“Refresh,” Brigid ordered into her mike pickup. A wipe panned down her terminal screen at the instruction, refreshing the information as though she was loading the file from scratch.
Nothing. No differences. Brigid’s eidetic memory would alert her instantly if something had changed.
“Go back,” she instructed into the pickup.
The screen blinked and refreshed as it went back to the previous document, exactly the same as the item that she had been looking at.
“Go back,” she said again, her voice soft, eyes flicking around the room for a moment to check that she wasn’t drawing any attention.
Before her, the screen blinked and refreshed once more, taking her back to a previous document. It appeared to be a schematic of an underground military facility—a redoubt—and Brigid’s brain automatically decoded the cryptic coordinates as she read them from the top right corner of her screen. The Tennessee River Valley, she realized, close to the barony of Beausoleil.
She had seen this before, she told herself, reassured. She had to have looked at the Pacific island stuff and just not taken it in. Mind wandering or maybe just tired. Yes, Brigid realized even as the word came to mind. Tired—that was it.
She sat there for a moment, looking at the schematic on the screen. “Revert,” she instructed, and the computer returned to her most recent file, the military report on the Pacific bomb tests. She looked at the report for a moment and a smile crossed her lips. There was a satellite picture of the island under discussion, and from this angle it looked sort of like an animal. Four legs, a body, a head with open mouth. No, not a head. Two heads. She giggled as she thought of the words “two heads are better than one.”
Must be tired, she realized. I’m seeing things. She removed her spectacles and glanced around the library room, but no one seemed to have noticed her giggle. Her section leader was across the far side of the room, leaning over Meredith Burrt’s desk, running through a file with the short, blond-haired woman.
Placing her glasses on the desk before her, Brigid raised her hand and waited for the section leader to come over and relieve her of her post. She needed to rest; maybe she was even coming down with something. She couldn’t recall the last time that she had felt so tired.
KANE OPENED the door to his apartment. It was unlocked, a carryover from the Program of Unification, when the Council of Front Royal had decreed that privacy bred conspiracy and, hence, deviant thinking.
He pushed his way into his compact two-room apartment, taking in its familiar walls and familiar smells. The whole place seemed faceless, with barely any sign of individuality or anything that could really be considered decoration. A single shelf against one wall of the main room included three books, one of them his precious, hidebound copy of The Law. Like all Mags, Kane could access all rules, amendments and subsections of the Cobaltville penal code merely by engaging the computer system, but there was something reassuring about having a genuine physical copy of the codes to refer to in his quiet moments. Three tall windows shed light onto the shelf and the wall to which it was attached, and Kane glanced through the panes for a moment, taking in the familiar lights glittering on the Administrative Monolith, which loomed over the ville.
Exhausted, he slumped down on the sagging cushions of his old couch, pondering what to eat. It was strange, he thought, to feel so tired after waking from a dream.
Chapter 5
Trent, a sallow-faced Cerberus tech with tired eyes and a messy mop of dark hair, checked the diagnostics as the mat-trans unit powered up. They were expecting Kane, Brigid and Grant to emerge momentarily, but the redoubt had received unexpected guests in the past.
Lakesh leaned over Brewster Philboyd’s desk as the tall man went back to monitoring communications frequencies for the various Cerberus field teams. “I feel increasingly uncomfortable with this part of the operation,” the elderly scientist admitted. “One never quite knows what may jump through the gateway.”
Philboyd’s lanky six-foot frame seemed to be hunched over the communications terminal as he nodded his agreement. “Hopefully they won’t bring back any monsters this time around,” Philboyd said. In his midforties, Philboyd wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks, with pale blond hair swept back from a receding hairline. He had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles over a year before, and his dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had proved invaluable. Although he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering quandary.
Mist began to fill the armaglass cubicle that housed the mat-trans itself, and the howling noise grew louder as the emitter array powered up. The vanadium-steel bulkhead that sealed the ops center off from the rest of the redoubt slid into place. When the mist cleared and the howling subsided, Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant stood revealed, none the worse for wear, and a collective sigh of relief went out from the Cerberus operations team.
“…where someone doesn’t start shooting at us?” Grant was asking as he stepped out into the anteroom.
Kane smiled and shook his head. “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?”
Grant glared at his partner. “Not if it’s going to depress me,” he growled.
Brigid stepped forward, the leather satchel slapping against her thigh as she strode through the anteroom. A moment later, the three-person field team stepped out into the ops room.
“My dears,” Lakesh said as he approached them, “how did it go?”
“You mean initially or overall?” Kane asked as he shrugged out of his faded denim jacket and stretched his tense muscles.
“A summary will suffice,” Lakesh said hopefully.
Pushing Kane gently aside, Brigid stepped ahead of the others and addressed Lakesh, giving the distinct impression that Kane’s response had struck her as juvenile and unnecessary. “It all went fine,” she explained, shirking off the leather satchel and placing it to one side. “We’ll need to speak with the trader again, but everything’s in place.”
“Yeah.” Grant laughed, slapping Kane on the back. “Thanks to Romeo here.”
Lakesh glanced across to Kane, who was looking just a little self-conscious as he busied himself with removing his wrist holster. “Would you care to explain, my friend?”
Kane looked away from Lakesh, glancing around the ops room for a few moments before he replied in a mutter, “Nothing to explain. Just the usual story of bullets, women and, well, mostly bullets.”
Lakesh laughed at that, watching as Kane continued to scan the room. It was strange, but just for a moment, Lakesh saw a side of Kane that he had only really noticed on the few occasions when he had accompanied the ex-Mag on a field mission. If he didn’t know better he would swear that Kane was checking out the room, searching for enemies with that old “point-man sense,” as he called it.
“I’m glad you’re all okay,” Lakesh concluded, “and that we’ve made a new friend.”
“‘Friend’ may be overstating the case a little, Lakesh,” Kane said, “but it is what it is.”
With that, the three warriors marched through the ops room and out into the corridor.
Working at the desks closest to the mat-trans unit, Skylar Hitch tapped Donald Bry lightly on the arm and indicated Kane and his colleagues. “What’s eating them?” she asked in a whisper.
Bry shook his head. “I didn’t notice,” he said.
“They just seemed a little, I dunno, pissy?” Skylar suggested, keeping her voice low.
After a moment’s thought,