It was usually quiet here, whatever the time was. The staff at Cerberus worked in shifts, and people respected that someone was always sleeping no matter what hour of the day it was. But the sounds of talking, of laughter, seemed to echo through her door today.
Brigid shifted, turning onto her side and reaching for the lamp. She squinted her eyes as she brushed the lamp’s side, switching it on with her touch. Beside the lamp, the notebook she kept at her bedside had been moved. Brigid had an eidetic memory, one that was photographic, and it remembered details like that. The book had been rotated twenty degrees from where she had left it. Her incredible memory could make her a little precise sometimes in the things she did.
She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties with an athletic body and long locks of red hair that curled past her shoulders to a point midway down her spine. Her eyes were emerald green, bright with a fire of curiosity. Her assessing gaze suggested a voracious intellect, while her full lips promised passion; Brigid was indeed intelligent and passionate and much more besides. An ex-archivist from Cobaltville, she had been expelled from the ville when she had helped uncover a millennia-long conspiracy designed to subjugate humankind. The conspiracy dated all the way back to the presence on Earth of the alien race called the Annunaki, who had posed as gods from the heavens and been worshipped and adored by primitive humans. Their intrigues had become legend, their infighting the basis of many of humanity’s myths—but the Annunaki were all too real. Brigid could assure you of that fact because she had been there when they had returned to the Earth in the care of their dragon-like wombship, Tiamat, and been reborn to subjugate humankind once more. They had failed, not in the least due to the concerted efforts of Brigid and her companions in the Cerberus organization, a military-style group dedicated to the protection of humanity and its freedoms.
Brigid had joined Cerberus after her expulsion from Cobaltville along with two disgraced Magistrates called Kane and Grant, and a feral child called Domi who had been living as a sex slave for a beast called Guana Teague. Their lives had moved on an awfully long way from that early meeting.
Brigid reached for the notepad, saw in that instant that there were words written upon it. She turned the pad slowly, looking at the words. There were two words—“emit part”—written in her hand, albeit shakily. The words were written not on a line but in a circle, like so:
Automatic writing, Brigid realized as she looked at the strange words, presumably written without conscious thought while she was asleep. Well, that was new.
But what did it mean? Obviously, something had disturbed her in the night; something had caused her to write those words on her notebook, an item that often seemed a redundant indulgence when her memory was such a keen tool and yet could sometimes elicit the answer to a nagging problem from the day before. After all, what would a woman with a photographic memory ever need to write down?
She lay in bed, the covers pulled up high to stay warm, holding the pad and gazing at the topmost sheet.
Emit part.
It meant nothing to her. What was the part? What did it emit? It was dream writing, the kind that adheres to the logic of the subconscious, whose meaning is lost when the waking mind takes over.
Brigid held the pad before her, stared at the letters until her eyes lost focus and stared beyond it into the whiteness of the page, turning the letters into a blur. From outside her suite, Brigid heard familiar voices raised in a friendly discussion peppered with joyful laughter, but the sound barely registered on her consciousness.
Eventually, she set down the pad, pushed back the covers and got out of the bed. The new day awaited, whatever it might bring.
Kane stepped out of a window in quantum space and into a hail of bullets. He stumbled back under the assault, shouting a command to his three partners before they, too, emerged from the interphase gateway that had materialized in thin air behind him amid the ruins of the Turkish fort.
“Abort the mission!” Kane shouted as his partners stepped out of the quantum ether amid a multicolored swirl laced through with lightning forks. Even as he spoke, he felt the passage of a bullet burn like hellfire across his right bicep, channeling a lance of white-hot pain through his arm.
Behind him, the same bullet—or maybe another from the same source, since it was impossible to be certain amid the hail of gunfire—slammed against the shining surface of the interphaser unit in a shriek of rending metal, sending out a shower of sparks and shattered plating in its wake.
Kane saw the quantum window collapse on itself at that moment, two conjoined cones of multicolored light streaked through with witch-fire lightning, disappearing in the space of a heartbeat, even as his partners stepped from their impossible depths.
The quantum gateway had been generated by the interphaser, a highly advanced device that used a hidden web of pathways across the globe and beyond to move people and objects great distances—even as far as other planets in the solar system—in the blink of an eye. Utilizing principles laid out by an ancient star-born race of aliens, the interphaser was a portable teleportation device which tapped into a network of so-called parallax points to deliver its users to their selected destination. Parallax points were widespread but not infinite, and as such their locations enforced their own strict limitation on where a user might travel—as one could only travel to and from a specific, designated parallax point, not create one at will. These parallax points had often become sites of religious and spiritual interest as primitive man sensed the strange forces contained within them. However, while the interphaser gave Kane and his Cerberus teammates an incredible measure of freedom in their travels across the globe, there was one very obvious problem with any teleportation system, one writ large as life before Kane’s eyes as he dived to the ground with the burn of the bullet stinging against his arm: you just never knew what you were materializing into.
“Down!” Kane cried, slamming against the sandy dirt as the roar of gunfire continued all around him, bullets riddling the ground like rain in a monsoon.
Kane and his partners had emerged in the ruins of an ancient fort, roughly sixty miles south of the Mediterranean Sea in the part of the African continent known as Libya. The fort had no doubt been impressive in its heyday, but now it looked like a scattering of sand-colored slabs—some significantly larger than a Deathbird helicopter—sprawled across the sandy scrub of the Bir Hakeim Oasis. The stones reminded Kane of a graveyard, its gravestones created in colossal proportions as if to mark the passing of titans. Appropriate, perhaps, as the place was yet another reminder of how much of history seemed to have been lost with the nukecaust two hundred years before.
There was a wide crack running through the center of the dilapidated compound, twelve feet across at its widest point and deep enough that its sides disappeared into stygian darkness, even under the relentless brilliance of the midafternoon sun. That sun was obscured by dark cloud cover intermingled with the dense smoke of explosions.
There were at least eighty other people here, Kane guessed as he rolled out of the path of another hail of bullets, one hand clapped against the sting of his arm. Two groups—tribes, gangs, armies, call them what you will—using the ruined fort for cover as they traded bullets from automatic weapons, the sound of gunfire like a thunderstorm echoing across the fallen stones and beyond.
The place had been the site of a Turkish fort a long time ago, back when state borders and ethnic groups mattered, before the nuclear holocaust had rewritten everything in the wink of an eye. It was estimated that 90 percent of the world’s human population had died in the scant few moments that had constituted the nuclear war, and even though two hundred years had passed since those retina-searing bombs had dropped, it seemed that humankind was still striving to recover.
One