Shadow Box

The steady stream of lost and weary people seemed never-ending, but finally, as the sun disappeared over the horizon for the second time since the quake, their numbers started to dwindle as people began making their way back to their ruined dwellings and thinking about picking up their lives again.

While the church hall was quiet, Brigid peeled back the bandage that was wrapped around Smarts’s head and took a proper look at the wound there. “You took quite a beating,” she said, dabbing at the dried blood with a damp cloth while Grant looked on.

Across the hall, Kane was busy with the onerous task of helping frightened relatives identify the handful of dead bodies. Rosalia was sitting with five children, telling them an old story she recalled from her own childhood. There were other locals there, too, officials and selfless do-gooders who had stepped in to man the recovery operation with no thought of their own concerns. It was remarkable how well the locals and the refugees had pulled together, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in adverse circumstances.

Señor Smarts shot a fierce look at Grant as he addressed Brigid. “I think your friend shot me,” he told her.

Grant looked apologetic. “Well,” he said, shrugging.

Smarts held his gaze a moment longer before his expression mellowed a little. “What’s done is done, señor,” he admitted, “and I’m sure I was intending to do the same given the circumstances of our meeting.”

Kane joined them as Brigid sterilized and dressed Smarts’s head wound from the church’s meager supplies. “Yeah, about that,” Kane said, “what made you think that we were Magistrates?”

“It’s obvious.” The olive-skinned Mexican smiled. “You and Señor Grant here have a certain manner about you, a way of walking, your heads held high. An air of authority, arrogance that comes only with the badge of office.”

Kane smiled bitterly, shaking his head as Rosalia walked over to join the group, having finally found a family to take care of the last of her young charges. “I’m not a Mag,” Kane told Señor Smarts. “We’re not Mags.”

The man smiled again in a display of yellowing teeth. “The way that the three of you took command here, organizing and taking care of the local people, tells me different, señor. If you are not Magistrates, then you almost certainly trained to be, at some point in your past.”

Grant flicked a warning look at Kane, as if to tell him it wasn’t a topic of conversation worth pursuing.

After a moment, Kane spoke again. “Any idea what happened to the rest of your crew? Where Carnack disappeared to?”

“I’m sorry, Señor Kane.” Smarts sighed. “I was unconscious for quite a while. When I realized what had happened I felt it my duty to help out. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Very admirable,” Grant muttered before he stood up and took Kane to one side. They stood together, looking at the devastation outside the open church hall doors for a few moments, and then he spoke to Kane in a low voice. “This doesn’t change anything. That hybrid DNA is still in the hands of their extended clan. We can’t ignore that just because these two helped out.”

Kane nodded, a haunted look in his gray-blue eyes. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said quietly.

“You reckon the girl knows anything?” Grant asked.

“I’d guess Smarts is Carnack’s majordomo,” Kane reasoned. “If anyone knows the location of the gang and the DNA, it’s him. But Rosalia is more than she seems. I’d dismissed her as a—” he shrugged “—companion when I first saw her, but the way she came at me with that sword yesterday afternoon—she’s trained and she’s deadly.”

“We’ll take both of them back to Cerberus,” Grant suggested. “We can interrogate them there, see what we turn up.” He glanced back at the Mexican in the loud shirt and stained velvet coat, and at the dark-haired enchantress who stood beside him. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be more forthcoming after all that’s happened.”

Kane chewed at his lip thoughtfully for a moment. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he told Grant.

As the two ex-Mags were striding back to where Brigid taped gauze to Señor Smarts’s head, their Commtacts came to life and the three Cerberus teammates heard the voice of Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh inside their heads.

Lakesh was the nominal leader of the Cerberus exiles, although his suitability to that role was somewhat contentious. Their early meetings with Lakesh had shown Kane, Grant and Brigid that the accomplished cyberneticist had orchestrated a Machiavellian plan to destroy their lives in Cobaltville, albeit for the greater good, and his methods had often proved to be supremely devious. However reluctantly, Lakesh had conceded his single-minded control of Cerberus and its exiles undermined the united front necessary to battle the Annunaki and the threat they posed to humankind.

