Kane, watching the road and the sights beyond as the wag continued its slow journey along the recently laid track. She was a slim, beautiful woman in her late twenties, with pale skin and a mane of red-gold hair like dancing flames. Her eyes were the bewitching green of cut emeralds. She had a high forehead that suggested intelligence, and full lips that promised a more passionate aspect. In reality, Brigid had both of these qualities and many more besides. But she had one quality that was as rare as it was useful—an eidetic memory, the ability to perfectly remember anything she had seen, even just for an instant. She too had been raised in Cobaltville, working as an archivist in the Historical Division until she had stumbled upon the same conspiracy as Kane, a conspiracy at the heart of which was the intention of alien beings to subjugate humankind and destroy all independence and free will. Like Kane, Brigid had been expelled from the ville and declared an Outlander by its ruling baron, a human-alien hybrid called Baron Cobalt. Along with Kane’s Magistrate partner Grant, Brigid had subsequently been recruited into the Cerberus organization.
Like the other adherents on the transport, Brigid and Kane were dressed in ordinary clothes that suggested a farming background. Kane wore a beaten brown leather jacket, patched at the elbows, over a checkered shirt, with dark pants and scuffed work boots that had seen better days. Brigid wore a leather jacket in a lighter shade of brown, an oversize man’s shirt and sleeveless T-shirt, with combat pants and hard-wearing boots. Beneath both of their outfits, the two Cerberus warriors wore shadow suits—skintight environment suits that regulated the wearer’s temperature as well as providing protection from blunt trauma and environmental threats. The shadow suits were perfectly hidden under their ragged clothes; no one on the transport would suspect they were in the presence of two highly efficient warriors.
The other people in the transport looked to be mostly rural types. Several, however, had dressed in what were obviously their finest clothes; two men wearing dark wool suits, a woman in a rose-pink floor-length dress with a matching wide-brimmed hat resting on her lap where she sat near the open rear of the wagon. Brigid guessed that those three saw this pilgrimage a little like attending church way back before the nukecaust, the way parishioners would wear their “Sunday finest” to show their respect for the Lord.
“I miss my George so much,” the woman with the hat was telling her bench mate in a low voice. “He walked into that storm out west two years ago and never returned.”
“That storm has taken a lot of people,” her companion sympathized. “’Cause of the nukecaust, they say it might never blow itself out.”
There were several other figures inside the bus-like transport, too, and all were dressed in matching robes that looked similar to a monk’s habit. The robes were made from a rough, fustian material and featured a hood that could be drawn down over the head to hang low over the face, along with a crimson shield-like insignia sewn over the right breast. The shield insignia haunted Kane—it was eerily similar to the shield he had worn when he had been a Magistrate for Cobaltville, years before. Two similarly dressed adherents were sitting up front, one of them working the driving controls while the other had used a map to give directions until they’d reached this stone-lined road that led solely to their final destination. Kane and Brigid had met these people before—firewalkers, Brigid had dubbed them, because of their seeming invulnerability when under a self-imposed trancelike state of meditation. Whether the firewalkers could still perform such superhuman feats now, with their leader—an alien prince called Ullikummis—dead, was unknown to the Cerberus teammates at this moment. As Kane might have said in his lighter moments, that only added to the fun.
Something big was happening, the Cerberus teammates knew. Excited rumors had been buzzing in the shadowy community of stone adherents that was strung across the continent in patches. There was talk that Ullikummis walked again.
They were in a place that the old maps called Saskatchewan in a country called Canada. If it had a new name, Kane had never bothered to learn it—his journeys across the globe on behalf of the Cerberus organization left him with little time to learn local customs or enjoy the sights. Rather, he and his Cerberus allies seemed to spend most of their time running headlong into danger, as arrows, bullets and honest-to-goodness death rays blasted all about them. Somehow, no matter the odds, the field personnel had always survived, thanks in part to their own phenomenal skills and in part to their backup, based in the redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana.
There was a palpable air of excitement in the pilgrims’ rugged transport now. The passengers had been gathered from a specified pickup point where they had been instructed to wait after being recruited at one of the numerous public sermons given by the stone adherents.
The wag was twenty feet long, with a wire frame over which strips of canvas had been laid to protect the travelers from the icy torrent that fell from the skies. The vehicle was unpainted, leaving the metallic frame gleaming darkly, and it featured seven wheels including a rear-mounted steering assist to tackle the rougher ground around the worship site. In the two hundred years since the nukecaust, the paved roads had fallen into disrepair, and sites like the one this wag was heading toward were poorly served by existing communications links. As Brigid had pointed out, the last time she had been here it had been a farmer’s field—and that had been less than eighteen months ago.
Brakes groaned as the transport pulled to a halt. Up ahead, Kane could see that the gravel road became wider, the standing stones funneling outward to leave a broad, circular expanse of gravel in the center of which was the towering structure with the red eye. The tower was roughly three or four stories—or thirty-five feet—high and built with straight, slightly rounded sides as if some baton had been shoved into the soil. It was phallic, Kane thought, but that didn’t come as any surprise—he had seen plenty of temples to the gods, and the phallus was a recurring theme. The baton-like structure was carved from dark stone like the standing stones, while dotted along its sides were streaks of polished red-orange glass. A single red glass circle had been placed close to the tower’s pinnacle, like a mighty eye staring down on the people below. This “eye” faced into the sun, drawing its rays inside the structure itself.
Kane recognized that design, too—it drew from the familiar pattern used in the nine baronies, the red circle atop the Administration Monolith that gave the citizens the impression that they were being watched at all times. One of the more insidious ways in which the stone adherents of Ullikummis operated was to take the familiar iconography of the baronies and twist it to their own ends—hence the cycloptic eye in the tower and the use of the breast badge that was familiar to anyone who had seen a Magistrate uniform.
“Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to make this place seem special,” Kane muttered to Brigid as he let the gap in the canvas slip closed again.
At the same time, one of the robed adherents addressed the group from the rear of the wag, close to the open gate at which passengers embarked and debarked, speaking in a bold voice. “Chosen of stone, we walk from here,” he explained, “to truly appreciate the majesty of his birthplace, as is the will of the infinite lord.”
“Will, my ass,” Kane muttered from the side of his mouth as he and Brigid joined the other passengers, filing toward the open rear of the stopped vehicle.
A moment later, the first of the pilgrims stepped from the transport, dropping down to the rain-wet gravel a few feet below. In less than a minute, everyone had disembarked from the wagon, and they clustered on the gravel in the lee of the baton-like tower, Kane and Brigid among them. The group were excited but they adopted a reverential silence as they strode across the ground before the grand structure, staring up at it in awe. To them, this was a place of incredible religious significance—the birthplace of Ullikummis, their savior, their god.
To all, that is, except for Kane and Brigid, of course; they were here to scope out the site and see whether something dangerous was building here, well out of sight of the crumbling baronies that had split North America into nine territories of harsh and subtle control. They had faced Ullikummis before—fought him and stopped him before he could take over the world.
A little over a year ago, a large meteor had crash-landed here. From within that meteor had emerged Ullikummis, a member of an alien race of creatures called the Annunaki who had posed as gods several