Janus Trap

Broken Ghost took a single pace forward, and she seemed suddenly much more imposing as Decimal River looked up at her from his seated position. “Prime the trap,” she said, her words the barest whisper as they left her mouth.

Cloud Singer smiled. Soon the Original Tribe would get its due. Soon they would have their revenge on Cerberus and its accursed leader. And then Lakesh would die.

“IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME with these bottom-feeders,” Kane growled as he mentally assessed the immediate area around the crates where the three Cerberus warriors had taken cover. The exit door was ten paces ahead of them, and there was certainly enough cover to escape the boathouse if they wanted to.

“What do you see out there, Kane?” Grant asked.

Another hail of bullets hammered into the crates beside them, splintering the wood and kicking up puffs of sawdust, and they heard the sounds of guards running all about them between the stacked crates.

“People in diving suits,” Kane said. “Frogmen armed to the teeth. They were rushing in from the open dock.”

Grant nodded toward the door to the boathouse. “You want to get out of here?”

Kane thought for a moment, glancing across at Brigid for confirmation. “Nah,” he decided. “Let’s go make friends, cause mayhem.” With that, Kane stood, reached up and pulled himself up the stack of crates beside him, clambering to the top in a series of quick, economical movements.

Raising the Sin Eater before him, Grant hunkered down and stalked off into the shadows, his black duster helping him blend into the darkness. Brigid took a different route toward the opposite side of the boathouse, weaving through the crates at a fast trot as bullets zipped all around, the TP-9 held high. As she ran, she rooted around in her satchel with her free hand, producing three small metallic spheres, like ball bearings, from its hidden depths.

As Kane pulled himself to the top of the stacked crates, he saw one of Ohio Blue’s men up there stagger backward toward him, an oozing red stain across his chest where he had been riddled with bullets from below. The man cried as he misstepped, falling from the high stack and plummeting past Kane to the solid floor almost fifteen feet below. Across from him, on a nearby tower of crates, another guard was falling over his own feet, a gout of red gushing from a large wound in what was left of his skull. Whoever the newcomers were, they were well-trained, Kane realized—it took some nice pinpoint work to take out the high guards so quickly.

He pulled himself over the lip of the crates and, keeping his body low, stalked across the towers as flashes of gunfire continued to light the floor below. The body of another security guard lay sprawled on his back close to the far side of the crate tower, a single red-rimmed wound between his staring eyes. In an automatic gesture, Kane’s left hand reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes as he passed.

Kane dropped, lying flat on his stomach, and crawled the last few yards to the edge of the tall tower. His head popped forward, and he peeked over the side as the gunfire continued below him. It looked as though a miniature war had erupted down there. In heavy helmets and diving gear, a dozen men were working as a team, using long-nosed pistols to take out Ohio Blue’s guards as they approached the beautiful trader where she cowered behind her crimson recliner, bullets flying all around.

As Kane watched, the tall blond trader reached beneath the bullet-riddled recliner and produced a long-barreled revolver from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the couch. It was a Ruger Security Six, a silver six-shooter with enough stopping power to drill through a wag door. Blue hadn’t been cowering, Kane realized; she was using the recliner as cover while she armed herself.

In a flash, Ohio Blue raised the Ruger, steadying the butt with her free hand, and blasted a shot at the lead frogman. The bullet took him full in the chest and the masked man staggered for a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the frogman shook his head and continued walking toward Ohio Blue, almost as though nothing had happened.

Ohio’s guards were also having little success, and Kane now saw why. The divers were wearing bulletproof vests over their diving suits.

Ohio Blue continued firing at the lead frogman, her shots going wild as she started to panic. A moment later, the six-shooter was out of bullets, but it took several pulls of the trigger before the beautiful woman realized. She tossed aside the useless weapon and ducked behind her crimson recliner as bullets zipped all around her.

“We want her alive,” one of the frogmen reminded his team as the group got closer.

On the crates above, Kane sighted down the length of his Sin Eater, slowing his breathing and focusing on the rearmost man in scuba gear. After a moment, Kane’s finger stroked the trigger, unleashing a short burst. The 9 mm bullets raced to their target, hitting the diver’s faceplate and shattering the strengthened plastic mask in an explosion of hard splinters.

