Reality Echo

“Yeah,” Brigid grumbled. “It’s nothing big for you, Mister Hero-man, to lay a slick line on one of those barbarian trollops you encounter on days ending with the letter y, but it’s not easy for women. He told me there’s a dozen moon base scientists who are afraid to talk to me because I’m out of their league.”

“You are,” Kane admitted. “Guys are intimidated by pretty girls,” Kane continued. “Throw in the fact that you’re a resident superheroine, able to walk across dimensions by concentrating on funky rugs and regularly prance about in skintight uniforms…”

Brigid grimaced.

“I’m not going to rain on your parade,” Kane said.

Brigid squeezed her eyebrows. “Just drop it, Kane.”

“Consider it dropped,” he answered. “Besides, what’s that you called us once upon a time?”

“Anam-chara,” Brigid said. “Soul friends. That’s if I buy into that jump-dream memory you had of rescuing one of my other incarnations. We’re bound together, but nothing you’ve told me says that we’re some kind of cosmic lovers. Good grief, I’m trying to apply logic to reincarnation.”

“Enlil reincarnated. Fand and Epona recognize my old soul,” Kane offered.

“Where’s Daryl with his soda?” Brigid muttered.

“The nozzle popped on his soft drink,” Kane said. “He and a couple of the other members of the geek squad have the dispenser disassembled and are arguing over how best to rebuild it.”

Brigid looked over her shoulder and saw Morganstern. The young scientist shrugged, looking pained at the brown, soaking stain on his chest. Brigid gave him a smile that she wasn’t particularly feeling at the moment, and he waved at her before walking toward the table.

“Sorry. It looks like we’ve got our emergency to counterpoint whatever crisis you’re dealing with,” Morganstern told her.

“Who says we’re in the middle of a crisis?” Brigid asked.

“Kane’s injured, and CAT Beta is preparing for a jump back to the Poconos,” Morganstern noted. “Grant’s going with them.”

Kane nodded. “I know. I hate being sidelined, but DeFore told me I have a concussion.”

Brigid sighed. “I’m sorry, Daryl.”

“That’s all right. We still have our date scheduled for tomorrow night. Running into you and Kane was an unexpected surprise for the day,” Morganstern offered.

Kane nodded toward the soft drink machine. “It looks like one of your buddies is upset.”

Morganstern looked back, horrified. “Wynan! No, we are not going to waste valuable platinum on diet soda! I’m sorry, Brigid.”

She reached up and grabbed Morganstern’s shirt, kissing him on the cheek. “Thanks for understanding, Daryl.”

Morganstern chuckled nervously, his dimpled smile glowing beneath blushing cheeks. “Brigid, I want to thank you.”

Brigid turned back and saw the smirk on Kane’s face. “You say another word, and I will peel the flesh from your bones and tell everyone that I was certain you are a death pod person from Dimension Fifteen. And they’d never blame me.”

Kane covered his mouth to hold back his laughter. Brigid hoped that in her mock rage, she hadn’t given form to a dangerous prophecy. The man’s stifled amusement seemed to echo in a haunting taunt to her doubts.

Chapter 6

As Grant went over the gear stuffed into the pouches of his web utility belt, Domi remained silent. The two had come a long way since their first meeting in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. Originally Domi had fallen deeply for the dark ex-Mag because he was the first person ever to show genuine concern and affection for her. Since then, both had found the true loves of their lives, and their relationship had matured. Domi herself had matured, and the love she felt for Grant wasn’t something that was based on sexual attraction.

If anything, Grant was a nurturing father figure that she had grown up without, which was why Grant had felt so uncomfortable with her fleeting advances, and then her campaign to scandalize and make him jealous. More than once, she had wanted to apologize for giving him such an awkward time, but Grant wouldn’t hear anything about it. They had both found partners, and now with that stumbling block out of the way, Grant no longer felt aloof toward her.

They could have these comfortable silences together. Though Domi could see a million questions and doubts storming through his mind, Grant focused on preparing for the mission back to the mountain range. It was enough that Domi was there, and though her vocabulary had grown greatly since her arrival at Cerberus, her silence spoke more deeply than anything else. Grant strapped his Sin Eater onto his forearm last of all, and he tested the holster mechanism. A quick whirr and the machine pistol snapped into his palm, then withdrew.

He looked at Domi who was ready for action. Her big, ruby-red eyes, startling globes of crimson, searched his face.

“If that’s the wrong Kane, we’ll find the right one,” Domi said softly.

Grant nodded. “He’s lucky like that. To have us come in as the cavalry and rescue his sorry ass.”

“He’s done it for us enough times.”

Grant took a deep breath and slid a Kevlar-lined load-bearing vest over his shadow suit top. The photocell camouflage of the remarkable uniform wouldn’t be needed, and Grant wanted plenty of pockets and some extra armor to augment the protective abilities of his uniform. The vest’s bullet-resistant fabric was reinforced with lightweight ceramic trauma plates. He’d heard the kind of firepower that the Fomorians were packing, and the AK-47 fired a notoriously difficult round to resist with conventional body armor. “’Course, it would be like him…”

“Shut up,” Domi whispered.

