Janus Trap

A quick shower and they would be ready to face the day.

THE ANCIENT MILITARY redoubt that served as the headquarters of the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountain Range in Montana, where 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. The wilderness surrounding the tri-level concrete structure was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, just a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended several of the Cerberus warriors over the years.

The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. Its official name was Redoubt Bravo, named, like all prewar redoubts, after a letter of the alphabet, as used in standard military radio communications. Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed matter-transfer network. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant rendition of the fabled, two-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the underworld. The artist was long since dead, but his work had inspired the people who had taken over the facility to call it the Cerberus redoubt.

Hidden within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the building, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of data for the Cerberus operatives within. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. The Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole communications satellite.

Despite its location high in the fresh air of the Bitterroot Mountains, the Cerberus facility was a self-contained unit. Its personnel had become accustomed to recirculated, filtered air as provided by vast air-conditioning units that continually churned and cleansed the facility’s air.

The Cerberus operation had been founded and staffed by a cryogenically displaced scientist called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who had dedicated the redoubt to the continued survival and freedom of humanity.

Kane, in his previous life as a Magistrate at Cobaltville, had come upon evidence of a vast conspiracy that threatened the autonomy of humankind. Kane had stumbled on the first clues to the existence of a hidden alien race called the Annunaki who had been dabbling in humankind’s affairs for longer than anyone could comprehend. Appearing as gods to early man, the Annunaki had, from the shadows, guided the course of human history over the subsequent millennia, with an ultimate agenda of utter subjugation. Recently, the Annunaki royal family had revealed themselves on Earth once more, and Kane and his colleagues now found themselves in a deadly war of attrition against this seemingly unstoppable foe.

The Cerberus warriors were one of humanity’s last bastions in the secret battle for the freedom of humankind.

GRANT’S THOUGHTS were suddenly interrupted by the buzzing of the transcomm at the side of his bed. He lay there another moment, just gazing up at the ceiling in the darkness as he felt Shizuka’s lithe body stir beside him. Then, with a reluctant sigh, he leaned over and activated the button to answer the call.

After a moment, a man’s face appeared in the tiny window display beside the little unit, smiling in a friendly manner. The man had dusky skin, an aquiline nose and a refined mouth. Lakesh appeared to be about fifty years of age, his sleek black hair displaying just the first hints of white at the temples and above the ears. In actuality, the expert physicist and cyberneticist was two hundred years older than that, having endured an extended period in suspended animation after the nukecaust in 2001. Until recently, Lakesh had physically appeared to be carrying every last one of his 250 years, until a would-be ally of the Cerberus exiles attempted to court their favor by reversing the aging process and giving the elderly scientist, literally, a new lease on life. However, in the months since that, Lakesh had become increasingly conscious that this miracle may not be all that it seemed, and he wondered whether this bountiful gift had hidden strings attached.

“Yeah, go,” Grant said, looking into the screen where a tiny camera picked up his face and relayed the image to Lakesh up in the operations room.

“Grant,” Lakesh began in his mellifluous voice, “did I wake you?”

Grant shook his head slightly as he felt Shizuka sidle behind him and wrap her arms around his wide chest, pulling herself close to him and nuzzling against his neck. “It’s no problem, Lakesh. What’s going on?”

“We’ve just heard from our contact in Tennessee,” Lakesh explained. “The meeting’s set up and, as we discussed a few days ago, I want you to attend with Kane and Brigid.”

Grant nodded his acceptance. “The old crew back on the clock,” Grant muttered with a reluctant smile. “When do we leave?”

“The meeting’s set for 10:00 a.m., local time,” Lakesh said. “You jump in forty minutes.”

“No problem. I’ll see you there,” he vowed as he hit the button to cut the communication.

Behind him, Shizuka tightened her grip on his chest, grinding her hips against him. “Do you really have to rush off so soon, Grant-san?” she asked.

Grant turned his head to look over his shoulder. “Sorry, darling,” he said, “but it’s a simple pickup. It won’t take more than a few hours.”

Still holding him tightly, Shizuka kissed Grant beneath his ear. “I’ll wait right here,” she whispered.

After a moment, Grant extricated himself from the woman’s grip and made his way to the tiny bathroom cubicle attached to the room. Shizuka watched from the bed as Grant flicked the motion-sensor light switch to the cubicle and began running the water for the little shower stall within. After a moment, Shizuka pulled herself from the bed and, naked, padded silently across the room to join Grant in the shower.

