Kane eyed the street, his mind racing, searching for some inspiration that might save their lives. He was in the business district again, the place where he and Brigid had found the abandoned media station full of video tapes. The buildings in this sector featured decorative quadrangles, open spaces with statues and fountains designed to calm their occupants. Up ahead Kane could see one of these open spaces tucked behind a series of decorative Grecian-style columns, a metal sculpture acting as a centerpiece in its concrete haven. The sculpture flashed bronze as Kane’s headlights touched it.
“Hang on,” Kane called, pumping the accelerator and pulling the steering wheel in a tight turn to send the Sandcat threading between the closest set of pillars.
Grant bucked about in his seat, clinging to the handgrips on the USMG-73s as the Sandcat left the road and leaped over the paving stones. The personnel carrier followed, the dead Mag’s eyes fixed on the Sandcat’s rear with deadly intensity.
The Sandcat zipped past the stone columns, clipping them with its right side as Kane goosed more power from the straining engine. Suddenly, his right-hand wing mirror disappeared in a crash of splintering plastic and glass, and Grant shouted a warning down from his vantage point.
“Go left!”
“Just get that monkey off our back,” Kane shouted back, his eyes fixed on the courtyard they now found themselves in where it materialized in the headlamps. The courtyard was littered with decorative features: wooden benches, water troughs and a giant chess board sitting in the shadow of the metallic sculpture at its center.
Kane wrenched the wheel, clipping a wooden bench with his front wing, knocking the seat from its restraining posts. The personnel carrier followed, keeping barely a car length behind him, rising and dipping over the cracked paving slabs. The distance was not much, but it was enough for Grant to line up his target and flick the triggers of the heavy machine guns once more, sending a stream of heavy-duty bullets into the hood of the personnel carrier, just beneath the nightmarish corpse face of its reanimated driver.
Grant’s bullets strafed the chasing vehicle as Kane weaved between benches, whipping the back of the Sandcat around as he roared past the metal sculpture in the center of the courtyard. Each bullet let out a hideous shriek as it tore from the muzzles of the USMGs as if in terrible pain. Grant ignored the noise, eyes fixed on the target.
The Sandcat kicked into the air, leaping over a raised section of the courtyard, slamming down again with a heavy bounce, bullets streaking from its top-mount turret. Kane yanked the wheel hard, forcing the vehicle toward the line of columns at the edge of the quad once more.
Grant tracked the personnel carrier that followed, keeping it dead in his sights as they raced through the paved area that fronted the office block.
The dead driver was struggling to keep up with Kane’s driving prowess, his heavier vehicle proving no advantage now in the tight space. Bullets were streaming before his armored windshield, kicking up debris and obscuring his vision.
Grant dipped the guns lower, targeting the grille of the chasing wag, his fingers never easing on the triggers. An unbroken stream of bullets slammed into the personnel carrier, rattling across the grille, staking it again and again with their pointed tips.
Suddenly, smoke began pouring from the personnel carrier’s hood, but Grant did not let up for even a moment—he kept strafing the engine cover with bullets, hitting as often as he could with the bouncing path that Kane was taking.
Kane pulled at the wheel again, hurtling around toward the bronze sculpture, shifting gears as he fought to keep traction. He heard something explode behind him, and Grant let out a cheer at the same moment. Behind them, the personnel carrier was on fire, its strengthened grille shattered by the relentless assault of the USMGs.
Kane hooked the Sandcat around, weaving back through the columns and onto the street. Behind him, the personnel carrier became a fireball before slamming against one of the pillars. Flames licked up the pillar, black smoke souring the night air.
“Nice work,” Kane congratulated as he watched the fireball in the rearview mirror.
But there was no escaping the ominous show of energy that powered through the ville from the direction they had come. It was getting closer all the time.
They were back on the road, but there was no time to let up.
* * *
D
EAD
M
AG
S
OUTH
LUNGED
for Brigid again with the cable, his dead eyes staring into hers. Brigid sidestepped, gasping as the length of cable snapped against her like a whip. She danced out of the way, feeling the pain in her side where the cord had struck.
The Magistrate came for her in the darkness, lashing the whip-cord up and back so that it snapped in the air.
At least he no longer has his gun, Brigid thought. That’s something.
She ducked around a ceiling support strut as the cable slashed through the air at her face, almost stumbling over the fallen body of another Magistrate blackened from electrical burns. Mag South slapped his palm against the metal strut, unreeling the cord at Brigid’s face. She felt it lash against her cheek, stumbled back at the sting.
Her face was throbbing around the cut, and when she touched her cheek she found that the cord had drawn blood. She looked up as the shadow of the Magistrate fluttered past her vision, skipped back as he grabbed for her...and slipped.
