Kane and DeFore watched in wide-eyed, breathless anxiety. Kane stared at the automatic blaster in the girl"s hands, feeling cold nausea leap-frog in his belly, chill fingers tapping out a ditty of dread up and down the b.u.t.tons of his spine. He knew full well the reason behind Domi"s current resentment of Grant. Although he had never treated her badly, certainly never abused her physically or emotionally, she felt she had never earned his respect-or his love. Since hoping to one day gain his love was no longer a mitigating influence on her behavior, Domi had pretty much discarded the little self-restraint she had practiced in the past. Grant was not an authority figure in her mind any longer.
But Kane also knew the depth.of Grant"s love for the girl, and the guilt he felt about treating her as less than a fully developed human being and more as an empty-headed stereotype. In many ways, guilt was the whole foundation of the ville society.
For the past ninety years, it was beaten into the descendants of the survivors of the nukecaust that when Judgment Day arrived, humanity was rightly punished. Therefore, people were encouraged to tolerate, even welcome, a world of unremitting ordeals, conflict and death; because humanity had ruined the world, punishment was therefore deserved. Love among humans was the hardest bond to break, sopeople were conditioned to believe that since all humans were intrinsically evil, to love another one was to love evil. That way, all human beings forever remained strangers to one another.
Both Kane and Grant had been conditioned to be- lieve that, as they had so many other spurious beliefs. But he recalled what Domi had said to him in Area 51: "You and Grant didn"t stay what you were. I don"t have to stay what I am. "
Domi had never spoken truer words, Kane reflected. A few months before, a stern word or stem look from Grant would have cowed any outburst. Now she refused to give ground to Grant. Nor did she lower her Combat Master, not even when he pressed his chest against the muzzle.
He kept his dark gaze fastened on her face, his expression as immobile as if it had been carved out of teak. By degrees, the twin flames of rage glittering in Domi"s eyes guttered out. In a remarkably gentle, almost affectionate tone, he said, "You couldn"t hurt a hair on my head," and he lightly pushed the barrel of the pistol away with a forefinger.
Placing both big hands on her shoulders, he told her quietly, "I have my reasons for asking you to go back to Cerberus. Please accept them."
Domi t.i.tled her head back, unshed tears glimmering in her eyes. "Can take care of myself. Always have."
Under stress she reverted to her abbreviated mode of outlander speech.
"I know that," Grant replied. "My reasons have nothing to do with whether you can or can"t take care of yourself. Please-do this one thing for me without an argument."
Domi"s shoulder"s sagged and she bowed her head in resignation. Her whispered "Okay" was barely audible.
Grant turned away from her. Both Kane and DeFore released their pent-up breaths in noisy exhalations of relief. They and Domi followed him through the doorway to where the gateway chamber stood.
The mat-trans unit, like most of the others they had seen, was a six-sided chamber whose floor and ceiling consisted of an interlocking pattern of raised metal disks. Although all of them were superficially familiar with the fundamental working principles behind the matter transmitters, they sometimes still seemed like magic.
Kane understood, in theory, that the mat-trans units required a dizzying number of maddeningly intricate electronic procedures, all occurring within milliseconds of one another, to minimize the margins for error.
The actual conversion process was automated for this reason, sequenced by an array of computers and microprocessors. Sometimes he wondered if Lakesh, despite his former position as Project Cerberus overseer, knew as much as he claimed about the devices.
As one of the major components of the Totality Concept"s Overproject Whisper, the quantum inter- phase mat-trans inducers opened a rift in the hyper-dimensional quantum stream, a wormhole between a relativistic here and there. That much of the theory and concept Kane understood, even though it seemed fiendishly complicated. He knew the pathways always had to lead to an active destination gateway, whether it was across the country or on the other side of the world. If a destination lock wasnot achieved, or a transit line not opened, then jumpers could conceivably materialize at completely random points in linear s.p.a.ce-or worse, endlessly speed through Cerberus"s global mat-trans network, going for eternity absolutely nowhere, with no chance of reconst.i.tution.
