They trekked for an hour before reporting in to Cerberus to request their ride back home. By that time they had reached a dirt track running between two vegetable fields, carrots to one side, potatoes to the other, a distant farmhouse looking out toward them.
“Grant, this is Kane,” Kane said, activating his Commtact. The Commtact was a small radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin of all Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtact could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funnelled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the additional effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf they would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
The radio link molded below Kane’s ear spoke with the familiar voice of his partner. “Hey, Kane, how did it go?” Even over the Commtact relay, Grant’s voice was deep as rumbling thunder.
“We bewildered and destroyed,” Kane replied. “Just another day at the office.”
Grant’s laughter echoed through Kane’s skull from the Commtact.
“Triangulate on our position and give us a ride,” Kane said. “We’re all set to go home.”
The triangulation was easy. Kane, Brigid and all other Cerberus personnel had a biolink transponder injected into their bloodstream. The transponder used nanotechnology to relay a subject’s position and detail their current state of health to a satellite pickup station, which then delivered that information to the Cerberus redoubt in the Montana mountains. This technology along with the Commtacts allowed Cerberus to remain in constant touch with its personnel while they were in the field, and it could be accessed by the operations staff to home in on an individual to deliver aid.
In this case, that aid came in the form of a Deathbird, a modified AH-64 Apache helicopter, that arrived over the field of potatoes, shaking their fluttering leaves in its passage. The Deathbird featured a turret-mounted chain gun, as well as missile armaments—and it had been on call in case the mission went sour.
Kane and Brigid watched as the Apache dropped down to the ground, landing gently on the dirt strip between fields, its rotor blades whirring in a blur. As soon as it was down, the two Cerberus rebels hurried toward it in a crouched run, keeping their heads and limbs well below the height of those rotating blades, even though they knew there was room to maneuver below them. Too many times, the drag created by the rotors had wrong-footed a man and created a shockingly swift accident as the fast-spinning rotors became like knives cutting the air.
Kane drew back the side door. Brigid tottered inside with Kane just a couple of steps behind her. As soon as Kane was in, Brigid shouted, “Clear!” and the helicopter ascended into the skies once more.
Piloting the craft was a large dark-skinned man in his late thirties, with a shaved head and gunslinger’s mustache. He was wearing a shadow suit that matched those worn by his passengers. Though large, the man was all muscle—accentuated by the tight fit of the shadow suit—without an ounce of fat on his body. This was Grant, who had served as Kane’s field partner all the way back to their days as Magistrates and with whom he had been partnered ever since. Grant was a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, as well as being trained in the use of most ballistic weapons. He was also a phenomenal pilot—Kane would argue he was the greatest pilot that Cerberus would ever know...excluding himself, of course.
“So, you guys pick up anything good while you were shopping?” Grant asked in his rumbling-thunder voice as Kane drew the side door closed.
Kane shrugged. “Trouble, a few stones. The usual.”
“Stones,” Grant muttered, shaking his head. “Like we’ve not had enough of that for one lifetime.”
Kane and Brigid had to agree.
* * *
THE TRIO ARRIVED back at the Cerberus redoubt two hours later. The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in the Bitterroot range in Montana, where it was hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base which had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust of 2001. A peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains in the years since that nuclear conflict, with their dark, mysterious forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now, the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago.
Inside, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology despite its rough exterior. The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study. The staff relied on two orbiting satellites at their disposal—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humankind. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were tucked beneath camouflage netting around the redoubt, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range and chattering with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the staff in residence a near-limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe, such as Kane’s team, which was designated CAT Alpha.
They convened in the Cerberus meeting room, a rarely used lecture theater with several stepped rows of fixed seats. Kane and Brigid had showered and changed clothes, so Grant was already sitting when they entered, his massive frame almost too much for the regular-size seat. Three other people were in the room—Lakesh, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore—and all were dressed in the standard white duty uniform.
Mohandas Lakesh Singh was a physics and cybernetics expert who was the head of the Cerberus organization. A man of medium height, he appeared to be in his fifties, with a dusky complexion and vivid blue eyes that shone like sapphires when he addressed you. His black hair was slicked back away from his forehead, showing a few threads of gray, especially at the sides above the ears. Lakesh had an aquiline nose and a refined mouth, and his breadth of knowledge was second to none, except perhaps Brigid’s. Though he was, for all intents, a man in his fifties, Lakesh was in fact far older than that—he had been born in the twentieth century, but thanks to cryogenics and organ replacement, he had lived past his two-hundred-and-fiftieth year and was still going strong. Amazingly, Lakesh had been one of the original scientists involved in the Cerberus facility based at this redoubt in the twentieth century, a research project developing and investigating the applications of a fixed-point teleportational device called the mat-trans. The mat-trans was still in operation all these years on, although it was only one of a number of transportation options that the Cerberus personnel employed.
Beside Lakesh stood Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man and the unofficial second-in-command of the Cerberus operation. In his thirties, Donald had an unruly mop of ginger curls atop his head and a look of perpetual worry on his features. Donald’s field of expertise was computers, but he was also knowledgeable about most of the general goings-on relating to Cerberus and its field operations,