Lakesh’s mellifluous voice piped directly to their ear canals with crystal clarity. “It seems that we may have an additional problem, and I wondered how the three of you would feel about taking a little detour to look into it?”

Kane held up his index finger to let his companions know that he would deal with the transmission. “Kane here,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Decard has just got in touch with us from over in Aten,” Lakesh explained. “He’s stumbled across something on one of his regular patrols, and he thinks we might want to take a look.”

Decard, like Kane and Grant, was also an ex-Magistrate. He had been adopted into the strange culture of the hidden city-kingdom of Aten, out in the wilderness of the California desert. His path had crossed that of the Cerberus crew on several occasions. Initially hostile, the people of Aten had come to respect the Cerberus exiles, and Decard had proved himself to be a faithful friend and valuable ally.

“Did Decard say what it was?” Kane asked, aware that the ex-Mag wasn’t one to jump at shadows.

“He seemed mystified,” Lakesh explained, “but the report he gave describes a group of people who apparently have no independent will. He called them ‘mindless, soulless wretches.’”

Kane considered this for a moment before responding. “Don’t want to be callous here, but is that such a big deal?” he asked.

“It is when the same people were vibrant and very much alive just three days earlier,” Lakesh told him, “or so Decard indicates.”

“Okay,” Kane agreed. “We’ll arrange transportation and get over there before dawn. Warn Decard that we’re bringing a couple of stragglers with us, and we might need to use his hoosegow.”

“I’m sending Domi over there now via mat-trans,” Lakesh replied. “She’ll pass on the message and meet you close to Aten. Take care.”

“Will do.” Kane signed off. He turned to the others, who had been able to hear the whole conversation on their own Commtact. “Well, troops, looks like we’re moving out.”

Señor Smarts, who had only heard Kane’s half of the conversation, smiled tightly. “Leaving so soon?” he said in a patronizing tone.

“Yeah,” Grant growled, reaching for the man’s elbow and helping him up, “and you’re coming with us, Charlie.”

Kane looked across at Rosalia the dancing girl and smiled. “You, too, Princess.”

Chapter 4

The five of them skulked through the alleyways of Hope, hidden in the shadows of the ruined ville. Kane walked close to Señor Smarts, leading the party, the Magnum handgun held tightly in his hand. Behind him, Grant accompanied Rosalia, pulling her by the elbow, his own pistol hidden under the folds of his leather duster. Brigid brought up the rear a few paces behind the rest of the group, her handgun drawn and held low, muzzle pointing to the ground.

As they made their way to the outskirts of the shantytown, Rosalia’s eyes flashed with anger. She pulled from Grant’s grip and strode ahead, catching up with Smarts and Kane. She glared at Kane. “Where are you taking us, Magistrate man?” she demanded.

“We’re needed elsewhere,” Kane replied laconically, while Grant reached for the woman’s elbow once more.

Rosalia pulled away and glared fiercely at them both, standing in place until Brigid caught up. “After all we have done for you,” Rosalia snapped, “you still treat us like…criminals?”

Grant suppressed a laugh when he heard that. Kane looked at him sternly before addressing the dancing girl.

“We need that hybrid DNA,” Kane explained, “and right now, the two of you are our only link to finding it.”

Brigid made eye contact with Rosalia and Señor Smarts as she joined them. “We all have a lot of admiration for what you both did back there,” she told them, indicating the buildings ruined by the quake. “You stepped in to help when it was needed. We don’t need to be enemies. Perhaps we can reach a mutually beneficial agreement with regards to the DNA.”

Smarts reached up to scratch at the gauze that had been attached to his head before stopping himself with a pained intake of breath through his teeth. “This puts us in a difficult position, señorita,” he lamented, his eyes warily watching the shadows around them. “It would be inadvisable for Rosalia and I to engage in dealings that might be considered traitorous to our group,” he added quietly.

Kane nodded in understanding. “Would that still hold true outside of ville limits?”

Smarts considered this for a few seconds, smoothing down his pencil-thin mustache while, Kane noticed, Rosalia’s dark eyes scanned the alleyway in a predatory fashion. “Perhaps,” Smarts said eventually, “we would reconsider our position if placed in such a situation.”

Kane smiled. “Then let’s keep moving.”