WHEN HE ARRIVED at the operations room thirty-five minutes later, washed and shaved, Grant found the large room a hive of activity. Lakesh had spread a series of papers across his desk that included several maps of the area around the recently destroyed ville of Beausoleil, Tennessee. Beside him, the red-haired Brigid Baptiste was glancing over the papers as Lakesh pointed out specific items of interest. Brigid was dressed in a shadow suit now, a one-piece black body stocking that appeared to be so thin as to be a second skin, and yet the fabric had remarkable properties. The shadow suit worked as a self-contained, self-regulated environment, and the weave was strong enough to deflect a knife blow or other blunt trauma but could not redistribute kinetic shock.

Off to one side of the room, Grant’s longtime partner, Kane, rested against a desk as he spoke with Cerberus physician Reba DeFore. DeFore was a stocky but curvaceous woman with long ash-blond hair that she had tied up in an elaborately braided knot atop her head. Grant couldn’t hear the details of their conversation, but he could see Reba count off items on her fingers. Grant watched as Kane copied her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember each item that she had told him. Like Brigid, Kane was dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits, as was Grant himself. Kane had added a thick belt with a heavy copper buckle to the suit, along with a pair of combat boots, and on the man’s right wrist Grant could see the familiar pressure-sensitive holster containing a Sin Eater handgun.

Grant had added his favored long black duster over his own shadow suit, its dark Kevlar weave reaching past his knees. Like Kane, he wore the familiar weight of the Sin Eater pistol at his right wrist, tucked out of sight, just a little bulge beneath the sleeve. The weapon was a legacy from their days as Magistrates in Cobaltville, a position that Grant had held for almost two decades prior to his exile at the Cerberus redoubt. Kane had been his partner in Cobaltville, and the pair of them had defected together, along with archivist Brigid Baptiste, after stumbling upon the first hints of the Annunaki conspiracy.

Crouched at a desk beside the anteroom that held the mat-trans unit, Donald Bry and one of his technical team, a petite, coffee-skinned woman whom Grant had seen around a few times, were working through a bunch of wiring amid what looked like the remains of a half-dozen computer terminals.

Catching Lakesh’s attention, Grant pointed to the tangle of wiring. “Trouble with the mat-trans?” he asked.

“No, thank goodness,” Lakesh replied. “Just general problems with the old computers. Emphasis on old.”

“Happens to us all,” Grant said amiably as he joined Lakesh and Brigid at their desk to look over the paperwork that had been assembled for the mission.

Ten minutes later, Grant, Brigid and Kane were standing within the mat-trans chamber, ready to blast themselves through the ether in an instantaneous transition from Montana to Tennessee.

Chapter 2

It took the blink of an eye to strip them down to their component atoms and fling the essence of their very beings across the country. And yet, no matter how many times he experienced it, Kane swore that he would never really get used to traveling by mat-trans.

Kane had added a denim jacket, a washed-out black turned gray, over his shadow suit. He stood in the Tennessee mat-trans chamber, its standard tiled floor and ceiling with the familiar, smoked armaglass walls all around. The armaglass here was tinted an odd color, and Kane knew from the color alone that he had not been here before. With the typical paranoia of the prenukecaust military mind, the mat-trans network, now over two hundred years old, used a simple color-coding system to establish location without any explicit indicators.

There were mat-trans units hidden in ancient military bases scattered across the old United States of America, with many others worldwide, including similar units developed by comparable military groups for other nations. The mat-trans units digitized an individual and thrust him or her across quantum space to a chamber at a programmed destination. In the intervening two centuries since their development, the network had remained largely undiscovered, with only a small number of people aware of these hidden gateways scattered across the globe.

Kane and the other Cerberus operatives considered the mat-trans a useful part of their arsenal, although traveling by it was still a disorienting and alien experience to the human body.

As his roiling stomach settled from the instantaneous journey, Kane glanced left and right, checking that his two colleagues had passed through the mat-trans gateway intact.

Grant stood to Kane’s left, his dark skin shining with beads of sweat. While he had grown more used to travel by mat-trans, the man still had a deep-rooted dislike for the transportation method. All muscle, Grant was an ominous presence on any mission.

