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Grant watched as the cockpit to the second Manta opened and two figures stepped out. Like him, both of them were dressed in white, wearing fur-lined jackets and white pants.
The first figure was a woman in her mid-twenties. She had vibrant red hair that trailed down her back like a burst of evening sunlight. Even as she stepped from the graceful wing of the Manta, the woman was bunching her hair back behind her head, pulling it away from her face as the Arctic wind blew it about her face. After a moment, she tied her hair back and looked up at Grant with her warm, friendly smile, her emerald eyes glinting with a furious intellect. Brigid Baptiste had been a crucial part of their triumvirate ever since Grant had joined the operation known as Cerberus. While her high forehead pointed to an intellectual aspect, her full lips suggested a more playful, passionate side; in truth, Brigid Baptiste was both of these and more besides.
Behind the attractive figure of Brigid Baptiste, the third member of the field team exited the Manta’s cockpit, even as the snow started to settle on its sloping bronze wings. This was Kane, Grant’s longtime partner, whose friendship was unquestioned, whose loyalty was unswerving. Grant had known Kane ever since their days in Cobaltville where they had been initially partnered as Magistrates, the strong-arm force that kept the citizenry in check. Whereas Grant was powerfully built and bulky, Kane was tall and lean with most of his bulk in his upper body. It had been said that Kane’s physique was like a wolf’s, and often his temperament was similarly inclined. He was pack leader, loner and scout. Like Grant, a bulky lump showed beneath the wrist of Kane’s jacket where he held his sidearm for quick access.
“Seen anything interesting?” Kane asked as he greeted Grant.
“Snow,” Grant grumbled, his deep voice sounding like a rumbling volcano.
Kane looked around before turning back to Grant with a self-deprecating grin. “Kind of samey, isn’t it?”
Grant nodded, his own mouth breaking into a grin.
“Monotonous,” Brigid corrected them both without looking up from the portable radar device she was consulting in her gloved hand, “is the word you are looking for. ‘Samey’? Honestly, who taught you two to speak?”
Kane glanced over Brigid’s head and caught Grant’s eye as the redheaded woman began walking away from the two Mantas. “You know, you’d never believe she used to be a librarian,” he said flippantly.
“That so?” Grant replied. “You’d think she’d let us forget once in a while.”
“Ha.” Kane laughed. “She never lets anyone forget anything, isn’t that right, Baptiste?”
Glancing up from the tracking device, Brigid fixed Kane with a disparaging glare before turning back to the readout screen she held in the palm of one hand. Although meant in jest, Kane’s observation touched on a crucial aspect of Brigid’s personality. The woman had what was colloquially known as a photographic memory, or, more accurately, an eidetic one. Brigid could study any image for just a few moments and commit it to memory in vivid detail, with the ability to draw from that memory again and again with total recall.
In her previous career as an archivist in Cobaltville, Brigid’s incredible powers of observation had put her in a critical position during the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy intended to subjugate humankind. Her subsequent work with Kane and Grant at the Cerberus redoubt had been primarily concerned with uncovering and overthrowing that conspiracy in all its many evolving forms. Even now, the presence of the Cerberus trio in the harsh environment of the Antarctic was tangentially related to that far-reaching scheme.
Their boots sank into the thick snow as the three figures trekked away from their Manta craft. Kane glanced back, watching for a moment as the swirling whiteness settled on the still Mantas. The two craft were already dappled with a thin coating of snow, and would doubtless be hard to spot in another hour or so. It struck Kane then that anything could be hidden out here—anything at all—and they might never see it.
Kane dismissed the thought. “Everyone remember where we parked, okay?” he instructed, his tone light. “Baptiste, I’m counting on you here.”
Brigid cast Kane another withering look as she continued to lead the way across the Antarctic wastes. “You think you’re funny,” she said. “Emphasis on ‘think.’”
“Lighten up,” Kane said as he brushed snow from his sleeves. “I’m just trying to keep things cheerful.”
“Oh, you’re very trying,” Brigid snapped. “I’ve had to listen to this blather for the full three-hour trip over here.”
“Really?” Grant asked, unable to hide the note of pity from his tone.
