James Axler - Death Cry

“No radios? No comm devices?” Kane queried.

“Only in the tanks,” the young man explained, looking across to the parked Scorpinauts, “to communicate with home. Nothing for here.”

This rang true to Kane and his team. The Millennial Consortium was not renowned for its lavish treatment of staff. Its operations were executed at minimal expense to generate maximum profits.

Kane strode toward the open, box-shaped entrance. Low-ceilinged, the tunnel dipped into a shallow slope, burrowing under the wrecked firewood and open foundations that had once formed buildings above. Kane could see a few paces into the tunnel, after which its contents were lost in darkness.

“Me and my buddies here are going to go in,” Kane explained to the guards as he tried to penetrate the darkness with his gaze. “You’re going to wait here, and you’re not going to do anything stupid. If you are under any illusions about how a dead man’s switch works, and you decide to be a chancer with your popguns, let me assure you that we will all be having the remainder of this discussion in the afterlife. Am I clear?”

The guards both nodded, their eyes wide in fear, but Kane didn’t bother turning to them. He was busy scanning the gloom of the tunnel and listening for any hint of approaching reinforcements.

“Now,” Kane continued as he led the way into the tunnel, “if nobody does anything stupid, nobody will get hurt and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

Grant held back as Brigid followed Kane into the dark tunnel, covering the two guards with his Sin Eater.

“Sit tight, boys,” Grant told them. “We won’t be here long.” With that, Grant ducked his head and jogged the few steps it took for him to catch up to his colleagues.

Brigid looked from Grant to Kane, a sour look on her face. “This is insane, you realize,” she whispered.

Still holding the flask aloft, Kane glanced at her. “We’re in and nobody’s been hurt so far,” he replied in a low voice. “Score one for diplomacy, I think.”

Grant sniggered for a moment at that, before Brigid pierced him with her emerald glare.

“The pair of you seem to have mistaken diplomacy for insanity,” she snarled.

Grant held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, despite the automatic pistol in his right hand. “Whoa there,” he muttered. “This is strictly Kane’s insanity. I just follow the leader.”

Brigid’s green eyes were narrowed slits and she bit back a curse at the huge, dark-skinned man before turning to address Kane once more. “So you plan to bluff your way inside, and then what?”

Even in the semidarkness, a mischievous twinkle seemed to play in Kane’s eyes, just for a second. “I’ll insist they all leave or I’ll set off the bomb.”

“What bomb?” Brigid snapped. “You’re holding a flask.”

“They don’t need to know that,” Kane said.

Grant agreed. “I’d say it’s preferable if they don’t know it,” he muttered.

“Scared by the loco bomber,” Kane continued, “they all wait outside a safe distance and we get the place to ourselves. You find what you need, then we head back to Lakesh and Cerberus.”

Brigid reached a hand up and fidgeted with the white scarf that covered her hair as she let loose a frustrated sigh. “Brilliant. And what, pray tell, is your plan for getting out again? You know, with maybe fifteen armed and now very much antagonized millennialists waiting for us at the end of a bottleneck.”

Kane’s smile was bright in the darkness. “This used to be a military base, right, Baptiste? We’ll use their mat-trans. Simple. And yet, genius.”

The mat-trans chamber was found in many of the prenukecaust military bases, and offered a quick way to move from one to the other by the almost instantaneous transfer of particles. Having been originally constructed as a military installation, the Cerberus redoubt, the headquarters of Kane’s field team, had a mat-trans chamber. However, they had traveled to Grand Forks via two Manta flyers, which acted as both transatmospheric and subspace aircraft. It would be a simple matter, Kane reasoned, to collect the hidden Mantas once the heat had died down.

The Cerberus exiles had a variety of ways to transport people, the Manta aircraft and the mat-trans network were just two. In the past few years they had come to rely increasingly on another form of teleportation called the interphaser, which exploited naturally occurring centers of energy both around the world and on the Moon and other planets. The interphaser was ideal for traveling between known locations but, like the mat-trans, could be dangerous when gating into the unknown. There were other limitations on the interphaser, as well, but for the right mission it was ideal.

Keeping pace with Kane, Brigid eyed him for a few moments before she spoke. “Nothing can go wrong with this, can it?”

“Not unless he drinks the bomb by mistake.” Grant grinned.

Kane led the way along the ill-lit tunnel, assuming the role of point man. Taking point was an unconscious habit for Kane, dating back to his days as a Magistrate. He exhibited an uncanny knack for sniffing out danger, a sixth sense in some respect, though it was really an incredible combination of the natural five he possessed, honed to an acute sharpness. Walking point, his eyes darting right and left, his hearing seeking changes in sound at an almost infinitesimal level, Kane felt electric, tuned in to his surroundings at a near Zenlike level. Walking point in the danger zone, Kane felt alive.

They met another pair of guards as they worked their way down the incline into the underground base, and each time they played the same bluff, with Kane insisting that anyone who disagreed with his proposal would end up picking his entrails off the tunnel walls.

By the time they reached the concrete exterior of the base itself, even Brigid was feeling quietly confident.

At the end of the shaft, a huge circular hole had been bored through the thick concrete wall of the old military base, taller than Grant and wide enough for two people abreast. Kane and Grant led the way into the interior, finding it lit by a string of dim, flickering lights that had been attached to vicious-looking hooks rammed into the ceiling. The lights hummed as they flickered, and the whole system had to be running off a generator of some kind, installed specially for the Millennial Consortium operation. Large gaps between the flickering lights left sections of the corridor in complete darkness.

“No expense spared,” Grant said wryly, pointing to the humming lights with the barrel of his Sin Eater.

The first thing Brigid noticed as she stepped into the underground lair was the stench of stale air. Slushy, muddy prints could be seen on the tiles beneath her feet, and there was a little mound of pale-colored powder where the hole had been drilled through the wall. She checked behind her, peering into the dark shaft they had just walked through to make sure no one had followed them.

“Know where we’re going?” Kane asked her as she tried to get her bearings. Brigid had an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory, and she’d studied maps of the Grand Forks base before leaving for the mission.

“Computer core’s a little down this way,” she said after a moment’s thought, pointing to the left corridor. “Twenty paces, maybe.”

As the three of them marched down the corridor, they could hear the sounds of voices and hammering coming from farther ahead. As they got closer, Brigid indicated a set of double doors to one side, and Kane locked eyes with Grant, putting a finger to the side of his nose for a moment, before they led the way inside. The gesture was a private code between the two ex-Mags, an old tradition to do with luck and long odds.