Ghostwalk

“We just call her Boss Bitch…not to her face, though.”

Kane’s eyes narrowed, recalling the last time they had questioned a couple of millennialists. They had referred to a female section chief, too.

“How did she know?” Brigid asked.

“She took over from another chief…Mr. Breech. He laid the groundwork.”

“And where is he now?” Grant inquired.

Gray hesitated before saying in a low tone, “A lot of us would like to know that.”

Edwards edged closer. “What about Philboyd?”

Mr. Gray blinked up at him curiously. “What about him?”

Edwards bared his teeth in a silent snarl. “Where the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know. He was taken away to be questioned. But he was alive.” Gray coughed and asked, “Could I have a drink? That pill is stuck in my throat.”

Kane nodded to Edwards. “Give him your canteen.”

The big ex-Mag scowled, but he didn’t object. Kane glanced meaningfully toward Brigid and Grant and jerked his head. The three people walked away, out of earshot of the consortium man.

Kane asked softly. “Do we believe him?”

Brigid sighed, running a hand through her hair. “I don’t see why not. If the consortium is out here, something big has attracted their attention.”

“I don’t mean that,” Kane retorted impatiently.

“He could be giving us wrong directions.”

Grant narrowed his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. “Even so, we’ve got to check out his story, no matter what.”

Brigid smiled wryly. “Unfortunately.”

Kane worked his shoulder up and down, wincing in pain. “Dammit.”

Brigid eyed him questioningly. “What?”

“That son of a bitch shot me. Didn’t get penetration, but it hurts like hell.”

“Let’s make sure,” Brigid suggested.

Kane shucked out of his field jacket and opened a magnetic seal in the upper half of his bodysuit, peeling it down over his right shoulder. His upper torso still burned where the bullet had punched him.

A livid red-and-purple bruise spread in a star-shaped pattern around the impact point.

Brigid probed with gentle fingers at the injury. “I think you’ll be all right, but your arm will be probably be very stiff in a couple of hours. When we get back to Cerberus, have DeFore look at it.”

Kane resealed the seam, setting his teeth against a groan of pain. Brigid and Grant wore identical midnight-colored garments under their BDUs. Although the material of the formfitting coveralls resembled black doeskin and didn’t seem as if it would offer protection from flea bites, the suits were impervious to most wavelengths of radiation.

Upon finding the one-piece garments in the Operation Chronos facility on Thunder Isle several years earlier, Kane had christened them shadow suits. Later they learned that a manufacturing technique known in predark days as electrospin lacing had electrically charged polymer particles to form a single-crystal metallic microfiber with a dense molecular structure.

Kane maintained the shadow suits were superior to the polycarbonate Magistrate armor chiefly for their internal subsystems. Also, they were almost impossible to tear or pierce with a knife, but a heavy-caliber bullet could penetrate them. And unlike the Mag body armor, the shadow suit wouldn’t redistribute the kinetic shock.

Turning, Kane called to Edwards. The man strode toward him swiftly. “Sir?”

“Me, Baptiste and Grant will scout out ahead.”

An uneasy expression settled over Edwards’s face. “With our comm signals being jammed, you could walk into a trap and we’d be none the wiser.”

“The jamming umbrella works both ways,” Grant pointed out. “Gray couldn’t have transmitted a warning, so the consortium is just as much in the dark about us as we are about them.”

“Unless Brewster talked,” Edwards said.

Brigid’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Brewster is accident prone and he’s pretty bad mannered even by ex-Mag standards, but he wouldn’t betray us.”

Edwards nodded contritely. “No, ma’am, I guess he wouldn’t.”

Kane said, “We’ll only go a little way…just to get the lay of the land. Worst-case scenario is that we run into trouble and fire off a couple of shots to let you know.”

Edwards didn’t seem comforted. “Yes, sir.”

Kane, Grant and Brigid moved away from the perimeter of the settlement and followed a scattering of footprints up along the face of a dune. The wind made the sand hiss around their feet.

“I don’t know if firing off some signal shots is a good idea,” Brigid commented. “Remember what Gray said about noise attracting ghosts.”

Grant snorted in derision but said nothing.

The sand bogged around their ankles as they climbed. When they reached the crest of the dune, Kane studied the massive thrust of dark rock Gray called Phantom Mesa. It stood like a giant sentinel of the desert.

Brigid tested her Commtact and grimaced in frustration when she heard only static. Quietly but with a hint of reproach underscoring her tone, she said to Kane, “You never should have let Brewster go out alone.”

“I didn’t ‘let’ him,” Kane answered. “And you know it. He waited until my back was turned and took off with the power analyzer. He thought he could trace down the origin of the jamming.”

Brigid nodded, her emerald eyes clouded by worry. “Brewster is far too headstrong for a scientist.”

“I don’t know about that…but he’s sure as hell clumsy.”

Grant suddenly halted, indicating with a hand wave for his partners to do the same. He leaned forward, head cocked to the right, his expression intent. “Hear something,” he whispered.

Kane strained his hearing, but only the sigh of the breeze touched his ears. Then he heard a faint groan, seasoned with garbled words. Through narrowed eyes, he scanned the ridge of the dune thirty feet ahead but saw nothing. At the very edge of audibility he heard panting, hard and labored.

Then a figure suddenly lurched over the top of the dune and fell awkwardly, his body digging a trench through the sand. Long legs thrashed. The shape rolled to the bottom and lay there, struggling feebly.

The Cerberus warriors scrambled down the dune and surrounded the figure, whose wrists were bound behind his back. Terrified and pain-filled gasps burst from split and bloody lips.

Kane clutched the man by the shoulders and said, “Take it easy. You’re safe now.”