“The first hour was okay,” Brigid assured him. “The second I started wishing we’d found a parallax point so we could jump here instantaneously instead of using the Mantas.” Parallax points formed a hidden network of nodes stretching across the globe and out into other planets that allowed the Cerberus warriors to jump via the quantum ether through use of an alien device called an interphaser. The system allowed for almost instantaneous travel across vast distances, but it relied on specific locations; no parallax point, no interphaser jump.
“What about the third hour?” Kane grumbled.
“Wish I was dead, wish I was dead, wish I was dead,” Brigid muttered, the words streaming into one.
Grant looked at Kane and shrugged. “I think she’s joking, buddy.”
“Because she thinks she’s funny,” Kane said.
“Oh, touché.” Grant chuckled, applauding.
They had walked just eighty yards across the snowbound wastes when Brigid Baptiste stopped in her tracks and pointed ahead. “It’s right there,” she said.
“Where?” Kane asked, shielding his eyes with a gloved hand.
“I don’t see anything, either,” Grant added, scowling.
Peering in the direction that Brigid was indicating, they saw a continuing expanse of whiteness. Out here, the sky was white, a thick blanket of clouds reflecting the ice and snow below them. Snow flurries continued to fall across their vision, a dappling of white across the whiteness of the background. Kane relaxed his eyes, surveying the wash of white that stretched before him. As he did so, he noticed the shadow. It seemed almost incongruous as it stretched across the snow, pouring out across the white blanket in a gray, indistinct pattern that was easy to miss. The sun was ahead of them, Kane noted, pushing the shadow of the structure toward them so that its apex almost touched their booted feet. They had landed the Mantas barely one hundred yards from it, and yet it had remained utterly invisible, disguised in the harsh, white landscape.
Kane raised his arm, drawing its shape in the air with an outstretched finger. “There,” he said. “You see it?”
Grant squinted, trying to cut down the dazzling effect of the sun on the white snow as he sought the thing that Kane could see. Beside him, Brigid checked the readout of her palm-sized tracker device before peering again into the swirling whiteness.
A sudden lull in the wind brought with it a break in the dance of the falling snowflakes, and for a few seconds the majestic structure stood revealed.
It was white, like the ground and sky around it, so white that it seemed to exist only in the shadows it cast. Its leading edge stood just twenty-five yards from the three Cerberus warriors, and it stretched far back into the snow-packed ground. It was difficult to estimate its actual size, for it was clear that the structure had been mostly buried by the snow. Yet the evidence of it was there, a rough circle of struts and spines that dominated the land for almost a quarter mile, becoming more crowded near to what was presumably the center.
There were other parts, too, they now realized as they gazed all around them. Struts stuck up here and there, like shoots from a hopeful plant. Kane looked behind him at the path they had just trod. Their footprints were already losing their shape as the swirling snow filled them in, and in another few minutes they would be gone completely as nature painted over them, obliterating any trace that they had ever existed. And over there, just a few feet from where they had walked but a minute before, another strut poked from the ground, rising up in a point that towered to twelve feet above them, twice the height of himself or Grant. As remarkable as it seemed, they had walked right past it, taking it for a natural feature of the snow-laden environment, a stalagmite striving up to the skies. Kane’s eyes flicked upward, and he smiled as he saw that there was nothing above the strut, nothing to drip down and create the beautiful stalagmite that twinkled in the frosty sunlight.
Brigid released the breath she hadn’t realized that she had been holding. “It’s colossal,” she gasped.
“See,” Kane said, “I’d have gone for big and maybe samey.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Brigid continued, ignoring Kane’s remark.
Still shielding his eyes, Grant stepped closer to Brigid, peeking at the display screen of the tracking device she held. “You think this is it, then?”
“Oh, this is it, all right,” Brigid assured him, never turning her attention from the magnificent spires that jutted from the white landscape. “The secret laboratory of Abraham Flag.”
Chapter 3
The wind picked up again, and snow swirled around them as they stood there, admiring what little they could see of the fantastical structure. After a few seconds, Kane turned to Brigid, who still stood with her mouth agape as she admired the magnificent spires of the buried building.
