Another roar of gunfire cut across Brigid’s words, a line of dust plumes accompanying each cough as bullets drilled into the ground all around her. Beside her, another woman—older, with a lean frame and short, dark hair that showed a few traces of gray—wove through the barrage, crouched down and closed her eyes, covering her head with her hands. This was Mariah Falk, a geologist for the Cerberus organization who, unlike the others, was inexperienced in combat situations.
“Get your head down!” the fourth member of the team—a gigantic, dark-skinned man called Grant—yelled, scooping Mariah up in one of his mighty arms and part lifting, part throwing her out of the line of fire. As he did so, another swarm of bullets came lunging through the air, drilling into the dirt and rattling against the chrome sides of the interphaser where it waited on the ground. As they struck, Brigid leaped in the opposite direction, diving for cover behind something that looked like a fallen obelisk.
The world seemed to spin around Mariah as Grant released his grip on her. Still moving, she seemed for a moment to dance toward the cover of a fallen stone archway that, even in its ruinous state, still loomed twice the height of Mariah herself. Then she slammed against it, back and shoulders striking it in a solid thump accompanied by a woof of expelled air from her lungs. She wore a camo jacket like the others, pants and hiking boots, and she had a leather satchel hanging behind her, its strap stretching in a diagonal line across her chest and back. Mariah was slight of frame and, though not conventionally pretty, she had an easy smile and a kindly way that put most people at ease. Right now, however, neither her easy smile nor her homespun charm were likely to help save her life. Instead, she took deep breaths and tried to hold down her breakfast as a drumbeat of bullets caromed off the other side of the stone archway she was pressed against. It was cover—scant but holding—and she knew it was the only thing keeping her alive in those frantic, heart-stopping moments. How did the others cope with this as part and parcel of their everyday lives? she wondered.
Grant scrambled out of the path of the bullets, darting past Mariah and ducking down behind the far side of the collapsed archway. “What the hell did we walk into?” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard over the cymbal crash of bullets.
Grant was a tall man with a muscular body and mahogany skin, his head was shaved and he sported a goatee. An ex-Magistrate in his midthirties, Grant was dressed in a camo jacket similar to his partners’, though it did nothing to disguise his hulking proportions, as well as a Kevlar duster. As Grant scrambled out of the line of fire, it was hard to miss the sheer power that was contained within his well-defined muscles—there was not an ounce of fat on his whole body.
“Don’t know,” Kane answered through clenched teeth, still pressing one hand against his arm where the bullet had glanced off his protective shadow suit, his back against a half-collapsed wall a little way from his partner. “Some kind of local trouble by the look of it.”
Kane was a tall man in his early thirties with broad shoulders and rangy limbs. His dark hair was cropped short and his eyes were the gray-blue color of steel. An ex-Magistrate like Grant, Kane wore a light jacket—desert camouflage colors—that reached down past his waist and featured a dozen pockets of various sizes, light-colored pants and calf-high boots whose leather had the satisfying creases of shoes that have been worn in. Beneath this, Kane wore another layer of clothes, the black all-in-one body glove known as a shadow suit, and it was this that had deflected the 9 mm bullet that had grazed his arm like an angry wasp when he’d stepped from the interphase window. Constructed from a superstrong nanoweave, the shadow suit was a skintight environmental suit that could regulate the wearer’s body temperature, even in extremes of heat and cold. While it was not bulletproof, the strong weave could repel blunt trauma and deflect small-caliber bullets, minimizing injury. Right now, Kane’s arm burned where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, but its full impact had been reduced thanks to the armor-strong weave of the protective suit.
There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his rangy, loping strides and his personality, for he could be both a loner and pack leader, depending on circumstance. Right now he was here as an operative of Cerberus, the outlawed organization that dealt in the esoteric, with a particular emphasis on protecting humankind from the hidden forces, human and alien, that seemed always arrayed against it. Together with Grant and Brigid, Kane formed one-third of Cerberus Away Team—or CAT—Alpha.
Between Kane and his partners was the interphaser, its square base and pyramidal sides now dotted with the impact of bullets so that it looked as if some carnivorous creature had sunk its teeth into it. Brigid was staring at it from her own hiding place behind a fallen obelisk of stone that lay close to the mighty rent in the ground.
“How do we get out of here now?” Brigid asked, reaching for the weapon holstered at her hip. She was dressed in a similar camouflage outfit to the others. Theirs was a noble pursuit, but sometimes it seemed that walking into a hail of bullets was a too-frequent part of the job. Almost as though to illustrate this, Brigid unholstered the TP-9 semiautomatic that she habitually wore at her hip, unlocked the safety and scanned their surroundings with alert eyes. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol finished in molded matte black with a covered targeting scope across the top. “Well?”
“Don’t ask me,” Kane spit, ducking his head down as another volley of bullets came hurtling past overhead. “I’m fresh out of ideas. Besides, I thought you were the brains of this outfit, Baptiste!”
Brigid glared at him. “Brains, yes. Miracle maker—that’s your department, I believe.”
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Belief will get you a miracle, all right.” As he spoke, he performed a long-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. The maneuver activated the catch on a holster located on the underside of Kane’s forearm, commanding a retractable blaster to his hand from its hiding place beneath his jacket’s sleeve. Kane’s weapon was a fourteen-inch-long automatic pistol called a Sin Eater, a compact hand blaster able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The weapon was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one, and a Mag’s judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch feels natural on a habitual wearer.
Back pressed tightly to the wall, Kane poked his head above the edge of the sand-colored bricks and scanned the area. There were people moving in all directions, some in groups, some alone, all of them armed. Some were dressed in semi-military uniforms, cobbled-together outfits that created a ragtag kind of uniformity. Others wore civilian clothing that looked like a cross between a long coat and a woman’s nightdress. All of them were scrambling through the ruins and blasting at one another with a wide variety of weapons. Someone must have seen the interphase window open and figured it for a bomb or a rocket launch or something—with the place full of hair-triggered nut balls the way it was, it was little wonder, Kane concluded, that someone had tried to blast the interphaser to smithereens.
Kane continued scanning the area beyond for a few moments, as another rush of bullets came rattling against the far side of his protective wall. Kane spotted a long-barreled machine gun on a tripod mount, hitched above one of the few remaining walls on the second level of the ruined fortress. It was unleashing serious damage on the fighters below in a continuous stream of 24 mm slugs. Four soldiers fell to its assault even as he watched.
Across from him, Grant and Brigid were scanning other sections of the collapsed fort, while Mariah just kept her head down, flinching at each new shout of a gun being blasted, each pee-ow of a bullet’s flight. They had appeared, it seemed, smack-dab in the middle of the ruined fort—which was smack-dab in the middle of what seemed to be a raging war zone.
“Nowhere