging at the closest two frogmen as they staggered about blindly. His blows connected with solid finality, and the two men fell to the floor.

Kane turned to Grant and nodded his approval. “Not exactly subtle,” he shouted to be heard over the earplugs he assumed that the other man still wore.

Pulling the handblaster from another frogman and throwing it aside, Grant lifted the man off his feet and tossed him against the nearest stack of crates with bone-jarring force. “Their vests shrug off bullets, right?” Grant explained. “What was I supposed to do?”

Kane aimed a stream of bullets at another frogman’s head, blasting his faceplate to splinters. “Aim for the head?” he suggested.

Grant’s leg kicked out, slamming into the gut of a blinded diver, knocking him backward with a shriek. “Sure. Now you tell me.”

Brigid joined them then, looking around as Kane and Grant made short work of the final few intruders. She crouched beside Ohio Blue, placing a steadying arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Can you hear me?” she shouted, close to the woman’s left ear.

Ohio nodded, looking in the direction of Brigid’s voice with vacant, bloodshot eyes.

“We’re getting out of here,” Brigid explained as she helped the trader to her feet.

There was a noise from the far end of the boathouse, and all three Cerberus warriors spun to see the front of the building—the wall where the exit door was located—cave in as a heavily armored vehicle crashed through it.

As the dust began to clear, the vehicle stood revealed. It was a square block on caterpillar tracks. Four abbreviated arms stretched out to either side of the vehicle, two on each side in a stack array, each containing three large missiles along its length. The muzzle of a gun stood out low in the rounded nose of the vehicle, swiveling left to right as it searched for a target.

Men swarmed in through the hole in the wall that had been created by the tank, armed with rifles, pistols and shotguns blasting the few remaining guards who were hidden among the crates.

“We’re going to need another exit,” Grant growled as he powered the Sin Eater back into his grip and, in unison with Kane, started taking shots at the approaching gunmen. The shots hit their targets but did nothing more than make the approaching gunmen slow for a moment. Like the frogmen, this team was wearing protective armor.

“Baptiste,” Kane shouted over the furious sounds of gunfire all around, “you studied the maps—any ideas?”

Brigid looked around the boathouse, and her eyes stopped as she came to the sunken area that dominated its center. Letting go of the stunned trader at her side, Brigid dashed across to the safety rail that surrounded it and peered into the lower area. There, bobbing in the choppy waters of the Tennessee River, was a long powerboat, painted blue and shaped like a dart. Perfect.

Brigid turned back to Kane and Grant, calling them over. “Come quick and bring Ms. Blue,” she instructed.

Bullets thudded all about them as Grant, Kane and Ohio Blue made their way toward the area where Brigid waited. Kane kicked over the recliner as he passed, using it for a shield while they retreated from the approaching gunmen.

At the far end of the boathouse, Kane could see the odd-looking tank trundling slowly forward, knocking against one of the towers of crates before shunting it aside.

“Oh, this had better be good,” Kane muttered.

When Kane turned he saw that Ohio Blue was at Brigid’s side, trotting down the short staircase that led to the sunken dock. Grant waited at the head of the stairs, blasting at targets with his Sin Eater, providing what cover he could for Kane.

“Keep moving,” Kane told him as he passed.

Grant drilled a line of bullets into the edge of the lowest crate in a nearby stack. Under the relentless attack, the crate began to sag, its structural integrity ruined, and then the whole tower swayed for a few seconds before it slowly toppled to the floor of the vast boathouse, blocking the way for the approaching gunmen.

The two ex-Mags turned and rushed down the staircase, one after another, their heads kept low as bullets whizzed all about them. Ahead of them, Brigid stood beside Ohio Blue in the dart-shaped boat, swiftly assessing the vessel’s dashboard controls.

Grant stepped into the boat with Kane just behind him. A moment later, the boat roared away, engine howling as Brigid powered it out of the boathouse across the undulating waves. A wall of water cascaded around them as the boat turned sharply and arrowed down the choppy waters of the Tennessee. Behind them, gunmen in the boathouse were blasting shot after shot at the rapidly disappearing boat, but they were already out of range.

As Brigid manned the wheel, Ohio Blue rubbed at her face and looked at the three Cerberus teammates. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said breathlessly.

“Who were they?” Grant asked.

Ohio Blue shrugged her pale shoulders. “Competition?” she suggested, a note of query in her tone.

“See,” Kane told her angrily, “this is what you get when you jack up the price at the last minute.”

In reply, Ohio Blue just gave him a cold smile as the boat carved a path through the waves away from the boathouse. “I guess my brother’s not quite as dead as I thought,” she muttered to herself.

At the wheel, Brigid glanced across to the passengers before addressing the black marketer. “Do you have somewhere else we can go?”

Ohio Blue laughed, pushing her blond hair—now damp from the spray of the river—back over her shoulders. “That place was an empty shell, just for show,” she said. “Do you think I’m foolish enough to invite interested parties to my stock?”

Kane’s jaw was set firm as he looked at the woman. “I figure you just lost maybe twenty men back there,” he said.

“Men can be replaced,” she told him. “They were slow and stupid, so they died.”