“And where exactly is it that we are going, Señor Kane?” Smarts asked.

“Just a little walk in the desert,” Kane explained. “Friends out there need our help, but you can just watch if you want.”

Rosalia looked at the half-moon rising in the sky. “It is almost midnight, Magistrate man,” she told Kane, “not a good time to be walking across the desert.”

“Gets mighty cold out there,” Smarts added.

Along with his companions, Kane had arrived in Hope from the desert. The three of them had used the interphaser to jump close to the ville location, but they had still been forced to walk the last eight miles for the sake of appearances as much as anything else. That had been in the daytime, in the rising heat. At night the temperature in the California desert dropped significantly, and the chill wind could catch a traveler unawares.

“There’s never a good time to cross the desert,” Grant said practically, tilting the pistol in his hands so that it caught the light for just a moment. “Hence the argument’s over.”

“I think not,” Smarts told them. “We could borrow a vehicle from one of the people here without too much trouble.”

“By ‘borrow’ you mean steal?” Kane asked. “We don’t do that.”

“Señor Magistrate,” Smarts argued, “many people here have lost their homes, their loved ones, some even their lives. The loss of a cart, an automobile would be of little—”

“Doesn’t matter.” Kane silenced him with a firm look. “You have legs, so we walk.”

Rosalia smiled. “We have reconditioned Sandcats,” she said, “ideal for desert travel.”

“And where would these Sandcats be?” Kane asked.

“Back at the base,” Rosalia said lightly, gesturing toward the depths of the shantytown labyrinth. “If we went there, we could—”

Kane held up a finger to stop her. “No. Nice try, but we won’t be walking into any traps tonight. Now, let’s get moving.”

Kane and Grant urged their charges on as Brigid sank back to cover the rear of the party. What Kane hadn’t told Smarts and Rosalia was that he had his own special transport located outside the ville. They weren’t safe here, and he had feared being overheard, but soon enough the group would be traveling a whole lot faster than the two street thieves could imagine.

IT WAS THREE in the morning by the time the group stopped. The ville was long since behind them, now just a speckling of lighted dots on the far horizon. Ahead and all around, Death Valley and the empty California desert stretched relentlessly onward. Stars twinkled in the night sky, and the cool air seemed to drill through their bones as the group strode across the open sand. Rosalia shook, cold and miserable, hugging herself as she pulled Smarts’s bright frock coat over her shoulders. Smarts himself was cold, too, but he prided himself on being nothing if not a gentleman.

“Where are we heading, señor?” Smarts asked, looking at the distant rock formations, the endless swathe of sand around them.

“We’re almost there,” Kane assured him.

“It has been a long day,” Smarts told Kane. “We could stop. If not for ourselves, perhaps we should consider the ladies?”

“We’re not going much farther,” Kane told him.

Then he raised his voice. “Baptiste?”

Brigid had drifted a little farther behind the others, and she was looking around carefully as they crossed the bleak desert. “It’s just over there,” she called back, pointing with the muzzle of her handgun toward a rising sand dune.

Kane held a hand to stop Smarts and the rest of the party, while Brigid ran toward the dune that she had indicated.

“Be a minute, people,” Kane explained, ignoring the quizzical looks of his captives.

Exhausted, Rosalia sat on the dry sand and shook her head. “Magistrate clowns,” she muttered under her breath.

Hearing this, Grant smiled and caught her eye, shaking his own head in chastisement. “Oh, you are in for such a sweet surprise,” he told her.

Smarts’s head twitched like a bird’s as he watched Brigid disappear behind the dune. “What is going on?” he demanded.

Deciding that there was nowhere his prisoners could run to, Kane placed his handgun back in his low-slung hip holster before addressing the small Mexican. “It’s time we traveled in style,” he said.

Smarts narrowed his eyes, peering at the dune, his head jutting forward, until Brigid reappeared carrying a small case. The case was caked with sand, which Brigid brushed away with her hand as she approached. Smarts realized immediately that this item had been hidden out here, buried somewhere in the empty, featureless desert.

