It had been more than four thousand years since Ullikummis had spoken anything other than one word

That word was a name, the name of his hated father.

He instructed them with a look, the apekin farmer and his apekin wife. His eyes, molten pits of lava that glowed fiercely in the darkening evening gloom, held them in his thrall, for the apekin were such simple creatures compared to him, compared to a god.

Alison and Peter Marks rose from the ground, their heads still bowed before their new master. Peter Marks had never so much as visited a ville, and he had never submitted to another man in anything. Yet this strangely beautiful being that stood before him in his own field, the same field his father had plowed fifty years before—here was something that he would bow to without question. Deep down inside him, he knew that here was something supreme.

Oblivion Stone

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

—Amelia Earhart

1898–1937

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

—Dawn Powell

1896–1965

The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Prologue

They had thought them dead—the Annunaki, for whom forever is but the blink of an eye.

It was said that Tiamat, their mother, had committed suicide.

Ultimately, her graceful form, shaped like a dragon of ancient myth, had been consumed by a fireball so glorious that it had lit the firmament above and shaken the Earth below. Some thought that the fireball had been of Tiamat’s own making, that she had chosen to expire in that dazzling tumult of flame.

Enlil knew better.

Enlil was one of Tiamat’s children, the Annunaki. They had called her mother, the spaceship womb. Her offspring were the rightful overlords of the planet Earth and all of her resources, the kings of all of her people and all of her things.

It was said that Tiamat, the spaceship womb, had taken her own life when she had seen the bitter disputes, the spite and viciousness that her own offspring had exhibited as they squabbled among themselves. For it was true that the Annunaki were never willing to compromise, even when carving the Earth up between themselves.

But in his heart, Enlil knew better.

The Annunaki had suffered their most devastating defeat at the hands of the apekin, the humans. Tiamat had been consumed by fire, her essence fragmented across the skies high above the Earth in a final display of brilliance. And some had thought her destroyed, that the final chapter of the Annunaki legend had been written.

The Annunaki, whose dominion over the Earth had lasted millennia, had controlled the nine fabled baronies that had emerged from the Deathlands to bring security and a future to humankind—a security and a future that man himself had been unable to achieve.

“Such fools these apekin be,” Enlil muttered to himself as he sat on the banks of the timeless Euphrates, gazing out across the great river as the sun played across its glistering surface. Around him, the land was a windswept plain of sand, lifeless but for Enlil himself as the sun’s heat pounded down, baking the dusty earth as it had for millennia.

But it had not always been so. Enlil remembered a time, not so very long ago, when his brother had had a city here—a city called Eridu, the first and most glorious city that the Earth had ever seen. Enlil had had his own city, too, a place called Nippur, located not far from Eridu’s walls, those scant millennia ago. And yet Enlil had chosen to return here, to Enki’s city rather than his own, recalling how its establishment had been a bold statement, the first acquisition of alien ground on the planet that would become their own, a flag in the dirt of foreign soil.

Enlil’s reptilian skin shimmered as the sunlight played across his scales, their color that of richest sunset, the color of gold bathed in blood. His form was mighty, a muscular, tall figure, imposing even now as he sat in the sand, gazing out across the shimmering surface of the water through his arrow-slit, crocodile’s eyes.

Tiamat was not dead. She had simply been changed, altered, readied herself for rebirth like everything else Annunaki. To change from one form to another, to enter the chrysalis state and be reborn, that was the Annunaki way. Enlil himself had taken other forms over the centuries. He had been Dagon and he had been Kumarbi and C. W. Thrush and, most recently, he had been Sam the Imperator until, like a snake, he had sloughed his skin and emerged wearing another, each more glorious than the one that came before. All these lives were like a dream, one life told from differing viewpoints, a single life seen through different eyes.

Beside Enlil, resting on the sand at the banks of the river, was the tiny seed from which Tiamat would grow once more. The tiny seed that would form the heart of his mother, and which, in turn, would begin the cycle anew.

Enlil glanced up to the heavens, eyeing the cloudless cerulean sky, and slowly a grim, purposeful smile formed on his alien lips.

It was all beginning again.

Chapter 1

Snakefishville stank of death.

Thick clouds of flies swarmed about the ruins, their furious buzzing echoing like an angry symphony of dying lightbulbs between the debris of collapsed buildings. The remains of bodies—and they could only be described as “remains” now, as most of them were no longer truly recognizable as human—lay in the streets and occupied shadowy corners of the rubble scattered at nightmarish angles within the wrecked circle of the ville’s high walls.

The walls themselves were destroyed almost beyond recognition, just a few jagged concrete struts remaining here and there, like the last few tenacious teeth in a crone’s rotting mouth.

Towering above the devastated streets like a two-fingered salute from some blank-faced god sitting in silent judgment, the last struts of the central Administrative Monolith remained, their jagged peaks clawing at the rain-heavy clouds that trundled disinterestedly over the inconstant sky. The Administrative Monolith had once been the radiant jewel in the city’s tiara of lights, but it was now hardly a shadow of its former self, just a few spindly posts all that remained as though marking the place where once there had been high walls. The struts leaned sideways like some ruddy-faced drunkard trying to find his bearings, a few smashed windows and chunks of masonry clinging to its otherwise lost structure as though the building’s body had been eaten away by cancer. The smaller structures around it had fared little better; it was as if the whole fabric of the ville had been struck by some virulent disease, an architect’s cancer.

Swooping down from above, circling through the jagged shards of buildings, carrion birds cawed their bitter cries of possession as they spied new morsels to feast upon among the rotting flesh that still clung to the bones of those most recently deceased.

Three living figures trudged among the ruins, masks over their faces to protect them from the corrupted air and the stench of death that hung all about.

The shortest of the figures looked somewhat like the Angel of Death herself. Her skin was a pallid shock of chalky whiteness, like something carved of bone, her eyes a ruby red like the flaming depths of Satan’s realm. Like her skin, her hair was white as a specter, cut short to accentuate her feral eyes. She was a petite figure, dressed in a protective shadow suit of a light weave that clung to her lithe body like a second skin, drawing attention to the bird-thin limbs and small, pert breasts that jutted from her diminutive form like some perfectly imagined china doll. She had added a light jacket over the shadow suit, reaching down past her hips but still loose enough to allow ample movement, its material the black of the Grim Reaper’s shroud. Her name was Domi and she was one-third of a field team sent out by Cerberus to investigate the remains of the destroyed ville.

Snakefishville had been one of the nine great baronies constructed across North America under the instruction of the hybrid barons. Once the barons had been revealed to be the chrysalis state for the higher, godlike beings known as the overlords, their baronies had been left leaderless, struggling to fend for themselves. Just a few weeks ago, a terrible earthquake had struck Snakefishville and several other communities, mortally wounding them like an assassin’s final blow. Operatives from Cerberus, a military-style group dedicated to the preservation of humanity in the face of the rising threat of the Annunaki, had been present during Snakefishville’s destruction. But it was only now, a few weeks after the event, that they had returned to survey the full extent of the damage and to scout for salvage.

Domi hated jobs like this. Though an operative for Cerberus, she was a wildling at heart, a child born of the Outlands. Being cooped up in a ville, even one as utterly scragged as this one was, set her teeth on edge. She looked around her, swatting flies away from her face as she took in the chunks of masonry, the cracked metal ribs of the broken buildings. If there was a Hell, Domi thought, it would probably look something like this—a ville with nothing left to offer but its own festering corpse.

Clambering over the fractured remnants of the main street came Domi’s two partners. Both of them were dressed in loose clothes with masks over their mouths. The first was a man called Edwards, whose shaved head and wide shoulders made him an imposing form even with his features obscured by the mask. Edwards’s hair was cropped so close to his scalp that his head shone in the sunlight, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. Edwards had the bearing of a military man and the patience of a raging inferno. Beside him came a man called Harrington, with pince-nez glasses and dark hair streaked with white that fell past his shoulders in a series of neatly layered steps. Harrington was consulting a handheld Geiger counter as the three of them made their way across the wrecked ville, scouring the rubble.

“Radiation’s at normal,” Harrington confirmed, stumbling for a moment as his foot got caught in a rut in the ruined roadway.

“Careful there, Poindexter,” Edwards growled, grabbing the scientist’s elbow and yanking him out of the pothole.

A few paces ahead, Domi stopped in her tracks and stared up at the spindly struts of the Administrative Monolith, watching as tar-feathered carrion birds circled around in its updrafts, nesting in the jutting metal bones that had once held a nearby structure together. Domi’s ruby eyes scanned the broken glass of the last remaining windows, searching for movement among the wreckage. As if on cue, a gull came swooping out of one of the shattered windows, its feathers a smoky gray, its impressive wingspan reaching almost three feet. The gull shrieked its ugly call as it took off, a pinkish morsel of bloody meat held in its claws.

As Domi watched, a trio of black carrion birds swooped down at the gull, chasing it through the jagged teeth of buildings that were all that remained of the once-proud ville. The birds flew around one of the lopsided building shells, disappearing from Domi’s sight in a clamor of ugly squawks.

Harrington peered up from the plate of the Geiger counter at the noise, taking in the abandoned ville as if for the first time. “This is weird,” he commented.

“What’s that?” Edwards asked, glancing back at the scientist as he climbed a mound of rubble that had once been a residential block.

“This place,” Harrington said. “Like walking through a cemetery.”

Domi shot Harrington and Edwards a look, hushing them immediately. “People coming,” she said, indicating one of the wrecked structures that abutted the ruins of the Administrative Monolith.

Edwards’s hand automatically went to his hip, pulling free the Heckler & Koch USP he had strapped there. “Keep your head down, Harry,” he ordered Harrington, his voice low.

A few paces ahead, Domi had pulled her Detonics CombatMaster .45 from its hidden holster at the small of her back. The handgun, finished in silver metal, looked large in her tiny, milk-colored hand. Domi scampered forward, leaping over the potholes that marred the road, making her way toward the crooked doorway of the building shell where she had detected people. She moved like something liquid, each motion blending effortlessly into the next as she sped toward the door. Edwards chased after her, his long strides struggling to keep up with her swift progress.

As Domi reached the open doorway, its lintel hanging at an awkward thirty-degree angle, she saw a figure moving within, its features hidden in the shadows. Warily, Domi waited at the door until Edwards caught up with her.

“On three?” Edwards proposed, mouthing the words without speaking them aloud.

Domi nodded, and watched as Edwards counted down on extended fingers.

When Edwards’s count reached zero, the two Cerberus warriors rushed through the doorway, guns held out before them, scanning the lobbylike room where they found themselves. The floor was littered with rubble and, when they looked up, they saw that the ceiling had almost entirely disappeared. Just its edges remained, clinging to the scarred and pitted walls of the higher stories. The whole structure had sunk by at least two stories, and so they found themselves on what was in fact the third or fourth story, despite being at ground level. There was no one inside the room, and the two warriors made their way swiftly into the next room, Domi taking point as Edwards covered her from beside the doorway.

The movement was so quick that Domi almost missed it. In fact, it most likely would have been missed by anyone else; only Domi’s eerily heightened senses caught the motion before it disappeared from her field of vision. The figure was rushing from the room, a foot visible for a fraction of a second as it ran through the crumbling archway of the next door, the dust of rubble puffing up in its wake.

Domi initiated pursuit, shouting, “Stay where you are. We mean you no harm.” It seemed a curious instruction. Technically, it was Domi and her team who were trespassing here, and yet they hadn’t expected to meet with anyone else after the ville had been destroyed.

Domi dashed toward the doorway, and another of the gray-feathered gulls came swooping out, shrieking an ugly cry as it flew at her. Domi ducked, and the confused bird flew on, flapping its wings and ascending into the open area above through a gap in the broken ceiling. Behind Domi, Edwards tracked his pistol on the bird as it disappeared, before returning his attention to her progress.