Although he accepted at face value that the machines worked, he had never grown accustomed to the concept that minds that created such stupendously complicated devices could not have found a way to prevent the nukecaust.
Kane pointed to the electronic keypad at the side of the jump chamber"s door. The LCD glowed with a string of numerals. In a low voice, he asked DeFore, "You remember the two-digit encrypted ID you"ll have to enter after you program the Cerberus destination code, right? If not, you won"t be going anywhere."
The extra pair of numbers was a security precaution concocted by Lakesh and his apprentice, Bry, to make doubly certain no one could jump unannounced into the Cerberus redoubt.
DeFore did her best to hide her nervousness when she nodded. "I remember."
Kane stepped into the chamber and waited for Grant to join him. With a wry smile, Domi lifted her right index finger to her nose and snapped it away in the sharp "one percent" salute. It was a gesture Kane and Grant had developed during their Mag days, symbolizing undertakings with very small ratios of success. Domi had seen the two men exchange the salute often enough to imitate it perfectly.
Grant returned the salute gravely. He started to step into the chamber, but Domi latched on to his arm and threw her arms around him. She stood on her tiptoes, pulled his head down and kissed him with a fierce possessiveness. She released him and stepped back.
By the metal handle affixed to the armagla.s.s, Grant sealed the door. The lock clicked, circuitry engaged and the automatic transit process began. He leaned against the wall, pushing his Sin Eater back into its holster. Kane followed suit. Inasmuch as the Sin Eaters were not equipped with safety switches, a reflexive jerk of the finger while reviving from the transit process could result in fatal consequences for the rest of the jump team.
As the hexagonal disks above and below them exuded a silvery glow, Kane wondered briefly if Domi had any idea why Grant was so violently opposed to her accompanying them on the jump. He decided it really didn"t matter.
Plasma wave forms resembling white, early-morning mist began wafting from the emitter array above and below. Kane closed his eyes, waiting to be swept up in the nanosecond of nonexistence.
Chapter 12.
Kane came to wakefulness with a faint electronic hum in his ears. He blinked, and the world swam mistily back into reality. He swayed on unsteady legs, a bit surprised to see he had ended the mat-trans jump in the same standing posture in which he had begun it.
Usually, no matter how jumpers arranged themselves before a transit, they arrived at their destinations flat on their backs. This time he remained upright, but he faced away from the door, staring at thesmoke-gray armagla.s.s. He felt remarkably clearheaded, a small bonus for which he breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes, even the cleanest of jumps had debilitating effects.
Grant, however, lay on the hexagonal floor plates, his p.r.o.ne body wreathed by fading wisps of vapor, a byproduct of what Lakesh referred to as the " "quincunx effect."
With a snorting exhalation of breath, Grant pushed himself into a sitting position, staring around anxiously. He climbed to his feet, stumbling slightly from a brief surge of vertigo. "Not too bad," he commented. "How do you feel?"
"No jump sickness, if that"s what you mean."
"I could see that," Grant said impatiently. "For one thing, we"re not puking our guts out. For another, I knew we weren"t jumping to a Russian unit."
Kane repressed a smile. Grant always held up their jump to Russia as the standard for bad transits. The Cerberus gateway link had been unable to establish a link with the Russian unit"s autosequence initiators.
The matter-stream carrier-wave modulations couldn"t be synchronized, which resulted in a severe bout of jump sickness, symptoms of which included vomiting, excruciating head pain, weakness and hallucinations.
Grant grasped the door handle. His Sin Eater popped into his waiting palm. Kane unleathered his own side arm. "You ready?" Grant asked.
Kane only nodded, dropping into a crouch.
Heaving up on the handle, Grant shouldered the door open. The heavy armagla.s.s portal swung outward on counterbalanced hinges. Grant ducked back inside the chamber and both men waited for a tense tick of time. Nothing happened, so they cautiously eased through the doorway. Kane wasn"t particularly surprised by what he saw.
