Brigid and Grant spun, turning to face the stranger who stood where Kane was indicating. Grant’s Sin Eater handgun snapped into his hand, propelled from its hiding place at his wrist holster.
The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them from their days as Mags in Cobaltville. An automatic handblaster, the Sin Eater was less than fourteen inches in length at full extension and fired 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, which powered the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard, as any kind of safety features for the weapon had been ruled redundant. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing without delay.
Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste’s hand whipped down to the hip holster where she stored her trusted TP-9 tactical pistol, a bulky, automatic handblaster in dull black finish. The butt was almost central to the unit, making it appear almost like a square block finished by the wielder’s hand.
Although Brigid’s training was recent, all three Cerberus warriors were schooled in numerous forms of combat, from hand-to-hand martial arts to the use of knives, pistols, rifles and antitank weaponry. Furthermore, all three had the honed, lightning-fast reflexes that familiarity, muscle memory and combat awareness brought. In short, Brigid, Grant and Kane could more than adequately acquit themselves in any given combat scenario.
Right now, however, combat was not required. Grant and Brigid relaxed as they saw the man now standing before them. It was Abraham Flag, all right, although to describe him as “standing” was not entirely accurate. He was held upright inside what appeared to be a glass cylinder. The clear glass of the cylinder was somewhat obscured by a bluish, misty gas that floated within, through which they could see that the man inside was naked. His eyes were closed and, despite standing upright, he seemed almost relaxed, as though in a deep, dreamless sleep. Large metal pipes fed the cylinder, and Brigid noticed a control podium off to the right. No noise exuded from the strange construct, but the misty gas drifted in languid, faltering curlicues within the tube.
Kane’s laughter came to their ears, as Brigid and Grant relaxed. “Boy, you two can really move when you want to,” he said when they glared at him, still chuckling as he spoke.
Grant holstered his Sin Eater with a casual flick of his wrist, while Brigid made her way across to the control podium that was attached to the strange cylinder by a series of wires and copper pipes. There were controls integrated into the flat surface of the desk itself, like paintings on the reverse of a glass pane, and a foolscap notebook rested atop the unit. Brigid brushed dust from the glass work top and looked at the information displayed there. A series of dials was set beneath the glass of the unit, their needles held steady at about the three-quarters mark on their respective gauges. Beside them, a seven-digit analog counter slowly turned, and Brigid watched for a few seconds as the wheel to the farthest right ticked past 3 and rolled on toward 4. Then she picked up the notebook and flicked through its pages, finding that it was full of calculations written in blue ink with an elaborate hand.
“What do we have?” Grant asked as he and Kane strode over to join Brigid at the podium.
“He’s a freezie,” she said. “Cryogenically frozen and held in stasis here since—” she ran her finger along the index page of the notebook before flicking through several pages and finding the information “—November 1, 1930.”
Kane whistled in amazement and paced over to the glass cylinder to take a closer look at the man inside. He was a muscular individual, well-built and broad shouldered, with a firm jaw and high brow. “He doesn’t look much more than—what?—thirty-five, maybe forty.”
“This is cryogenic research,” Brigid said, indicating the book, “far in advance of anything Professor Flag’s contemporaries would have been working on.”
“The guy’s a supergenius, remember,” Grant stated.
“Supergenius or not, this is really quite remarkable,” Brigid told them both. She closed the notebook and placed it back on the glass work top. “You can be the smartest Neanderthal in the cave, but it still won’t do you much good to design a computer until someone develops the microchip. Flag’s notes here indicate that he bypassed so many hurdles with regards to the limitations of the technology around him. I mean, look at him. He’s a 250-year-old man, and he has been perfectly cryogenically preserved.”
Kane looked at the impressive man standing before him in the glass cabinet. “Kind of vain, though, isn’t it?”
“What?” Brigid asked.
“Why freeze yourself?” Kane asked. “Dead is dead—why prolong it any more than you need to?”
“I don’t think he died, Kane,” Brigid considered. “I think maybe something terrible happened back in 1930, and this was his way of keeping out of its path.”
Kane knocked the cylinder with the edge of his fist. “Yeah, great job. Happy 250th, Sleepy.”
Kane stepped away from the cylinder and headed back into the vast laboratory area, peering this way and that. “Anyway, let’s go see if we can find this knife thing,” he said. “Hopefully there’s a map somewhere. I don’t want to be wandering around this place forever.”
Brigid and Grant followed, spreading out so that the three of them could scope out the vast Laboratory of the Incredible as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working swiftly and methodically, they checked work surfaces and desks, opened cabinets and looked beneath wipe-clean work tops, pushing aside notebooks and Bunsen burners, beakers and glass tubes. There were bottles and jars full of strange concoctions, and many of them appeared to hold crystals or small deposits of salt. Kane presumed these had once been liquid, too, but had evaporated over the vast passage of time since anyone had last walked through this strange and startling laboratory.
“You think he’ll ever wake up?” Grant asked, calling across the room to Brigid as he peered behind a rudimentary spectrograph.
“I only glanced at his notes,” she admitted, scanning the shelves of a freestanding cabinet, “but it looked like he couldn’t finalize the wake-up protocols in time.”
Leafing through some loose papers at a desk, Kane stopped what he was doing and looked over at Brigid warily. “In time for what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Brigid said. “Do you want me to read the notebook, or do you want me to look for the knife?”
“Well, let’s start by…” Kane began and then his words tailed off. Suddenly, like an anxious rabbit, he stood to his full height and looked off to the far end of the room. “You hear that?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“What?” Grant asked, keeping his own voice low.
Silently, Kane indicated ahead of them to where a brightly lit doorway waited. With a swift hand gesture, he stalked toward the doorway, encouraging his partners to follow.
“This had better not be another joke,” Brigid muttered as she pulled the TP-9 from its holster once more.
Kane hurried forward, his body low as he made his way to the doorway. Peering inside, he observed that it opened into a short corridor that led to another doorway just a dozen paces ahead. The noises were coming from beyond the second doorway.
Grant edged up beside Kane, giving his partner a concerned look. “What have we got?” he whispered. Grant had known Kane for years, and he knew that his partner had remarkable instincts, what Kane would call his “point-man sense.” In reality, the point-man sense was a combination of spatial awareness and the refined use of Kane’s other senses to become almost spiritually at one with his surroundings. In their days as Cobaltville Magistrates, Kane’s point-man sense had saved Grant’s life on more than one potentially lethal occasion.
Kane made a face before he stepped into the brightly lit corridor. His face said it all: whatever