Kane watched as the man ducked and clawed at the mask, his companions turning to look at him. From up there, Kane couldn’t hear the man’s howls over the sounds of gunfire, but he assured himself that his victim was cursing their unseen attacker even now. A grim smile crossed Kane’s lips at the thought, and he pulled himself back from the edge of the crates, rolled to one side and made his way to a new location as a hail of bullets slapped against the edge of the uppermost crate.

On ground level between the towers of crates, Grant rushed back toward Ohio Blue, his dark eyes assessing the squad of men in scuba gear. Even as he watched, the rearmost man took Kane’s bullet to his face and dropped to his knees, clawing at the shattered remains of his faceplate.

Placing his back flush to the crates, Grant scanned the area until he spotted Ohio Blue crouching behind her recliner, muzzle-flashes reflected in the sapphire blue of her dress. She was too far away and too out in the open for him to reach safely; he would need a distraction.

“Kane, Brigid,” Grant whispered as he activated his Commtact, a top-of-the-line communication device that had been recovered from Redoubt Yankee years before. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtact didn’t need sound to be activated; it could pick up and interpret subvocalized speech if necessary, making it an ideal device for sneak work. Permanent usage of the Commtact involved a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably squeamish about, and so their use remained at field-test stage for now. However, the communication device was considered an essential tool for Kane and other field teams.

“The trader’s in trouble,” Grant explained. “I can’t reach her. Any ideas?”

“Be careful,” Kane instructed over the linked transmission. “They’re wearing some kind of armor that deflects bullets.”

Brigid’s voice came over Grant’s auditory receiver after a moment. “I’m just getting in position now,” she said. “Going to give our guests a little light show.”

Grant knew what that meant, and he pulled a pair of sunglasses from the inside pocket of his coat as Brigid spoke, following up by inserting tiny earplugs into his ears.

“Count us in, Baptiste,” Kane said in a low voice over the Commtact as he got into place above them.

Brigid Baptiste was hunkered down in the shadows of the towering crates, close to one of the high walls of the boathouse. She had placed a pair of dark lenses over her own eyes and wore earplugs to muffle sound, just as Grant did. Her head was steady as she watched the group of frogmen swarming around the main area of the building, shooting the few remaining guards as they approached the recliner where Ohio Blue cowered. Swiftly, Brigid assessed the floorboards between her and her target—they were rough in places, and a little warped here and there with damp, but they were basically flat and smooth enough for her purpose.

She drew her arm back, rolling the three silver spheres in her hand for a moment, assessing their weight as she gave one last look at the scene. Then, her arm arced forward, low to the floor, and she released the three globes as her arm continued its fluid sweep ahead. Released, the tiny silver spheres rolled along the floorboards, bumping across the rough chinks in the wood as they rushed toward the recliner.

As the spheres rolled steadily across the floor, Brigid engaged her Commtact once again. “Three, two, one,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes and turning her head away from what she knew was about to happen.

For a moment, nothing did. The three spheres rolled to the open area beside the recliner, their momentum dwindling. Two of the intruders in scuba gear had spotted them, and one shouted a query as he stepped ahead and placed his foot in the path of the first sphere. “What the fu—”

His words were lost in the explosion of sound and light that followed as the flash-bangs detonated.

Atop the crate tower, Kane surged forward, his Sin Eater held low. Even through the polymer lenses of his darkened glasses, the dazzling explosive burned into his retinas, and he blinked the pattern away as he leaped from the high crate and out into the open.

A moment later, Kane dropped into the open area of the boathouse, the Sin Eater blasting a lethal arc of 9 mm steel before him. He landed amid the frogmen with a heavy thump of boot soles against wooden floorboards, then swiftly recovered into a fighter’s crouch as he began targeting the men in scuba gear. The sound of the Sin Eater seemed dulled by the ringing in his ears that the flash-bang had wrought, but his earplugs had helped protect him from the worst of it.

