LITMIR.BIZ

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      Kane grimaced.

      “You got hit on the head hard enough to be knocked out. And you stated that the Thrush duplicate and the Fomorian had taken you captive after rendering you unconscious,” DeFore said. “When you woke up, you puked, emptying your stomach.”

      “Yes,” Kane added, annoyed. “You get knocked out, you wake up and vomit. It’s happened enough times to me…I think.”

      “What I can tell is that you suffered a mild concussion. Your skull, thick wonder that it is, hasn’t been fractured,” DeFore said. “You’re not a cyborg. You’re not an android. You’re as real as can possibly be.”

      Kane touched his forehead, feeling the nylon sutures that had closed up the gash. “Another scar.”

      “If there is, I’ll be disappointed,” DeFore told him. “That should heal up nicely.”

      Kane looked at the one-way glass, as if trying to see past the mirrored surface on his side and look into the faces of his friends. “So, I’m me. I’m Kane, right?”

      “You tell us,” Grant spoke said into the microphone in the observation room.

      Lakesh felt his gut tighten at the pronouncement. Yes, they were dealing with a pandimensional being with access to technologies that even the brilliant scientific knowledge amassed at Cerberus couldn’t even dream of. But would Thrush go so far as to make an unwitting duplicate that actively voiced doubts of its own veracity? Or would the fiendish hive mind be so crass and subtle as to engage in a series of obfuscating maneuvers to plant a cunning and savage entity in their midst?

      Lakesh’s brilliant mind went over every single iteration of the ruse that had seemingly thrown their friend into such paranoia that he had had himself taken prisoner and subjected to a wide suite of physical, chemical and genetic scans. He tried to apply Occam’s razor to each of these plots, but realized that, given the history of their brutal encounters with Colonel Thrush and his continuum of alternate selves, carving away the improbable was impossible. Which ended up with another potential outcome that the pandimensional menace could have sought. By inserting a poisonous doubt into Cerberus, a doubt affecting the man who, essentially, was the heart of the entire war against the Annunaki overlords and all others who would enslave Earth and humanity, had Thrush taken the wind out of their sails? The android multiverse traveler had just made it so that they couldn’t trust one-third of the triumvirate of heroes who had formed such a confluence that they could accomplish the impossible.

      Without that perfect team at the core of Cerberus, savagely undercut by doubt, the whole of the rebellion against Enlil and his kind, and by proxy, all the other superpowers seeking Earth’s domination, had been instantly defanged.

      “Friend Kane?” Lakesh asked. “You’re the one who brought this crisis to our attention. What do you feel?”

      Kane closed his eyes, concentrating. When he finally opened them, he sighed. “I feel bruises all over my carcass, a splitting headache and I’m getting nauseous from lack of food and drink. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s damn guess.”

      Grant studied his friend’s face as he spoke. He turned to the others. “Sounds as authentic as ever to me.”

      “No variations from Kane’s normal form of speech,” Brigid added. “Right now, we’ve got one hundred percent verification on retinal and fingerprint analysis, dental records are identical right down to the wear factor and, after forty percent of the data has been analyzed on his genetics, there is not a single variation. Healed scars match photographic record of prior wound recovery, as well, except for the new injuries he picked up in the battle with the Fomorians.”

      Kane looked at the mirrored glass separating him from the rest of the leadership of the Cerberus base. “So does that mean I can have a cup of coffee and a pot roast sandwich? Or just crackers and water?”

      Grant leaned to the intercom. “Edwards, give Kane his damn lunch before he starves to death.”

      The hulking ex-Magistrate under Domi’s command in Cerberus Away Team Beta strode into the operating room carrying a tray. Edwards was almost the same size as Grant, and Lakesh marveled at the rippling power emanating from the ex-Mag as he handed the meal to Kane.

      “Edwards,” Domi spoke up, “you couldn’t intimidate the real Kane. You can unclench your muscles now.”

      Edwards looked down at Kane, then snorted. “If you’re just a fake, I’ll take your head off.”

      Kane rubbed the crown of his head, as touching his forehead would obviously unleash whole new waves of pain. He glanced up to the physical monster in the room with him and sighed. “You know, you’d actually be doing me a favor.”

      DeFore put a small cup on the tray before Kane. “You step off the mat-trans all grim and determined not to show an ounce of human weakness, but after a few hours, you’re bitching that I’m not giving you some ibuprofen. If that’s not a sign he’s the real Kane, then I’ll eat my thermometer.”

      Lakesh cupped his hand over his mouth. He wanted to tell DeFore not to make promises she might have to keep, but for now, he didn’t want to cause any conflict. He fought down the doubt from his voice and spoke up. “So now what are we going to do regarding the Thrush presence in the Poconos and their mutant assistants?”

      “I dropped a mountainside onto them,” Grant said. “So for now, they’ll be off balance. Epona has moved her people to an older settlement before their expansion closer to the valley we hit with the avalanche. It will give the Appalachians some room and leave the Fomorian raiders nothing to attack.”

      “Why couldn’t they just stay in the older valley?” Domi asked.

      “Pride. The fact that the Fomorians would eventually track them down,” Brigid said. “As well, the hunting and water supplies are plentiful in that area, not exhausted like the area they’d abandoned. Right now, all Epona’s people have only a few days of supplies that they were able to move into the older shelters.”

      “We could transport extra stuff to them,” Domi suggested.

      “Really? Because we’ve got a redoubt full of people here,” Lakesh interjected. “I’m all for a little bit of charity, but we have our own needs to take care of, and the Appalachians don’t strike me as the type of people to willingly resort to welfare from people they barely trust.”

      “It’s a temporary solution,” Grant concluded. “But between Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta, we’ll be able to deal with whatever the Fomorians and Thrush can recover from the avalanche.”

      “And if not, we can always request assistance from Shizuka and Aristotle,” Brigid said, mentioning the respective leaders of the Tigers of Heaven in New Edo and the Pantheon operating out of New Olympus. “Between a force of samurai and a squad of gear skeletons, we can hit the Fomorians with a lot of fighting skill and technology.”

      Lakesh frowned. “Or give Thrush information about the extent of our allies. He knew about the Tigers of Heaven, we assume, since it was around the time he returned to Earth as the Imperator Sam that we first encountered them. Whether Thrush retains the knowledge of Enlil and the related technology is unknown for now.”

      “And who’s to say that Thrush, being a robot himself, really would worry about the relatively primitive combat suits of the Olympians?” Grant asked. “It’d be like throwing a Deathbird after one of Enlil’s scout ships.”

      Kane rapped his knuckles on the mirror. Lakesh sighed and turned on the lights in the meeting room, then retracted the one-way glass. “Yes, friend Kane?”

      Kane swallowed his mouthful of sandwich. “I’d like to point out that while we know one form of Thrush, native to our planet, became Enlil, I don’t think that they share all the same technology. The Orb is as different from an Annunaki scout ship as you can get. Otherwise, Thrush would be sending his android copies after us in squadrons of craft, and the Orb would be parked in orbit, throwing down as much

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