Suddenly Brigid was falling, the broken wall at her back, just two inches of floor under the toes of her boots. She reeled in place, bringing herself back from the brink and right into the arms of the dead Magistrate. The Mag cinched the cord around her throat in an instant, shoving her down to her knees with a violent thrust. He stood over her, the electrical cable wrapped around Brigid’s neck, one hand on each end as he pulled it tighter.
Brigid made a gagging noise, felt the pressure on her windpipe. She grasped for the electrical cable, tried to hook her hands under it to alleviate the pressure. Standing over her, the Magistrate just pulled harder, using his leverage to force her back to the edge of the floor where the outside wall was missing.
Brigid’s back arched, her head tilted backward out of the wall, rain falling against her face. The Magistrate would kill her now; she had nothing left to give, no way to fight back.
Her hands skittered on the floor seeking purchase, her head reeled. There had to be something she could do, some way to stop this monster that she and Kane had left in the offices.
In the offices.
Of course, that was it. As black spots swam before her vision, Brigid’s right hand reached behind her, feeling desperately along her waistband until she found the snub-nosed .38 she had jammed there, discovered in the skeleton hand of Bryan Baubier.
Brigid pulled the weapon free, brought it around without really seeing anymore, flipping the safety off as she guessed where the Magistrate was—and pulled the trigger, all in the space of a second. The .38 boomed loud in the darkened room, expelling its bullet in a flash of explosive.
The Magistrate took the bullet to the side of his skull, no longer protected by the lost helmet he had worn.
Brigid felt the pressure on her neck ease as the Magistrate’s grip slackened. She wrenched the cord from her throat as the reanimated Mag stomped backward clutching the gaping wound in his desiccated face.
Her mind still whirling, Brigid tried to make sense of the scene before her as the Mag stumbled back, the glow of the approaching energy wave behind him. Brigid levelled the .38 and took another shot, blasting the Magistrate from her crouching position, driving a bullet through his forehead, right between the eyes. The Mag stumbled back with the hit, and then suddenly he was gone, his feet on empty air, tumbling over the side of the building through the missing wall.
Brigid stood up and ran across the room to the space where the Magistrate had disappeared, watching with satisfaction as he struck the street below in a jangle of limbs. The tidal wave of energy was edging ever closer. And down there, among the abandoned buildings, she saw twin headlights traveling at high speed toward her, bumping and weaving past the wrecked vehicles that lined the deserted streets.
Brigid smiled, shaking her head. “Got to be Kane—no one else drives like that,” she said, her throat raw from the attempted strangulation.
Chapter 32
“So, who was the old guy I saw you with?” Kane asked as they pulled up outside the hospital. The street was littered with the broken bodies of Magistrates. Their limbs sprawled at painful angles and many exhibited awful blaster wounds on their rotted torsos and ruined faces. Not one of them moved.
“Scientist,” Grant told Kane as he climbed out of the Sandcat’s cab. “Professor type. He was a plaything of a baron. Just like all of us were, once.”
Kane surveyed the dead bodies of the Magistrates where they lay in the rain, their vehicles abandoned. Two-dozen fixed lines were attached to the ruined front of the hospital building, swinging in the wind. “Looks like Brigid has been busy,” he deadpanned, reaching for one of the dangling fixed lines. He gave it a hard tug to test it. “Cords seem secure. Gonna be our easiest way up.”
The two friends looked back down the street for a few seconds. In the distance, the roads were rippling with energy as if an earthquake were shaking them apart, great gouts of lancing electricity crackling into the air in plumes as it carved a path outward from the Magistrate headquarters. In the far distance they could see a glowing column of fire, the Magistrate Hall burning itself into oblivion, folding in on itself as the overloaded gateway seared through the dimensional rift it had carved.
“Easy’s good,” Grant acknowledged, reaching for a rope. “Quick’s better.”
The two men hurried up the fixed lines, pulling themselves up with their hands and ankles, grips tight despite the wetness of the cords from the rain.
* * *
T
HEY
FOUND
B
RIGID
TALKING
into a deconstructed radio unit beside the mat-trans chamber. Lakesh’s voice was coming from the tiny speaker, sounding small and distorted by an overlay of static.
“We need to get more power to pluck you from your current location,” Lakesh was explaining.
“There’s nothing here,” Brigid told him in her hoarse voice. “I’m sorry. If I could figure out how we’d been misrouted here then maybe I could find us a way back.” She looked up as Grant and Kane came trudging in out of the rain, the fierce energy churning in the streets behind them.
“Hate to admit this,” Kane said by way of greeting, “but I think I may have blown up our only way home.” He gestured to the green-gold column of fire that could be seen billowing through the missing walls.
Brigid shook her head thoughtfully. “No,” she insisted. “If I can send a signal to Lakesh then I can send a person. There has to be a way. What did you blow up?”
