“How’d they know about us?” Brigid asked, dismayed.
Philboyd took another drink of water before replying, “Beats the hell out of me.”
Grant uttered a weary sigh but said nothing. Both Kane and Brigid could guess his thoughts. Brewster Philboyd was one of many expatriates from the Manitius Moonbase who had chosen to forge new lives for themselves with the Cerberus warriors.
Although the majority of the former lunar colonists were academics, they had proved their inherent courage and resourcefulness and wanted to get out into the world and make a difference in the struggle to reclaim the planet of their birth.
Nearly twenty of them were permanently stationed on Thunder Isle in the Cific, working to refurbish the sprawling complex that had housed Operation Chronos two centuries before and make it a viable alternative to the Cerberus redoubt.
The other Manitius expatriates remained in the redoubt concealed within a Montana mountain peak as part of the Cerberus resistance movement. For three years, Kane, Brigid and Grant had struggled to dismantle the machine of baronial tyranny in America. Victory over the nine barons, if not precisely within their grasp, did not seem a completely unreachable goal—but then unexpectedly, nearly two years before, the entire dynamic of the struggle against the nine barons changed.
The Cerberus warriors learned that the fragile hybrid barons, despite being close to a century old, were only in a larval stage of their development. Overnight the barons changed. When that happened, the war against the baronies themselves ended, but a new one, far greater in scope, began.
The baronies had not fallen in the conventional sense through attrition, war or organized internal revolts. The barons had simply walked away from their villes, their territories and their subjects. When they reached the final stage in their development, they saw no need for the trappings of semidivinity, nor were they content to rule such minor kingdoms. When they evolved into their true forms, incarnations of the ancient Annunaki overlords, their avaricious scope expanded to encompass the entire world and every thinking creature on it.
Even two-plus years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, with various factions warring for control on a daily basis.
A number of former Magistrates, weary of fighting for one transitory ruling faction or another that tried to fill the power vacuum in the villes, responded to the outreach efforts of Cerberus.
Once the Magistrates joined Cerberus, Kane and Grant had seen to the formation of Cerberus Away Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta.
“Do you have any idea of what the Millennial Consortium is looking for out here?” Brigid asked.
Brewster Philboyd waved to the desert at large. “I think we’ll have to find our own answers.”
“Nothing new about that,” Kane said sarcastically. “How did you escape?”
“To be honest, I don’t really know. About half an hour ago, I realized I was alone. Everybody had just left me.”
He paused, high forehead furrowed in thought. “I sort of got the impression that the consortium had a bigger problem to deal with than just me.”
“Something to do with ghosts?” Brigid ventured.
Philboyd swung his head toward her, his one good eye widening in surprise. “You know, I thought I heard one of the millennialists say something about ghosts, but I thought I misheard him. Figured he was talking about something else.”
“Do you at least know if the consortium has found a base out here?” Grant demanded impatiently.
“Logically, I’d have to say yes,” Philboyd retorted. “But I haven’t seen it. But the energy emissions were strongest in the direction of that big mesa over there.”
“How are they getting to and from the place?” Brigid inquired.
Philboyd opened his mouth to answer, then his shoulders stiffened. Grant looked at him quizzically, then tilted his head back to scan the darkening sky. “Everybody down.”
They huddled into the shadow cast by the dune. In the distance, they heard the thumping beat of helicopter rotors. Craning his neck, Kane glimpsed a big transport chopper angling in from the south. Red-and-yellow navigation lights glowed along its undercarriage.
“An MH-6 transport…not a common piece of ordnance nowadays,” Grant murmured.
He spoke very truly. After the atmospheric havoc wreaked by the nukecaust, air travel of any sort had been very slow to make a comeback.
The machine did not fly over them, but instead inscribed a half circle around Phantom Mesa and sank from view. The sound of its vanes faded away.
Kane straightened up, brushing sand from his clothes. “Brewster, do you think you can make it back to the settlement on your own?”
Philboyd frowned and slowly climbed to his feet, massaging his wrists. “I think so.”
“Good,” Grant said. “Tell Edwards to bring the team and follow our tracks. We’ll head out toward the mesa.”
“What about me?” Philboyd inquired.
“You’ll stay behind and guard our prisoner.”
“Prisoner?”
“Yeah, a guy named Gray,” Kane replied. “He’s hurt pretty badly, so he won’t give you any trouble. Doesn’t look like you can handle much more.”
Wincing, Philboyd touched his bruised face. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to go with you.”
“It’s not the same to me,” Kane declared harshly.
“You took off against my express orders to stay put. You got jumped and beat to hell and now you’re no good to us.”
Resentfully, Philboyd snapped, “Yeah, but the energy readings I picked up are localized in the area of that mesa. That’s where the jamming umbrella is transmitting the white noise.”
“We figured that out without being captured and having the crap kicked out of us,” Grant retorted unsympathetically.
Kane pointed in the direction of the village. “Do as I say for once. Go back and stay put.”
Philboyd looked to be on the verge of arguing, but then his shoulders slumped in resignation. Without another word or a backward glance, he began trudging up the face of the sand dune.
After he topped the rise, Brigid turned to Kane, her eyes glittering with anger. “There was no need to be so hard on him. He only wanted to pull his own weight.”
“Brewster is an academic,” Kane shot back coldly. “And every time he goes out into the field, something like this happens to him. If we weren’t around to pull his ass out of the various fires he falls into, he would have been dead years ago.”
“But this time,” Grant interjected, “he gave us away to the millennialists.”
Brigid pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Not intentionally. Somebody recognized him. Whoever it was would have recognized us, too. It was just Brewster’s bad luck to be spotted first.”
“Yeah,” Grant grunted, “and either they didn’t think Brewster was worth wasting a bullet on or they wanted to save all they had to settle a larger problem.”
“Like what?” Brigid challenged.
Kane started forward. “Let’s go see, why don’t we?”
The three people marched swiftly toward the immense pinnacle of rock, noting the rubble piled high around its base. Brigid estimated it as nearly three hundred feet in height. As sunset progressed, the deep fissures scoring the surface of the gigantic monolith became fathomless