The flash-bang was a miniature explosive device, designed purely to shock and startle an opponent. The explosive was all sound and light, but the charge itself was so tiny as to be worthless as a demolition device. The flash-bang was standard equipment for Kane and his team, who often saw a benefit to using nonlethal force to restrain or completely halt an enemy.

The divers were all pulling at their masks in their sudden blindness, and several fired shots at random as they struggled to recover. To one side of the recliner, Ohio Blue was sitting on her backside, an enticing sweep of bare leg visible where her dress had fallen about her. Her blue-gloved hand was held over her eyes and her shoulders heaved as though she was crying.

Off to Kane’s left, Brigid was securing the area, her TP-9 raised as she checked every nook and cranny before moving closer to the main action. A few of Ohio’s guards were still alive, but they seemed to be wounded almost to a man. Tough to stand toe to toe with an enemy who could shrug off bullets, Kane realized.

Like a charging rhino, Grant joined Kane from his hiding place among the crates, fists swinging at the closest two frogmen as they staggered about blindly. His blows connected with solid finality, and the two men fell to the floor.

Kane turned to Grant and nodded his approval. “Not exactly subtle,” he shouted to be heard over the earplugs he assumed that the other man still wore.

Pulling the handblaster from another frogman and throwing it aside, Grant lifted the man off his feet and tossed him against the nearest stack of crates with bone-jarring force. “Their vests shrug off bullets, right?” Grant explained. “What was I supposed to do?”

Kane aimed a stream of bullets at another frogman’s head, blasting his faceplate to splinters. “Aim for the head?” he suggested.

Grant’s leg kicked out, slamming into the gut of a blinded diver, knocking him backward with a shriek. “Sure. Now you tell me.”

Brigid joined them then, looking around as Kane and Grant made short work of the final few intruders. She crouched beside Ohio Blue, placing a steadying arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Can you hear me?” she shouted, close to the woman’s left ear.

Ohio nodded, looking in the direction of Brigid’s voice with vacant, bloodshot eyes.

“We’re getting out of here,” Brigid explained as she helped the trader to her feet.

There was a noise from the far end of the boathouse, and all three Cerberus warriors spun to see the front of the building—the wall where the exit door was located—cave in as a heavily armored vehicle crashed through it.

As the dust began to clear, the vehicle stood revealed. It was a square block on caterpillar tracks. Four abbreviated arms stretched out to either side of the vehicle, two on each side in a stack array, each containing three large missiles along its length. The muzzle of a gun stood out low in the rounded nose of the vehicle, swiveling left to right as it searched for a target.

Men swarmed in through the hole in the wall that had been created by the tank, armed with rifles, pistols and shotguns blasting the few remaining guards who were hidden among the crates.

“We’re going to need another exit,” Grant growled as he powered the Sin Eater back into his grip and, in unison with Kane, started taking shots at the approaching gunmen. The shots hit their targets but did nothing more than make the approaching gunmen slow for a moment. Like the frogmen, this team was wearing protective armor.

“Baptiste,” Kane shouted over the furious sounds of gunfire all around, “you studied the maps—any ideas?”

Brigid looked around the boathouse, and her eyes stopped as she came to the sunken area that dominated its center. Letting go of the stunned trader at her side, Brigid dashed across to the safety rail that surrounded it and peered into the lower area. There, bobbing in the choppy waters of the Tennessee River, was a long powerboat, painted blue and shaped like a dart. Perfect.

Brigid turned back to Kane and Grant, calling them over. “Come quick and bring Ms. Blue,” she instructed.

Bullets thudded all about them as Grant, Kane and Ohio Blue made their way toward the area where Brigid waited. Kane kicked over the recliner as he passed, using it for a shield while they retreated from the approaching gunmen.

At the far end of the boathouse, Kane could see the odd-looking tank trundling slowly forward, knocking against one of the towers of crates before shunting it aside.

“Oh, this had better be good,” Kane muttered.

When Kane turned he saw that Ohio Blue was at Brigid’s side, trotting down the short staircase that led to the sunken dock. Grant waited at the head of the stairs, blasting at targets with his Sin Eater, providing what cover he could for Kane.

