James Axler - Death Cry

Domi brushed herself down and watched Grant return to the redoubt and disappear into the darkness of the tunnel mouth. After a few moments, she turned to Kane, still standing at the side of the circle. “Did you want to see me?” she asked him.

Kane shook his head. “Nah, I just came out here to get some peace and quiet. Didn’t realize that fight club was in session this morning.”

Domi smiled shyly, the barest hint of color rouging her pure white cheeks. “You wanna fight?” she asked Kane after a moment.

Kane looked out over the plateau, watching as wispy cotton-candy clouds drifted slowly over the distant sky, before he reached for the top of his shirt and began unbuttoning it. “What the hell, why not,” he told her, tossing his shirt to one side. “But no pulling hair, okay?”

“I won’t if you won’t,” Domi promised him as she walked across to the far side of the dirt circle.

As he stepped into the circle and dropped his body into a fighter’s stance, Kane felt the nagging doubts of the past few days ebb away. It felt good to be alive.

B RIGID WAS BESIDE Lakesh in the ops center while Brewster Philboyd sat before them, tapping at the keyboard Lakesh had attached to the recovered computer. They had spent three days trying to decode the encrypted information, and every false lead had sapped just a little of their enthusiasm for the task.

The question remained: what was stored on the hard drive and would it be worth this effort? Lakesh had one answer, and Brigid consoled herself that his was the wisest way to look at the problem. “It doesn’t matter what’s in the files,” he had assured her. “This is a scientific investigation to find out the truth—that there is something in the files.” In their ceaseless quest to find out what that something was, Brigid wasn’t entirely sure that any of them had gotten enough sleep.

An astrophysicist, Brewster Philboyd was in his midforties and wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks. His pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline, and his lanky six-foot frame towered above many of the other scientists in the redoubt. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other exiles from Manitius more than a year before, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t a fighter, but Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when a scientific or engineering problem crossed his path. He had stepped in to help with the Grand Forks database when he overheard the exasperated cries coming from Brigid and Lakesh on the second day of attempting to probe its files.

“This stuff was really important two hundred years ago,” Brigid said, “but for pity’s sake, couldn’t they have put a time-sensitive release on the damn coding?”

“There’s every possibility that it’s just as important today,” Lakesh said, chastising her lightly before turning back to the streams of code that whizzed across the screen, seeming to blur into one continuous, green glowing mass after three solid days of watching them flash before his eyes.

“Well,” Philboyd chipped in, “we know that the code is alphanumeric and that it uses uniform block placement to disguise any natural patterns that might be there. Maybe if we drop some of the letters and transpose others…”

“And stand on our heads and rub our stomachs,” Brigid added.

Philboyd scratched at his head absently. “That might help, too,” he admitted.

Lakesh took them both in with a kindly look. “We’ll break it, my friends,” he assured them calmly. “Just let’s all take things logically, one step at a time.

“And the first step,” he added firmly, standing up and feeling the twinge in his joints where he had been hunched over the computer terminal too long, “is to make everyone a cup of tea so we can all retain our sense of focus.”

A few minutes later, as the three of them sat nursing mugs of tea, Cerberus’s resident communications expert, Donald Bry, left his post as the day shift began and came across the room to join them.

“I’ve worked up a quick program that you can use to reverse selected batches of the coded sequence,” he explained, brandishing a shiny CD with the words Reverse decoder scrawled across it in permanent marker.

Lakesh reached across and took the CD, thanking Bry as he did so. “We’ve thought of reversing every other sequence, but it didn’t generate any definite patterns,” he told the communications man, “but this will open up more options, I’m certain.”

Bry nodded. “All we can do is try, right?” he told them, trying to buoy their spirits.

Her hands clasped around the warm mug of tea, Brigid nodded. “Thanks, Donald,” she said, feeling the cold ache of tiredness creeping over her and clutching the mug tighter to stave it off.

Lakesh stepped across to a free terminal and began running Bry’s program from the CD, while Brewster Philboyd transferred a copy of the recovered hard drive across for him to work with.

Bry stood behind Lakesh as he began typing instructions out at the keyboard. “Maybe if you reversed every third or fourth or, I dunno, tenth part of the string,” Bry suggested.

Lakesh’s brilliant mind was already several steps ahead. “I’m adding something to your program,” he told Bry. “A little randomizer so that we can test different parts of the coding in different ways. That should save us quite some time, assuming this provides a key to open the files.”

Still sitting beside Philboyd, Brigid felt Lakesh’s words wash over her as her eyelids began to get heavier. The steady rhythm of clicking computer keys had an oddly calming effect as she closed her eyes and began thinking, for no particular reason, about a game she used to play in her childhood that involved chasing boys to kiss them, much to their disgust. Eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular, Brigid smiled at the memory.

T HE CAVE WAS ALMOST entirely dark, the only light source coming from the faint glow of a computer screen. Five men had come there to confer, away from prying eyes.

“Somebody has tapped into the Keyhole orbital comsat,” Rock Streaming explained to the others as they stood together in a tight circle. Rock Streaming was a tall man in his early twenties, with long black hair tied in a ponytail and light brown skin the color of milky coffee. He had a wide forehead and a wide, flat nose beneath dark, intelligent eyes. He wore boots and combat pants with a long, tan-colored duster worn open across his bare chest. Tribal tattoos could be seen beneath it, dotted across his wide chest, swirls and black flames surrounded by curlicues.

The other men in the cave bore the signs of similar ethnicity, with café-au-lait skin, dark hair and flat noses, and the younger ones had harsh, bold tattoos striping the sectors of bare skin that they displayed.

One of the older men nodded sagely. His face displayed a tangled beard, as dark as his messy hair, and he was dressed in a simple loincloth, leaving the rest of him, including his feet, bare. A strange-looking cuplike object was tucked into his waistband, connected to a long section of twine. “Have you secured the feed?” he asked, his voice a low mutter.

Rock Streaming nodded, flexing his fingers for a moment like a prestidigitator warming up for his act. “They don’t know we’re there, Good Father, I guarantee it.”

The older man nodded once more, his eyes distant as he considered the implications of the young man’s statement. “Where is the link?” he asked after a moment. “Where is it that you are monitoring?”

The long tails of the duster coat whipped behind him as Rock Streaming strode across the cavern to the quietly humming laptop. He crouched, displaying uncanny balance as he dropped to rest on pointed toes, and tapped at the keyboard for several seconds. “The old United States,” he replied as a satellite image appeared to one side of the main display on the terminal. As Rock Streaming worked the keys, labels flashed up on-screen, identifying different parts of the image. “A place called Bitterroot in the area known as Montana by the old mapmakers.”