Brigid stopped before them and knelt, placing the case on the ground. Then she began to work at its twin catches. The carrying case folded open and a squat, broad-based pyramid-shaped object was revealed. Made of a dull metal that shimmered with the blurred reflections of the bright stars, the pyramid’s base was barely one foot square, and its peak was about twelve inches above the ground. This was the interphaser.

“What is this thing?” Smarts inquired.

Kane smiled tightly. “A little shortcut,” he said enigmatically.

Smarts gestured around them at the featureless desert. “You left this thing here, yes?” he asked. “How could you possibly find it? It is a—what you call it?—needle in the haystack.”

“Brigid’s our needle finder,” Kane said as Grant helped Rosalia to her feet behind him.

Smarts looked baffled as he assessed the beautiful woman with the shimmering red-gold hair.

Brigid smiled and tapped the side of her head. “I remember things,” she told him.

The Cerberus team had opted to bury the interphaser in its protective carrying case close to where they had first appeared in the desert. This was, on reflection, much safer than carrying the astonishing piece of technology into a covert meeting with Carnack’s merciless thieves and brigands. They had needed no marker for the location. One of the advantages of Brigid’s phenomenal memory was her ability to recall the smallest details of anything she had seen. While the desert appeared featureless and largely unchanging to most people, Brigid would recall the tiniest details, a ridge here, a dead tree stump there. Finding the burial spot for this particular treasure chest was as easy to Brigid as finding the toes on the end of her feet.

The interphaser interacted with naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices to create an instantaneous teleportation system. In simple terms, the little pyramid opened dimensional rifts through which one could travel from point A to point B, despite the two points being dozens, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.

The Parallax Points Program provided a map of these naturally occurring vortices, which could be found around the world and even on other planets.

The success of the interphaser was the combined work of Brigid Baptiste and a Cerberus scientist called Brewster Philboyd, and had taken many months of trial and error to achieve. While a useful device, their interphaser still depended on the location of a parallax point, as opposed to the mat-trans units, which had been installed in military redoubts. As Grant had put it when they had arrived in Death Valley with an eight-mile walk still ahead of them, “What good’s having a personal mat-trans if we still have to walk halfway?”

While Brigid readied the pyramid-shaped device, Kane probed the sand around them with the toe of his boot until he found what he was looking for. He kicked at the sand and used his instep to brush it away until he had uncovered a flat, stone disk. The stone disk was approximately two feet square and showed cuneiform carvings around its outer ring. Brigid stepped across and carefully placed the interphaser unit in the center of the stone ring.

“What is that?” Smarts asked once more, absolutely out of his depth with the progression of events before his eyes.

“We think it was some kind of grave marker.” Kane shrugged. “Probably Navaho or Apache.”

“Or whatever those peoples called themselves way back when,” Brigid added, mostly to herself.

Rosalia took a step closer and peered at the stone circle with the pyramid now protruding from it. Then she looked at Smarts, a quizzical frown on her beautiful brow. “What is all this?” she asked him.

“I admit,” Smarts responded, “to being mystified. Seems the Magistrates don’t want to share their secrets today.”

Kane confirmed with Brigid that the interphaser was ready for use, then he turned to address Smarts and Rosalia. “Okay, here’s the skinny,” he began. “What we have here is a transport network like you folks can only dream of. The whole thing is instantaneous—”

“Like a mat-trans only portable,” Smarts broke into Kane’s explanation with a knowing smile.

“You’ve used a mat-trans?” Kane asked him, intrigued. The mat-trans units were mostly the realm of Cerberus and similar covert outfits who had penetrated the secret military redoubts to access the hidden technology there; their existence was hardly common knowledge.

“I have seen them in action once or twice,” Smarts confirmed.

“Good,” Kane affirmed. “That makes it easier for all of us. Rosie?” he asked, turning to the dancing girl.

She nodded, her face solemn. “I am aware of the mat-trans machines,” she said quietly, “though only through anecdotal evidence.”

“These are smaller,” Kane explained, “and there’s no chamber to enter. But they function in much the same way.”

He encouraged the pair to step forward, closer to the foot-high pyramid resting on the stone circle on the ground. The stone circle was a parallax point, and would work as a secure entry point for their jump.

Grant stepped across from the others, so that the team now formed a rough circle around the interphaser as the stars twinkled in the sky above.