“I think we’d better find a way inside, Baptiste,” he told her, “before my, er, frozen assets fall off.”
“What?” She turned to him, mystified. “Sorry, Kane, I was just…”
“It is beautiful,” Kane agreed. “But let’s not wait to see what it looks like inside. That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”
Brigid nodded. “It is going to be very exciting seeing what’s inside there,” she said as she jogged forward, leading the way. “I can feel it.”
Kane followed the red-haired woman, while Grant brought up the rear, as she compared the electronic readout she held to the structure around her. Brigid’s instrument held a portable sonar device, as well as a computer memory containing the plans that they had found for Flag’s so-called Laboratory of the Incredible. The plans had been discovered among other sensitive information that had been held as encrypted files on a computer drive that Kane, Brigid and Grant had found on a mission in North Dakota a few months previously. The computer had contained a wealth of military information dating back over two hundred years to the final days of the twentieth century, before the nukecaust of 2001 had changed everything. Decrypting the files was proving to be a laborious process, teasing out the information one tiny thread at a time. The first useful file to be decrypted from the North Dakota hard drive had contained information relating to a secret weapons project near the Russian-Georgian border. The weapon, code named the Death Cry, promised to be of devastating use against a race of alien invaders called the Annunaki, who had been manipulating the human race since their earliest days. However, a confluence of events upon finding the Death Cry had resulted in the device going off in a level of the quantum plane generally reserved for matter transfer, though thankfully not a plane that the Cerberus team accessed.
The scientists working at Cerberus had continued in their endeavors to decrypt further files from the database in the hopes of finding something else that might be of use against the Annunaki. Their latest discovery had been the incomplete schematics to a fabled research laboratory from the 1920s. The Laboratory of the Incredible had been the rumored workplace of Abraham Flag, an adventurer and explorer of some renown, whose exploits had abruptly halted on All Saints’ Day, 1931. A master of many scientific fields, Flag had been conducting research that was years—decades even—beyond that of his contemporaries. However, he had chosen to keep many of his remarkable discoveries to himself and, upon his disappearance, a persistent rumor had it that the man’s fortresslike laboratory contained numerous treasures, from nuclear reactors to a functioning cell phone that required no broadcasting network for its operability. The truth of these rumors had, to Brigid’s knowledge, never been proved, but clearly Flag’s hidden Antarctic retreat had been a matter of some concern to the U.S. military.
Guided by the information from the North Dakota data base, the Cerberus field team had traveled to the Antarctic and pinpointed the Laboratory of the Incredible as best they could. Only here, on the ground, was the enormity of the structure becoming apparent.
Kane, Grant and Brigid spent almost an hour searching the immediate area, looking for a point of entry into the strange construction, but other than the spires and bumps, there seemed to be nothing but deep snow.
“I think it got buried,” Brigid announced after they had spent a full twenty minutes just trekking around the perimeter of upthrust spires.
Kane looked at her, his brow furrowed.
In reply, Brigid shrugged. “It’s been here a long time,” she said. “The natural weather patterns cover everything with snow over time.” As she said it, she unconsciously shook her head, and settling snow fell from her ponytail of bright red hair.
“Guess we’re making our own entrance,” Kane decided, producing a compact tool kit from inside his Arctic jacket. The tool kit was roughly the length of Kane’s forearm, and it featured a weatherproof pouch of soft leather that snapped together so that it could be placed snugly into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kit contained several compact tools, including a lock pick, a glass cutter and a digital lock jammer.
As the wind and snow blew about them, Kane pulled out a handheld buzz saw and snapped together an acetylene torch from the leather pouch. Then he set about finding a place to start working, with Grant and Brigid dogging his footsteps.
As Kane selected a mound from which one of the curious icelike spires protruded, Grant turned to Brigid and asked why anyone would design a building that needed to be constantly dug out of the snow.
Brigid shrugged. “Maybe the owner preferred it that way,” she suggested. “Abraham Flag was, by all accounts, a fascinating and unique individual. He liked his privacy.”
“So Lakesh was saying back at the base,” Grant responded, recalling the briefing that the Cerberus team leader, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, had given them prior to dispatching the Manta craft. “But what’s the big deal about all this anyhow?”
