“Funny,” Clem mused, his rich voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts, “I can’t seem to get any response from Cerberus. I hope they’re not sleeping on the job.”
“With Lakesh in charge?” Mariah asked. “They’re lucky they’re allowed restroom breaks!”
“Quite,” Clem agreed, removing the earpiece and looking it over. “I wonder if perhaps the river water has got into my equipment.”
“Aren’t they waterproof?” Mariah asked.
“They’re meant to be,” Clem said thoughtfully, turning the earpiece over on his open palm. “It certainly appears to be sealed tight.”
Mariah reached into her own pocket and pulled loose the earpiece that she had stowed there. “Do you want to try mine?”
Clem nodded, plucking Mariah’s earpiece from her grip. In a moment he had the earpiece hooked over his ear, and was engaging its pickup mic. “This is Clem Bryant calling home. Come in, home.” He waited a moment, stopping at the side of the road as a cart drawn by a donkey and laden with ripe melons trundled past. There was no response from the earpiece.
“Anything?” Mariah asked as a half-dozen chickens went rushing past, herded by a shirtless boy who appeared to be no more than ten years old.
“Nothing at all,” Clem mused, and his tone was irked. “It’s very unusual for two comm devices to go offline at the same time like this. In fact, I’d estimate the odds are up in the hundreds of thousands against.”
“Me, too,” Mariah agreed. “That hardware is old but it’s military solid. Do you think maybe something else has happened? Perhaps Cerberus doesn’t want us back.”
Clem looked pensive as he considered what to do next. “I’m going to keep trying them while we return to the mat-trans. If there’s no response by then, we may need to consider our options more thoroughly.”
Mariah nodded as she replaced the white pumps on her feet, feeling the water in them squelch against her toes. Whatever else you might say about Clem, she thought, he was certainly a man who didn’t ruffle easily.
THE MAT-TRANS UNIT at the end of the Cerberus ops center was just winding down, clouds of mist being sucked away by hidden filters beneath the hexagonal chamber. The door hissed back on its hinges, and three familiar figures stepped out into the antechamber only to find themselves facing a veritable wall of armed guards.
“Hey, guys,” Kane said, dropping the sword and raising his empty hands as he saw the wall of firepower arrayed before him. “It’s us.”
Beside Kane, Grant and Brigid were also raising their empty hands to shoulder level where they could be seen, and all three of the Cerberus field team were wondering just what was going on.
A mellifluous voice called to Kane from somewhere behind the wall of armed guards and, a moment later, Lakesh came brushing past the guards to greet the three of them. “I’m frightfully sorry about all this,” Lakesh began as he grasped Kane’s hand in a solid two-handed shake. “We’ve had a major glitch with the communications relay, causing us to lose contact with everyone out in the field. Precautions will remain in place until we can track who’s entering via the mat-trans, I’m afraid.”
Kane nodded as Lakesh made a path through the wall of armed guards toward the main area of the control room. He saw Edwards sitting with his own field team in one corner of the room. The military man’s face was red with anger and he was complaining in loud terms to his teammates about having his own people pointing guns at him on his arrival at the redoubt.
“Some welcome this is,” Edwards snorted. “If I’d wanted this kinda aggravation every time I walk in the door, I’d’ve got married.”
Edwards’s teammates agreed with the man, used to his bluster.
Kane and his crew strode beside Lakesh toward the Cerberus leader’s own desk.
“Our Commtacts ceased working about an hour ago,” Grant explained. “I was talking with Kane at the time and suddenly—nada—the line was dead.”
Lakesh looked from Grant to Kane to Brigid, concern marring his features. “Did everything go okay?” he asked.
Kane nodded. “Got a little hairy for a while, but you know us—managed to play things by ear.”
“And what about the artifact?” Lakesh quizzed. “An alien chair, wasn’t it?”
“It’s Annunaki, all right,” Brigid confirmed as she removed her dark hat and tossed her lustrous hair back over her shoulders. “I think it’s an astrogator’s chair, used for navigation in starship travel.”
Lakesh stroked at his chin in fascination. “You tested it?” he asked.
Brigid made a sour face. “It kind of tested me,” she admitted, still conscious of the tingling feeling on her skin where the tendrils had tried to consume her just an hour before.
“That doesn’t sound so good,” Lakesh mused. “Would you care to elaborate?”
Brigid began to explain about the strange chair that had held her in its unshakable clutches, but Kane interrupted. “That can wait,” he said. “What’s going on with the Commtacts?”
“And the transponders?” Grant added. “My tracker’s still operating but it couldn’t even locate my own frequency blip while I was out in the field.”
Lakesh indicated the satellite monitoring and communication desks where Brewster Philboyd, Donald Bry and several others were working in unison on what was evidently a fraught and urgent project. “The satellite feeds went down fifty-three minutes ago,” Lakesh explained. “We’ve lost all external comms, including Commtacts, monitoring and general analysis and prediction software.”
“You ‘lost’?” Kane asked.
“It’s still down,” Lakesh told him. “Our best guess is that something has taken out the Comsat and Vela satellites, and Donald and his team are trying to backtrack over the unmonitored feeds to see if we can find any evidence as to what.”
Tucking a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear, Brigid asked hesitantly, “Do you think this was a deliberate sabotage?”
“We haven’t ruled out that possibility yet,” Lakesh said ominously, “but at the same time it may just as easily be a natural phenomenon or a massive internal failure of the satellites themselves.”
“Affecting both of them at once?” Brigid asked, clearly dubious.
“Freak weather conditions, such as a magnetic storm, could result in a block to all our signals,” Lakesh suggested. “Until we can locate the specific data, we’ll be hard-pressed to give any definitive answers.”
“And in the meantime,” Kane observed, “you don’t know who’s coming through the mat-trans, be they friend or foe.”
“Hence the security detail,” Lakesh said. “Though some people seem less understanding of the need for it than others.” He inclined his head toward Edwards, who continued to rant about having a blaster pointed in his face when his team had arrived