To Kane’s right stood Brigid Baptiste. Brigid had put a loose-fitting suede jacket over her clinging shadow suit, and the scuffed, shabby-looking jacket gave her ample freedom of movement. Her ankle boots were a matching brown to the jacket, and she wore her compact TP-9 pistol in a low-slung hip holster. A pockmarked leather satchel, also brown, was hanging at her opposite hip, its strap slung across her body, cutting a line between her breasts.

Tensing his wrist tendons, Kane drew the Sin Eater blaster into his hand, the compact weapon opening up to its full size in a half second. Less than fourteen inches in length when fully extended, the 9 mm Sin Eater folded in on itself to be stored in the holster just above Kane’s wrist. The holster reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the weapon would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard—as the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the need for such safety features had been considered redundant; a Magistrate could never be wrong.

Though schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, both Kane and Grant still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old friend, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a comfortable and familiar wristwatch.

Kane’s partners drew their own weapons as the trio exited the armaglass room and made their way to the corridor at a slow, wary pace. As they entered the corridor, banks of overhead lights stuttered into operation, bathing its walls in their brilliant glow. Although they had traveled here on what was ostensibly a peace mission, they had too much experience to enter any new situation unarmed.

They proceeded through the windowless military bunker at a steady pace. Although the facility was deserted, the lights came on automatically as they found their way along the corridors toward the exit. A bank of powerful generators located in the underground complex had begun channeling power through the redoubt automatically as soon as the old sensor units had detected that the mat-trans had been activated; it was standard protocol for these old military facilities.

Brigid took the lead as they jogged to a staircase and up into the main reception hall of the redoubt. Brigid Baptiste was blessed with an eidetic—or photographic—memory, and she had scrutinized the plans of this facility in preparation for their mat-trans jump here. Now she could recall every detail of its construction from those blueprints merely by calling them to mind.

In less than three minutes, the group stood shoulder to shoulder at a huge door leading to the outside world.

“Everyone ready?” Kane asked, his voice echoing in the empty, gray-walled reception chamber of the redoubt. To one side, a dusty old desk stood behind a pane of armaglass with a grille in its center. A computer sat atop the desk, long since inactive, its monitor stained with the greasy black charring of smoke.

Brigid nodded while Grant just put a finger to his nose in silent acknowledgment of Kane’s question. Brigid typed the code into the old push-button pad to unlock the door. They heard the magnetic lock click, and Grant, having holstered his Sin Eater, worked the large lever on the front of the huge door to move the heavy slab of metal on its ancient rollers. The door creaked a little, juddering on the tracks after so many years locked in one position. But with a little effort, Grant got it moving enough that a three-foot-wide gap appeared at the far right side.

Kane stepped forward, gun held in the ready position, his old point-man sense alert as he peered through the gap and into the Tennessee morning sunshine. “Welcome to Beausoleil, people,” he announced. “Let’s try to keep things friendly out there.” With that, Kane edged sideways and made his way out of the redoubt and up the dirt bank that he found immediately outside.

They had journeyed to Tennessee at the request of Reba DeFore on what could loosely be described as a mercy mission. During her recent inventory, Reba had noticed that supplies of their standard immunization boosters were falling low. With the devastating radiation storms that had accompanied the nukecaust, the whole landscape had become a near-lethal hot zone. Even now, more than two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, there were still dangerous pollutants in the air and pockets of radiation scattered across the globe. While the atmosphere was far cleaner than it had been, the use of immunization boosters remained standard procedure for anyone involved in fieldwork.

Many of the medications in use by Cerberus had actually been produced in the villes of the nine barons who had ruled over America until very recently. Black marketers with connections to the villes remained a convenient source of immunization boosters when necessity demanded it.

A few months earlier, the barony of Beausoleil in the Tennessee River Valley had fallen in a devastating air attack orchestrated by Lilitu, a would-be goddess whose ambition was matched only by her unquenchable blood thirst. Beausoleil had been razed, leaving a vast number of refugees and a blossoming secondary market in salvage. Just a few weeks earlier, Kane, Grant and Brigid had been involved in tracking genetic material that had been stolen from its ashes and had fallen into the hands of a criminal gang on the Pacific coast.

Now, once more, the three Cerberus warriors found themselves tracking down material taken from the devastated ville, only this time it promised to be a far simpler mission—or so the Cerberus desk jockeys would have them believe.