James Axler - Scarlet Dream

Kane looked at her and smiled. “Aw, it had it coming,” he said, indicating the swaying bag as it slowly returned to a static position, waiting for its next opponent.

Brigid looked at the punching bag and laughed, creases of delight appearing momentarily around her emerald eyes as she did so. “What, did it outsmart you at chess?” she asked. “Again?”

Brushing a hand through his sweat-damp hair, Kane reached for the hand towel that he had left on a nearby bench. “What can I do for you, Baptiste?” he asked, ignoring her friendly taunt.

“Lakesh is asking us to meet in the ops room,” Brigid explained as she watched Kane wiping the sweat from his powerful arms. “I don’t know the details yet, but it seems there’s trouble out there in paradise and he wants us ready to ship out in the next hour.”

Kane tapped at the side of his head, indicating the subdermal Commtact unit that was hidden there beneath the skin. “Guess I didn’t hear the call,” he explained.

Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the military artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, a deaf person would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtacts had other properties, too, including acting as intelligent, real-time translators on the condition that a sufficient sample of a language had been programmed into them to decipher a dialect.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Brigid assured Kane. “I told him I’d come find you.”

Kane fixed Brigid with his most mischievous look as he slung the towel over one shoulder. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

In reply, Brigid leaped from a standing start, high into the air, and kicked the punching bag that hung between them, making it rebound so hard that it almost clipped Kane in his smugly smiling face.

“You wish,” she told him as she landed in a graceful crouch.

Despite their outward antagonism, Kane and Brigid had the utmost respect for one another and they shared a very special bond. That bond was known as anam-charas, or soul friends, and it referred to a connection that transcended history itself. No matter what form the two found themselves in, no matter the nature of their reincarnations throughout eternity, the pair would remain unequivocally linked, tied together by some invisible umbilical cord that meant they would always be there for each other. Some had interpreted this link to mean that they were lovers, but the anam-chara bond was something more than that—the friendship and love of siblings or respectful contemporaries, with Brigid the yin to Kane’s yang.

While Kane and Brigid had been partners for a long time, there was a third integral member of their group, as well. Grant was also an ex-magistrate and had been Kane’s original partner in his Magistrate days. Grant was as much Kane’s brother as any blood relative. Together, the three of them formed an exceptional exploration group who seemed able to handle themselves in any given situation. Which was fortunate, as the situations they encountered while working for Cerberus had ranged from the improbable to the outright impossible.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Kane strolled into the operations room dressed in a clean shadow suit, his hair still damp from the shower he had taken on leaving the gym.

As Kane walked through the doors beneath the Mercator map with its multicolored lines of light, Lakesh stepped forward to greet him. “I am glad you could make it so quickly, Kane,” he said briefly.

As with Brigid Baptiste, Kane had known Lakesh for a long time and he recognized when the formidable scientist sounded worried. Behind Lakesh, Brigid and Grant waited along with several other personnel who were prepping the mat-trans for use. The mat-trans chamber was located in an antechamber at the far corner of the large room, well away from the entry doors. The unit itself was situated within a small, eight-foot-high cubicle surrounded by armaglass walls tinted a brown hue. The door to the unit operated using a numeric key code, and the use of the unit was monitored by a computer terminal located just to the side of its entry door. Right now, Lakesh’s deputy, the copper-haired Donald Bry, sat at the mat-trans terminal, a look of deep concern on his features. Normally, Kane would not take Bry’s expression as a reliable indicator of the situation. The man was a compulsive worrier and Kane struggled to recall an instance when his brow wasn’t furrowed beneath his untamed mop of copper curls. However, the atmosphere in the room was such that Kane knew immediately that he had entered a serious situation.

“Well, I aim to please,” Kane replied as Cerberus weaponsmith Henny Johnson rushed over to arm the ex-Mag for the field. “What’s going on?”

Briefly, Lakesh outlined the situation regarding the intrusion alert at Redoubt Mike and how the Louisiana redoubt potentially contained any number of decommissioned weapons along with its outdated mat-trans unit.

“This may be a simple glitch in our system, or in Mike’s,” Lakesh concluded, “but there’s an adage that I think applies here—it is better to be safe than sorry.”

“I quite agree,” Kane said as he strapped a familiar wrist holster to his right arm and checked that the Sin Eater pistol that Henny handed him was fully loaded.

Henny glared at Kane as he checked the pistol, as if offended that he would, for even a moment, believe she might send him out into the field with equipment that wasn’t fully prepared. She was a small woman, five foot five with blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below her ears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as Kane placed the compact pistol snugly in its wrist holster and shrugged the sleeve of his black denim jacket over it to conceal it. “Don’t trust me anymore, cowpoke?”

Kane glanced up at the armorer. “I trust you, Johnson,” he said, “but I’d also expect you to double-check my work if your life was about to depend on it.”

“Thanks… I think,” Henny said as she passed Kane a handful of spare ammo cartridges and flash-bang globes for use in the field.

“Well, then.” Grant’s voice rumbled from where he sat, perched on the edge of one of the computer desks. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Grant was a huge man, well over six feet in height and broad like an oak door. A little older than Kane, he was a solid wall of muscle, with skin like polished ebony and a gunslinger’s mustache curling down from his top lip. Grant wore his hair cropped so close to his skull that he seemed almost bald, and he had placed a dark woollen cap over his head now, pulled low so that it met with his thick eyebrows, enhancing his permanent scowl.

Like Kane, Grant had dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits beneath his long, Kevlar-weave black coat. Though they appeared to be made of the thinnest of material, the tight-fitting one-piece shadow suits acted as artificially controlled environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.