“Keep moving,” Kane told him as he passed.

Grant drilled a line of bullets into the edge of the lowest crate in a nearby stack. Under the relentless attack, the crate began to sag, its structural integrity ruined, and then the whole tower swayed for a few seconds before it slowly toppled to the floor of the vast boathouse, blocking the way for the approaching gunmen.

The two ex-Mags turned and rushed down the staircase, one after another, their heads kept low as bullets whizzed all about them. Ahead of them, Brigid stood beside Ohio Blue in the dart-shaped boat, swiftly assessing the vessel’s dashboard controls.

Grant stepped into the boat with Kane just behind him. A moment later, the boat roared away, engine howling as Brigid powered it out of the boathouse across the undulating waves. A wall of water cascaded around them as the boat turned sharply and arrowed down the choppy waters of the Tennessee. Behind them, gunmen in the boathouse were blasting shot after shot at the rapidly disappearing boat, but they were already out of range.

As Brigid manned the wheel, Ohio Blue rubbed at her face and looked at the three Cerberus teammates. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said breathlessly.

“Who were they?” Grant asked.

Ohio Blue shrugged her pale shoulders. “Competition?” she suggested, a note of query in her tone.

“See,” Kane told her angrily, “this is what you get when you jack up the price at the last minute.”

In reply, Ohio Blue just gave him a cold smile as the boat carved a path through the waves away from the boathouse. “I guess my brother’s not quite as dead as I thought,” she muttered to herself.

At the wheel, Brigid glanced across to the passengers before addressing the black marketer. “Do you have somewhere else we can go?”

Ohio Blue laughed, pushing her blond hair—now damp from the spray of the river—back over her shoulders. “That place was an empty shell, just for show,” she said. “Do you think I’m foolish enough to invite interested parties to my stock?”

Kane’s jaw was set firm as he looked at the woman. “I figure you just lost maybe twenty men back there,” he said.

“Men can be replaced,” she told him. “They were slow and stupid, so they died.”

Kane’s finger snapped up, jabbing toward Ohio’s face in accusation. “You very nearly died, too, sister,” he snapped.

“Ah, but you saved me, O handsome prince.” Blue sighed. Her visible eyelid fluttered as though swooning, and she clutched her hands together before her breasts. She was mocking Kane and he knew it.

Brigid powered down the engine and the boat slowed to a crawl as she steered it toward the muddy bank. They were over a klick away from the boathouse already, and no one was chasing them as far as Brigid could tell—they didn’t need to keep running. When Kane looked at her quizzically, she nodded toward the verdant slopes in the distance: the redoubt was nearby, its mat-trans unit their quickest way home.

Brigid spoke briefly to the trader before exiting the boat, with Grant leading the way. Kane was the last to leave, his senses on high alert once more in case they ran into further trouble on their way back.

“Well, it’s been a blast,” Kane told Ohio as he stepped up onto the edge of the boat, “but this is our stop.”

“Ohh,” Ohio drawled. “Leaving so soon? How will I ever take care of myself, O handsome prince?”

“You’ll manage,” Kane growled. “And I’m not your handsome prince.”

A wide smile crossed Ohio Blue’s cerulean lips then, that playful fire back in her visible blue eye. “But what else would I call you?” she challenged. “I never did learn your name.”

“Kane,” he told her as he stepped from the boat.

Ohio Blue reached out and pulled him back by the arm. Then she inclined her head, her mouth close to Kane’s ear, and whispered, “I owe you, Kane. Tell Ms. Baptiste that she will get her meds, and at the original price.”

Kane’s steely blue-gray eyes looked at her and a lopsided grin crossed his mouth for a moment. “That’s a very noble gesture,” he acknowledged.

Ohio Blue looked at him through the drooping curtain of her damp blond bangs. “I remember who my friends are, Kane,” she told him, squeezing his arm tightly for just a moment before letting him go.

In a few moments, Kane joined Grant and Brigid on the banks of the Tennessee as Ohio Blue powered the boat away. When he told them that they were getting the booster shots after all, Grant laughed.