They were in a very long room, at least twenty yards. The wall on their left was completely covered by armagla.s.s, running the entire length of the room. On the far side of it they saw a catwalk leading to a central control complex. Instrument consoles with gla.s.s-covered gauges and computer terminals lined the walls. Even at this distance they could hear the purposeful hum of drive units and banks of computers chittering like a flock of startled birds.
"This place look the slightest bit familiar?" Grant inquired in a husky whisper.
"Onjy the slightest bit," Kane answered in the same subdued tone. "We"re on Thunder Isle... pretty much within spitting distance of New Edo and Shizuka."
Grant swiveled his head on his neck, anger glittering briefly in his dark eyes. Kane met his gaze with no particular expression on his face. "That couldn"t be the reason you forbade Domi to come with us, could it?"
In a threatening rumble, Grant retorted, "You know better than that."
Kane didn"t respond. In fact, he didn"t know better than that, but it wasn"t the time or place tointerrogate Grant as to his motives for insisting Domi stay behind. His own concern for Brigid rose with every pa.s.sing second, considering the company she was no doubt being forced to keep.
They walked onto the railed catwalk, listening to a low hum ahead of them, almost like the vibrations of a gong that had been struck. The hum gradually became a whine, and the air all around them seemed to shiver with the sound.
The catwalk overlooked a vast chamber shaped like a hexagon, and was far larger than looked possible from the outside. A dim glow shone down from the high, flat ceiling. Two faint columns of light beamed from twin fixtures, both the size of wag tires. Ma.s.sive wedge-shaped ribs of metal supported the roof.
The shafts of luminescence fell upon a huge forked pylon made of some burnished metal that projected up from a sunken concave area in the center of the chamber. The two horns of the pylon curved up and around, facing each other. Mounted on the tips of each p.r.o.ng were spheres that looked as if they had been sculpted from multifaceted quartz crystals. The pylon was at least twenty feet tall, with ten feet separating the forked branches. Extending outward from the base of the pylon at ever decreasing angles into the low shadows was a taut network of fiber-optic filaments. They disappeared into sleeve sockets that perforated the plates of dully gleaming alloy sheathing the floor. Many of them were buckled here and there, bulging but not showing splits. The faint odor of scorched rose blossoms tickled their nostrils.
They paused to look down at the pylon, recalling the last time they had seen it. It had been encapsulated chaos, a cosmic madness. Sparks sizzled through the facets of the prisms, crackling fingers of energy darted from one sphere to the other and back again.
They remembered how the crystals spit arcs of energy in random, corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g patterns, and how the floor supporting the pylon suddenly heaved beneath their feet, the metal plates squealing, rivets popping loose with the sound of gunshots. Plasma had lanced from the p.r.o.ngs of the pylon, two coruscating fountains of fiery sparks that shed glowing droplets of molten silver.
"I would have figured this place would have blown itself to h.e.l.l within minutes after we jumped out of here," Grant muttered.
"Me, too," Kane agreed. "But look around- most of the damage has been repaired."
Shiny new floor plates had been riveted down, replacing those that had buckled. Even scorch marks left by the wild energy overspills were gone, apparently scrubbed away.
"One thing you have to say about him," Kane commented, turning away from the pylon, "he"s neat."
As they strode down the catwalk, Grant inquired lowly, "So you"re sure he"s behind this?"
"Who else has the technical expertise-and the sheer gall-to experiment with Operation Chronos technology?"
"You said he was dead," Grant pointed out glumly.
"No, I said I a.s.sumed he was. I also said I never saw his body."The catwalk terminated in a room packed with module after module, console upon console of advanced computer equipment. Electronic instruments and machinery rose from plinths and podia from all around.