Ahead, Domi rushed through the next doorway, leaving the corridor behind her. She found herself face-to-face with a half-dozen people dressed in the ragged clothes of Outlanders. They were huddled around a fire that had been set in an upturned canister, warming their hands as they cooked several rats and birds at the ends of greasy sticks hung over the yellow flames. Domi cursed herself for missing the cooking smells—the breath mask had hidden them from her, obscuring the natural senses that she relied upon.

The room itself was a vast open area. The floor was tiled in terra-cotta, a swirling pattern like sea spray created using a series of darker tiles within the mosaic. The tiles had been cracked by the earthquake that had shaken the ville weeks before, and a number of them were missing, now just crumbled to dust. On the far side of the room stood a counter at roughly chest height, indicating that the room had probably been some kind of reception area just a few weeks before. Now it was simply a corpse, the rotting remains of a once magnificent building.

As Domi dashed forward, she became conscious of something coming at her from behind, and she moved just swiftly enough to avoid a harsh blow to the back of her head. She spun to face her attacker, seeing the tall figure dressed in a dark, hooded cloak with a lighter pattern in the weave. The lighter pattern was almost undetectable now, so much dirt had become ingrained in the man’s clothes.

“Submit,” the hooded man spat, following through on his first attack.

Domi ducked as the cloaked man lunged at her again, inexpertly driving a heavy fist toward her face. As the man’s fist sailed over her head, Domi rushed at him, barreling shoulderfirst into his gut and knocking him off his feet. The man fell backward and became tangled in his cloak even as he struggled to right himself. Leaping back, Domi held her gun on him, instructing him not to move. The whole attack and rebuttal had taken less than four seconds.

Behind Domi, Edwards was making his way through the doorway, the black barrel of his Heckler & Koch nosing into the room before him. “Everything okay in here?” he asked.

“Just peachy,” Domi said. “Fuckwit here tried to ambush me.”

Edwards glanced at Domi’s would-be attacker sprawled on the cracked tiles. “Looks like you had it covered.”

Domi’s red eyes flicked to Edwards for an instant, and he saw that her expression was one of irritation. He ignored it, turning to assess the other people in the room.

“Now, why don’t you nice people tell us what the shit is going on here?” Edwards asked, striding toward the group huddled around the fire.

For a moment, no one answered. Edwards glared at them, his snarl visible through the transparent cup of the breath mask. Then, keeping his movements slow and smooth so that everyone could see just what he was doing, Edwards lowered the Heckler & Koch until he had it held loosely at his side. Still, he left the safety catch off so that he could fire it at a moment’s notice.

Then, her voice timid, a woman with ragged ginger hair and dirt-caked clothes spoke to Edwards, her pleading eyes wide. “Are you the new baron?”

“What?” Edwards spit. “Shit, no. The barons have all gone.”

“But how can we have a barony without a baron?” another of the ragged figures spoke up, this one a man with stubble darkening his jowls, a woollen cap pulled low over his brow.

Other members of the group muttered their assent as they cooked the vermin over their little, contained fire.

Domi backed across the room on light feet until she was standing beside Edwards, her pistol still pointed firmly at the hooded man sprawled on the floor. Wisely, the hooded man stayed where he was, his eyes locked on the silver barrel of Domi’s CombatMaster.

“These guys are looking for a baron,” Edwards explained.

“So I heard,” Domi replied, her words laced with cynicism. She glanced over her shoulder, turning her attention from the hooded man for a moment while she addressed the group. “Care to explain why your friend here attacked me?” she asked.

“He’s a Magistrate,” the ginger-haired woman who had first addressed Edwards explained. “You must have broken laws.”

Domi spoke to Edwards out of the side of her mouth, keeping her voice low. “The way he attacked me—guy was no Mag. Way too sloppy.”

Edwards addressed the ginger woman, his gaze taking in the other people in the group before him. “Has your friend here been a Mag for long?” he asked. When no one answered, Edwards turned to the hooded form lying on the floor, casually turning his gun over in his hand so that it caught the light. “Well?”

The man in the hood groaned as he spoke. “Three days,” he said. “Volunteered three days ago. Ville needs Magistrates, right? What the hell did your freak girlfriend hit me with?”

Domi reacted angrily. “What did you call me?” she asked, taking a menacing step toward the self-proclaimed Magistrate, jabbing her gun at his face.

“Mutie, right?” the hooded man asked. “Figures.”

Domi looked irritated, but Edwards told her to ignore the man’s comments.

“So,” Edwards asked, “you’re all here building a ville? That right?”

As one, the group of stragglers shook their heads. “No, sir,” said the stubbled man in the woollen cap, “we came back. This is how people should live. Within walls. Within rules. There’s a place for you here. Can’t you feel that?”

Though not a man given to introspection, Edwards was taken aback. “I think you want to be careful what you breathe in around here,” was all he could think to say. “Lot of nasty crap in the atmosphere just now. Quake churned up a lot of shit.”

The stubbled man nodded. “Thank you, sir. Won’t you stay and help us to rebuild?”

Edwards smiled and shook his head. “Not today, ace.”

As the people stood watching the strangers in their midst, grease from one of the cooking birds spit and the fire flared brighter for a second.

Wary of the locals around them, Edwards and Domi made their way slowly out of the sunken building, both of them feeling somewhat unsettled by what they had seen.

“Seven of them,” Edwards growled, “and they’re planning on rebuilding a ville. Waiting for the new baron to appear. Crazy.”

“The villes do shitty things to people,” Domi told him. “Mangle them.” She glanced back, confirming that no one was following them.

“But there’s no barons anymore,” Edwards pointed out. “They all vanished and became overlords. So what’s drawing these people back?”

Domi stopped for a moment, fixing Edwards with her demonic eyes. “Like I said, the villes mangle people. Give them tangle-brain. The Outlanders know this, and that’s why we didn’t come to the villes unless we had to.”

Edwards looked at the petite woman, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Didn’t you grow up in Cobaltville, Domi?” he asked.

“No,” Domi told him, shaking her head. “Settled there for money. Saw the way people were on the inside.”

“Hah.” Edwards laughed. “You make it sound like a prison.”

Domi said nothing. While she had recognized the differences in ville dwellers from Outlanders, she had never seen anything quite like this—people coming back, choosing to live in the ruins while they waited for the next epoch to begin. It was almost as if the villes themselves had some kind of magnetic pull over their citizens. Domi, who had spent a portion of her life as a sex slave in Cobaltville, knew little of the scientific principles of magnetism, but she understood fatal attraction all too well.

Outside of the wrecked skeleton that had once been a building, Domi and Edwards found Harrington sitting on a mound of rubble that looked out over the ruined streets. He had found three chunks of rubble and was juggling them while he waited for his partners.

“You find anything?” Harrington asked when he noticed Edwards and Domi approaching.

“What do you think you’re doing, man?” Edwards barked. “This is a danger zone—gotta keep alert.”

“I am alert,” Harrington replied petulantly. “You think I can juggle like this when I’m asleep?”

Edwards shook his head, muttering something about eccentric scientists.

“We found a wannabe Magistrate,” Domi explained, “and a group of people waiting for the next baron.”

Harrington sighed. “And so the system reboots itself,” he said. “Are we reverting back to…well, the Deathlands era? Jumped-up little barons fighting it out for their little piece of land?”

“There’s no baron,” Edwards clarified. “They just think there will be. So they’re waiting here, eating rats and setting up a hierarchy of Magistrates to keep the peace.”

Domi looked around her, taking in the ruined structures of the ville once more, seeing the mangled struts where its old Administrative Monolith had once stood noble and proud. “Somehow, the villes call to people,” she said. “Like boys in heat, hormones drawing them to the honey trap.”

Edwards shook his head. “You may be right, but it’s all way over my head.”

Chapter 2

“They say that the gods came from the sky,” Papa Hurbon said as he led the three-strong party through the Djévo room, his wooden leg clomping on the decking of the floor.

Ohio Blue’s response was to offer the man an indulgent smile. “I never held much stock in gods,” she admitted as they walked through the large room of the wooden shack, its air as hot and as damp as the night sweats.

Ohio Blue had brought two bodyguards with her—a man and a woman—who followed her and Hurbon as they paced slowly through the room, moving just as fast as Hurbon’s false leg would allow. As per the rules of the meeting, her bodyguards were unarmed, and in return Hurbon had kept his own people out of sight, though it was understood that they could appear in a moment upon his request.

Blue felt the man’s eyes play across her for a moment. She was a tall, slender woman in her midthirties, and her thick, long blond hair was cut in a peekaboo style, leaving only her left eye boldly visible. The eye was a brilliant blue, dazzling as a polished sapphire. She wore loose combat-style pants with a silk vest top that shimmered as she moved. Over this, despite the stifling heat of the Louisiana afternoon, was a neatly tailored jacket that was cut short, reaching barely to the small of her back. Her clothes, like her name, were blue.

“You ever meet one?” Papa Hurbon asked, his voice so low it sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder.

Hurbon was a large man, both tall and corpulent, with the lustrous, dark skin of an octoroon. His skin glistened with free-flowing rivulets of perspiration, which he wiped from his heavy brow as they trudged through the Djévo, passing glass jars filled with herbs, feathers, snail shells and other curios. Hurbon wore a sweat-stained undershirt and cutoffs, with a homemade sandal on his remaining foot. His right leg was missing below the knee, and a wooden strut had been shoved in its place that he used to totter forward with a lunging, rolling gait that looked as though he might overbalance at any moment. Hurbon’s shaved head was shaped like a bullet, wide at the bottom and tapering at the top, and when he smiled it was a gap-toothed maw that seemed to engulf the whole width of that impressive, bucketlike jaw. Both of Hurbon’s ears were pierced in multiple places, both at the lobes and along the archlike helix of the ear, and what appeared to be two tiny fetus skeletons depended from their bulbous lobes.

“I’ve never had that pleasure,” she admitted, her long blond tresses sweeping across her back as Ohio Blue shook her head.

Hurbon offered his wide, all-encompassing smile. “Ain’t no pleasure,” he told her. “You can take my word for that. Ezili Coeur Noir came here one time, ’bout a year ago. Mad bitch took my leg. Laughed the whole time she was doing it, too. When she was done she held it up before my congregation, blood spittin’ everywhere, and she laughed and told them to do the same. Mad bitch.”

Ohio blanched at the story. “And did they?”

Hurbon’s brow creased in a frown. “Did they what?”

“Remove their legs?”

Hurbon nodded. “Some did,” he said, resignation in his voice. “They wanted her blessing, lizard-skinned vision that she was. That sound crazy to you, Mam’selle?”

“Like I said, I never held much stock in gods,” Ohio told the corpulent man as they passed through an arched doorway and into the center of the voodoo temple.

Papa Hurbon stopped for a moment, openly admiring Blue’s shapely figure from head to toe. “With the gams on you, that’s probably for the best, little peach,” he said with a rich basso laugh.

Through the archway, the inner room was much smaller than the Djévo, roughly square and just nine feet from wall to wall. Lit by candles, this was a mirrored room, wherein one side balanced the other. Thus, it featured a door to the far side, precisely opposing the one that Ohio’s party had entered. Several figures could be seen milling about in the room beyond that far doorway, and Ohio’s bodyguards tensed as they eyed them through the gloom.

This inner room was uncluttered, holding just a few objects. A polished broadsword had been placed horizontally on the wall, resting there on two hooks, ornately weaved tassels drooping down from its leather-wrapped hilt. Two matching hooks had been drilled into the opposite wall and they held what appeared to be a human shinbone of roughly the same length as the sword, polished so that it shone in the flickering light of the candle flames. Two foot-high clay pots filled with the dried stalks of dead flowers sat at opposing corners of the room, placed at diagonals to each other.