Grant’s eyes flashed with annoyance, but he remained silent. It may have been silly superstition on Domi’s part, but she was not the kind of woman to tempt fate by talking about the worst that could happen. The loss of Kane from Cerberus would be a crippling blow on so many levels. It was his courage and compassion that had redirected and refocused the fight against the barons after Lakesh’s years of quiet, desperate machinations. Kane had forged the bond with the local Native American tribe, and had been instrumental in rescuing societies from corruption. He’d saved everyone’s life a dozen times over.

Domi remembered how Kane had, in a moment of desperation, plucked her from the brink of annihilation with the technology of Thunder Isle. It had been during a fierce battle to escape Area 51. Domi had helped Kane escape a forced breeding program where he sired a new generation of children with superior genetics and all of Kane’s phenomenal physical and mental attributes. In the battle to break loose, Domi had been trapped in the path of an implode grenade, a powerful weapon that by all rights should have turned her into a smear of plasma.

Instead, Kane had discovered the Thunder Isle temporal matrix. He pushed the staff to lock on to her position at the moment just before the grenade’s detonation. In Domi’s mind, she had simply blinked, leaving behind the underground complex and appearing in the time scoop. She’d lived simply because Kane had not given up, because his supersharp perceptions noticed that her supposed death was not how it should have been from a grenade detonation. His faith, his willingness to defy the laws of physics and consequence enabled Kane to wrench her from the jaws of death.

That same undying loyalty had been the impetus to save others. Kane would never think that someone was dead and lost. He’d fight with the Grim Reaper himself to protect those he loved. Without him, the glue that united Cerberus would dry, crack and come apart in a spray of brittle crumbs. Domi would never admit to any possibility that Kane was dead, and she wouldn’t allow others to even breathe that doubt into existence.

It was stubborn and superstitious, but Kane had been too bullheaded to allow Domi to be murdered.

Grant swallowed hard and recovered his ability to speak, but this time, he skirted the issue. “You might want to take some extra equipment.”

Domi patted her crossbow, a large steel one with a reel crank on the side. It was an upgrade of the small pistol bow model she often carried. “Shot through tree trunk with this.”

Domi blushed as she realized that she’d dropped back into her abbreviated outlanders speech. Grant smiled, then pretended that he couldn’t detect the nerves made all too obvious when she spoke.

“This crossbow’s rated at 416 feet per second for a bolt,” she said, fighting down her clipped verbosity. “And the crank allows for fast reloads.”

“But it’s not going to be ideal if a Fomorian comes into close combat,” Grant said. “I’m not so much worried about me or Edwards—we’re as big as they are.”

“I know,” Domi said. “But I’ve got my Detonics .45.” She patted the small pistol on her hip. “There’s a MAC-10 in my bag, too.”

“I hope that’s enough.” Grant sighed. His mind had already let go of the logistical issues of their upcoming trip and had returned to his best friend. It had been a feeble effort, trying to distract Grant from his true fears by delving into the musketry necessary to bring down Bres’s mutants. Still, it was a moment or two where he had been distracted from worries.

Domi took Grant by the hand and gave him a quiet, loving embrace. Her slender arms squeezed around his shoulders with far more strength than they would have appeared to, and Grant responded with a gentle tap on her back.

“Go get the rest of your team,” Grant said. “I want to make one last check with Brigid and him.”

Even as she left him alone in the locker room to check on the status of her CAT Beta Team, Domi noted that Grant couldn’t bring himself to say his friend’s name. Though she remained skeptical of “supernatural” abilities, she’d survived in the Outlands and the slums of Cobaltville utilizing instincts that couldn’t readily be defined. Grant’s instincts refused to allow him to call the man everyone recognized as Kane by that name. The bonds of friendship were strong, and they ran deeper than simple blood chemistry and genetics. There was a hint of falseness, an imperceptible doubt that shouldn’t exist after retinal scans and fingerprint matching.

Domi hated that her own hunter’s senses didn’t pick up anything worthwhile, except that she could tell that Grant didn’t quite trust the version of Kane they carried back through the mat-trans. Whatever the menace Thrush had placed within their ranks, it was something that had been an absolutely perfect duplicate, right down to healed scars and a jawbone implant to attach a Commtact. The similarities were so fine that even Brigid Baptiste’s eidetic memory couldn’t find enough incongruity to give more than a vague doubt on her own.

The balance of the three Cerberus heroes had been altered, and they weren’t certain if it was due to head trauma. Brigid herself had suffered a skull injury before and had taken a while to recover. For a brief period, the three people weren’t at their top game on missions, part of what had inspired Lakesh to form a second Cerberus away team to take up the slack. Domi had done her best to emulate the kind of team formed by her friends, but Kane, Grant and Brigid were a magical combination, a one-in-a-million act of emotional and mental chemistry that went far beyond the sum of intellect and raw muscle. Lakesh had pointed out many times before that their union as a team allowed them to defy the laws of probability and defeat threats that loomed so large, they could swallow the entire solar system.