Kane’s finger snapped up, jabbing toward Ohio’s face in accusation. “You very nearly died, too, sister,” he snapped.

“Ah, but you saved me, O handsome prince.” Blue sighed. Her visible eyelid fluttered as though swooning, and she clutched her hands together before her breasts. She was mocking Kane and he knew it.

Brigid powered down the engine and the boat slowed to a crawl as she steered it toward the muddy bank. They were over a klick away from the boathouse already, and no one was chasing them as far as Brigid could tell—they didn’t need to keep running. When Kane looked at her quizzically, she nodded toward the verdant slopes in the distance: the redoubt was nearby, its mat-trans unit their quickest way home.

Brigid spoke briefly to the trader before exiting the boat, with Grant leading the way. Kane was the last to leave, his senses on high alert once more in case they ran into further trouble on their way back.

“Well, it’s been a blast,” Kane told Ohio as he stepped up onto the edge of the boat, “but this is our stop.”

“Ohh,” Ohio drawled. “Leaving so soon? How will I ever take care of myself, O handsome prince?”

“You’ll manage,” Kane growled. “And I’m not your handsome prince.”

A wide smile crossed Ohio Blue’s cerulean lips then, that playful fire back in her visible blue eye. “But what else would I call you?” she challenged. “I never did learn your name.”

“Kane,” he told her as he stepped from the boat.

Ohio Blue reached out and pulled him back by the arm. Then she inclined her head, her mouth close to Kane’s ear, and whispered, “I owe you, Kane. Tell Ms. Baptiste that she will get her meds, and at the original price.”

Kane’s steely blue-gray eyes looked at her and a lopsided grin crossed his mouth for a moment. “That’s a very noble gesture,” he acknowledged.

Ohio Blue looked at him through the drooping curtain of her damp blond bangs. “I remember who my friends are, Kane,” she told him, squeezing his arm tightly for just a moment before letting him go.

In a few moments, Kane joined Grant and Brigid on the banks of the Tennessee as Ohio Blue powered the boat away. When he told them that they were getting the booster shots after all, Grant laughed.

“You do have a way with the ladies,” Grant said, slapping his friend on the back.

Kane wasn’t so sure. Friends like Ohio Blue almost always turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

SHIZUKA SAT CROSS-LEGGED upon the ground on the empty plateau outside the entrance to the Cerberus redoubt. She had dressed in casual clothes, a loose-fitting cotton blouse in a pink so pale as to be almost white, black trousers and flat, open sandals. She sat there, breathing deeply as the midmorning sun played across the exposed skin of her arms, her throat and face, letting her mind fall silent with stillness.

Shizuka had brought two items with her that seemed, because she was dressed so casually, very much out of place: a katana blade, twenty-five inches of sharpened steel, held within a dark scabbard beautifully decorated with gold filigree, and a small wooden casket, just six inches by three, like a musical box. The sword and box rested on an open blanket that she had laid out on the dusty ground before sitting on it.

She had been thinking of Grant, that aching need to be in his company, to share nothing more important than the simplest of moments. But between his commitments to Cerberus and hers to the Tigers of Heaven at New Edo, the couple never quite seemed to have enough time together. Indeed, some of their most significant shared moments had been during the heat of raging battle. This day, for the first time in months, it seemed, Shizuka finally had a free day, the demands of her role as leader of the Tigers of Heaven quiet for once. And, with typical bad timing, Grant was required on a mission halfway across the country.

What had he said? A simple pickup, won’t take long. Her breath slow and calm, Shizuka reached forward and flipped open the brass catch on the little wooden box. She would wait for Grant, so that they might yet spend the afternoon together, with no distractions but for each other.

Shizuka’s delicate hands pushed open the lid and reached inside the box. Its contents had been placed carefully inside specific compartments, a masterpiece of simple design and economic use of space. There were sheets of thin rice paper, a soft square of cotton, a lightly chalked powder ball and a small bottle of oil. Along the front of the compartmentalized box rested a tiny brass hammer, held separate from the other items in the cleaning kit.

Shizuka reached forward, taking the sheathed katana from where it lay on the blanket. Gripping the hilt of the sword with her right hand, she pulled at the scabbard with her left, drawing the blade into the open where its polished steel surface reflected the rays of the sun. The graceful movement was automatic, an unconscious thing for her, practiced so many times as to be a part of her muscle memory, the weight of the sword like just another segment of her body. She looked at the blade for a moment, her eyes scanning its length, observing the grain of the steel, checking for flaws. Then, careful to hold the sharp edge of the blade away from her, Shizuka took a single sheet of the crackling, wafer-thin rice paper and began to slowly stroke the blade with it.

This was a necessary process, a chore that every samurai going back to the days of feudal Japan had performed to ensure that his katana—often referred to as the soul of the samurai—remained strong and clean, free from defects that might hinder a warrior in battle. But it was also a ritual, one that served to fill and calm Shizuka’s mind as she awaited her lover’s return.

As Shizuka sat there, the rice paper now discarded, tapping the length of the finely honed blade with the powder ball, she became aware that someone had approached and was standing behind her. She tilted the sword just slightly, looking in its reflective surface between the dustings of chalk, to see who it was who had come upon her with such stealth.