A curious-looking chair waited in the center of the room. The chair appeared to be carved of some kind of plant root, and it had a seat and a back but apparently had no legs. Instead, the seat itself had been ignominiously placed atop a stack of house bricks, like some stripped-down automobile.

“Here she be,” Papa Hurbon rumbled, indicating the odd-looking chair.

Ohio appraised the strange chair for almost half a minute, pacing slowly around it to view it from all angles before she finally spoke in her soft drawl. “Where did it come from?” she asked, sapphire eye still peering at the chair.

Hurbon pointed to the ceiling. “Tumbled out of the sky,” he said, “just like my people told you. Gift from Ezili Coeur Noir. Instructed me to take care of it, tend to its needs. It gives visions in the head, makes you see beyond the Barriè.”

Blue looked quizzically at Hurbon for a moment until, finally, he elaborated.

“The Barriè, the spirit world,” he said. “So, you want?”

“How does it work?” Blue asked.

“Just sit down,” Hurbon encouraged, “and let the visions flow through you. Simple as that. Chair of the gods, you see?”

Ohio Blue looked dubious as she considered the man’s strange boast. Finally, she turned to her two bodyguards. “One of my people will test it,” she decided, “to verify your claim. If that is satisfactory to you.”

Hurbon shrugged. “The gods deserted me. What do I care?”

Ohio turned to her waiting bodyguards, who had assumed positions at either side of the entry door, their expressions grim. “Brigid? Kane?” she asked, addressing each in turn. “If one of you would be so kind…?”

Kane smiled sourly. A muscular man with steel-gray eyes and short, dark hair, Kane resembled a wolf, for his limbs were long and rangy and his body seemed furiously powerful, a coiled spring waiting to release. He was like a wolf in other ways, too, naturally adopting the role of pack leader and equally comfortable striking out on his own. Despite current circumstances, Kane was not a bodyguard, and nor was he an employee of the blond-haired trader, Ohio Blue. An ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the Cerberus exiles. The Cerberus redoubt was hidden in Montana, and its residents were dedicated to the protection of humanity, tasked with freeing it from the hidden shackles that the alien Annunaki race had placed upon it. Kane’s role had taken him across the globe and beyond in his quest to eliminate the Annunaki’s nefarious meddling in the affairs of humankind, and his appearance here, as Ohio Blue’s bodyguard, was yet another instance of that ongoing struggle for freedom. He wore a ragged denim jacket and pants over the figure-hugging black weave of his shadow suit, which offered protection from radiation, contamination and could even withstand minor blunt-force trauma.

Ohio Blue was playing her own role admirably, Kane thought. An independent trader, Blue had a solid reputation in the Tennessee/Louisiana area and boasted a whole network of contacts through whom she could locate items of value and interest. As such, she had one important asset that the Cerberus team lacked—credibility among the minor players who occasionally ended up with something the Cerberus exiles might need. A recent meeting with Blue had resulted in Kane saving the woman’s life, and she had vowed to return the favor should he call on her to do so.

This operation, however, had not come at his urging but at hers. Aware of Kane’s interest in alien artifacts, Ohio Blue had contacted him with information regarding a possible sighting out here in Louisiana. In this case, Papa Hurbon, a houngan priest in a small voodoo sect hidden in the swampland, had come into possession of what was rumored to be a section of the Annunaki mother ship, Tiamat. It seemed that this odd-looking chair was that item, although Kane couldn’t be certain. He had been inside Tiamat during that final, frenetic battle that had resulted in the destruction of that incredible Annunaki starship, but he was hard-pressed to remember all of the details of the furniture that he had seen there. Kane nodded dourly toward the other bodyguard, indicating that she was better qualified to examine the chair.

The other bodyguard was a striking woman with an athletic body and vibrant long hair the red-gold color of sunrise. Her name was Brigid Baptiste and she had partnered with Kane ever since the pair had joined the then-embryonic Cerberus operation several years before. Brigid’s dazzling green eyes and high forehead suggested intelligence, while her full lips hinted at a more passionate aspect; in truth she was both of these things and more. An ex-archivist, Brigid Baptiste possessed an eidetic memory—more commonly known as a photographic one—with total recall for any item or text that she had seen for more than a few seconds. Dressed entirely in black, including a thin cotton shirt over her figure-hugging shadow suit and a snap-brim hat holding her hair out of her eyes, Brigid stepped forward and reached tentatively for the chair.

As the others watched, the beautiful redhead sat down on the barklike surface of the seat, settling herself until her back rested against the back of the chair itself.

Papa Hurbon leaned close to Brigid’s face, his broad smile forming once more on his lips. “Just make yourself comfortable there, little cherry,” he instructed. As the large man spoke, Brigid smelled something sickly sweet on his breath. “Let yourself go an’ the visions, they will flow through you.”

Sitting there, Brigid eyed the chair, confirming that it was of the same design as one she had seen when she had been aboard Tiamat with Kane just prior to the great starship’s destruction. Up close she recognized it, despite the damp, swamp-ring stain that had bleached away its original color. It was a seat from the bridge, a piece of salvage somehow fallen to Earth after the mighty spaceship had been destroyed. It was incomplete; the base was missing and Brigid was certain that its back part was missing a headrest. But, just as Hurbon himself had said, it was a chair of the space gods, fallen from the heavens, a gift to him from his lizard-skinned goddess.

Brigid slowed her breathing, closed her eyes and let the mysterious power of the Annunaki chair wash over her, waiting for the promised visions to begin. If what Papa Hurbon had said was true, then the visions from the spirit world might in fact be valuable reconnaissance information about their alien enemy. And if that was the case, then the chair itself could prove to be an invaluable asset to Cerberus.

Behind her eyelids, Brigid saw the familiar light-embracing darkness that was always there, a shadow playing across it as one of the people in the room moved across her field of vision. And for a moment there was nothing else. No great revelation, no fantastic visions of another world. She opened her eyes, fixing Hurbon with her emerald gaze. She was about to ask how long before the visions would begin, but he spoke first.

“Give it time, sweet cherry apple,” Hurbon said, the conviction in his voice clear. “I seen things there the likes o’ which man hain’t never seen before.”

Brigid smiled indulgently. “Time,” she agreed. She realized now what the sweet smell was that wafted off the man’s breath—he was high on narcotics, most likely painkillers for his missing leg. This voodoo priest didn’t need to sit in an alien chair to get visions—he was probably tripping most of his waking life, and who knew what his dreams were like.

Kane’s eyes met with Brigid’s momentarily, and he recognized the bubbling disappointment there. But even as he looked, he saw something change in Brigid’s appearance.

For just a second, Brigid saw something projected over the candlelit room, pinpricks of light hovering in place. “Do you see that?” she asked, her voice quiet, awestruck.

Hurbon chuckled. “The Barriè. Amazing, is it not?”

Brigid looked at the corpulent man as the pinpricks of light swirled across her vision. Stars. She was looking at the stars. It was a map, a star chart that could only be seen by the person occupying the chair. It was incredible.

Papa Hurbon, meanwhile, had turned back to Ohio, that broad, gap-toothed smile tugging at his lips. “Now, your people said something ’bout an art collector out near Snakefish,” he began.

“Ruined Snakefish,” Blue corrected automatically. The whole baronial ville had been wrecked by an earthquake recently and rumor had it there was barely anything of the old structure left. Yet another of the nine baronies fallen with the disappearance of the Annunaki.

“Think this might be something that your buyer be after?” Hurbon asked.

“For the right price,” Blue said nonchalantly. There was no art collector in Snakefishville; that was simply a lure to disguise the true significance of the item. Ohio turned to Brigid, looking for any indication that the redhead might give as to the item’s value to Cerberus, that she might begin negotiations.

Beneath the wide brim of her hat, Brigid offered a barely perceptible nod of her head, her long hair brushing at her shoulders. Right now, the strange chair was an eyesore that happened to have fallen into the lap of a drugged-up cultist. However, there was value here, and certainly Cerberus would be interested in testing the genetic makeup of the object to find out as much as they could about the Annunaki. If it possessed star charts that could locate the Annunaki’s home planet, for instance, such knowledge would be of inestimable value.

“Vision chair like that,” Hurbon continued, “visions as big as the sky, that’s got to be real valuable to your client. Art collector sees visions like that and he won’t need to buy any more art.”

Hurbon laughed at his own observation as Brigid began to rise from the strange rootlike seat. As she did so, her hand brushed against the water-stained armrest and something clicked within. Brigid stared in shock as a series of thornlike spikes appeared along the arms of the chair, and several of them pierced the heel of her hand where it still rested against the chair itself.

“Oh, you gone done it now, haven’t you, girl?” Hurbon muttered, and a rich laugh came from deep in his chest.

As the four of them watched, the thorns were turning into tendrils, reaching out from the surface of the chair’s arms like a plant’s shoots emerging from the soil. In a second, the waving tendrils latched on to Brigid as she struggled to get up out of the chair, wrapping around her arms before she could pull away.

“What’s it doing?” Brigid asked, an edge of panic in her tone as she found she could no longer rise from the alien seat.

The tendrils continued to pull Brigid’s struggling form back down into the seat, wrapping around her wrists and bonding them to the armrests like manacles.

“I can’t move,” Brigid said as she struggled against the squirming tendrils.

Kane fixed his steely stare on the voodoo priest. “You have to switch this thing off right now,” he insisted.

Hurbon shrugged. “Ah, the chair chooses her own lovers,” he said, a mellow laugh peppering his words. “I only find them for her.”

As Hurbon continued to chuckle, the shoots rushed upward, grasping the underside of Brigid’s right arm as her bare skin brushed against them. In a split second, the tendrils wrapped around her arm, more and more of them branching from the first few that snapped around her, spreading to form a network of veins across her flesh. Brigid gritted her teeth as her arms were yanked down toward the armrest, the budding tendrils wrapping over them to lock her in place. Despite her physical fitness, the chair seemed to have no trouble pulling Brigid down, drawing her closer with the viselike grip of those thin, plantlike tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Brigid asked fearfully.

“You triggered it,” Hurbon stated, laughing once again.

“I just touched it,” Brigid said. “You tricked me.”

Despite her struggles, Brigid was pulled back down into the seat once more, and she squirmed at an angle as she tried to right herself and get away from the alien chair.

Calmly, Kane bent down and pulled a combat knife from the sheath he wore at his ankle. “Quit struggling, Baptiste,” he told her. “You’re just making it worse.”

Brigid’s eyes went wide with shock when she saw Kane move toward her with the lethal-looking blade. “Kane, don’t do anything crazy, okay?” she said through gritted teeth, letting out a yelp as the thorns pressed against her supple flesh.

Kane eyed the tendrils as more and more appeared, growing from the arms and back of the chair and then wrapping themselves tightly around his beautiful companion’s struggling form. The strange tendrils were already cinched over both of Brigid’s arms and had reached around to encompass her pale, slender neck, pulling her so that she sat upright despite her squirming. “Stay still,” Kane instructed. “I’ll cut you free.”

Hurbon laughed louder when he heard that, as though the whole thing was nothing more than a joke.

Ohio Blue fixed the voodoo priest with a fierce look. “Is this your idea of a game?” she challenged. “I had a collector lined up for this piece, but I don’t think it’s money you’re after.”

“You’re astute for a nonbeliever,” Hurbon growled. As if to punctuate his response, Papa Hurbon swung one of his meaty arms at the blue-clad trader, moving fast despite his size and disability. In a second he had knocked her to the floor with a loud, open-palmed slap.

Ohio cried out in pain as she slid across the wooden floorboards, a loose nail tearing the thin cotton of her pant leg.

In the Annunaki chair, Brigid was straining back and forth, shaking her head left and right as the thorny appendages began to burble around her face, covering her eyes. “It hurts,” she yelped, and Kane saw the tiny runnels of blood begin to snake across her flesh amid a glistening sheen of sweat.