“If that military record was correct,” Brigid explained, referring to the coded file they had found on the North Dakota computer, “there’s a strong possibility that Flag gained control of an ancient Annunaki artifact. It’s that artifact that caused him to go into hiding.”
“What sort of artifact?” Grant asked, brushing snow from his sleeve.
“A weapon,” Brigid said.
“What kind of weapon?” Grant asked. “A nuke?”
“Well, what kind of weapon does a god carry?” Brigid replied enigmatically.
“A lightning bolt,” Kane growled, not bothering to look up from his work at the mound, “if what we found Marduk using in Greece is anything to go by.”
“We’ll see,” Brigid said diplomatically.
Kane’s eyes met with hers and Grant’s for just a moment, and the hint of a smile crossed his lips. “I’m saying lightning bolt,” Kane said. “Anyone care to take a bet?”
“Kane…” Brigid began, her expression frosty.
“Giant hammer,” Grant cried, snapping his fingers. “I say it’s a great big hammer with a handle as tall as Brigid. A hammer that can…knock down mountains.”
Kane laughed. “Sure, that’s likely,” he said, an edge of sarcasm to his tone.
“You never heard of Thor?” Grant snapped back.
“Whatever.” Kane laughed. “I’ll take the bet.
“Baptiste?” he prompted.
Brigid shook her head, her ponytail of vibrant red hair whipping about her with the rising wind. “I can’t really…”
Brigid offered a resigned sigh. “Okay. I say it’s a…dagger.”
“A dagger?” Kane repeated dubiously, while Grant worked beside him, hefting the hunk of reinforced glass away. The hunk of glass was large, almost as tall as Grant himself and it clearly weighed a great deal. Yet Grant seemed to lift it with almost no effort, such was the man’s strength.
“A knife,” Brigid continued thoughtfully, “made of stone that features…”
“Features?” Kane encouraged.
“Writing,” Brigid finished. “A stone knife with writing down both sides that promises the death of godly enemies. Satisfied?”
Kane raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Pretty specific, Baptiste,” he said. And then, after a moment’s thought, he asked, “How much inside knowledge you got?”
“Me?” Brigid replied, offended.
“Come on, spill,” Kane insisted.
“If you’d bothered to read Lakesh’s notes, you’d have seen…” Brigid began.
“Notes?” Grant spit. “Did you see how thick that report was? The file was like the Prophesies of Whathisnamus.”
“Nostradamus,” Brigid corrected automatically.
As they spoke, Kane swept snow aside and pulled back a hunk of glistening metal from the ground. The edges were a little jagged, but it had the rudimentary appearance of a door into the snow. “Okay, kids,” he announced, “we’re in.”
Seconds later, Kane clipped a powerful xenon flashlight to his jacket’s lapel and clambered through the door, his two partners following him.
Making their way through the makeshift doorway, the three Cerberus exiles found themselves standing on a ledge about seven inches across. Leading the way, Kane walked along the ledge, kicking several small objects aside that appeared to be nothing more than paperweights.
Together, they made their way along the ledge until they could jump down to what appeared to be a series of steps running along the towering walls of a vast chamber. They found themselves in a high-ceilinged area that reminded Brigid of a chapel. Remarkably, Kane’s flashlight beam was redundant; the area appeared to be lit through some hidden process that granted the ceiling a soft, pleasant glow. The glow was more than enough to light the room, and it almost seemed to be natural light, rather than artificial.
The chamber stretched on for almost eighty feet, with a width of half that again. The high ceiling gave it the air of a cathedral, and Brigid found herself looking up in wonder at the enormity of the place. The ledge that they had initially dropped onto had led to a series of shelves that doubled as steps. The shelves stretched all the way up all four walls, with a few items placed sparsely along their lengths. Everything was the color of ice, white and blue and crystal clear.
As they peered all around them, the three explorers saw twin rows of glass cabinets spaced widely apart in two perfectly straight lines that led to the exit doorway. Each of the cabinets held a mismatched item of some description, and Brigid found herself drawn to the one nearest to where they had climbed down the shelves. Inside, she saw an old-fashioned barrel organ, finished in lustrous mahogany with a large wheel at each of the four corners of its base. She leaned closer, peering at the strange item until her forehead brushed against the cool glass of its containment box.
