“I don’t make the choices,” Hurbon reiterated, cackling a wicked, wheezing laugh, “the chair does. We are just its faithful servants.” His next command was addressed to the newcomers: “Kill him.”
“I knew it’d come down to this,” Kane muttered to himself as the first of the shirtless voodoo worshippers took a step forward and swung a filthy eight-inch blade at Kane’s face.
The ex-Mag stepped back just enough to be out of range as his attacker’s blade cut through the air. Then he stepped forward once more and delivered a brutal knee to the man’s crotch. With a pained howl, Kane’s attacker doubled over and dropped heavily to the floor like a sack of coal.
Though the others watched the falling form of their colleague, Kane himself ignored the falling man. Instead, the ex-Mag rushed forward and swung a swift right hook at the nearest of his two remaining foes, his fist slamming into the man’s jaw with tremendous force. Even as the man reeled from the blow, Kane was ducking down and whipping his leg out to connect with the kneecap of the other voodoo worshipper. With a sharp crack, the third man’s knee snapped backward, bending his leg at an awkward angle, and his arms flailed as he struggled to respond.
Kane was a trained Magistrate, and these penny-ante sec men weren’t even enough to make him break a sweat. In six seconds, Kane had eliminated all three men from the fight, leaving two sobbing in pain and the third tossing and turning in semiconscious delirium.
“Now,” Kane snarled, turning his attention back to the languishing figure of the priest, “how do I switch off the chair?” He held the knife where Hurbon could clearly see it, menace in his eye.
“Can’t be done,” Hurbon said defiantly. “Once she starts, the chair takes whatever she wants.”
“Screw that,” Kane spat, whirling back to his partner, who remained struggling against the clawing grip of the eerie chair.
Brigid Baptiste had almost entirely disappeared amid a cocoon of wavering tendrils. Outside the room, Kane could hear the clomping feet of more voodoo warriors as they ran to investigate the sounds of battle that had come from this inner sanctum.
Biting back a curse, Kane leaned down and began working once more at the tendrils, snapping them aside as rapidly as he could with his combat knife. As he did so, he activated his Commtact—a tiny communications device embedded beside his mastoid bone that allowed him to speak with his teammates in real time via satellite linkup. “Grant? We’re making a hasty exit and we’ll be needing some covering fire in two to three minutes. That suit you?”
The rumbling voice of Grant, Kane’s longtime partner and equal, responded in Kane’s Commtact. “I read you loud and clear, buddy. Just let—” With that, the communication went abruptly dead.
For a moment, Kane waited, his busy knife still working through the swirling mass of spindly tendrils as they reached for Brigid’s now static form. Had something happened to Grant? The Commtact shouldn’t just go dead. Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. In theory, even someone completely deaf could still hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. As well as radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign languages on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks. Loss of communication through them, while not unheard of, was exceedingly rare.
“Grant?” Kane asked in a low voice, and he listened for a moment for any indication of his partner from the Commtact. “Grant, you read me?”
Beside Kane, Ohio Blue was just coming back to her senses, her thick blond hair in disarray as she struggled up from the floor. Swaying a little, she looked around the room at the scene of devastation. “Kane, my sweet, sweet prince,” she said, urgency in her voice, “I think it’s time we were leaving.”
Kane turned at Ohio’s voice, but his attention was distracted by the people appearing behind her. Two new figures pushed through the doorway, and Kane saw immediately that there was something wrong with them. They were tall and emaciated and they walked with a shambling gait. When Kane saw the way that their eyelids flickered over unfocused orbs, he concluded that they were either drugged or something worse. The word zombie flashed through the ex-Mag’s mind.
Kane spoke into the Commtact again. “Grant? Do you read me? Please respond.” After a moment’s silence, he tried patching his signal to home base. “Cerberus? This is Kane. Do you copy? Please respond, Cerberus.”
And still the only response from the Commtact was a deafening silence.
Chapter 3
Grant stood well over six feet tall, with impressively wide shoulders, deep chest and a solid mass of hard, taut muscle. His dark skin was a rich shade of mahogany, and he wore his black hair close-cropped to his skull, with a drooping gunslinger’s mustache curving down from his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate, and their partnership went all the way back to their time together in Cobaltville, years before the formation of the Cerberus operation. Grant was several years older than Kane, and the trust between them was absolute. They had seen combat across the globe, saved each other’s lives on countless occasions and there was an unspoken understanding between them that went as deep as the bond between brothers.
Right now, Grant waited in the mouldering marshes of the Louisiana swamps, hunkering down between the low branches of a tree. Clad in camouflaged greens and browns, Grant peered through the sniper’s scope of his SSG-550 rifle where it rested high on its bipod legs. He kept his voice to a low whisper as he spoke into the hidden pickup of his Commtact. “Kane? Please repeat, I didn’t copy.” He waited a moment, listening for any signal from his Commtact over the humming, squawking and chirping of the swamp fauna. “Kane?” he repeated, his voice just a little louder. “Brigid?”
There was still no answer.
Eye locked on the eyepiece of the sniper scope, Grant watched for movement at the entryway to the dilapidated shack. The wooden structure was just one story high yet covered almost 4,000 square feet. Despite its size, the low roof and rotting nature of the building made it appear cramped and unwelcoming.
Grant had seen Kane and Brigid enter the building in the company of the independent trader, Ohio Blue, about fifteen minutes before. They had arrived here via airboat, transported across the marshland by a dark-skinned woman with a toned body and a scarred face, her left leg missing below the knee. Grant had tracked the airboat via the transponder units that were embedded beneath his partners’ skins, using his own uplink to Cerberus headquarters to keep track of his friends as they traveled through the maze of swamps. This had allowed him—unseen—to keep to a roughly parallel route on his own airboat, its huge fan whirling as it carved a new pathway through the dense shrubbery of the sweltering marshes.
“Cerberus, this is Grant out in the field,” Grant spoke to his Commtact once more. “Appear to have lost radio contact with Kane and Brigid. Please advise.”
Grant listened intently, hearing the humming, squawking, chirruping sounds all around him, but the Commtact itself only offered dead air by way of response.
“Cerberus?” Grant repeated. “Anyone there reading me?”
Yet again, there was no response.
Anxious, Grant turned away from the rifle’s scope and reached for the handheld unit he had used to track his partners’ transponders. Its tiny screen was functioning, but it showed no evidence