LITMIR.BIZ

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home,” Kane said, brushing back his wet hair.

      Brigid Baptiste nodded as she tapped in the code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. The Cerberus redoubt had served as the hub of teleportation research and development for over two hundred years.

      Brigid’s hair clung to her face, still damp from her encounter with the queen of all things dead in the Louisiana redoubt. “I need a shower,” she told Kane as the door slid open before her. “A warm one this time, with soap.”

      “Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed his aching shoulder.

      A few years older than Kane, Grant was a behemoth of a man, tall with wide shoulders and ebony skin. His muscles strained at the weave of his shadow suit. A Kevlar trench coat hugged his shoulders and draped down like a bat’s wings over his legs. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp and he wore a gunslinger’s drooping mustache over his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville. In fact, he had been Kane’s partner in the Magistrate Division, and over the years the two had fallen into an uncanny simpatico relationship during combat. Grant had been recruited into the Cerberus operation along with Kane when the two of them had gone rogue from the barony, after learning it threatened the well-being and natural progression of humankind. They seemed to be somehow closer than just combat partners or friends—they were more like brothers.

      Grant rolled his shoulder as he followed Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room with its huge Mercator map dominating the far wall. What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.

      Something had paid Cerberus a visit.

      Something bad.

      The room was a mess. The overhead lighting flickered and flashed. The two neat aisles of computer terminals were wrecked, and Kane saw the glass of monitor screens littering the floor as he dodged beneath a hail of bullets launched at him and his companions. No, not bullets, he realized as they rattled against the desk he had dodged behind—they were tiny chips of rock flying through the air.

      Already Kane was moving, his hand preparing to receive the Sin Eater pistol he wore in a wrist rig on his right arm. The fabled sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the compact pistol elongated to its full length of eighteen inches as it was powered into his waiting palm. Once it was there, Kane’s index finger met the gun’s guardless trigger, reeling off a swift burst of fire at the hooded interlopers in the room. A storm of 9 mm titanium-coated bullets sped across the ops room as Kane darted for cover, trusting his colleagues to do the same. His attack was met with another hail of stones.

      When the rain of tiny rocks ceased, he popped his head up over the side of the desk and began assessing his targets systematically. Kane counted eight strangers in an eye blink, all of them dressed in dirty cowls that covered their heads like a monk’s habit. They were hurrying through the room, striking out at the last few Cerberus personnel who opposed them as they smashed the remaining computer terminals, using clubs or just their fists. Even as Kane watched, the blond-haired comms op, Beth Delaney, was knocked to the floor by a savage, backhanded slap from one of the strangers. She toppled over with a loud crack of breaking bones.

      Through the chaos, Kane spotted his colleague Domi leaping for cover, her agile, alabaster form flying through the air like some crazed jack-in-the-box.

      “Domi, what’s going on?” he demanded.

      Ten feet ahead of him, the albino girl looked down the aisle, pinpointing Kane by his voice. A true child of the Outlands, she was a strange-looking individual, barely five feet tall with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair. Her tiny frame was more like a teenage girl’s than a woman’s, her small, pert breasts pushing against her maroon crop top. Besides the top, Domi had on a pair of abbreviated shorts pulled high at the hip and leaving the full length of her dazzling white legs exposed. As was her habit, she was barefoot. The albino woman’s weird, crimson eyes flashed as they met Kane’s down the length of the computer aisle. “Took your sweet time getting here, Kane,” she shouted. “We’re under attack! They took Lakesh.”

      “Dammit!” Kane spit.

      Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, known to his friends as Lakesh, was Domi’s lover, and the founder of the Cerberus operation. A fabled physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh was a freezie—which was to say, he had been born over two hundred years ago, in the twentieth century, bringing his incredible knowledge of the mat-trans system, along with a sense of freedom almost forgotten by humankind, here to the twenty-third century. Lakesh had helped establish the Cerberus operation, and had been there with Kane at the start. While their relationship had not always been one of absolute trust, Kane respected the man and knew they needed to have him in command. Moreover, Lakesh’s exceptional knowledge could prove to be a weapon in enemy hands. Leaving him hostage to the machinations of these mysterious interlopers could very well prove the end of the Cerberus facility as Kane knew it.

      He became aware of other gunshots behind him, and he turned to see Grant vaulting over a nearby desk and meeting one of the hooded strangers with both feet, knocking the creep backward.

      “We were out in the field,” Kane explained. “No one alerted us to—”

      Domi cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “There was no time,” she explained. “These weirdos seemed to come from nowhere. Screwed with the power, screwed with our comms.”

      “How did they get in?” Kane asked, mystified. The mountaintop redoubt was well protected from intruders, so a force the size Domi’s words implied should not have been able to waltz in easily.

      She glared back at him, a snarl appearing on her alabaster lips. “What am I, the answer girl?”

      “Hold that thought,” Kane instructed as he spotted one of the strange robed figures scrambling toward him from the other side of the desk. Kane leaped from cover, blasting off a stream of shots at the approaching intruder, felling him. The stranger toppled as the bullets struck, crashing over a desk before landing in a heap. A little way along, Kane saw Domi reappear from her own hiding spot and snap off three quick shots at another of their foes, while behind them both, Brigid Baptiste was putting up her own defense with her TP-9 semiautomatic.

      “Any idea who they are?” Kane asked.

      “No, no and no,” Domi snapped, as if guessing his next questions. Then she did the strangest thing—leaped over the desk before her, the Detonics Combat Master spitting fire at her target even as he fell.

      “He’s down,” Kane called as he ran to join her, leaping over the fallen body of a Cerberus tech. “No need to expose yourself.”

      “No, Kane, you not know,” Domi explained, slipping into her strange, clipped Outlander patois as she glared at him over her shoulder.

      But he did. In that moment, he saw the man Domi had felled in a volley of bullets get up, and brush himself off as if her shots had meant nothing. Instantly, a feeling of dread gripping him, Kane turned to see his own foe—the one he had shot and presumably killed—struggle back up off the desk, return to a standing position, the spent bullets dropping from his robe like snowflakes.

      “What are they—armored or undead?” Kane asked as he drilled the figure again with 9 mm bullets. “’Cause I have had my fill of undead for one day.”

      “Not undead,” Domi told him. “But dead inside. Nothing hurts them.”

      Kane spun as another shower of stones hurtled toward him, and he saw now that their enemies were using simple slingshots to launch the projectiles at exceptional speed. It was almost as if the stones themselves could gather speed as they cut through the air. Sharp edges slapped at the protective weave of the shadow suit Kane wore beneath his torn denim jacket as he held his arm up to protect his face. The stones ripped his sleeve, sending pale blue threads flying like seeds blown from a dandelion. Kane pulled the remains away, tossing them aside. When he drew his arm back, he saw that the superstrong fiber of the shadow suit beneath it was torn, and needle-thin streaks of blood ran through it where his bare skin had been exposed. The weave of his suit was akin to armor, so whatever

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