“Stay still,” Kane repeated, pressing his left hand against Brigid’s for a moment. Then he swept the knife rapidly through the tendrils, cutting through the first dozen strands that had laced up her arm.

But before Kane could get any further with his task, the vast form of Papa Hurbon reached for him from behind, pulling the ex-Mag away from the chair in a mighty bear hug before flinging him to the floor. Kane slid across the worn floorboards before thudding into the far wall next to Ohio Blue with a bone-shaking crash.

“The chair’s chosen,” Hurbon barked. “You leave her be now, boy.”

Head reeling, Kane struck out from where he lay, sweeping his legs out and catching Hurbon’s own wooden leg as the massive figure loomed over him. With a howl, Hurbon’s bulbous form fell sideways and he lost his balance, arms reaching out as he slammed against the wall.

“You chose the wrong victim for your little scheme,” Kane snarled, pulling himself up off the floor.

“Ain’t you been listening, boy?” Hurbon snapped as he struggled on the floor like a beached whale. “I don’t choose—Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair does that.”

Writhing in the chair, Brigid yelped as the weird tendrils squirmed around her face, wrapping around her, covering her eyes. Then she felt the tendrils worming up into her nostrils, pushing between her lips, and she felt as if panic might consume her at that moment.

But something even stranger than that was happening. Within her mind, hovering in her field of vision, a star chart appeared with crystal clarity. Planets rotated in their orbits, and as Brigid’s eyes were drawn to them, tags appeared to identify each, written in a script that even she could not decipher despite her incredible base of knowledge.

It was terrifying, that feeling of being trapped in the all-encompassing embrace of the nightmare chair, and a part of Brigid felt the rising panic of claustrophobia as the tendrils snaked over her face. But another part of her, her rational mind, marveled at that star chart playing across her eyes, shifting with the movements of her irises, shifting with her very thoughts themselves.

Across from Brigid in the wooden-floored room, Kane spat a curse at Hurbon as the corpulent priest lay flailing on the floor, unable to right himself without help thanks to the wooden leg he wore.

Papa Hurbon’s only response was to look at Kane with defiant eyes as that broad, indefatigable smile formed once more on his lips. Kane dismissed him from his mind, glancing down at Ohio’s semiconscious form before returning to Brigid in the chair. But as he did so, three new figures stepped into the room via the far doorway. Each of them was male, muscular and held a vicious-looking blade. They glared at Kane as he stood before the fallen body of their leader.

“I don’t make the choices,” Hurbon reiterated, cackling a wicked, wheezing laugh, “the chair does. We are just its faithful servants.” His next command was addressed to the newcomers: “Kill him.”

“I knew it’d come down to this,” Kane muttered to himself as the first of the shirtless voodoo worshippers took a step forward and swung a filthy eight-inch blade at Kane’s face.

The ex-Mag stepped back just enough to be out of range as his attacker’s blade cut through the air. Then he stepped forward once more and delivered a brutal knee to the man’s crotch. With a pained howl, Kane’s attacker doubled over and dropped heavily to the floor like a sack of coal.

Though the others watched the falling form of their colleague, Kane himself ignored the falling man. Instead, the ex-Mag rushed forward and swung a swift right hook at the nearest of his two remaining foes, his fist slamming into the man’s jaw with tremendous force. Even as the man reeled from the blow, Kane was ducking down and whipping his leg out to connect with the kneecap of the other voodoo worshipper. With a sharp crack, the third man’s knee snapped backward, bending his leg at an awkward angle, and his arms flailed as he struggled to respond.

Kane was a trained Magistrate, and these penny-ante sec men weren’t even enough to make him break a sweat. In six seconds, Kane had eliminated all three men from the fight, leaving two sobbing in pain and the third tossing and turning in semiconscious delirium.

“Now,” Kane snarled, turning his attention back to the languishing figure of the priest, “how do I switch off the chair?” He held the knife where Hurbon could clearly see it, menace in his eye.

“Can’t be done,” Hurbon said defiantly. “Once she starts, the chair takes whatever she wants.”

“Screw that,” Kane spat, whirling back to his partner, who remained struggling against the clawing grip of the eerie chair.

Brigid Baptiste had almost entirely disappeared amid a cocoon of wavering tendrils. Outside the room, Kane could hear the clomping feet of more voodoo warriors as they ran to investigate the sounds of battle that had come from this inner sanctum.

Biting back a curse, Kane leaned down and began working once more at the tendrils, snapping them aside as rapidly as he could with his combat knife. As he did so, he activated his Commtact—a tiny communications device embedded beside his mastoid bone that allowed him to speak with his teammates in real time via satellite linkup. “Grant? We’re making a hasty exit and we’ll be needing some covering fire in two to three minutes. That suit you?”

The rumbling voice of Grant, Kane’s longtime partner and equal, responded in Kane’s Commtact. “I read you loud and clear, buddy. Just let—” With that, the communication went abruptly dead.

For a moment, Kane waited, his busy knife still working through the swirling mass of spindly tendrils as they reached for Brigid’s now static form. Had something happened to Grant? The Commtact shouldn’t just go dead. Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. In theory, even someone completely deaf could still hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. As well as radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign languages on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks. Loss of communication through them, while not unheard of, was exceedingly rare.

“Grant?” Kane asked in a low voice, and he listened for a moment for any indication of his partner from the Commtact. “Grant, you read me?”

Beside Kane, Ohio Blue was just coming back to her senses, her thick blond hair in disarray as she struggled up from the floor. Swaying a little, she looked around the room at the scene of devastation. “Kane, my sweet, sweet prince,” she said, urgency in her voice, “I think it’s time we were leaving.”

Kane turned at Ohio’s voice, but his attention was distracted by the people appearing behind her. Two new figures pushed through the doorway, and Kane saw immediately that there was something wrong with them. They were tall and emaciated and they walked with a shambling gait. When Kane saw the way that their eyelids flickered over unfocused orbs, he concluded that they were either drugged or something worse. The word zombie flashed through the ex-Mag’s mind.

Kane spoke into the Commtact again. “Grant? Do you read me? Please respond.” After a moment’s silence, he tried patching his signal to home base. “Cerberus? This is Kane. Do you copy? Please respond, Cerberus.”

And still the only response from the Commtact was a deafening silence.

Chapter 3

Grant stood well over six feet tall, with impressively wide shoulders, deep chest and a solid mass of hard, taut muscle. His dark skin was a rich shade of mahogany, and he wore his black hair close-cropped to his skull, with a drooping gunslinger’s mustache curving down from his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate, and their partnership went all the way back to their time together in Cobaltville, years before the formation of the Cerberus operation. Grant was several years older than Kane, and the trust between them was absolute. They had seen combat across the globe, saved each other’s lives on countless occasions and there was an unspoken understanding between them that went as deep as the bond between brothers.

Right now, Grant waited in the mouldering marshes of the Louisiana swamps, hunkering down between the low branches of a tree. Clad in camouflaged greens and browns, Grant peered through the sniper’s scope of his SSG-550 rifle where it rested high on its bipod legs. He kept his voice to a low whisper as he spoke into the hidden pickup of his Commtact. “Kane? Please repeat, I didn’t copy.” He waited a moment, listening for any signal from his Commtact over the humming, squawking and chirping of the swamp fauna. “Kane?” he repeated, his voice just a little louder. “Brigid?”

There was still no answer.

Eye locked on the eyepiece of the sniper scope, Grant watched for movement at the entryway to the dilapidated shack. The wooden structure was just one story high yet covered almost 4,000 square feet. Despite its size, the low roof and rotting nature of the building made it appear cramped and unwelcoming.

Grant had seen Kane and Brigid enter the building in the company of the independent trader, Ohio Blue, about fifteen minutes before. They had arrived here via airboat, transported across the marshland by a dark-skinned woman with a toned body and a scarred face, her left leg missing below the knee. Grant had tracked the airboat via the transponder units that were embedded beneath his partners’ skins, using his own uplink to Cerberus headquarters to keep track of his friends as they traveled through the maze of swamps. This had allowed him—unseen—to keep to a roughly parallel route on his own airboat, its huge fan whirling as it carved a new pathway through the dense shrubbery of the sweltering marshes.

“Cerberus, this is Grant out in the field,” Grant spoke to his Commtact once more. “Appear to have lost radio contact with Kane and Brigid. Please advise.”

Grant listened intently, hearing the humming, squawking, chirruping sounds all around him, but the Commtact itself only offered dead air by way of response.

“Cerberus?” Grant repeated. “Anyone there reading me?”

Yet again, there was no response.

Anxious, Grant turned away from the rifle’s scope and reached for the handheld unit he had used to track his partners’ transponders. Its tiny screen was functioning, but it showed no evidence of the transponders—not even his own, Grant realized with a start. He wiped the screen with his fingertip, and then pressed the reset button, causing the little portable unit to run through a ten-second reboot sequence.

“What the hell is going on?” Grant muttered as he watched the tracker unit reboot. Comms were down and now the transponders seemed to have gone offline, as well. Not good. Not good at all.

After ten seconds, the tracker unit returned to full functionality, but still showed no evidence of any transponders in the area—not even Grant’s.

Concerned, Grant bent down to the rifle’s scope once more and focused his attention on the shadowy doorway to the shack, waiting to see what would emerge.

THE HEADQUARTERS for the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. A military redoubt, it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains themselves. The wilds around the three-story concrete redoubt were virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, where a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians had settled, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. For the brief years of its first life, like all prewar redoubts, it had been named Redoubt Bravo after a phonetic letter of the alphabet used in standard military radio communications. In the twentieth century, Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed mat-trans network of instantaneous teleportation. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a garish rendition of the fabled three-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the Underworld. The artist—whose signature identified him only as Mooney—was long since dead, but his work had inspired the sixty or so people who had taken up residence in the facility, acting as their lucky—and unquestionably fearsome—mascot.

Tucked within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the redoubt, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of empirical data for the Cerberus operatives within. These links were the source of field communications through the Commtacts, as well as routing the feeds from the subcutaneous transponders that monitored the health of the personnel, and it was these that Grant had used to track his partners in the field. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. Today, the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Comsat satellite. Or, at least, that was the theory.

Within the operations center, however, a far different story was being played out. Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh leaped out of a seat that overlooked the vast control room, his swivel chair whirling off behind him on its little plastic wheels. Lakesh had dusky skin and sleek black hair that was just beginning to turn white at the temples. Lakesh had a distinguished air about him, holding himself straight and poised, with a refined mouth beneath his aquiline nose. Though he appeared to be about fifty years of age, Lakesh was in fact a “freezie,” one of a number of military personnel who had been placed in cryogenic stasis when the outbreak of nuclear hostilities began, only to be revived some time after that cataclysmic conflict. As such, Lakesh was closer to 250 years old. A physicist and cybernetics expert, Lakesh was an exceptionally capable individual who served as the founder and was still the nucleus around which the Cerberus operation centered.

“What’s happened to the feed?” Lakesh demanded, his eyes flicking from his own computer terminal to those of his colleagues who sat all about him. Every monitor had cut to static in the same instant, their flow of live data lost.

Brewster Philboyd, a tall, sallow-faced, blond-haired man wearing black-framed glasses and the evidence of acne scars on his cheeks, yanked off the comm headset he had been wearing as a burst of static interference cut through the earphones. “Some kind of glitch,” he stated, gritting his teeth as he glared at the headset. “I’m not sure what it is.”

Lakesh ran over to Philboyd’s desk. “Find out,” he urged.

