James Axler - Oblivion Stone

Right now, Grant waited in the mouldering marshes of the Louisiana swamps, hunkering down between the low branches of a tree. Clad in camouflaged greens and browns, Grant peered through the sniper’s scope of his SSG-550 rifle where it rested high on its bipod legs. He kept his voice to a low whisper as he spoke into the hidden pickup of his Commtact. “Kane? Please repeat, I didn’t copy.” He waited a moment, listening for any signal from his Commtact over the humming, squawking and chirping of the swamp fauna. “Kane?” he repeated, his voice just a little louder. “Brigid?”

There was still no answer.

Eye locked on the eyepiece of the sniper scope, Grant watched for movement at the entryway to the dilapidated shack. The wooden structure was just one story high yet covered almost 4,000 square feet. Despite its size, the low roof and rotting nature of the building made it appear cramped and unwelcoming.

Grant had seen Kane and Brigid enter the building in the company of the independent trader, Ohio Blue, about fifteen minutes before. They had arrived here via airboat, transported across the marshland by a dark-skinned woman with a toned body and a scarred face, her left leg missing below the knee. Grant had tracked the airboat via the transponder units that were embedded beneath his partners’ skins, using his own uplink to Cerberus headquarters to keep track of his friends as they traveled through the maze of swamps. This had allowed him—unseen—to keep to a roughly parallel route on his own airboat, its huge fan whirling as it carved a new pathway through the dense shrubbery of the sweltering marshes.

“Cerberus, this is Grant out in the field,” Grant spoke to his Commtact once more. “Appear to have lost radio contact with Kane and Brigid. Please advise.”

Grant listened intently, hearing the humming, squawking, chirruping sounds all around him, but the Commtact itself only offered dead air by way of response.

“Cerberus?” Grant repeated. “Anyone there reading me?”

Yet again, there was no response.

Anxious, Grant turned away from the rifle’s scope and reached for the handheld unit he had used to track his partners’ transponders. Its tiny screen was functioning, but it showed no evidence of the transponders—not even his own, Grant realized with a start. He wiped the screen with his fingertip, and then pressed the reset button, causing the little portable unit to run through a ten-second reboot sequence.

“What the hell is going on?” Grant muttered as he watched the tracker unit reboot. Comms were down and now the transponders seemed to have gone offline, as well. Not good. Not good at all.

After ten seconds, the tracker unit returned to full functionality, but still showed no evidence of any transponders in the area—not even Grant’s.

Concerned, Grant bent down to the rifle’s scope once more and focused his attention on the shadowy doorway to the shack, waiting to see what would emerge.

THE HEADQUARTERS for the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. A military redoubt, it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains themselves. The wilds around the three-story concrete redoubt were virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, where a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians had settled, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. For the brief years of its first life, like all prewar redoubts, it had been named Redoubt Bravo after a phonetic letter of the alphabet used in standard military radio communications. In the twentieth century, Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed mat-trans network of instantaneous teleportation. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a garish rendition of the fabled three-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the Underworld. The artist—whose signature identified him only as Mooney—was long since dead, but his work had inspired the sixty or so people who had taken up residence in the facility, acting as their lucky—and unquestionably fearsome—mascot.

Tucked within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the redoubt, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of empirical data for the Cerberus operatives within. These links were the source of field communications through the Commtacts, as well as routing the feeds from the subcutaneous transponders that monitored the health of the personnel, and it was these that Grant had used to track his partners in the field. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. Today, the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Comsat satellite. Or, at least, that was the theory.

Within the operations center, however, a far different story was being played out. Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh leaped out of a seat that overlooked the vast control room, his swivel chair whirling off behind him on its little plastic wheels. Lakesh had dusky skin and sleek black hair that was just beginning to turn white at the temples. Lakesh had a distinguished air about him, holding himself straight and poised, with a refined mouth beneath his aquiline nose. Though he appeared to be about fifty years of age, Lakesh was in fact a “freezie,” one of a number of military personnel who had been placed in cryogenic stasis when the outbreak of nuclear hostilities began, only to be revived some time after that cataclysmic conflict. As such, Lakesh was closer to 250 years old. A physicist and cybernetics expert, Lakesh was an exceptionally capable individual who served as the founder and was still the nucleus around which the Cerberus operation centered.

“What’s happened to the feed?” Lakesh demanded, his eyes flicking from his own computer terminal to those of his colleagues who sat all about him. Every monitor had cut to static in the same instant, their flow of live data lost.

Brewster Philboyd, a tall, sallow-faced, blond-haired man wearing black-framed glasses and the evidence of acne scars on his cheeks, yanked off the comm headset he had been wearing as a burst of static interference cut through the earphones. “Some kind of glitch,” he stated, gritting his teeth as he glared at the headset. “I’m not sure what it is.”

Lakesh ran over to Philboyd’s desk. “Find out,” he urged.

Philboyd had been monitoring the incoming communications when the link to Kane’s field team had gone down. Replacing his headset, he spoke into the pickup mic, calling to the other CAT teams who were out on assignment. “CAT Beta, do you read?” Receiving no response, Brewster’s fingers played rapidly across his computer keyboard before he tried for CAT Gamma. Then he turned to Lakesh, shaking his head. “Nothing. I’m receiving no response from anyone.”

Cerberus physician Reba DeFore, a stocky woman with ice-blond hair weaved into an elaborate plait atop her head, called to Lakesh from her own terminal where she had been monitoring the feeds from the transponders. “Everything’s gone dead here, too, Lakesh,” she stated, looking uncomfortable at her unfortunate choice of words.

“A massive equipment failure?” Lakesh murmured to himself incredulously, but even as he spoke, another dissenting voice was calling from one of the terminals in the vast operations room.