Overhead lights gleamed on alloys, gla.s.s coverings, the CPUs. Ten chairs rose from the floor before each console. Covering four walls were crystal-fronted vid screens. Two of the screens were blank, while another showed only whorls of color. Images slid across the fourth screen, attracting Grant"s and Kane"s attention.
In grim silence they watched the vid record of the last few minutes of their previous visit to the installation. The camera had apparently been focused on the pylon. They had no problem remembering how the crackling display of energy between the forks of the pylon increased until a virtual ribbon of blue current seemed to stretch from one to the other.
The air between the p.r.o.ngs had wavered with a blurry shimmer like heat waves rising off sunbaked asphalt, and tiny glittering specks, like motes of diamond dust, swirled within the area of distortion. They spun, then whirled faster and faster, turning into a funnel cloud, like a tornado made of gold-and-silver confetti.
The funnel cloud seemed to peel back on itself, turning inside out amid vivid bursts of color. The recording didn"t have a sound track, but both men remembered the deafening, cannonading blast that accompanied the pyrotechnics.
Waves of dazzling white flame and variegated lightning bolts streaked and blazed. From the curving p.r.o.ngs spit sharp bolts of lightning, which whipped and hissed along the network of wires like serpents made of blue plasma.
Crooked ringers of energy continued to stab between the p.r.o.ngs, forming a cat"s cradle of red lightning.
They watched, feeling the same awe and dread as they had on that day a few months previous, when thousands of crackling threads of light coalesced in the center of the forks.
Gushing lines of energy formed a luminous cloud between the p.r.o.ngs, and almost faster than the eye could perceive, the cloud grew more dense and definite of outline. The shimmer built to a blinding bo-realis.
Then a star seemed to go nova, bringing a millisecond of eye-searing brilliance. The funnel cloud burst apart in fragments, as if a giant mirror shattered, and the shards flew out in all directions.
Amid the flying, glittering splinters, a small body plummeted out of the heart of darkness and fell heavily to the platform. The body wore a black, bulky combat vest, which contrasted sharply with her porcelain-hued skin and bone-white hah-.
The two men watched the image of Domi pushing herself to all fours by trembling arms, then hanging her head and vomiting.
Grant swung away from the screen, moisture gleaming in his eyes, his face contorted into an indefinable expression. Inhaling a lungful of air, he shouted, "Sindri! Show yourself!"
The echoes of his bellow chased one another through the room. Grant roared again, "Sindri! You went to a lot of trouble to lure us here, so stop playing hide-and-seek!"
A lilting voice said mildly, "It wasn"t all that much trouble, Mr. Grant."Kane shifted position so Grant didn"t block his view of the very small man stepping out from an alcove between a pair of free-standing consoles. Sindri was walking hand in hand with a very tall woman. She looked taller than she actually was, because of her nip-to-head proximity with the little man. Although his head went light with relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, he said nothing. When facing Sindri, he knew it was best to put on the facade of being unsurprised by anything and everything.
Both Brigid and Sindri appeared to have been dipped in jet-black dye from the necks down. After a second, Grant and Kane realized they wore the same formfitting bodysuits as the night-gaunts. Although they weren"t wearing the cowls or masks, the big Casull revolver pointed at Brigid more than made up for it.
"Mr. Kane. Mr. Grant." Sindri nodded in turn to both men. "Nice to see you again. You"re looking well."
Kane ignored him. To Brigid he inquired, "You"re all right?"
She gave him a wan, jittery smile. "Except for being held hostage again, I"m fine."
Although Kane pretended Sindri wasn"t present, Grant addressed him in a loud, snarling tone. "What the f.u.c.k are you up to here, p.i.s.sant?"
Anger glittered briefly in Sindri"s blue eyes. "That you will find out for yourselves. And might I ask you to lower your voice a trifle? It disturbs the feng shut of this place."
Kane rolled his eyes ceilingward.