Philboyd had been monitoring the incoming communications when the link to Kane’s field team had gone down. Replacing his headset, he spoke into the pickup mic, calling to the other CAT teams who were out on assignment. “CAT Beta, do you read?” Receiving no response, Brewster’s fingers played rapidly across his computer keyboard before he tried for CAT Gamma. Then he turned to Lakesh, shaking his head. “Nothing. I’m receiving no response from anyone.”

Cerberus physician Reba DeFore, a stocky woman with ice-blond hair weaved into an elaborate plait atop her head, called to Lakesh from her own terminal where she had been monitoring the feeds from the transponders. “Everything’s gone dead here, too, Lakesh,” she stated, looking uncomfortable at her unfortunate choice of words.

“A massive equipment failure?” Lakesh murmured to himself incredulously, but even as he spoke, another dissenting voice was calling from one of the terminals in the vast operations room.

“Monitoring feed just went haywire,” said Henny Johnson, a young, petite woman dressed in the regulation white jumpsuit of the Cerberus team, her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended in line with her earlobes. “I can’t see anything. Just static.”

Lakesh looked around the ops room with frustration. The room had a high ceiling and housed two aisles of computer terminals dedicated to the monitoring of the outside world. A huge Mercator map stretched across one wall, displaying the globe patterned by a plethora of blinking lights and stretching lines showing the patterns and uses of the mat-trans system, the now-antique military teleportation network whose operation had been within the original remit of the base.

Tucked away in the far end of the room was an anteroom that housed the mat-trans unit, which was surrounded by tinted armaglass. This mat-trans unit was still operational and used frequently to transport Cerberus operatives all across the globe. The vast ops room itself was windowless and indirectly lit, allowing for better observation of the backlit terminal screens. Right now, the majority of those monitoring screens had devolved into static or dead feeds of data showing just the standard base-level defaults.

“What the devil is going on here?” Lakesh said, addressing the question to no one other than himself.

Reba DeFore spoke again from her terminal as a scrolling data readout raced across her screen. “My system is working,” she stated, “but it’s just not receiving any input data.”

“The satellite’s down,” Lakesh realized, the words leaving his mouth almost before he had acknowledged the thought.

Like fascinated meerkats, the people in the ops room peered up from their terminals, eyes on Lakesh as he outlined his thoughts. “We’ve lost the satellite relay,” he said, his voice more decisive now as a plan began to form in his mind. “I need to know why. Brewster, Henny—backtrack through the logs and locate when we lost contact, both sound and vision, and whether there was an indicator of its imminence.”

Lakesh whirled around, his gaze falling on Donald Bry, an operative with a mop of ginger hair and a permanently dour expression on his drawn face. Bry acted as Lakesh’s right-hand man, and had been known to run the Cerberus ops room when Lakesh himself was otherwise engaged. “Donald, let’s start checking meteorological activity, sunspots, magnetic glitches, anything we can find a record of.”

Donald Bry nodded as he reached across from his own terminal to switch on another vacant one that sat unused beside him. “Aye, sir.” As the spare terminal went through its boot-up procedure, Bry’s fingers began working furiously over his own keyboard, bringing up a stream of data covering the preceding hours leading to the loss of satellite feeds.

Lakesh, meanwhile, was standing in the center of the room, reeling off instructions to the other personnel there. “I want you to manually check our power supply,” he ordered Farrell. “See if anything’s happened to cause a breakdown in service. Get engineering to run a full systems check, both localized to the ops room and for the whole base itself.”

Farrell nodded, his gold hoop earring catching the light for a moment before he briskly walked through the doors and exited the ops room to check the generators.

“Reba,” Lakesh continued, turning to address the blonde physician, “I want you to bring up the final reports from the transponders, make sure everything’s in order and patch the reports through to my screen so that I can double-check them.”

DeFore shot Lakesh a fierce look. “You don’t need to double-check me,” she told him.

Lakesh offered her a concerned look. “We have three teams out in the field. Kane, Grant, Edwards, Morganstern, others. I’ll double-and triple-check everything if it means protecting the life of one person while they’re under my command.”

“Point taken,” Reba submitted. Chastised, she turned her attention back to her terminal and began to run a system history to the point where the live feeds had been interrupted.

Agitated, Lakesh paced across the room until he stood behind Henny Johnson at the satellite-monitoring feed. “What do we have, Henny?”

Henny replayed the feed sequence, watching the locator numbers as they scrolled along the side of the screen in a separate window to the feed images themselves. “They just seemed to pop, vanish,” she explained. “Like someone pulled the plug.”

“So,” Lakesh mused, “let’s figure out who or what pulled the plug, shall we?”

Henny nodded. “Time of signal break—15.37.08,” she began, and Brewster and Reba both agreed with the time from their desks.

“Complete shutdown on both satellites,” Lakesh said to himself as the other personnel continued comparing their data feeds. This could be something very big. Very big and very nasty.

PAPA HURBON was chuckling as Kane spun to face the two newcomers who had stepped through the doorway in their plodding, deliberate way. He watched the grim figures as they approached on heavy tread, their eyes flickering white slits.

“Grant,” Kane said, engaging his Commtact once more. “My Commtact’s not receiving your signal—”

The first zombie swung a vicious blow at Kane’s head, moving far faster than the ex-Mag had expected. Kane ducked the sweeping, meaty fist as the second zombie stepped toward him. Up close, both dead creatures stank, and Kane was reminded of the garbage area of the Cerberus redoubt.

“I’m planning to evac in two minutes via the south exit,” Kane continued into the Commtact, hoping that Grant could hear him. As he spoke, his arm snapped up to block the second zombie as it reached for him, emaciated fingers clawing for his throat with jagged, yellow-brown fingernails. “We may have some company in tow,” Kane continued as he thrust the blade of his combat knife into the zombie’s exposed throat. The zombie simply shook its head, and when Kane removed the blade an off-white pus exuded from the rent in the dead man’s flesh. As Kane pulled his blade away, he heard Papa Hurbon chuckling from his supine position on the floor.

“We are surrounded by hostiles,” Kane continued into the Commtact feed. “Pick off anyone you don’t recognize.”

At that moment, the first zombie connected with a hard blow to the back of Kane’s head, and the ex-Mag staggered forward. Though Kane’s knees bent, he kept himself upright as he slammed against the other lurching zombie.

“I repeat,” Kane stated into the Commtact, “we are surrounded by hostiles. Dispatch on sight.”

With that, Kane drove a powerful fist into the face of the zombie standing before him. The undead creature didn’t move, but its face caved in like a rotten fruit, a cloud of skin dust flaking across Kane’s fist. The creature itself seemed to just wait in place, swaying a little as Kane watched it, the remnants of its face splayed across Kane’s knuckles.

The zombie behind Kane was moving closer, too, and the Cerberus warrior realized that he was hemmed in. Even as he backed away from his twin attackers, he saw that Ohio Blue was finally on her feet once more and had made her way over to the wall where the sword had been mounted. Blue pulled the sword from its twin clips and spun around to face the monstrous figures of the undead.

The beautiful blonde woman stepped forward, swishing the blade through the air and cutting at the zombie behind Kane. Although her blow struck, it was a pathetic effort, and Kane was reminded of his previous contretemps with the female trader out near Knoxville where she had proved to be far more of a con artist than a fighter.

With a foul stench reeking from its rotting flesh, the shambling form of the struck zombie turned to face Ohio Blue as she readied herself for a second strike.

“Ohio,” Kane instructed as he stepped across the small room to her side, “give me the sword.”

Blue didn’t need to be told twice. She handed Kane the two-foot-long sword as the shambling zombies took another step closer.

In return, Kane handed the blond-haired trader his knife. “I need you to free Brigid,” he instructed, stepping away from Ohio to face the zombies once again, sword held upright in a ready position.

The demands of her Outlander lifestyle had made Ohio Blue a very perceptive woman and, although she didn’t comment on it, she noticed that Kane had referred to his partner by her first name. That was unusual—very nearly unheard of, in fact—and though Blue didn’t know it, was a sign of his concern for the beautiful redhead trapped in the alien chair.

As Ohio trotted past the fallen body of Papa Hurbon, he reached out and snatched her ankle, pulling her down toward him. “Not so fast, pretty peach,” he said, that sickly sweet breath exuding from his mouth with each word he spoke. “There are other games we can play, man and woman.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Ohio rammed the short blade of the combat knife into Hurbon’s crotch, and the man let out a pained shriek. “I’ll pass,” she told him as she scrambled away from the overweight priest.

A few steps away, Kane swung the length of tempered-steel blade at the approaching zombies, ignoring the howl coming from the floor behind him. The sword itself was the ritual weapon used to cut the curtain between the physical and the spiritual world in voodoo ceremony. Right now, however, Kane was using it in a less metaphorical manner, as he hacked at the looming figures, slicing chunks from their torsos as they silently strode ever onwards at him in the confines of the room. With a downward slice, Kane chopped off the reaching hand of the closest zombie, leaving the undead man with a stump that oozed putrid white pus. The hand itself slapped against the floor, a cloud of dust puffing up in its wake. Kane elbowed the wounded zombie aside and drove the length of the blade at the other figure’s torso, spreading the zombie’s ribs with the brutality of his attack.

Even as Kane dispatched the second zombie, three more had appeared in the open doorway to the inner sanctum, instinctively obeying the commands of Papa Hurbon as the man himself lay in a widening pool of his own blood. Kane steadied himself and swung the sword at the next wave of attackers.

Just six feet away from the scene of carnage, Ohio Blue ripped the last of the waving tendrils from Brigid’s form and pulled her from the savage embrace of the alien chair. A network of veinlike tendrils clung to the woman’s face and bare hands, and Blue hastily brushed these aside, feeling their spines snag at her own flesh like nettles.

“Are you okay, Ms. Baptiste?” Ohio asked as she swept the last of the tendrils from Brigid’s skin. As she did so, red welts formed and runnels of blood appeared on Brigid’s face in a cobweblike pattern.

Brigid’s breath came in an uneven, stuttered rush as she spoke. “What the—? Where was I?”

“Right here,” Blue assured her. “You were right here.”

Brigid rubbed a hand over her eyes, seeing the eerie alien visions still playing there for a moment. “I saw something,” she said, groping for the words to describe it, “like alien cartography.”

“We need to get out of here,” Blue told Brigid, and the words seemed to snap the former archivist out of her daze. “It was all a setup. Or something very much like it.”

Brigid saw Kane then, and she saw the horde of zombies shambling toward him through the open doorway of the sanctum. “Kane…” she began.

Without turning, Kane batted another zombie aside as it grasped for him from the open doorway. “We about done here, Baptiste?”

“I think so,” Brigid told him, still breathless.

Using the sword’s hilt as a club, Kane slammed another of the undead figures in the chest, forcing it to step backward as a cloud of foul-smelling dust burst from the point of impact. Knocked back, the zombie fell into one of its colleagues, and the two slow-moving figures struggled in the doorway for several seconds. As they did so, Kane turned and indicated the far door—the one through which he and the others had entered with Hurbon.

“Let’s get moving,” Kane instructed.

From his place on the floor, the one-legged priest shouted angrily, “You won’t get far. The chair has chosen her lover. You can’t escape it now.”

As Ohio and Brigid rushed out of the cramped inner room, Kane turned back to look at Hurbon, fixing him with his steely blue-gray glare. “I’ll bring your sword back when I’m done,” he told the corpulent man, whose hands still held his bleeding groin.

With false bravado, Hurbon laughed for a moment, until he saw the grim look on Kane’s face. “I’ll be ready,” he said, blood pooling beneath him.

“No, you won’t,” Kane told him as he stepped through the doorway and out of the inner sanctum of the voodoo temple.

