Several months later
The whole of Cerberus redoubt was in pieces, or so it seemed when Donald Bry walked into the operations room.
Bry’s breath caught in his throat as he saw exposed wiring and circuitry littering the surfaces of the three desks farthest from the door. He held two mugs of freshly brewed coffee, and as he took a step closer, the petite-framed Skylar Hitch popped up from beneath one of the desks, so close that she almost knocked the mugs out of his hands.
Hitch was a timid woman in her twenties who stood a mere five feet tall. Her light coffee-colored skin was smooth and flawless, while her hazel eyes seemed alive with intelligence. This day, she had tied her glossy black hair back in an abbreviated ponytail that brushed against her nape as she turned her head. Like the other personnel in the operations room, Skylar wore a white bodysuit with a vertical zipper. She laughed nervously as she saw Bry standing before her.
“My goodness, I’m sorry, Donald,” she said, looking away from him in discomfort. “I almost knocked you flying.”
Although only a small man himself, Bry doubted whether Skylar Hitch would actually be able to knock him flying, even catching him unawares like that. He was a round-shouldered man with an unruly mop of curly, copper-colored hair. A well-trusted member of the Cerberus team, Bry acted as deputy leader for the facility. He wore his customary expression of consternation as though always unable to find the answer to a pressing problem.
The operations room itself was large and high ceilinged. There were two aisles of computer terminals, and a huge Mercator-relief map stretched the length of the wall over the entry. The map was dotted with lights of different colors that played across it like old-fashioned flight paths.
In the corner of the room where Hitch worked at the dismantled computers, far away from the main door, a small chamber was set inside a larger anteroom, its transparent walls made of smoked armaglass. This was the mat-trans unit and, back when the redoubt had originally been established, it had formed the centerpiece of the whole military-funded operation.
Coffee sloshed about in the mugs Bry held as he gestured to the mess of wiring and circuitry. “What is going on here, Skylar? I left you alone for fifteen minutes…”
“I’ve located our problem.” Skylar smiled. “The motherboards are overheating, and it’s causing the system to crash.”
Bry looked at her, astonished. Though timid and bookish, Hitch was a computer expert who sometimes gave the impression that she actually thought in computer language, she was so in tune with the machinery in the Cerberus redoubt. Over the past week, there had been several instances when the computers in the ops area froze, shut down or provided streams of gobbledygook on their monitors. Bry had genuine concerns that a virus was attacking their computers—a group in Australia had hacked into their system and fed the Cerberus machines false data only a few months ago—but he had been unable to find any obvious coding glitches.
Skylar Hitch was one of a number of IT experts who were on call for such problems, and she and Bry had spent the early morning running a series of system checks trying to diagnose the glitch. He had left her for a quarter of an hour while he used the bathroom and grabbed some strong coffee from the facility canteen, trusting Skylar to continue the diagnosis alone. The last thing he had expected to find on his return was three computers stripped down to their component parts.
“These computers are years old,” Skylar explained. “They’re just wearing out.”
Bry shook his head and sighed. “We’re all wearing out,” he grumbled, finishing his statement with a sip of hot coffee.
Skylar rolled a two-inch-long screwdriver across her fingers, a nervous tic. “I can keep replacing bits piecemeal,” she told Bry, “but ultimately we should probably look at updating or renewing the whole system.”
Bry nodded. “Replace what you can, Skylar,” he told her as he placed the mugs on the desk and offered to give her a hand.
Around them, the morning shift personnel filed in to begin their designated tasks, working the monitoring system and tracking the various field teams, all of them ignoring the disruption going on beside them.
ELSEWHERE IN THE VAST complex, Grant lay in bed in a darkened room, head resting against his upturned hand, admiring the beautiful woman lying next to him. He was a huge, muscular man, and he seemed like a coiled spring even as he lay peacefully watching his sleeping companion. Grant had skin like polished mahogany and his dark hair was cropped close to his scalp. A drooping, gunslinger’s mustache brushed across his upper lip, and the dark shadow of stubble was just starting to appear upon his chin. Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville, whose labyrinthine life’s journey had brought him here to the Cerberus redoubt.
The woman beside Grant seemed tiny in comparison to the ex-Mag, but her slight frame was that of an athlete, her belly flat, tight knots of muscle visible on her arms and legs. Shizuka was a warrior born, but unlike Grant, her skin was a golden color accented with peach and milk, and her closed eyes showed the pleasing almond curve of her Oriental ancestry. She had full, petaled lips beneath a small stub nose, and her fine blue-black hair was cut so that it brushed the tops of her shoulders. Shizuka was a woman of astonishing beauty, and Grant knew that he would never, even for a second, take her for granted.
As he silently watched Shizuka, the woman’s eyes fluttered open. After a moment she turned to face him, a smile on her lips. “What are you doing?” she queried, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“Just thinking about how beautiful you are,” Grant told her.
Shizuka blushed, her smile growing wider. “What are you after, Grant-san?” she asked.
One of Grant’s mighty hands reached forward and, with infinite gentleness, brushed her dark hair from her face. “Nothing you don’t want to give, Shizuka,” he assured her, leaning across the bed to kiss her fully on the mouth.
Shizuka’s golden arms reached around and pulled the huge man closer, kissing him back with the same ferocious passion that she showed for battle.
SEVERAL FLOORS BELOW, in a long room at the end of a corridor that ran the length of the subbasement, two people stood side by side, blasting shot after shot from the guns in their hands as though their very lives depended on it. Four large speakers placed strategically around the room were pumping out loud, guitar-led music, filling the room with the strains of a long-forgotten rock and roll band.
One of the shooters was a muscular man with dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Like Grant, Kane was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville whose life in recent years had been intrinsically tied to the well-being of the Cerberus operation. He was built like a wolf, firm muscles across the upper half of his body, powerful legs holding him in a rock-steady stance as he reeled off a stream of bullets at the multiple targets that hurtled toward him from all sides of the room. He was dressed in casual clothes, a dark T-shirt and combat pants, and his eyes shifted from one target to the next as they appeared at various positions along the length of the firing range. His Sin Eater handgun blasted a continuous stream of 9 mm bullets as each item appeared, each bullet finding its target, not a single shot wasted.
Standing beside him, Kane’s companion was a tall woman with pale skin and dazzling red hair that fell in waves to almost halfway down her spine. The woman wore the standard white jumpsuit of the Cerberus redoubt’s staff, and it hugged her so tightly as to accentuate the curves of her trim, athletic body. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she scanned the room for new targets, the bulky TP-9 pistol held before her in a two-handed grip. Brigid Baptiste was an archivist-turned-warrior who excelled in both disciplines.
There was a clatter off to the left, its sound masked by the loud, pumping music, and a target dropped from the rails that ran the length and breadth of the ceiling. Kane and Brigid shifted their weapons toward the target in unison, their movements liquid smooth. Kane’s favored Sin Eater pistol spit bullets at the silhouette’s chest, scoring a hit dead center of the heart, while Brigid’s TP-9 semiautomatic pistol blasted a bullet through the silhouette’s forehead,