LITMIR.BIZ

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of river wended its way through the center of the town like a main street, and people could be seen moving along its edges.

       The trio on the cliff top wore shadow suits weaved from a high-tech armorlike material that could deflect blunt trauma and act as a self-contained environment, keeping its wearer hot or cool depending on the needs of their surrounds. Over the shadow suits, the three of them were dressed in indistinct clothing that showed the wear from long days on the road. Kane wore a beaten leather jacket in a tan color turned dark with sweat and dirt, Grant a long black duster with a bullet-blunting Kevlar weave in its thread, and Rosalia was wearing a beaten-up denim jacket with loose threads dangling from its cuffs and collar and a light summer skirt that swished just above her shapely ankles, which in turn were encased in black leather boots.

       Kane checked the map again, running his hands across the creases to brush away the dusty sand that had blown across it. “Damn ville wasn’t on the map. Must have sprung up in the last eighteen months. But our next closest parallax point is fifty miles eastward,” he explained. “We’re looking at a heck of a trek, and we’d have to find a way across the Rio Grande.”

       “The big villes have been vomiting out people for a while now, forcing little shitholes like this to crop up all over,” Rosalia told them both, pushing her dark hair out of her face as the wind snatched at it. “You Magistrate men seldom notice what’s going on in front of your eyes,” she added contemptuously.

       Kane shot her a look before turning back to watch the people moving around in the ravine below them. Twenty-four buildings meant maybe seventy people in total, he guessed, could be more as a refugee settlement, but it seemed as if it had taken a while growing up. The structures certainly looked sturdy, perhaps it had been here for years—who could say?

       Grant turned his eyes from the settlement below to Kane. “Let’s keep our heads down and act friendly to the locals,” he rumbled, pointing to the little town between the cliffs.

       With that, the imposing ex-Mag pushed himself up, snagging the cloth knapsack sitting behind him in the dirt and hooking it over one of his massive shoulders before leading the way down the steep path that led to the gully. The others followed a moment later, but Rosalia stopped at the top of the path for a moment, peering behind her.

       “Come on, stupid,” she huffed, irritation in her voice.

       From close by, a dog came tromping out from behind a crop of drooping bushes, their leaves wizened from lack of water. The carcass of a cony lay behind the bushes, and the dog had been sniffing at it, wondering if it could still be eaten. The dog was a mongrel with mottled fur and a long snout, and Rosalia suspected that it had more than a hint of coyote in it. Most remarkably, it had the palest eyes that she had ever seen, their irises a creamy washed-out white like mozzarella cheese. She had “owned” the dog for seven months, finding the creature wandering alone out in the Californian desert. In all of that time, the woman had never given the animal a permanent name, hoping to avoid any attachment.

       “Stupid mutt,” Rosalia cursed as the dog trotted along at her heels down the dust path. “Always thinking about your stomach.”

       A dozen paces ahead, Grant was talking with Kane, polychrome sunglasses protecting their eyes as they walked into the sun, keeping their voices low.

       “You look worried, old friend,” Grant observed as Kane fiddled with the Sin Eater pistol he habitually wore at his wrist.

       Once the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Even at full extension, this remarkable pistol was less than fourteen inches in length, and it fired 9 mm rounds. The holsters reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard; it had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The absolute nature of this means of potential execution was a throwback to the high regard with which Magistrates were viewed in the villes—their judgment could never be wrong. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days as one in Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand.

       Grant, too, had one of the remarkable blasters hidden beneath the sleeve of his Kevlar duster, though he carried other weapons, as well, secreted in the lining of the long coat. Primary among these, Grant carried his favored Copperhead close-assault subgun, tucked just out of sight.

       Kane shrugged at Grant’s observation as the pair shuffled sideways along a narrow section of the steep pathway. “I just don’t like entering new places these days,” he said. “Seems things are getting more and more hostile.”

       Then, as Kane spoke, his booted heel slid on a loose stone and he began to slip toward the edge of the path. “Whoa!”

       Grant instantly reached out, grabbing his friend in a firm grip just above his left wrist. “No need to expect trouble,” Grant said as he pulled Kane back onto the path. “And I’ve always got your back if things do turn nasty.”

       “Humph,” Kane grumbled. “We used to say the same thing to Baptiste—and look how that worked out.”

       “We’ll find her, Kane,” Grant assured his partner. “If she’s out there, we’ll find her.”

       Kane nodded. “Damn straight we will.”

       Until recently Brigid Baptiste had been the third member of their field team, accompanying Kane and Grant on numerous adventures across the globe and beyond. Baptiste was a gifted archivist with remarkable talents. However, in a recent attack on the Cerberus redoubt—the headquarters from which Kane and his companions had operated—Baptiste had gone MIA. Despite their best efforts, her current whereabouts remained unknown.

       The gradient of the path eased for the last thirty yards, and Kane had returned his Sin Eater to its hiding place beneath the right sleeve of his jacket by the time the trio reached its foot. They walked three abreast, with the dog skulking at Rosalia’s side as they made their way along the last part of the dusty roadway that led into the hamlet itself.

       A single thoroughfare dominated the village, running parallel to the thin river. People dressed in light clothes were walking along that main street, a few youngsters paddling at the stream’s edge. A bearded man in simple clothes was leading a mule down the street, its back laden with two great baskets full of the leaves of some edible root crop or other. It seemed normal enough.

       As they neared the closest of the buildings, the companions could hear the tink-tink-tink of a blacksmith at work. Kane turned and saw an open-fronted shed beside the single-story house. Inside a man worked at shaping a horseshoe that glowed white-hot at the end of his tongs. The man peered up from his work as the companions passed, eyes narrowing as he watched the strangers entering the village.

       “By my reckoning,” Kane told his companions, keeping his voice low, “our parallax point should be in the northwest corner of this place.” He pointed. “Over by that storage silo, maybe?”

       Parallax points were a crucial part of a system of instantaneous travel that was employed by the Cerberus rebels. The process itself involved a quantum inducer called an interphaser, which could fold space upon itself, granting its user immediate teleportation to another location, either on Earth or beyond. Though portable, the interphaser units could only be engaged in set locations. The units tapped into an ancient web of powerful, naturally occurring lines of energy stretching right across the globe, much like the ley lines of old. On Thunder Isle the Cerberus crew had discovered the Parallax Points program, which encoded all the vortex points. The interphaser relied on this program, and new vortex points were fed into the interphaser’s targeting computer.

       Frequently the specific sites of interphase induction had become sacred in the eyes of primitive man. However, over time many of these parallax points had become forgotten or buried beneath the rise and fall of civilizations. As such, they often turned up in the most unlikely of locations.

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