OUTSIDE THE WOODEN STRUCTURE, crouched against the bole of a tree, Grant waited, the SSG-550 sniper rifle leveled in the direction of the building’s rotted doorway. Approximately two hundred feet from the doorway itself, Grant peered through the lens of the rifle’s scope. He had had no further radio contact with Kane since the initial burst when his partner had requested covering fire in two minutes. That had been more than five minutes ago, and Grant was pondering whether he should enter the temple himself and recover his teammates. One thing that was certain was that his Commtact was dead. Not only had he been unable to raise Kane and Brigid, but Grant had also failed to patch through to the Cerberus base. In short, he was out in the field on his own now, with no access to backup.

Irritated, Grant comforted himself with the fact that he hadn’t heard any gunfire coming from the voodoo temple itself. Kane, Brigid and Ohio had gone in unarmed at the request of Papa Hurbon—a standard indicator of trust between two trading parties in the Outlands—but there was no reason to suspect that Hurbon’s people would remain unarmed if trouble arose. And based on Kane’s record, Grant reckoned that trouble would undoubtedly arise.

Grant glanced up over the rim of the sniper scope to check that no one was approaching. All he saw were the clouds of insects that buzzed all about the sweltering Louisiana bayou. He fixed his eye back on the scope and waited; he would give Kane one more minute to show himself. If he didn’t appear by then, Grant would have to go inside and find out just what the heck was going on.

“Come on, Kane,” Grant muttered under his breath, “let’s keep the game in motion.”

INSIDE THE SINGLE-STORY TEMPLE, Kane, Brigid and Ohio were running through the large Djévo room, their shoes banging loudly against the wooden floorboards.

“You okay, Baptiste?” Kane asked as he glanced behind them to see a horde of followers, both the living and the apparently undead, clambering through the doorway of the inner sanctum in pursuit. Several of their pursuers were balancing on false legs, Kane noted, recalling the horrific story that Papa Hurbon had told them regarding his deity’s awful request.

“I’ve been better,” Brigid replied breathlessly, “but I’ll get over it. Just let me breathe some fresh air.”

Jogging along beside her, Ohio Blue chuckled. “You’ll be lucky, Brigid,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a swamp—all you’ll breathe when we get outside is local stink.”

“Stink will do,” Brigid assured the blonde woman as the three of them hurried through another doorway and into a corridor lined with shelves. The shelves contained jars filled with fascinating and disturbing items: human ears and pickled fetuses; shrunken heads; a vase full of dyed feathers; a sealed jar brimming with canine teeth.

“What happened in the chair?” Kane asked, eying the shelves with disdain.

“I saw stars,” Brigid explained, awe coloring her words.

“Meaning?” Kane asked.

“It’s an astrogator’s chair,” Brigid realized. “It projects star charts for the user.”

“Projects them where?” Kane asked.

“In your head,” Brigid explained. “Inside your eyes. It’s an Annunaki navigator’s seat. It must operate by physical contact.”

“Yeah,” Kane growled, “that kind of physical contact I don’t need. Hurbon called it Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair. Any idea how he reached that conclusion?”

“Lilitu,” Brigid said thoughtfully, “the dark goddess of the Annunaki. Not averse to taking on other forms so that she will be worshipped.”

“And she’s a sadistic bitch,” Kane recalled as he thought back to his own meetings with the Annunaki female, whose perverted peccadilloes were boundless. “Instructing her worshippers to remove a leg to prove their devotion isn’t out of the bounds of belief.”

The three of them stopped short as a figure appeared in the far doorway, blocking the exit from the shack. It was a dark-skinned man, so tall his head scraped the ceiling when he stood upright, and with the widest shoulders that Kane had ever seen. A necklace of animal skulls hung over the man’s bare chest. A pair of sweat-stained combat pants ended in ragged cuffs below which his left foot was bare, while his right leg ended at a metal spike that attached to his knee. The man was armed with a thick, curved blade about eighteen inches in length and he smiled wickedly, a sinister half moon across his wide face.

Sword in hand, Kane eyed the brute for a moment. “Step aside,” he instructed in his authoritative Magistrate voice.

In response, the brute merely laughed, raising the cruelly curved blade in his hand as he took a single thunderous step toward the three strangers. Behind them, just entering the corridor of odd delights, the first of a dozen voodoo followers were coming to box in Kane and his partners.

Ohio turned to Kane, fear lacing the songbird tone of her voice. “We don’t have time for this, Kane.”

“Sure we do,” Kane said. He began charging forward, swinging the sword in a great, sweeping arc as he approached the dark-skinned giant in the bone necklace.

“Stay close,” Kane heard Brigid instruct Ohio as he closed in on the brute.

A second later, the corridor resounded with the echoes of clashing steel on steel as Kane’s sword struck the curved edge of the brute’s scimitar. The power in the huge man’s strike was uncanny, and Kane felt the vibration run up and down his arms as he parried the giant’s blows. Even as the towering brute lunged at Kane, thrusting his scimitar forward in a devastating attack, Kane’s mind calmed and his Magistrate training kicked in. Although he was a part of the battle, Kane also seemed to be standing to one side of the action, analyzing his opponent’s strategies and probing for signs of weakness. As he fended off another attack, Kane shifted his balance, kicking off the floor and spinning around. The giant could only watch in amazement as Kane turned in a low arc and slashed the hard edge of his sword against his adversary’s bare leg.

The huge man stood there, rocking in place for a moment as blood began to blossom in red stains across the left leg of his pants. And then Kane was driving forward once more, his left arm powering upward to slam the heel of his hand into his opponent’s nose. The brute’s nose exploded in a shower of blood and mucus, and the fearsome giant howled in agony.

Kane stepped back and glanced over his shoulder in time to see the first of the rearguard meet with Brigid Baptiste as Ohio cowered behind her. Brigid delivered a swift and brutal kick to her would-be attacker’s stomach and the man doubled over the pain.

Trusting Brigid’s abilities, Kane turned back to the brute who was standing on unsteady feet, pawing at his ruined nose.

The giant man snarled, swinging his curved blade at his opponent as Kane rushed forward once more. Kane ducked beneath the intended blow with ease, and his free hand whipped out and snagged the necklace of skulls and bones that the hulking man wore about his neck. In a second, Kane had wrapped the necklace over his hand, doubling it around and around until he was tight up against his foe. Struggling to keep from being dragged down, the brute swung his blade once again, but Kane drew his left arm back, pulling the necklace—and his attacker—off balance. The man choked as the necklace tightened against his windpipe.

Ignoring the man’s cries of pain, Kane yanked at the cinched necklace again. The huge man staggered forward before falling to his knees, the metal clamped to his right leg ringing against the floor with a resounding clang. The brute’s scimitar clattered to the wooden floorboards as he reached up with both hands and tried to loosen the gruesome necklace that was now strangling him. His fearful eyes were wide, their whites turning pink with blood as the man tried desperately to take a breath.

Kane watched impartially as the man danced on his knees, the awful hacking sounds of strangulation coming from his open mouth. Standing over the brute, his left arm wrapped in the hideous necklace, his right still holding the sword, Kane fixed his gaze on the struggling man’s desperate eyes. “I won’t let you die,” he promised in a solemn tone.

The man’s struggles were lessening now, as the strength ebbed from his oxygen-starved body, and whether he had heard the ex-Mag’s vow Kane could not be sure. With a pained croak, the man finally keeled over and Kane released the necklace as his heavy opponent toppled to the floor with a resounding crash. The huge man had blacked out.

Kane turned back to the others and saw Ohio Blue standing with her back to the wall, fearfully watching as Brigid Baptiste struggled to fend off a trio of male attackers while even more hung back, waiting for their chance. Kane marveled at the economy and grace of Brigid’s movements as she dispatched men twice her weight with a series of kicks and rabbit-style punches. She was fluid as a rushing waterfall as she defended herself from the gamut of blows aimed in her direction.

Kane winced as Brigid grabbed one man by the hair and pulled him downward until his face struck her extended knee with such force that three teeth flew from his jaw. She pulled the man’s head back and, before he could recover, snapped a savage right hook into his face, obliterating his nose in a burst of blood. When Brigid finally let go of his hair, the man staggered backward as though drunk, crashing into one of his colleagues before dropping to the floor. By that time, Brigid had already moved her attention elsewhere, ducking the swinging arc of a machete before grabbing its wielder’s wrist and snapping it in a brutally swift movement. The knife wielder stepped back, screaming in pain as he stared at his broken hand, which now drooped at an awkward angle from his wrist.

“Come on, Baptiste,” Kane instructed as he sidled up beside her, the sword held ready. “Door’s open.”

Brigid didn’t need telling twice. She drove her elbow into the face of another of the faithful—this one showing the gossamerlike skin of the undead—and turned to run down the corridor toward the far doorway.

Standing in place, Kane swung the long blade of the sword in a wide arc to fend off their remaining attackers, forcing them to retreat from its lethal edge. Then he turned and sprinted down the corridor after Brigid and Ohio, catching up to them with long, distance-humbling strides.

“Everybody still in one piece?” Kane asked as he leaped over the unconscious body of the brute in the skull necklace.

“I think so,” Brigid said, and Ohio nodded in agreement, though the blond-haired trader was clearly shaken up by the rapid turn of events.

Behind them, four more lumbering zombies were making their way through the corridor while their living colleagues strode warily beside them, daggers ready.

Kane engaged his Commtact once again, informing Grant of their location, but his only response was dead air.

WATCHING THROUGH the rifle scope from his hiding place amid the dense undergrowth of the marsh, Grant saw the sunlight flash off a sword blade. A moment later, Kane appeared in the shadowy doorway to the low shack. Grant breathed a sigh of relief in seeing Kane still alive, but he didn’t relax for a moment. Instead, his finger rested against the trigger of the sniper rifle, waiting to take out any hostiles.

As soon as Kane had stepped from the building and out onto the raised wooden platform that surrounded it, Grant saw the familiar, svelte figure of Brigid Baptiste as she ran through the doorway accompanied by the trader, Ohio Blue. Even held in place by her dark snap-brim hat, Brigid’s fiery red hair was instantly recognizable.

Three for three, Grant realized with relief, a brief smile crossing his lips. The smile disappeared a moment later when he saw a lumbering form come striding through the doorway. Kane spun to face the figure, the sword held high in a two-handed grip.

Kane shouted something to his colleagues, and the words echoed back to Grant amid the chirruping background chorus of the swamp: “Get back!”

That confirmed it. Grant leaned into the SSG-550 and waited for the gaunt form of Kane’s attacker to be framed in the crosshairs. Behind the strange, pale figure, Grant could see more figures emerging from the shadows of the doorway. In an instant, he stroked the sniper rifle’s trigger and the lead figure’s head exploded in a shower of bone and pus.

Grant ignored it, shifting the rifle infinitesimally as he centered the next of the attackers in the scope’s crosshairs.

STANDING ON the wooden veranda, Kane leaped back as the zombie’s head exploded in a splatter of foul-smelling ooze. Glancing over his shoulder, he ran to meet with the next zombie attacker, but even as he moved, the next attacker’s face blew apart in a similar spray of pus and brittle bone.

Kane stood in place, the two-foot-long blade of the ceremonial sword held low to the ground. As the next zombie walked through the doorway and out into the sunlight, Kane heard the crack of the rifle somewhere behind him. Suddenly a messy hole appeared on the zombie’s neck, a great gob of flesh blasting from it and splattering the wall. Another gunshot, and the zombie fell to the ground, a gaping wound where its chest had been just moments before.

Grant, Kane realized with a bitter smile.

“Grant has us covered,” Kane told the others as he turned from the doorway. “Let’s get out of here.”

Brigid and Ohio ran ahead while Grant’s shots rang through the swamp, felling the eerie, undead men as they emerged from the voodoo temple.

Ninety seconds later, Kane, Brigid and Ohio were reunited with Grant in the undergrowth.

“What the hell happened in there?” Grant asked, his right eye still fixed on the view through the sniper scope. Nobody had attempted to leave the shack in almost a minute.