“Domi,” she said calmly, a pleasant smile lifting her lips for a moment before she moved the sword back and continued tapping chalk along its length.

“Hi, Shizuka,” Domi said breezily as she walked across the plateau to stand before the sitting woman. Shizuka thought that she could detect just the tiniest hint of disappointment in Domi’s tone, where she had perhaps hoped to sneak up on the warrior woman unawares.

Domi cut a figure like no other. She was barely five feet tall, with a tiny, waiflike frame. An albino, Domi’s skin was as white as the chalk that Shizuka used to dust her blade. Her hair was also white, with the slightest variation in color, like paper turned to ash, and cut short in a pixie style that framed her face. It was within that face that Domi’s most unearthly feature resided, however—her eyes, which were an angry, vibrant scarlet, like pools of blood, and seemed to burn into the soul of whomever she looked at.

Domi had appeared from the undergrowth around the plateau, dressed in a pair of denim shorts cut high to the leg, and a drab green abbreviated halter top that barely covered her small, pert breasts. Her skin and bare feet showed a few marks, where dirt had brushed against them, and Shizuka saw the bow and quiver of arrows strapped to Domi’s back. The young woman had been out hunting, not for any real reason beyond the pleasure of the early-morning solitude and the thrill of the chase. Domi was a true child of the Outlands, often distinctly out of place around others—particularly the scientific types who dominated the Cerberus facility—and a born survivor. Like Kane, Grant and Brigid, Domi had joined the Cerberus operation via a disrupted life in Cobaltville, in her case, as a sex slave to the repulsive Guana Teague. Since then, she had become a highly valued member of the Cerberus crew.

“What you doing?” Domi asked, gesturing to the blanket spread across the ground. “Picnic?”

Shizuka smiled, shaking her head imperceptibly. “Only as food for the soul,” she said, running another sheet of rice paper along the length of her katana to brush away the powder.

As Domi stood watching her, Shizuka reached for the bottle of oil and dribbled a few spots along the blade. Then she tilted the katana so that the oil ran along its length. With her free hand, Shizuka took the cotton square from the wooden box and began to clean the blade in a long, sweeping stroke along its length, following the lines of the grain of the steel.

“You want maybe some food for the stomach, too?” Domi asked. “’Cause I’m heading inside and I wouldn’t outright object to company.”

Shizuka waved her blade before her, feeling its familiar weight in her hand as it swept through the air. Looking up at Domi, she smiled. “That would be nice,” she said, sheathing the katana and placing the contents back in the little wooden box.

THE THREE CERBERUS rebels made their way across the grassy swells back to the hidden redoubt. As they walked, the rain started once more, a cold, lancing drizzle on their faces that dimpled the surfaces of the puddles and turned the ground to slippery mud beneath their feet.

Making certain that they were not being observed or followed, Kane led the way through the gap in the chain-link iron fence and stood there for a moment, waiting as the others stepped through and followed. According to his wrist chron it was almost 1:30 p.m., local time; the back-and-forth of their little escapade had made it a three-hour-plus effort. Still, with the instantaneous transportation of the mat-trans, they would be back at Cerberus in a few minutes—plenty of time to catch the lunch shift at the canteen and grab themselves a proper meal.

Grant yanked back the heavy door just a little—he had left it slightly open when they had passed through earlier—and rainwater had already pooled across the flat concrete flooring that stretched out into the lobby of the abandoned underground bunker.

“Do you have afternoon plans, Grant?” Brigid asked as he held the door for her.

He shrugged. “Shizuka,” he said, the hint of a smile on his lips.

Brigid winced at that, feeling that she had somehow invaded her friend’s privacy without meaning to.

Once Grant had closed and sealed the main door, they trekked through the silent corridors of the redoubt and found themselves back at the mat-trans room just three minutes after they had entered the complex. Kane checked the room briefly as they entered, assuring himself that no one had been there in their absence.

HALFWAY AROUND the world, in a cave that was hidden from the late-afternoon sun, Decimal River watched a blinking light flashing on his laptop screen. “They’re inside,” he announced, his eyes never leaving the screen.

“Activate the trap,” Broken Ghost said, her voice a whisper just behind the man’s tattooed shoulder.

Across from the ash-skinned assassin, Cloud Singer, the bloodred strips of cloth that she wore blending with the russet walls and dark shadows of the cave, felt a tiny shiver run up and down her spine in anticipation. To her irritation, the shiver reminded her of how it felt back when she could activate the implant, back when the dreamslicer still took the Original Tribe into the Dreaming World, before the Cerberus people had blocked their access with the master weapon, the Death Cry. Cloud Singer held her breath as she watched Decimal River’s nimble fingers race across the keyboard of his portable computer.

Decimal River watched the numbers on his screen race toward zero as the mat-trans unit was activated in Tennessee.

“They’ve primed it,” he said in a hushed voice. “Just a few seconds longer.”

Beside him, her head jutting forward as she watched the countdown, Broken Ghost remained utterly expressionless. Her voice betrayed no emotion when the readout went to zero and she finally spoke.

“Close the trap.”