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One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”
The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.
Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.
“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”
One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”
Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”
Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.
The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”
Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”
Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.
Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”
“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.
Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”
“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”
She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.
Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”
Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”
Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”
Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.
“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.
“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.
“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.
Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”
Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”
Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”
O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.
Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.
Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.
If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.
Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.
As he moved forward, holding the Sin Eater before him with his left hand steadying his grip, Grant spotted movement in the dark. Someone was approaching, walking along the corridor toward him. Grant was suddenly very conscious that, despite the poor lighting, he was still dressed in white jacket and hat for the snow. He sank into a crouch, holding the pistol steady as he dropped out of the stranger’s potential eye line.
Silhouetted against the flickering light for an instant was a tall, bulky figure reaching for a rifle that was slung from a shoulder strap across his chest. “Who’s there?” the newcomer asked, his voice deep but cracking with fear. “I can see you’re there.”
A tiny glint of light reflected from the muzzle of the rifle as it swung toward him, and Grant leaped forward, powering himself at the man in a driving rush of coiled muscles. In two steps, Grant was upon the gunman, his arms wide as he gripped the man’s shoulders, toppling the gunman backward onto the hard floor. The long barrel of the gunman’s rifle spit a half-dozen shots as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger, their report loud in the enclosed area of the corridor, but Grant was already inside the firing arc, his heavy body crushing the man beneath it. With a loud crack, the gunman’s head smacked into the floor tiles, splitting one across its center.
Grant pulled back his right hand, ready to shoot the guard with his pistol, but the man was already unconscious. Breathing heavily through his clenched teeth, Grant watched as a trickle of blood seeped across the cracked tile from the back of the gunman’s head. Grant got up and stepped away from the unconscious gunman, holstering his Sin Eater and kicking aside the man’s rifle.
“Mouse, meet cat,” Grant muttered as he turned from the fallen guard and headed back down the corridor to look at the map.
I NSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Brigid’s fingers were frantically racing across the keyboard as a stream of digits raced across the screen.
“I’m into the basic coding,” she told Kane without looking up, “but the whole thing is encrypted. Whatever’s in here is either very important or it’s the diary of a very paranoid teenager.”
Kane looked at her, brushing concrete dust from his short, dark hair. “Thinking of anyone in particular, Baptiste?”
“What?” she asked as her fingers sped across the keys. Then she looked up, seeing the sly grin on her colleague’s face. “Well, don’t look at me. Do you think I ever had time to keep a diary when we were in Cobaltville?”
Kane shrugged, laughing to himself as she went back to work on the computer code. As he did so, they both heard shots coming from a little way down the corridor, and Kane took two swift steps across the room to the closed double doors, the Sin Eater appearing in his hand.
There had been six shots, fired rapidly as if from an automatic. No further noise followed, and Kane risked opening one of the double doors, pushing his back against it as he raised the pistol in his hands.
“Grant?” he called tentatively. “Grant? You okay?”
Grant’s deep, rumbling voice echoed back along the corridor. “Just fine. Rodent problem, but I dealt with it.”
Kane stepped back into the room, his pistol returning to his sleeve as he walked across to stand behind Brigid.
She didn’t look up as she spoke. “I don’t feel safe here, Kane.”
“We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” he told her.
Just then, Grant came running through the double doors, clutching his Sin Eater. “We have got a problem,” he announced, a scowl across his dark brow.
“What now?” Brigid asked in exasperation.
“Unless I am very much mistaken,” Grant told them, “there is no mat-trans in this facility.”
Kane and Brigid looked at Grant, their eyes wide as they took in his statement.
“No back door, people,” Grant reiterated, shaking his head.
Brigid shook her head, as well, as she continued working the keys of the computer terminal. “Worst plan ever,” she growled without looking up at Kane.
Chapter 2
Kane was pacing the computer room like a caged tiger, head low as he tried to think through the situation. He had assumed that this installation would have a mat-trans, but there had been no guarantee of that. “There’s got to be a way out,” he assured the others. “A back door. Something.”
Brigid watched him over the rims of her glasses as she sat at the computer terminal. “This place has been buried for two hundred years, remember?” she told him. “Any back doors that might have existed are long since sealed. Essentially, we’re sitting in an archaeological dig.”
“Then we go out the same way we got here,” Kane decided. “We use the shaft.”
“We get the shaft, you mean,” Grant rumbled. “You heard what Brigid said when we came in. That route is a bottleneck with fifteen, maybe twenty armed millennialists just waiting to take a pop at us.”
Kane reached for the gunmetal flask that hung from his belt. “So we’ll use the same trick, the dead man’s switch.” He smiled. “They won’t shoot me while I’m holding the dead man’s switch.”