“Bumped into a girl you know,” Kane said obliquely.

“That so?” Grant asked, intrigued.

“Yeah,” Kane spat. “Little misunderstanding.”

“Oh, her.” Grant laughed. “She does like to visit us wherever we go, doesn’t she?”

“However,” Kane continued, “I have another problem—my Commtact’s dead.”

“Mine, too,” Brigid explained. “We think there may have been a jammer in the temple.”

Grant raised the rifle and stood up. “No, it’s affected mine, too,” he explained wearily. “Can’t raise Cerberus and the tracker’s scragged, too.”

“Shit,” Kane growled. Then he turned to Ohio, favoring her with an anxious smile. “Looks like we may have some problems of our own, Ohio. We’ll get you back wherever you need to go, as promised, but we won’t be able to stick around.”

Ohio gave him an up-from-under look through the curtain of her thick blond hair. “Oh, my handsome prince,” she cooed. “You’re always in such a rush. I’m going to start to think you’re only after one thing from me.”

“That would make things a lot less complicated,” Kane growled as he led the way through the swamp toward Grant’s hidden airboat.

From there it would take them almost an hour to reach the hidden redoubt that contained the mat-trans they had used to travel here. For the entire journey, Kane, Grant and Brigid took turns trying to raise Cerberus through the Commtacts, but they received no response.

Chapter 4

“The Hindus believe that everyone should bathe in the Ganges at least once in their lives,” Clem Bryant explained, a mischievous twinkle in his clear blue eyes. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with a trimmed goatee and dark hair swept back from a high forehead.

Bryant’s companion, Mariah Falk, looked at him dubiously. “You want me to—” she air quoted “—‘bathe’ in that?” A slender woman in her midforties, Mariah had short brown hair streaked with gray. While not conventionally pretty, she had an infectious smile and an inherent inquisitiveness that made her a delight to be with.

Both Bryant and Falk were Cerberus personnel. He was an oceanographer turned chef, while she was an expert geologist. Like many of the Cerberus personnel, the pair shared an unusual bond—as government employees, they had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and placed in the Manitius Moon Base, where they were protected from the subsequent nuclear holocaust that ravaged the Earth. They had been awoken two hundred years later, and found themselves in a world blighted by the horrors that had superseded civilization in the United States of America in the wake of the nukecaust.

“I’ve done it,” Clem told her as they stood at the head of eight wide stone steps leading down to the flowing, muddy waters of the mighty Ganges River in India. The steps were a pale sandy color and there were numerous other people there, locals going about their business, washing their clothes, filling buckets that they rested on yokes across their shoulders, Brahmans washing the soles of their feet. No one seemed to take much notice of the two Westerners who were dressed in the immaculate clothes of the Cerberus redoubt, and whose skin was so much paler, as if they had never seen the sunlight.

Wrinkling her nose, Mariah looked out over the silty wash that swirled past the foot of the steps. “I don’t know, Clem,” she said. “How long ago did you do this?”

“I took a gap year after college,” Clem told her. “Traveled a little. Many Hindus believe that the Ganges is the source of all life. They hold it in the highest respect. They say that Brahma washed the feet of Vishnu here and they believe that it has the power to wash away an individual’s sins.”

“I don’t have any sins,” Mariah said, shaking her head and turning away from the murky water as sunlight twinkled across its surface in dazzling white highlights.

Clem took Mariah’s hand and squeezed it, looking into her bright eyes. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “Bad choice of destination. Next time you can choose where we go.”

Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.

Mariah looked down at the murky water, watching the silt swirl within it as the many activities there churned sand up in little cloudlike bursts. “Am I going to catch anything?” she asked Clem, wincing and gritting her teeth.

“Only enlightenment,” Clem assured her as Mariah pulled her hand away from his grasp.

In a final rush, Mariah took the last few paces on her bare feet and waded into the flowing Ganges, letting it lap around her bare ankles and calves as she held her shoes aloft. “Eeeee,” she cheered, “it’s warm.”

Sedately, Clem followed her in, feeling the water flowing over his sandals, splashing around his feet and soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He turned to Mariah as she held her pumps over the sun-dappled surface of the water and tentatively waded a little deeper, making her way from a group of local women who were busy washing their clothes. To Clem’s eyes, she looked happy and, for all the activity going on around her, she looked at peace.

Clem called to her as he made his way over to where his companion was now standing hip-deep in the flowing river. “Can’t you feel your sins washing away?” he inquired.

Mariah dipped down and, to Clem’s surprise, ducked her head under the water for a moment before resurfacing and shaking the water from her dark hair. “Oh, Clem, how did you ever talk me into this?”

“I don’t recall,” Clem replied with a laugh. “Did I promise infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss?”

“No,” Mariah said, “you said you’d teach me to scuba dive. And take me dancing.”

Clem shook his head. “I can’t imagine that I would have agreed to the dancing.”

“Are you saying you won’t dance with me, Bryant?” Mariah asked coquettishly, reaching her arms around his shoulders.

Placing his own arms around her waist, Clem pulled Mariah closer and together they danced in the flowing waters of the River Ganges, Mariah’s shoes still dangling from her crooked fingers, while all around them people carried on with their daily chores, oblivious to the couple’s joy.

Mariah was still laughing five minutes later as Clem led her back to shore and they ascended the wide stone steps. “I can’t believe you made me do that,” she said. “I’m soaked through.”

Clem stretched his arms wide and turned his head toward the sky. “The sun will dry you off,” he told her. His own clothes—a light ensemble of shirt and cargo pants—had stuck to him from the soaking that he had received in the river. “I can’t believe I’m back here. I feel like I’m twenty-one all over again.”

Mariah walked barefoot up the steps, her sopping pumps dripping in her left hand. “Me, too,” she said. “With everything we go through at Cerberus, it’s funny to think that places like this still exist. It feels like they haven’t changed in a thousand years.”

“India suffered in the global conflict as much as any country,” Clem told her. “It’s just that New York and Washington, London and Moscow—those locales have been relegated to the history books. While places like this—” he swept his hand about him to indicate the magnificent vista of the wide river “—they’re eternal.”

“Do you really believe in this stuff?” Mariah asked as she and Clem made their way back onto the dusty road that led down toward the steps. “Enlightenment and the washing away of one’s sins?”

Clem smiled. “The belief in a higher purpose, the desire to be a better person—these are universal,” he said. “These are precisely the tenets that Cerberus subscribes to.”

“I didn’t really think of it like that,” Mariah admitted, running her hand through her hair. To her surprise she found that it was almost dry already, thanks to the warmth of the pounding sun.

“Speaking of which,” Clem said, reaching into a sealed pocket of his pants and pulling free an earpiece with a built-in microphone pickup, “it’s about time we were heading back to work. I’ll radio in and let them know we’ll be entering the mat-trans in about twenty-five minutes.”

Mariah nodded reluctantly as she watched Clem place the portable communications device over his ear. Unlike the field teams, she and Clem had decided to forgo the minor operation that inserted the Commtact equipment beneath the surface of the skin. As such, they were both limited to carrying robust, portable units around with them and firing them up when they needed to. Also Cerberus was less easily able to contact them while they were away from home base. On occasions such as this, Mariah reflected, that lack of contact and the privacy it brought wasn’t such a bad thing.

It had been a nice afternoon, Mariah considered as Clem patched his signal through to Cerberus and waited for an acknowledgment. Although she had seen Clem around the base in the Bitterroot Mountains on a number of occasions, where the man mostly served as a cook within the canteen, having forsaken his primary discipline of oceanography, it was only in recent months that they had become close. It had started innocently enough—they had been thrown together by chance to investigate the epicenter of an earthquake. But somehow, Clem’s easy manner and his dry wit had put Mariah at her ease and, more than that, had reminded her of something that most of the Cerberus personnel seemed to have forgotten—what it was like to live in a world without constant fear. Clem was capable and incisive, and he was renowned among his Cerberus peers as a fiercely logical tactician and puzzle-solver. And yet, at times like this, he seemed almost carefree in his utter enjoyment of the world about him. For Clem, it seemed, being cryogenically frozen and learning of the nukecaust were just minor blips in that delightful adventure he called life. And while the rest of Cerberus were geared up to the discovery of new horrors and the unveiling of new conspiracies concerning the ceaseless subjugation of mankind, Clem’s was a very refreshing attitude to have.

“Funny,” Clem mused, his rich voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts, “I can’t seem to get any response from Cerberus. I hope they’re not sleeping on the job.”

“With Lakesh in charge?” Mariah asked. “They’re lucky they’re allowed restroom breaks!”

“Quite,” Clem agreed, removing the earpiece and looking it over. “I wonder if perhaps the river water has got into my equipment.”

“Aren’t they waterproof?” Mariah asked.

“They’re meant to be,” Clem said thoughtfully, turning the earpiece over on his open palm. “It certainly appears to be sealed tight.”

Mariah reached into her own pocket and pulled loose the earpiece that she had stowed there. “Do you want to try mine?”

Clem nodded, plucking Mariah’s earpiece from her grip. In a moment he had the earpiece hooked over his ear, and was engaging its pickup mic. “This is Clem Bryant calling home. Come in, home.” He waited a moment, stopping at the side of the road as a cart drawn by a donkey and laden with ripe melons trundled past. There was no response from the earpiece.

“Anything?” Mariah asked as a half-dozen chickens went rushing past, herded by a shirtless boy who appeared to be no more than ten years old.

“Nothing at all,” Clem mused, and his tone was irked. “It’s very unusual for two comm devices to go offline at the same time like this. In fact, I’d estimate the odds are up in the hundreds of thousands against.”

“Me, too,” Mariah agreed. “That hardware is old but it’s military solid. Do you think maybe something else has happened? Perhaps Cerberus doesn’t want us back.”

Clem looked pensive as he considered what to do next. “I’m going to keep trying them while we return to the mat-trans. If there’s no response by then, we may need to consider our options more thoroughly.”

Mariah nodded as she replaced the white pumps on her feet, feeling the water in them squelch against her toes. Whatever else you might say about Clem, she thought, he was certainly a man who didn’t ruffle easily.

THE MAT-TRANS UNIT at the end of the Cerberus ops center was just winding down, clouds of mist being sucked away by hidden filters beneath the hexagonal chamber. The door hissed back on its hinges, and three familiar figures stepped out into the antechamber only to find themselves facing a veritable wall of armed guards.

“Hey, guys,” Kane said, dropping the sword and raising his empty hands as he saw the wall of firepower arrayed before him. “It’s us.”

Beside Kane, Grant and Brigid were also raising their empty hands to shoulder level where they could be seen, and all three of the Cerberus field team were wondering just what was going on.

A mellifluous voice called to Kane from somewhere behind the wall of armed guards and, a moment later, Lakesh came brushing past the guards to greet the three of them. “I’m frightfully sorry about all this,” Lakesh began as he grasped Kane’s hand in a solid two-handed shake. “We’ve had a major glitch with the communications relay, causing us to lose contact with everyone out in the field. Precautions will remain in place until we can track who’s entering via the mat-trans, I’m afraid.”

Kane nodded as Lakesh made a path through the wall of armed guards toward the main area of the control room. He saw Edwards sitting with his own field team in one corner of the room. The military man’s face was red with anger and he was complaining in loud terms to his teammates about having his own people pointing guns at him on his arrival at the redoubt.

“Some welcome this is,” Edwards snorted. “If I’d wanted this kinda aggravation every time I walk in the door, I’d’ve got married.”

Edwards’s teammates agreed with the man, used to his bluster.

Kane and his crew strode beside Lakesh toward the Cerberus leader’s own desk.

“Our Commtacts ceased working about an hour ago,” Grant explained. “I was talking with Kane at the time and suddenly—nada—the line was dead.”