Still kneeling, Brigid tapped out a brief sequence on the interphaser’s miniature keypad. As she stood, a waxy, illuminated cone fanned up from the metal apex of the foot-high pyramid. It had the appearance of mist, with flashes of light swirling within its depths.

Smarts’s jaw opened in astonishment as the cone of light grew larger, taking over not just more geographical space, but, in some way, swamping his mind like the onrush of a migraine, blurring everything around him to insignificance as it overwhelmed his comprehension. A glowing lotus flower blossomed from the base of the pyramid. The radiance stretched into the night sky, filled with sparks of lightning witch fire.

“Just walk into the light,” Kane’s calm voice came to his ears, and Smarts turned from the cone of brilliance to look at the hard face of the ex-Mag. The light was dancing in Kane’s gray-blue eyes, playing across the stubbled chin and sharp planes of his face.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Señor Kane,” Smarts admitted, rising fear in his voice.

Then Grant’s bearlike arm whipped behind Smarts, slapping so hard across his back that the little Mexican stumbled forward. “Man up,” he heard the dark-skinned man say, “you’re going first.”

There was a rush of sensation, energy crackling all around him, colors so bright and vibrant that Smarts didn’t have names for all of them. And then his senses rebelled at the unfamiliarity of the situation, and the next thing Smarts saw was his shadow grow as he stepped out of the cone of light behind him. Then he was joined by his four companions.

They had arrived.

“Did we do it?” Rosalia asked, her voice breathless with wonder.

“Sixty, seventy miles in a footstep,” Kane assured her. “We did it.”

“Sixty-eight miles,” Brigid confirmed as the interphaser powered down, its lotus blossom of colors sucked back inside the unit like liquid swirling down a drain. She crouched beside the device, which now rested on an otherwise unremarkable section of sand, and placed the carrying case beside it, undoing the catches. There was another circle of stone there, almost entirely buried in the sand, its cuneiform markings long since worn away.

Having packed up the interphaser in its carrying case, Brigid scanned the sky around them, looking at the constellations and assessing their position in her head.

Kane triggered the Commtact and spoke in a subdued tone, “Domi, we are on-site. Please respond.”

A few seconds passed before Domi’s enticing, husky voice was audible over the subcutaneous Commtacts.

“Hi, Kane. I’m with Decard’s team. We’re sending up a tracer on three.”

“Aten should be somewhere over that way,” Brigid decided, pointing off to the east.

Almost as soon as she said it, they saw a scarlet-colored firework whoosh into the sky, leaving a bright point high over their heads as the flare beacon floated on the wind currents.

“Guess that’s them.” Kane smiled.

IT TOOK ANOTHER fifteen minutes to cover the ground on foot, but Kane, Brigid, Grant and their two prisoners finally found their way to the temporary campsite that Decard’s crew had set up among the windswept dunes.

When she saw them approaching, Domi broke into a run and met the Cerberus team halfway.

“Madre de dios!” Smarts exclaimed as Domi raced toward them, startled by the woman’s unique appearance.

Though a fully grown woman, Domi still had the diminutive frame of a girl just entering her teens. Her limbs were thin and birdlike, yet she was a superb athlete and robust hand-to-hand combatant. Most significantly, however, Domi looked like no one else that Smarts had ever seen. She had the chalk-white skin and bone-white hair of an albino, and her eyes blazed a burning ruby-red like the flames of hell. She wore her hair in a short, pixieish style, enhancing her skeleton-like appearance, and she had chosen the briefest of clothes—a halter top and cutoff shorts—leaving her midriff, limbs and feet bare. Her clothing was beige, matching the sandy desert beneath the dark sky, its light color making her white skin seem somehow more pale than ever.

Like the other members of Kane’s field team, Cobaltville played a prominent part in Domi’s past. Domi had been forced into sexual servitude in the lowest echelons of the ville. She had grown up as a wild child of the Outlands, and her wits and decision making still had something of the instinctive to them.

“Kane,” she cried, running up to the ex-Mag and wrapping her arms around him. Kane hugged her back, looking like a giant holding a tiny, china doll. “I heard you ran into that quake over on the coast. You’re okay?”