Kane continued scanning the area beyond for a few moments, as another rush of bullets came rattling against the far side of his protective wall. Kane spotted a long-barreled machine gun on a tripod mount, hitched above one of the few remaining walls on the second level of the ruined fortress. It was unleashing serious damage on the fighters below in a continuous stream of 24 mm slugs. Four soldiers fell to its assault even as he watched.
Across from him, Grant and Brigid were scanning other sections of the collapsed fort, while Mariah just kept her head down, flinching at each new shout of a gun being blasted, each pee-ow of a bullet’s flight. They had appeared, it seemed, smack-dab in the middle of the ruined fort—which was smack-dab in the middle of what seemed to be a raging war zone.
“Nowhere to run,” Grant concluded, peering left and right, front and back. As he spoke, he pulled a Copperhead assault subgun—almost two feet of thick black pipe with mounted laser scope—from a hidden holster rig under his jacket and was already ducking back behind the cover of a fallen stone archway, scanning for targets.
The Copperhead was a favored field weapon of Grant’s. The grip and trigger were in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the long length of barrel to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant favored the Copperhead for its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.
“We can’t fight them all,” Brigid reasoned, even though she looked set to try.
“I don’t want to fight anyone,” Mariah added, ducking lower as a bullet clipped the archway six inches from her left shoulder.
Kane nodded in resignation. “Libya,” he muttered. “I think I hate the place already and I ain’t been here two minutes.”
Several hours earlier and a continent away, Mariah Falk had been running an analysis on some data she had received from her earthquake monitoring equipment when her interest was piqued.
A geologist for the Cerberus organization, Mariah was a twenty-first-century émigré who had found herself in the postnukecaust world after being cryogenically frozen, alongside a number of other top scientists and military personnel, on the Manitius Moon Base. The Moon Base had been rediscovered in the twenty-third century by Cerberus explorers, who had revived its residents and given them a new home on Earth in the Cerberus redoubt.
The redoubt was located in one of the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, North America, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and 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. The shaman had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago, and Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so keep his friends undisturbed.
Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom, like Mariah, had been cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.
Cerberus relied on two dedicated orbiting satellites—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humanity. Gaining access to the satellites had taken countless hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range where they chattered incessantly with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth as well as providing almost instantaneous communication with its agents across the globe, wherever they might be, and it was this stream of data that provided Mariah with cause to investigate further.
Mariah traced the tip of her index finger across her computer screen, which was located in a small, rectangular office with off-white walls and harsh lighting, and set in a large rig that hung from the high ceiling. She was alone, a cup of coffee beside the computer screen.
“A blip,” she muttered to herself, frowning, “a definite blip.”
She cross-referenced the blip with the location coordinates and satellite feed data from Cerberus’s mighty data banks, tapping commands into her computer keyboard. She reached for her cup as the computer whirred, bringing up the data she had requested. It took just a few moments for Mariah to confirm the location of the blip: it was in the North African territory that was still called Libya on her maps.
“Lakesh is going to want to see this,” Mariah muttered, tapping the command key to print off the data. As the printer rumbled to life, Mariah swigged from her cup and grimaced, discovering that her coffee had gone cold. Ghastly. Still, if cold coffee had been the worst of her worries today, she could have rested easy.
* * *
THE CERBERUS OPERATIONS ROOM was abuzz with activity as Mariah brought her findings to the attention of the founder of the organization. It was an environment where many highly educated personnel operated in harmony, plotting out field missions and surveying data. Mariah had not always been confident here, feeling somewhat intimidated by the array of physics and chemistry degrees possessed by the on-call staff. In the past two and half years, however, she had grown in confidence, beginning with a relationship with an oceanographer called Clem Bryant. Clem had encouraged Mariah to be more involved in the fieldwork that was crucial to her discipline, something she had at first shied away from when she had been faced with this dangerous new world. But Clem had been killed during an enemy infiltration of the redoubt base, and he had died protecting Mariah from attackers. She still thought of him often, a year after his death, and she regretted that their relationship had not developed further, that he was no longer with her to help guide her and assist the Cerberus operation.
The ops room was a huge space with a high roof and two aisles of computer terminals, lit indirectly so as not to distract their operators. Carved from the inside of the mountain itself, the ceiling looked like the roof of a cave. Within that space, twenty-four computer desks ran from left to right, facing a giant screen on which specific findings could be highlighted.
A giant Mercator map dominated one wall—it was dated, still showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The map was sprinkled with numerous glowing locator dots, which were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. Those highlighted routes were not flight paths, however, but the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network that the Cerberus redoubt had originally been tasked to monitor over two hundred years ago.
Developed for the US military, the mat-trans network was primarily confined to North America, although a few outposts could be found farther afield