Lakesh looked from Grant to Kane to Brigid, concern marring his features. “Did everything go okay?” he asked.

Kane nodded. “Got a little hairy for a while, but you know us—managed to play things by ear.”

“And what about the artifact?” Lakesh quizzed. “An alien chair, wasn’t it?”

“It’s Annunaki, all right,” Brigid confirmed as she removed her dark hat and tossed her lustrous hair back over her shoulders. “I think it’s an astrogator’s chair, used for navigation in starship travel.”

Lakesh stroked at his chin in fascination. “You tested it?” he asked.

Brigid made a sour face. “It kind of tested me,” she admitted, still conscious of the tingling feeling on her skin where the tendrils had tried to consume her just an hour before.

“That doesn’t sound so good,” Lakesh mused. “Would you care to elaborate?”

Brigid began to explain about the strange chair that had held her in its unshakable clutches, but Kane interrupted. “That can wait,” he said. “What’s going on with the Commtacts?”

“And the transponders?” Grant added. “My tracker’s still operating but it couldn’t even locate my own frequency blip while I was out in the field.”

Lakesh indicated the satellite monitoring and communication desks where Brewster Philboyd, Donald Bry and several others were working in unison on what was evidently a fraught and urgent project. “The satellite feeds went down fifty-three minutes ago,” Lakesh explained. “We’ve lost all external comms, including Commtacts, monitoring and general analysis and prediction software.”

“You ‘lost’?” Kane asked.

“It’s still down,” Lakesh told him. “Our best guess is that something has taken out the Comsat and Vela satellites, and Donald and his team are trying to backtrack over the unmonitored feeds to see if we can find any evidence as to what.”

Tucking a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear, Brigid asked hesitantly, “Do you think this was a deliberate sabotage?”

“We haven’t ruled out that possibility yet,” Lakesh said ominously, “but at the same time it may just as easily be a natural phenomenon or a massive internal failure of the satellites themselves.”

“Affecting both of them at once?” Brigid asked, clearly dubious.

“Freak weather conditions, such as a magnetic storm, could result in a block to all our signals,” Lakesh suggested. “Until we can locate the specific data, we’ll be hard-pressed to give any definitive answers.”

“And in the meantime,” Kane observed, “you don’t know who’s coming through the mat-trans, be they friend or foe.”

“Hence the security detail,” Lakesh said. “Though some people seem less understanding of the need for it than others.” He inclined his head toward Edwards, who continued to rant about having a blaster pointed in his face when his team had arrived home.

Kane shrugged. “You know as well as I do that Edwards will be on his feet and covering your back at the first sign of trouble,” he said quietly. “Leave the man to let off steam for a while—he’ll be there when we need him.”

Lakesh looked at Kane and smiled, reminded of the natural leadership qualities that the ex-Mag possessed.

While the men explained how Kane had come into possession of the ceremonial blade and outlined what had happened with Ohio Blue out in Louisiana, Brigid took it upon herself to assist Donald Bry and his brain trust in sifting through the data to verify the nature of the satellite disruption itself. Brigid had been a crucial player in many of the Cerberus team’s technical advances, including the understanding and development of the interphaser, a portable teleportational device that exploited naturally occurring geomagnetic energy. With her uncanny memory and natural intelligence, Brigid’s contribution of both facts and intuitive leaps had served the operatives of the redoubt well in their continued defence of the people of Earth.

When she joined them, copper-haired Bry was flicking through screen after screen of raw data along with two other computer operators, analyzing each page as quickly as they could, looking for possible errors or glitches. While it was true that Cerberus monitored much of the activities on Earth at any given moment through a variety of data streams, it would be impossible to assign an individual to continuously monitor each of those feeds, particularly given the redoubt’s personnel limitations. Instead, the vast majority of the system was automated, requiring staff only to engage in the more time-responsive feeds, such as the real-time communications that the Commtacts offered.

Brigid rested against the side of the desk next to Bry, sitting on its very edge. “What do you have, Donald?” she asked brightly, gazing at the scrolling data on his terminal screen.

“A headache,” Bry growled, shaking his head. “Something like this should be obvious, but I just can’t pinpoint what it is.”

“Looking too hard, maybe?” Brigid suggested as she peered at the data screen for a few more seconds, feeling Bry’s frustration. “What time did this happen?” she asked.

“We have it as 15.37 and eight seconds,” Bry responded. “But I’ve looked through all the satellite footage and data leading immediately up to that point and nothing is showing up.”

“Both satellites went down at the same time?” Brigid asked.

Bry shook his head. “There’s three seconds in it,” he explained. “The Keyhole sat went first.”

Brigid considered this for a moment. “What if you flip the search?” she asked. “Look outwards instead of in?”

“We’ve checked sunspot activity,” Bry told her. “In fact, it was one of the first things that Lakesh suggested—but there’s nothing.”

“Do you have footage?” Brigid asked.

At a nearby desk, lanky Brewster Philboyd overheard Brigid’s request and called up something on his own computer monitor with a quick tapping of the keys. “This is what we’ve got,” he told her.

Brigid dropped down from where she perched by Bry’s desk and stepped over to watch the footage playing on Philboyd’s monitor. It was a fairly standard satellite photo, showing an unspecified terrain of yellow-brown color, coupled with the dark blue edge of water to one side, and a white blush of clouds drifting across the center. Brigid watched for a few seconds, noticing the slightest movement of the shadows of the clouds on the terrain beneath, confirming that it was not simply a static image. After fifteen seconds, the image abruptly cut to static.

“15.37.08,” Brewster told her.

“Play it again,” Brigid instructed, her eyes still on the monitor’s recorded satellite feed.

Brewster tapped at his keyboard for a moment, and then the image seemed to reset itself before the sequence repeated. He ultimately played it a further seven times before Brigid caught what it was she was searching for.

“There’s a shadow,” Brigid told him.

By this stage Donald Bry and several of the other techs had joined them to watch the sequence for themselves, wondering at what Brigid’s eerily insightful mind might discover that they had missed.

Brewster ran the fifteen-second sequence once more, and Brigid closed her eyes and counted it down in her head. “Sun’s roughly overhead. Watch the cloud to the bottom right of the screen,” she instructed, not bothering to open her eyes. With her exceptional memory, Brigid was able to reconstruct the sequence with incredible accuracy in her mind, and she used that facility to focus in on the information she wanted, magnifying the image in her head. “Twelve, thirteen,” she counted to herself, and then she pronounced in a louder voice, “shadow.”

Then the feed went dead once more, the clock indicator showing 15.37.08.

A smile played across Brigid’s lips as she opened her eyes and saw Donald, Brewster and the others turning from the static-filled screen to stare at her in openmouthed bewilderment.

“It’s there for a second,” Bry said.

“Less than that,” Brewster corrected. “What is it?”

Brigid’s brow furrowed as she thought it over, trying to transform the half-second shadow on the uneven surface of the cloud into a three-dimensional object. “Pass me your notepad,” she instructed.

Brewster Philboyd did so, handing her a pen, as well. Still standing, Brigid bent over the table and sketched hurriedly on the pad until she had roughed out a side view of a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Then she drew the shadow that they had seen upon it, recalling the details from her mind while Brewster brought up a static frame for reference for the others. Sketching three quick lines out from the shadow, she extrapolated its form, interpreting the shape of the object that must have cast it. It was roughly circular, fat at its girth so that it appeared to be more like a flattened or squashed circle. The edge seemed ragged, deliberately so, for Brigid’s penmanship was precise. When she had finished she showed the others her sketch, and the notebook was passed around the handful of technicians standing around the desk.

“What is that?” Donald asked as he gazed at the ragged, circular object that Brigid had drawn.

“Unless it’s been severely damaged, it’s almost certainly nothing mechanical or man-made,” Brigid said. “It’s too irregular. I think it’s a meteor.”

“Couldn’t be,” Bry muttered, shaking his head with disbelief. “It would have to be pretty big to knock out both satellites so completely.”

When he looked up, Donald Bry found Brigid staring at him with her piercing emerald eyes. “Is there a new rule?” she inquired coquettishly.

“What do you mean?” Bry asked.

“Meteors can only get so big now?” Brigid suggested.

In spite of himself, Bry laughed at her comment. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just so unbelievable. We’ve had trouble coming at us from every which way since Cerberus was established—aliens and parasites and insane tribal killers. I just never expected to lose everything so suddenly because of a natural phenomenon.”

“Meteors don’t always travel alone,” Brigid pointed out. “Could be a storm, with two separate rocks knocking into our equipment.”

As the discussion continued, Lakesh, Kane and Grant came over to see what the commotion was. When Bry explained Brigid’s extrapolation based on the data, Lakesh looked concerned.

Kane sidled up to Brigid as the others discussed the implications of her theory. “You wouldn’t have thought a big chunk of rock would cause so much upset,” he muttered.

Brigid looked at him. “An impacting meteor could fall into the class of an extinction-level event, Kane,” she told him quietly.

Kane made a show of looking at his hands, checking he was in one piece before looking back at her with a lopsided grin. “And yet we still stand.”

Brigid shook her head in despair. “A meteor killed the dinosaurs, darling,” she told him sarcastically.

“An’ if it takes out lizards, I’m all for it,” Kane assured her.

Chapter 5

Afternoon was beginning its soft surrender to evening, and the moon could be seen high in the pale sky, a white orb peering down from the curtain of slowly darkening blue.

Peter Marks sat contentedly on the old bench that rested on the stoop outside his front door, his glasses perched on his nose, his faithful hound Barney dozing at his feet. It had been a long day, just like any other, up at 5:00 a.m. to work the fields. Now he was happy just to sit in the cooling breeze and read while his wife toiled in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Today, Peter Marks was reading a dog-eared history book that outlined the establishment of the Program of Unification and told of the horrors of the beforetimes. It was a strange thing to read about, up here in the north, so far from the mighty villes and their sophisticated ways—almost like reading about an alien world. Here in the place that the old maps called Saskatchewan, Canada, the villes and their strictures seemed like something from another planet.

Peter Marks had worked these fields for as long as he could remember, and before that the fields had been worked by his father, who had still called him Junior until the day he died forty years ago. Two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, Peter was still powerfully built with the strength of an outdoors man and the thinning white hair and tired eyesight that came with age. The Marks Farm had stood out here in the middle of nowhere for longer than anyone could remember, yielding crops of carrots and beets and potatoes that Peter and his wife would take to market fifteen miles away and trade for everything else they needed. It was a hard life, but it had an honesty and a simplicity that Peter enjoyed. As his father had told him so many times as they sat down at the dinner table to enjoy the food he had grown, “There’s a truth to growing things that won’t ever be found in any ville.” Peter agreed, though he found himself fascinated by the literature that the villes produced, so caught up in their little worlds and their narrow worldviews.

As Peter’s eyes worked over the page, reading slowly and carefully, following the line of his finger, Barney suddenly woke up and let out a bright yip. Peter reached down and stroked the old mongrel on his flank as the dog stood and peered at the sky above the fields.

“What is it?” Peter encouraged. “What is it, boy?”

Barney barked again, standing rigid as he watched the skies. Peter patted the dog’s side reassuringly as he peered out across the fields. High in the darkening blue sky, Peter Marks saw the streaks of light appear—shooting stars—a hundred or more. It was beautiful.

“Alison!” he called. “Ally, come quick.”

A moment later, Peter’s wife, Alison, came bustling out onto the porch, wearing an apron across her wide hips, a wooden spoon held in her hand. “What is it, Pete?”

Peter stood up and pointed to the skies. “Something wonderful is happening,” he said. “Shooting stars. A hundred of them. Mebbe more.”

“Oh, it’s so pretty,” Alison cooed. She sidled next to her husband of forty years, wrapping her arm around his strong body. “We should make a wish.”

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