Death Cry

Grant sniggered for a moment at that, before Brigid pierced him with her emerald glare.

“The pair of you seem to have mistaken diplomacy for insanity,” she snarled.

Grant held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, despite the automatic pistol in his right hand. “Whoa there,” he muttered. “This is strictly Kane’s insanity. I just follow the leader.”

Brigid’s green eyes were narrowed slits and she bit back a curse at the huge, dark-skinned man before turning to address Kane once more. “So you plan to bluff your way inside, and then what?”

Even in the semidarkness, a mischievous twinkle seemed to play in Kane’s eyes, just for a second. “I’ll insist they all leave or I’ll set off the bomb.”

“What bomb?” Brigid snapped. “You’re holding a flask.”

“They don’t need to know that,” Kane said.

Grant agreed. “I’d say it’s preferable if they don’t know it,” he muttered.

“Scared by the loco bomber,” Kane continued, “they all wait outside a safe distance and we get the place to ourselves. You find what you need, then we head back to Lakesh and Cerberus.”

Brigid reached a hand up and fidgeted with the white scarf that covered her hair as she let loose a frustrated sigh. “Brilliant. And what, pray tell, is your plan for getting out again? You know, with maybe fifteen armed and now very much antagonized millennialists waiting for us at the end of a bottleneck.”

Kane’s smile was bright in the darkness. “This used to be a military base, right, Baptiste? We’ll use their mat-trans. Simple. And yet, genius.”

The mat-trans chamber was found in many of the prenukecaust military bases, and offered a quick way to move from one to the other by the almost instantaneous transfer of particles. Having been originally constructed as a military installation, the Cerberus redoubt, the headquarters of Kane’s field team, had a mat-trans chamber. However, they had traveled to Grand Forks via two Manta flyers, which acted as both transatmospheric and subspace aircraft. It would be a simple matter, Kane reasoned, to collect the hidden Mantas once the heat had died down.

The Cerberus exiles had a variety of ways to transport people, the Manta aircraft and the mat-trans network were just two. In the past few years they had come to rely increasingly on another form of teleportation called the interphaser, which exploited naturally occurring centers of energy both around the world and on the Moon and other planets. The interphaser was ideal for traveling between known locations but, like the mat-trans, could be dangerous when gating into the unknown. There were other limitations on the interphaser, as well, but for the right mission it was ideal.

Keeping pace with Kane, Brigid eyed him for a few moments before she spoke. “Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”

“Not unless he drinks the bomb by mistake.” Grant grinned.

Kane led the way along the ill-lit tunnel, assuming the role of point man. Taking point was an unconscious habit for Kane, dating back to his days as a Magistrate. He exhibited an uncanny knack for sniffing out danger, a sixth sense in some respect, though it was really an incredible combination of the natural five he possessed, honed to an acute sharpness. Walking point, his eyes darting right and left, his hearing seeking changes in sound at an almost infinitesimal level, Kane felt electric, tuned in to his surroundings at a near Zenlike level. Walking point in the danger zone, Kane felt alive.

They met another pair of guards as they worked their way down the incline into the underground base, and each time they played the same bluff, with Kane insisting that anyone who disagreed with his proposal would end up picking his entrails off the tunnel walls.

By the time they reached the concrete exterior of the base itself, even Brigid was feeling quietly confident.

At the end of the shaft, a huge circular hole had been bored through the thick concrete wall of the old military base, taller than Grant and wide enough for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.

“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.

The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.

“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.

“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”

As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Kane announced as he entered the computer room, his hand holding the gunmetal flask prominently out before him.

Inside it was gloomy, with smoke damage on the walls. Three guards spun to face the intruders, reaching for their sidearms. Two other men were in the room, and they looked up from their work at the stripped-down computer banks.

“I’d like to introduce you to my friend,” Kane said, “the dead man’s switch. Some of you look like scientific types so I’ll put this in terms you’re all familiar with—get out of here or I will blow us all up. Any questions?”

One of the guards pointed his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”

The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.

Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.

“Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”

One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”

Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”

Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.

The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”

Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”

Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.

Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”

“You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.

Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”

“Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”

“This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”

She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.

Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”

Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”

Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”

Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.

“You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.

“How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.

“This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.