Grant shook his head. “Oh, yes, they will.” Kane shot a questioning look at the huge ex-Magistrate, and Grant began counting off points on the fingers of his free hand. “One, they know exactly where we’re coming from this time. Two, they’ve had time to think about it. Three, they’ve had time to set up sharpshooters.”
“Four,” Brigid chipped in, a sour smile on her face, “they’ll most likely shoot your arm off at the elbow.”
“What makes you so sure?” Kane asked, his tone abrupt as angry frustration bubbled to the surface.
“’Cause that’s what you’d do,” Grant told him, locking his gaze with Kane’s fierce stare.
After a moment, Kane looked away, shaking his head heavily. “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted.
Stepping over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.
Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”
“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”
Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”
Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”
Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”
Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.
“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.
Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.
Grant crouched beneath the computer desk and began unplugging connections, including the jury-rigged power that the millennialists had attached to get it running in the first place. “Insane or not,” he told Brigid, “would you trust your life in anyone else’s hands?”
Brigid didn’t even need to think about it. A dozen images jockeyed for position in her mind’s eye, situations where Kane had covered her back, taken care of her and saved her life. A hundred further instances were rushing through her head as she helped Grant unwire the base of the computer. Photographic memory could be a double-edged sword when you wanted to be mad at someone, she decided.
“Any idea how we’re getting out of here?” she asked as they discarded leads and Grant pulled the blocky computer from the desk.
“None at all,” he told her, smiling broadly, “but I’m not worried. Kane’ll do something. He always does.”
Brigid grabbed the TP-9 pistol from where she had placed it beside her on the desk, and she and Grant walked briskly across the room to the double doors and out into the corridor.
Kane was waiting for them just by the door, the gunmetal flask back in his hand. Grant took one look at the flask and shook his head. “That’ll never work,” he warned his friend as the lights flickered above them.
Kane started off toward the hole in the wall at a fast trot, trusting the others to keep up. “Oh, I’ve added a little something-something this time,” he said, grinning maliciously as he stepped over the unconscious gunman on the floor and headed for the large gap in the wall that led into the boxed tunnel.
Grant was right behind him, hefting the computer under his left arm. The black, metal-covered unit stretched from beneath his armpit right down to the curled tips of his gripping fingers, and he was forced to keep his arm straight to carry it. They had left the monitor and keyboard behind, knowing they could substitute these items when they reached their headquarters at the Cerberus redoubt. “This thing is going to throw my aim off,” Grant advised the others. “I can keep you covered, but I don’t think I can do much pinpoint work.”
“Won’t be necessary,” Kane assured him, still clutching the flask. “Baptiste and I will handle things, won’t we?”
Brigid sight-checked the chamber of her TP-9 before answering. “Can’t wait,” she said grimly.
With that, the three-person reconnaissance team began to jog along the shaft, making good speed without exhausting themselves as they worked their way up the muddy incline.
They didn’t meet anyone along the shaft, but as they turned a slight corner close to the exit, they suddenly found themselves assaulted by a volley of bullets. Kane urged his companions backward, and the Cerberus trio waited just around the corner as a stream of bullets peppered the wall across from them.
“Told you,” Grant said quietly as the stream of bullets slapped the wall.
Taking point, Kane edged forward to the turn in the shaft, answering Grant without looking back. “They’ll get bored in a minute.”
Kane drew his right arm back and stepped two paces forward before tossing the gunmetal flask ahead of him like a baseball pitcher. The flask hurtled through the air toward the entrance to the mine shaft. Still tucked behind the curve in the shaft, Brigid and Grant heard the astonished cries of Millennial Consortium guards as they saw the projectile fly toward them.
Kane ducked behind cover as a stream of steel-jacketed bullets poured into the shaft. “Look away,” he instructed Brigid and Grant. “Close your eyes and look away!”
All three of them turned to face the underground lair that they had just come from. A second later an almighty noise assaulted their ears, and even from behind lidded eyes they could see the bright flash of an explosion.
Moments later, Grant and Brigid were chasing after Kane as he led the way, Sin Eater in hand, up the last part of the shaft and into the open air.
“What the hell did you just do?” Grant asked, incredulous.
Kane snapped off a shot from his pistol, and the bullet swept the legs out from under a millennialist guardsman who was rubbing at his eyes, his own pistol forgotten in his limp hand. “I stuffed the flask with flash-bangs,” Kane explained as he darted out of the entrance and continued running, head low, across the snow-carpeted ground.
Once outside, they could see that the millennialists had arranged themselves in a crescent shape across the open entrance in a determined bid to trap the Cerberus exiles inside the shaft and, presumably, contain the expected explosion when the dead man’s switch was detonated.