“Dimensional gateway,” Kane said, brushing a hand through his rain-soaked hair.
Brigid eyed the gold-green column that was blasting into the atmosphere. “Which means those energies...” she began.
“Already ahead of you,” Lakesh’s voice said from the tinny speaker of the radio unit. “How long do you think you have there?”
Brigid, Kane and Grant watched as the fiery column cut through the ville like the sword of some great, mythical god. “Not long,” they agreed in unison.
“Sooner’s better,” Kane added.
“Always,” Lakesh agreed, his voice beamed to them from another Earth.
* * *
I
N
THE
C
ERBERUS
OPS
ROOM
,
things were getting back to normal. Cleanup teams were already packing up the ruined computers and bringing in replacements, while Donald Bry ran a subroutine check on the mat-trans. A team would replace the armaglass before the day was over.
“We’re tracking a major power spike in Brigid’s immediate vicinity,” Brewster Philboyd related as he studied the readings on his laptop. His fixed computer had been trashed by a Magistrate’s bullet somewhere during the firefight.
Lakesh looked up from his own screen, studying Brewster’s for a few seconds. “Whatever that energy source is, it appears to be expanding,” he observed.
“It is,” Brewster confirmed. “Exponentially. I don’t know what it is but it’s cutting a hole right through dimensions. My guess is it has something to do with how Kane’s team ended up on that other Earth.”
“Agreed,” Lakesh said, but he was already figuring out a way to tap it. “Reroute power through the CJ-GS circuit cluster,” he commanded, leaping up from his desk.
Donald Bry shook his head. “Those circuits can’t take much,” he stated dourly as he ran the systems check.
“Precisely,” Lakesh replied. “I want to overload them. We’re going to route everything through them and during the power spike we should be able to hook CAT Alpha up, bypassing the normal safety protocols.”
Bry began rechecking Lakesh’s calculations, tapping figures into his calculator pad. “I really think—” he began.
“No time for that,” Lakesh warned as he pushed Bry gently from his seat at the mat-trans terminal and took over. “Reroute the circuits, Donald. And as soon as he’s done, Brewster, transfer the power. No stalling, we do this now.”
Bry ran a power switchover from his adjoining computer, the one he had been using to double-check his adjustments to the compromised mat-trans. With so many bullets flying, half the equipment had been compromised. It took just ninety seconds, and Bry told Lakesh the second his change was live. An instant later, Lakesh had toggled a run of virtual levers on the control computer, activating the corresponding circuits deep inside the mat-trans itself. Suddenly, the mat-trans was running through its power-up cycle, the chamber’s internal lighting brightening.
Domi was standing over Lakesh now, watching the lights power up through the tinted armaglass. “This will work, won’t it?” she asked.
Lakesh smiled grimly as he reprogrammed the mat-trans on the fly, drawing on his incredible knowledge of the system to reposition its command protocols. “We live in hope,” he told her breathlessly.
Bry checked his terminal screen, waiting for the switchover to complete and take effect. “We’re ready,” he announced.
“And we’re live,” Brewster said a moment later. “Power diverting now.” He watched his laptop screen for five seconds before looking up to where Lakesh sat poised before the mat-trans console. “Readings are...off the chart, Dr. Singh. We have thirty seconds, at best, before the system burns out.”
“That’s more than enough,” Lakesh said, striking a switch on his console. “Brigid?” he called over the Commtact. “We’re scooping you out of there now. Get into the mat-trans and lock the door. And inform the others that it may hurt.”
* * *
“R
OGER
THAT
,” B
RIGID
SAID
before ripping the power lead from the radio.
The room seemed suddenly silent without the radio’s buzz, even though the mat-trans was beginning to cycle through its prep sequence.
“We’d better get inside,” Kane said.
Brigid nodded, tapping the door code into the keypad of the matter-shifter’s chamber. She took one last look out the holed wall of the hospital as the door slid open. Out there, the column of cosmic energies was widening, ripping through whole buildings as it expanded across the ville. It burned brightly, lighting the ville like the noonday sun.
“How long do we have?” Grant asked, seeing the look of consternation on Brigid’s face.
“Less than a minute,” Brigid estimated as the shock wave ripped through a building just a block away.
Together the three Cerberus warriors stepped into the mat-trans and locked the doors.
* * *
“T
HEY
’
RE
IN
,” B
RY
CONFIRMED
as he watched the changing digits on the control screen.
“Power’s being channelled,” Brewster explained. “Scoop is ready.”
At the mat-trans control console, Mohandas Lakesh Singh jabbed the button that would scoop Kane and his team out of the other world. And held his breath.
* * *
T
HROUGH
THE
ARMAGLASS
wall of the mat-trans, Kane, Grant and Brigid could see the energy wave plowing through the ville toward them, a hundred broken lines of green-gold lightning blistering across the pebbled safety glass, brighter and brighter.
