The other man was called Edwards, who was similarly well built. He had chosen to forgo a jacket, leaving his rippling arm muscles cinched beneath the tight sleeves of his dark cotton shirt. He was closer in age to Kane. Like Grant, his hair was shaved close to his skull, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. During the war with Ullikummis, Edwards had been duped into acting in the interests of the enemy through a hidden implant in his skull. That implant had been removed via ultrasonic surgery just four days earlier, but Edwards was in the field already—determined, as he put it, to make up for lost time. Kane and Grant kept an eye on him, neither of them sure that he could be fully trusted yet.
There was a fourth Cerberus agent in the room, an albino woman called Domi who had been tracking down information about this meeting for several days. She had patched through to Cerberus just a few hours before, confirming the time and location and giving the go-ahead for the others to move in.
The meeting itself was in the West Coast territory of the old United States of America, just forty miles from the majestic settlement of Luikkerville. Built on the ruins of Snakefishville, Luikkerville was a city constructed from faith, its populace enthralled by the preachings of Ullikummis and his followers. News of Ullikummis’s passing had done little to temper that burgeoning faith in the region, and Domi was there to ensure it remained at a manageable level. Where the Annunaki were involved, that was often easier said than done.
The crowd numbered close to fifty, and they came from all walks of life, all ages and ethnicities. But there was a definite atmosphere in the room. Kane could sense an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and mistrust, the belief that some great betrayal had occurred. Their god was dead.
Kane and his team continued moving through the crowd, splitting up with assured casualness as they lost themselves amid the ragtag congregation.
“...brother died,” Kane heard one of the crowd complain as he walked past. “Disappeared in a warp and never came back.”
“Yeah,” his companion agreed. “Same thing happened to my cousin. Ain’t seen him since Sunday.”
Kane moved on, gently pushing the occasional crowd member aside as he found a good vantage point to view the raised stage that dominated one end of the room.
Elsewhere within the crowd, Grant and Edwards made similar progress, making their way through the throng without drawing attention to themselves. All three men were trained Magistrates and they knew how to work through a crowd, walking with that inherent authority and challenge to their step that made others move aside.
A simple podium had been erected at one end of the hangar, just boards raised on piled blocks, and Kane, Grant and Edwards took their places as a woman stepped up onto it with the help of a man in a hooded robe. The robe was made of rough hessian material, and it featured a red shield insignia over the left breast. Kane winced as he recognized the design. Just a few years before, he and his colleagues had worn something similar in their roles as Magistrates; this new religion had appropriated much of the iconography of the dying villes in its manipulation of the populace. The woman looked to be in her late twenties, with mouse-brown hair to which she had added streaks of purple like an anarchic road map. She walked with a shuffle to her step, and Kane saw she carried a little extra weight around her middle beneath the loose, floaty dress she wore. The dress was white, and it billowed around her as it caught the drafts from the broken windows, clinging to her legs as she took each step.
To the side of the podium, two more of the robed Magistrate stand-ins waited, their hoods down revealing their emotionless expressions. They were watching the crowd warily.
The crowd came to a hush as the woman stood astride the podium, casting her eyes slowly over them, an appreciative smile forming on her lips. The woman raised her arms and, once the crowd was silent, she spoke.
“I was made a promise by Lord Ullikummis,” she announced in a clear voice, “that stone would be the future. That stone would be our future.”
A little rumble went through the crowd, and voices were raised in dissent.
“I heard it was over.”
“Yeah, Lord Ullikummis abandoned us.”
“He died.”
The woman raised her hands for silence. “Please, people. Please.”
Gradually, with a palpable sense of reluctance, the crowd quietened.
“Ullikummis is dead,” the woman on the podium announced. “The rumors are true.”
Someone in the crowd cried out, and others raised their voices in shock once again, taking a minute to finally quieten once more.
“Ullikummis ascended,” the woman continued, “to watch over all of us, to better guarantee his utopia would come to pass. And he left us a gift.”
The woman pulled at her waist then, and Kane saw that what she wore was not a dress after all but a skirt and top of the same shimmering material. She raised the top, lifting it up and over her belly until it cinched just below her breasts. Her pink belly was swollen, a little bump showing in line with her hips. At first, Kane had taken the bump for fat, but now he realized his mistake.
“He planted his seed in me before he ascended,” the woman announced to the stunned crowd. “I am the Stone Widow, and Ullikummis’s child grows within me. Our lord has departed, but his flesh shall live on.”
Once again, the crowd began to talk, raising questions and surging forward to see and to touch the swollen belly of the pregnant woman who called herself the Stone Widow.
Careful not to draw attention to himself, Kane engaged the hidden receiver of his Commtact and subvocalized, “Edwards, what are you making of this?”
A moment later, Edwards responded, his voice crystal clear in Kane’s head. “I need to be closer to be sure, Kane.”
Commtacts were communications devices that were hidden beneath the skin of the Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit whose designs had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. 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 funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
Kane bit back a curse as he saw Edwards’s tall form pushing farther toward the very front of the crowd. The man’s height made him conspicuous and, unlike himself and Grant, Edwards had never had much experience working in low-key ops like this one. Instead, he just barreled on, eyes on the prize.
“Cool off, Edwards,” Kane subvocalized. “You’re drawing too much attention.”
“Well, shit, Kane,” Edwards’s voice came back. “Whatever’s left inside me from that monster needs to get close to sense things. So, I’m getting close. You got a better idea, I’m all ears.” As he spoke, Edwards peered across the heads of the crowd, fixing Kane with a challenging stare.
Kane looked away, his eyes automatically playing over the rest of the crowd. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it should play out. Edwards had been turned into a traitor against his will, and now that he was back on side he felt like he had something to prove. If they weren’t careful, that desire to prove himself was going to land them all in very hot water.
* * *
MEANWHILE, CLOSE TO the rear wall of the hangar, the fourth agent of the Cerberus team had slipped past the celebrants and was making her way along the length of the room behind the stage. Domi was an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair that was cut into a short, pixie-style bob. Barely five feet in height with eyes a fearsome red, Domi