Brigid loosed three shots from her TP-9, catching two of the dazzled millennialists in the chest and clipping the gun hand of a third. A few paces ahead of her, Kane was firing 9 mm bursts from his Sin Eater, mostly as warning shots rather than aiming at specific targets. The way he saw it, they were pretty much home free with the opposition blinded by the flash-bangs; it didn’t warrant unnecessary deaths now.
The flash-bang was a little explosive charge that provided exactly what its name implied: a big flash and a loud bang. Kane and Grant carried various different types of the little capsules, some able to generate copious amounts of smoke or a foul stench upon breaking, and they used them for distraction in favor of actually hurting an enemy. The bright glare of the flash-bangs could temporarily blind an unsuspecting opponent and make his or her ears sing, but it wouldn’t leave any permanent damage.
Grant didn’t want to think about how many of the little explosive spheres Kane had packed into the flask, but he could see that it had dazzled the millennialists into submission. “Vintage Kane,” he muttered as he chased across the snow after his colleagues, his rolling gait compensating for the weight of the computer unit.
The snow was falling heavier than when they’d entered the shaft, thick flurries obscuring their sight as they rushed up the low hill and past the fir tree that Kane had used for cover. Kane took point with Brigid and Grant a few paces behind. As they ran, their boots leaving heavy tracks in the deepening snow, they heard the familiar report of a gunshot, and a bullet zinged past Grant’s ear.
“What the—” Grant yelled as he spun back to look over his shoulder.
The gunman he had encountered inside the underground lair had awakened and was running after them out of the square shaft entrance. Grant threw himself at the ground, using his right shoulder to cushion his fall as he saw the gunman sight and fire again.
A spray of bullets zipped past over Grant’s head as he sank into the soft snow, still clutching the computer base unit to his side. “A little help here, guys?” Grant called as he clambered up the hill amid a further hail of bullets.
Kane and Brigid stopped running, spinning on their heels and sighting the gunman outside the boxy entrance. Their guns blazed in unison as bullets flew over their heads, and suddenly the gunman’s head snapped back in a spray of crimson.
Kane leaned forward to give Grant a hand up. As he pulled the big man back to his feet, a movement caught Kane’s eye. He looked up, over Grant’s head, and spotted the large black object moving between the ridges of snow like a prowling panther. It was a Scorpinaut, one of the tanklike vehicles that the Millennial Consortium employed for field operations, and it was heading their way.
“Troops,” Kane began, “we’ve got bigger problems.” He pointed a little to the left of the minelike entrance, and Grant and Brigid looked where he indicated. Suddenly, the dark shape came into view between two mounds of snow, weaving around a copse as it headed up the slope toward them.
“Must have been looking the other way when you set off the flash-bangs,” Grant speculated. “Got any ideas?”
Kane’s mind raced as he calculated the various factors that were now in play. “The Mantas are about a click away. We could get there in under five minutes without that computer slowing you down.”
Brigid gasped and looked at Kane with pleading eyes. “No, we can’t leave it behind after everything we just went through to get it.”
“Nobody’s leaving anything behind, Baptiste,” Kane told her. “Just need to find a way to give Grant a head start. You guys go on, and I’ll catch you up as soon as I’m able.”
Just then, the amplified voice of a well-spoken woman split the air, and they realized that it was coming from a speaker unit set on the hull of the Scorpinaut. “Attention, runners,” the woman’s voice said, “you have stolen properties that belong to the Millennial Consortium by right of salvage. Please cease and desist your current actions and return the property immediately, or we will be forced to reclaim by any means necessary. We urge you to swiftly comply.”
Grant started trekking up the slope, shifting the computer beneath his arm as he did so, struggling to secure a firmer grip.
Brigid turned to join Grant, the TP-9 still in her hand, then she stopped and turned back to their team leader. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
Kane shook his head, watching the Scorpinaut navigate up the slope. “Play chicken with five tons of heavily armed wag, by the look of it,” he told her, shrugging out of the white jacket he had worn for camouflage. Then he was off, a dark shadow against the white snow, running back down the slope toward the approaching Scorpinaut, the Sin Eater held in his upraised hand.
Kane half ran, half jumped down the snow-covered incline, his legs and arms pumping as he made his way toward a group of low trees off to the right of the approaching vehicle. He saw the foreclaws of the unit whirr in readiness, and then they were spitting fire in his direction as a stream of bullets began cutting through the air. Kane leaped and weaved, always moving, giving the crewof the Scorpinaut the least possible chance of getting a bead on him.