KANE RARELY DEVOTED much thought to his enemies, primarily due to the fact mat most of them were dead. They either had died at his or Grant"s hands, or through their own machinations. Sindri was one of the exceptions, an enemy who had apparently perished twice before. Despite the fact he had returned from the dead after their first collision, Kane didn"t figure it was reasonable to think they"d ever contend with him again. But Sindri delighted in unpredictability. The fact he existed at all was due to unpredictability and the often cruel whims of nature.
Nearly a year before, while exploring an anomaly in the Cerberus network of functioning gateway units, Lakesh, Brigid and Kane visited Redoubt Papa near Washington Hole. They found the body of a strange, stunted, troll-like man and returned with it to Cerberus. After a postmortem, the troll was found not to be a mutant or a hybrid but a human being modified to live in an environment with a rarefied atmosphere and low gravity.
After a bit of investigation and a process of elimination, Lakesh traced the quantum conduit used by the transadapt to jump into Redoubt Papa, to a point in outer s.p.a.ce-a predark s.p.a.ce station on the far side of the Moon known as Parallax Red.
Kane, Grant and Brigid jumped to the station, which was functional, if not exactly comfortable. It was populated by a group of stunted people known as transadapts, and led by an ingenious gnome of a man calling himself Sindri, after the master forger of the troll race in Norse mythology.
Sindri impressed them all with his wit, his charm, his probing intellect and his affected manner. They wereparticularly impressed by the startling story he told about Parallax Red and its connection to a human colony on Mars.
However, dreams of empire consumed him. After living his entire life under the heel of a minority human ruling committee, Sindri was fixated on establishing his own kingdom regardless of the cost. To that end, he planned a double strike that would not only unseat the barons, but literally destroy Mars, his birthplace and the world he despised.
That was only one element of Sindri"s plan. Even if he and his transadapts migrated to Earth, the males were sterile, the women barren and utter extinction was less than thirty years away. He realized their only chance for survival was to successfully hybridize then" genetic structure with those of native Ter-rans, so the women at least could reproduce. When Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived on Parallax Red via the gateway, Sindri saw them as both fonts of information about Earth and the salvation of the trans-adapts.
Though his plans were foiled, and Kane, Brigid and Grant escaped from the s.p.a.ce station, it wasn"t the last they heard from Sindri.
The day following their return to Cerberus, the ingenious dwarf had sent them, via the mat-trans unit, his signature walking stick. The theatrical gesture told them he was still alive and could overcome their security locks. Although the Cerberus mat-trans computers a.n.a.lyzed and committed to then-memory matrixes the modulation frequency of Sin-dri"s carrier wave, and set up a digital block, it stood to reason if he could overcome one security lock, he could overcome another.
A few months later, he proved he could do so. Sindri set into motion a set of circ.u.mstances to draw Lakesh, Brigid and Kane to the Anthill, the primary Continuity of Government installation built within Mount Rushmore.
Sindri forced them all into taking a flight on the Aurora stealth plane, and announced his intention to use the nuclear weapons on board to force the barons into line, even if it meant destroying one or two.
Lakesh managed to distract Sindri and his party of transadapts, but in the process the little man"s gun went off and disabled the controls. Brigid, Kane and Lakesh ejected from the Aurora and watched it crash.
In the months that followed the incident, Kane had never spoken of his suspicions Sindri might have survived. The episode had been traumatic on a number of counts, so he had kept quiet.
There certainly seemed to be no reason to mention it now, with the little man himself smirking up at him over the sights of a revolver.
Chapter 13.
Kane composed his face into a mask of placid non-interest. Sindri c.o.c.ked his head quizzically at him, then he c.o.c.ked back the hammer of the huge revolver. The double clicks sounded frighteningly loud. In direct counterpoint, Sindri"s voice was little more than a croon. "Lower your weapons, both of you."
Kane met Brigid"s eyes and she nodded shortly. He dropped his arm to his side, and after a moment"s hesitation, Grant did the same."Nothing to say, Mr. Kane?" Sindri asked. "No gasps of astonishment, no exclamations of "You! You"re supposed to be dead!"?"