LITMIR.BIZ

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bunching her hair back behind her head, pulling it away from her face as the Arctic wind blew it about her face. After a moment, she tied her hair back and looked up at Grant with her warm, friendly smile, her emerald eyes glinting with a furious intellect. Brigid Baptiste had been a crucial part of their triumvirate ever since Grant had joined the operation known as Cerberus. While her high forehead pointed to an intellectual aspect, her full lips suggested a more playful, passionate side; in truth, Brigid Baptiste was both of these and more besides.

      Behind the attractive figure of Brigid Baptiste, the third member of the field team exited the Manta’s cockpit, even as the snow started to settle on its sloping bronze wings. This was Kane, Grant’s longtime partner, whose friendship was unquestioned, whose loyalty was unswerving. Grant had known Kane ever since their days in Cobaltville where they had been initially partnered as Magistrates, the strong-arm force that kept the citizenry in check. Whereas Grant was powerfully built and bulky, Kane was tall and lean with most of his bulk in his upper body. It had been said that Kane’s physique was like a wolf’s, and often his temperament was similarly inclined. He was pack leader, loner and scout. Like Grant, a bulky lump showed beneath the wrist of Kane’s jacket where he held his sidearm for quick access.

      “Seen anything interesting?” Kane asked as he greeted Grant.

      “Snow,” Grant grumbled, his deep voice sounding like a rumbling volcano.

      Kane looked around before turning back to Grant with a self-deprecating grin. “Kind of samey, isn’t it?”

      Grant nodded, his own mouth breaking into a grin.

      “Monotonous,” Brigid corrected them both without looking up from the portable radar device she was consulting in her gloved hand, “is the word you are looking for. ‘Samey’? Honestly, who taught you two to speak?”

      Kane glanced over Brigid’s head and caught Grant’s eye as the redheaded woman began walking away from the two Mantas. “You know, you’d never believe she used to be a librarian,” he said flippantly.

      “That so?” Grant replied. “You’d think she’d let us forget once in a while.”

      “Ha.” Kane laughed. “She never lets anyone forget anything, isn’t that right, Baptiste?”

      Glancing up from the tracking device, Brigid fixed Kane with a disparaging glare before turning back to the readout screen she held in the palm of one hand. Although meant in jest, Kane’s observation touched on a crucial aspect of Brigid’s personality. The woman had what was colloquially known as a photographic memory, or, more accurately, an eidetic one. Brigid could study any image for just a few moments and commit it to memory in vivid detail, with the ability to draw from that memory again and again with total recall.

      In her previous career as an archivist in Cobaltville, Brigid’s incredible powers of observation had put her in a critical position during the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy intended to subjugate humankind. Her subsequent work with Kane and Grant at the Cerberus redoubt had been primarily concerned with uncovering and overthrowing that conspiracy in all its many evolving forms. Even now, the presence of the Cerberus trio in the harsh environment of the Antarctic was tangentially related to that far-reaching scheme.

      Their boots sank into the thick snow as the three figures trekked away from their Manta craft. Kane glanced back, watching for a moment as the swirling whiteness settled on the still Mantas. The two craft were already dappled with a thin coating of snow, and would doubtless be hard to spot in another hour or so. It struck Kane then that anything could be hidden out here—anything at all—and they might never see it.

      Kane dismissed the thought. “Everyone remember where we parked, okay?” he instructed, his tone light. “Baptiste, I’m counting on you here.”

      Brigid cast Kane another withering look as she continued to lead the way across the Antarctic wastes. “You think you’re funny,” she said. “Emphasis on ‘think.’”

      “Lighten up,” Kane said as he brushed snow from his sleeves. “I’m just trying to keep things cheerful.”

      “Oh, you’re very trying,” Brigid snapped. “I’ve had to listen to this blather for the full three-hour trip over here.”

      “Really?” Grant asked, unable to hide the note of pity from his tone.

      “The first hour was okay,” Brigid assured him. “The second I started wishing we’d found a parallax point so we could jump here instantaneously instead of using the Mantas.” Parallax points formed a hidden network of nodes stretching across the globe and out into other planets that allowed the Cerberus warriors to jump via the quantum ether through use of an alien device called an interphaser. The system allowed for almost instantaneous travel across vast distances, but it relied on specific locations; no parallax point, no interphaser jump.

      “What about the third hour?” Kane grumbled.

      “Wish I was dead, wish I was dead, wish I was dead,” Brigid muttered, the words streaming into one.

      Grant looked at Kane and shrugged. “I think she’s joking, buddy.”

      “Because she thinks she’s funny,” Kane said.

      “Oh, touché.” Grant chuckled, applauding.

      They had walked just eighty yards across the snowbound wastes when Brigid Baptiste stopped in her tracks and pointed ahead. “It’s right there,” she said.

      “Where?” Kane asked, shielding his eyes with a gloved hand.

      “I don’t see anything, either,” Grant added, scowling.

      Peering in the direction that Brigid was indicating, they saw a continuing expanse of whiteness. Out here, the sky was white, a thick blanket of clouds reflecting the ice and snow below them. Snow flurries continued to fall across their vision, a dappling of white across the whiteness of the background. Kane relaxed his eyes, surveying the wash of white that stretched before him. As he did so, he noticed the shadow. It seemed almost incongruous as it stretched across the snow, pouring out across the white blanket in a gray, indistinct pattern that was easy to miss. The sun was ahead of them, Kane noted, pushing the shadow of the structure toward them so that its apex almost touched their booted feet. They had landed the Mantas barely one hundred yards from it, and yet it had remained utterly invisible, disguised in the harsh, white landscape.

      Kane raised his arm, drawing its shape in the air with an outstretched finger. “There,” he said. “You see it?”

      Grant squinted, trying to cut down the dazzling effect of the sun on the white snow as he sought the thing that Kane could see. Beside him, Brigid checked the readout of her palm-sized tracker device before peering again into the swirling whiteness.

      A sudden lull in the wind brought with it a break in the dance of the falling snowflakes, and for a few seconds the majestic structure stood revealed.

      It was white, like the ground and sky around it, so white that it seemed to exist only in the shadows it cast. Its leading edge stood just twenty-five yards from the three Cerberus warriors, and it stretched far back into the snow-packed ground. It was difficult to estimate its actual size, for it was clear that the structure had been mostly buried by the snow. Yet the evidence of it was there, a rough circle of struts and spines that dominated the land for almost a quarter mile, becoming more crowded near to what was presumably the center.

      There were other parts, too, they now realized as they gazed all around them. Struts stuck up here and there, like shoots from a hopeful plant. Kane looked behind him at the path they had just trod. Their footprints were already losing their shape as the swirling snow filled them in, and in another few minutes they would be gone completely as nature painted over them, obliterating any trace that they had ever existed. And over there, just a few feet from where they had walked but a minute before, another strut poked from the ground, rising up in a point that towered to twelve feet above them, twice the height of himself or Grant. As remarkable as it seemed, they had walked right past it, taking it for a natural feature of the snow-laden environment, a stalagmite striving up to

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