“This better work,” Kane said as the mat-trans began to shudder beneath them, the power sequence engaging via remote.
The tidal wave of energy swooped closer, crashing into the hospital with the power of a thousand suns. In the street, the Magistrates and their vehicles were consumed in the cosmic whirlpool, and the missing facade of the building was torn through in an instant. Inside the mat-trans chamber, the Cerberus warriors gritted their teeth as the wave struck.
The mat-trans glowed brilliantly for a single second as it shunted its three occupants to another destination. And then the wave hit and the mat-trans, the room and the whole hospital disappeared in a burst of cosmic static.
The wave continued its rapid expansion, carving a searing path through the abandoned ville of Quocruft before blasting outward, consuming everything in its way. From a distance, Earth looked like a beacon, a shaft of energy sticking through it like an olive on a cocktail stick.
* * *
M
ILLIONS
OF
MILES
AWAY
,
as she crossed through the orbit of Jupiter,
Tiamat
witnessed the great conflagration that impaled Earth, consuming the planet too soon for the dragon mother ship to complete her final download and bring the Annunaki back from extinction. Her last child was dead, she knew, stillborn before he could ever know life.
* * *
T
HEY
WERE
SURFERS
on the cosmic wave, multiple worlds racing before their eyes. Kane, Grant and Brigid could only strain as a billion different images vied for space in their brains, their bodies hurtling across the timeless stream.
And then they were home.
They stood in the hexagonal chamber, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass walls arrayed before them, new cracks visible in the old panes.
“Everyone okay?” Kane asked through rasping breaths. He was leaning over, pressing his palms to his upper legs as he tried to shake the vertiginous feeling of movement that buzzed through his body.
Brigid nodded very slowly while Grant muttered a few words of agreement before vomiting in the corner of the Cerberus mat-trans. They were home.
* * *
L
AKESH
’
S
TEAM
WERE
READY
with thermal blankets and rehydrating drinks when the mat-trans doors were finally opened once the power flux had dissipated. The system was powered down entirely, and Lakesh informed everyone that it would be out of commission for a week while they recalibrated everything and replaced the burned-out components.
“A normal facility would require
three weeks
to recover from something like this,” he reminded his team, “which is why I’m telling you all we’ll be back online inside of seven days. Don’t make a liar out of me.” He smiled then, knowing that his trusted personnel would step up to the challenge. They always did.
Domi took pains to tell Kane, Grant and Brigid about everything that had happened while they had been away. They had missed an other-dimensional invasion and it had been that invasion that had tapped into their mat-trans journey and thrown them to the abandoned ville of Quocruft.
They had visited a dead world and lived to tell the tale. That was all that really mattered. Donald Bry promised to recalibrate their Commtacts as soon as everyone had caught their breath.
As the others got themselves sorted out, filed their reports and caught up on a much-needed meal, Brigid Baptiste excused herself. She headed through the corridors of the Cerberus facility alone, wrapped in her own thoughts. Brigid made her way to the residential area where a whole run of self-contained suites and rooms was arrayed along a corridor like an apartment block. Like the rest of the Cerberus facility, the corridor had been carved directly into the mountain and it had a cold, rocky feel, reminding Brigid of cave exploring.
The beautiful redhead strode past the doors, acknowledging the occasional familiar face as she passed other personnel. Two-thirds of the way down the corridor she stopped, gazing at the door before her. There was nothing remarkable about it; it looked much like the others that lined the corridor. If anything, it had less character than the others, where some occupants had painted decorations or hung charms on the doors.
Brigid reached forward and tried the handle. It was unlocked—of course it was unlocked, why wouldn’t it be?
She pushed the door wide, stepping into the darkened room that sat silently behind it.
“Lights,” Brigid said to the empty room, and the automated lights came to life with a momentary dimming.
Inside, the suite was very simple, just a couch, a desk and a bed. There was a door to one side that led to a private shower cubicle and toilet, a small nook where coats could be hung and a simple fitted wardrobe. Brigid walked over to the desk, eyeing the notebook that lay open on it. The page was filled to the halfway point with complex equations written in a neat, precise script. Brigid smiled as she saw that a line had been crossed through and corrected beneath by the same hand. Typical of Daryl Morganstern, to correct his own work before he showed it to anyone else.
Brigid took a moment just to take in the atmosphere, to feel the man’s presence one last time. “I’m sorry, Daryl,” she said to the dead man’s living quarters. “I didn’t mean for you to die. You were so kind, so brave, even in the end. You died a hero’s death to protect me. And to protect Cerberus.
“I know I should have said all this earlier,” she finished, “and I’m sorry that I didn’t.”
Brigid remained in the room the rest of the night, tidying and boxing the man’s possessions so that the living quarters could finally be given to someone else when the time was right.