“You do have a way with the ladies,” Grant said, slapping his friend on the back.

Kane wasn’t so sure. Friends like Ohio Blue almost always turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

SHIZUKA SAT CROSS-LEGGED upon the ground on the empty plateau outside the entrance to the Cerberus redoubt. She had dressed in casual clothes, a loose-fitting cotton blouse in a pink so pale as to be almost white, black trousers and flat, open sandals. She sat there, breathing deeply as the midmorning sun played across the exposed skin of her arms, her throat and face, letting her mind fall silent with stillness.

Shizuka had brought two items with her that seemed, because she was dressed so casually, very much out of place: a katana blade, twenty-five inches of sharpened steel, held within a dark scabbard beautifully decorated with gold filigree, and a small wooden casket, just six inches by three, like a musical box. The sword and box rested on an open blanket that she had laid out on the dusty ground before sitting on it.

She had been thinking of Grant, that aching need to be in his company, to share nothing more important than the simplest of moments. But between his commitments to Cerberus and hers to the Tigers of Heaven at New Edo, the couple never quite seemed to have enough time together. Indeed, some of their most significant shared moments had been during the heat of raging battle. This day, for the first time in months, it seemed, Shizuka finally had a free day, the demands of her role as leader of the Tigers of Heaven quiet for once. And, with typical bad timing, Grant was required on a mission halfway across the country.

What had he said? A simple pickup, won’t take long. Her breath slow and calm, Shizuka reached forward and flipped open the brass catch on the little wooden box. She would wait for Grant, so that they might yet spend the afternoon together, with no distractions but for each other.

Shizuka’s delicate hands pushed open the lid and reached inside the box. Its contents had been placed carefully inside specific compartments, a masterpiece of simple design and economic use of space. There were sheets of thin rice paper, a soft square of cotton, a lightly chalked powder ball and a small bottle of oil. Along the front of the compartmentalized box rested a tiny brass hammer, held separate from the other items in the cleaning kit.

Shizuka reached forward, taking the sheathed katana from where it lay on the blanket. Gripping the hilt of the sword with her right hand, she pulled at the scabbard with her left, drawing the blade into the open where its polished steel surface reflected the rays of the sun. The graceful movement was automatic, an unconscious thing for her, practiced so many times as to be a part of her muscle memory, the weight of the sword like just another segment of her body. She looked at the blade for a moment, her eyes scanning its length, observing the grain of the steel, checking for flaws. Then, careful to hold the sharp edge of the blade away from her, Shizuka took a single sheet of the crackling, wafer-thin rice paper and began to slowly stroke the blade with it.

This was a necessary process, a chore that every samurai going back to the days of feudal Japan had performed to ensure that his katana—often referred to as the soul of the samurai—remained strong and clean, free from defects that might hinder a warrior in battle. But it was also a ritual, one that served to fill and calm Shizuka’s mind as she awaited her lover’s return.

As Shizuka sat there, the rice paper now discarded, tapping the length of the finely honed blade with the powder ball, she became aware that someone had approached and was standing behind her. She tilted the sword just slightly, looking in its reflective surface between the dustings of chalk, to see who it was who had come upon her with such stealth.

“Domi,” she said calmly, a pleasant smile lifting her lips for a moment before she moved the sword back and continued tapping chalk along its length.

“Hi, Shizuka,” Domi said breezily as she walked across the plateau to stand before the sitting woman. Shizuka thought that she could detect just the tiniest hint of disappointment in Domi’s tone, where she had perhaps hoped to sneak up on the warrior woman unawares.

Domi cut a figure like no other. She was barely five feet tall, with a tiny, waiflike frame. An albino, Domi’s skin was as white as the chalk that Shizuka used to dust her blade. Her hair was also white, with the slightest variation in color, like paper turned to ash, and cut short in a pixie style that framed her face. It was within that face that Domi’s most unearthly feature resided, however—her eyes, which were an angry, vibrant scarlet, like pools of blood, and seemed to burn into the soul of whomever she looked at.