“So,” Kane asked, “what is all this?”
Brigid turned away from the cabinet. “Storeroom?” she proposed with some uncertainty.
“You said this place had become buried,” Grant said, “which means we’re at the top of the building. Meaning it’s an attic full of junk. Nothing unusual about that.”
Kane glanced around him, checking several of the cabinets. The nearest held an empty wooden chair, and in the one beside it a single bullet rested on a plinth. “Trophy room maybe,” he suggested. “Where old man Flag kept his treasures.”
“I wonder what they all mean,” Brigid said, her quiet voice echoing through the vastness of the chamber as they made their way toward a doorway at the far end of the room.
Kane gestured to the large wooden throne that stood inside the nearby cabinet, indicating the strange ideographs that decorated its surface. “Looks like Egyptian writing,” he said.
Brigid glanced at it for a second. “Aztec,” she corrected him.
Trailing behind them, Grant cast his eyes across all the curiosities in the vast room. “So, what was this Flag guy?” he rumbled, his voice echoing in the room. “Some kind of collector of junk?”
“He was an adventurer, like us,” Brigid explained, leading them past the cabinet with the bullet inside, checking her portable scanner with a furrowed brow.
They stepped out of the room of curiosities and found themselves on a balcony containing an old-fashioned radio receiver. The balcony overlooked a huge area that stretched farther than they could readily make out. The area contained two desks and several comfortable seats, but the vast majority of it was dedicated to what appeared to be a scientific laboratory. The lab was stocked to an almost obsessive degree, featuring equipment whose nature Kane couldn’t even begin to guess. Above and to the sides, the walls and ceiling appeared to be made of pure ice, twinkling in place as the light played over its smooth surface.
“This is nothing like the schematics,” Brigid said as she consulted the palm-size tracker screen.
“Schematics can be wrong,” Kane reminded her with a shrug, his eyes still fixed on the level below them.
“Not these,” Brigid told him, tapping at the portable screen with her fingernail. “This is a portable sonar unit. It should be able to give us an accurate representation of where we are.”
“And…?” Kane encouraged warily.
“According to this,” Brigid said, showing Grant and Kane the display, “we’re standing in a wall. I mean, right inside a wall.”
Kane felt decidedly uncomfortable when he heard that, a jab of fear running through his spine. Irritated, he calmed himself, demanding that he behave rationally. “It’s just an empty, forgotten redoubt, same as dozens of others we’ve visited,” Kane stated firmly, making his way along the balcony toward a stairwell. The stairwell was built in a subtle curve that doubled back on itself, forming a double helix.
“What does it mean?” Grant asked. “Is your dohickey on the fritz?”
“It’s tracking us just fine,” Brigid assured them. “No, this is something far more subtle. I think that this place, this Laboratory of the Incredible, has stealth technology that can confuse tracking systems, so that it cannot be spied upon.”
Pushing back his hood, Grant ran a hand over his cropped hair and whistled. “When did you say this place was built?”
“I’d say 1920-something,” Brigid replied. “Nobody’s quite sure. Flag would disappear for months at a time, and there’s every possibility that he built this place in sections as he required it. Likely, I’d say.”
“Any idea how?” Grant asked.
“He used some kind of sonic drill, I think,” Brigid said. “A pretty powerful one.”
Kane looked around at the glasslike walls. “Stealth technology,” he said. “For a building. In 1920. You have got to be kidding.”
“Professor Flag was a scientist of exceptional ability,” Brigid reminded him as she followed down the stairwell with Grant at her side. “Years—perhaps decades—ahead of any of his peers.”
“So the guy was a genius,” Grant said.
Brigid considered Grant’s statement for a few seconds before she responded. “That term might actually be construed as an insult,” she said. “The man was extraordinarily intelligent. ‘Genius’ doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”
Stepping from the curved stairwell, Kane walked a few paces across the laboratory and looked all around. “Any idea what this Flag guy looked like?” he asked as Brigid and Grant came over to join him.
“I’ve examined the photographs in the Cerberus database,” Brigid began.