James Axler - Janus Trap

Philboyd’s lanky six-foot frame seemed to be hunched over the communications terminal as he nodded his agreement. “Hopefully they won’t bring back any monsters this time around,” Philboyd said. In his midforties, Philboyd wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks, with pale blond hair swept back from a receding hairline. He had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles over a year before, and his dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had proved invaluable. Although he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering quandary.

Mist began to fill the armaglass cubicle that housed the mat-trans itself, and the howling noise grew louder as the emitter array powered up. The vanadium-steel bulkhead that sealed the ops center off from the rest of the redoubt slid into place. When the mist cleared and the howling subsided, Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant stood revealed, none the worse for wear, and a collective sigh of relief went out from the Cerberus operations team.

“…where someone doesn’t start shooting at us?” Grant was asking as he stepped out into the anteroom.

Kane smiled and shook his head. “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?”

Grant glared at his partner. “Not if it’s going to depress me,” he growled.

Brigid stepped forward, the leather satchel slapping against her thigh as she strode through the anteroom. A moment later, the three-person field team stepped out into the ops room.

“My dears,” Lakesh said as he approached them, “how did it go?”

“You mean initially or overall?” Kane asked as he shrugged out of his faded denim jacket and stretched his tense muscles.

“A summary will suffice,” Lakesh said hopefully.

Pushing Kane gently aside, Brigid stepped ahead of the others and addressed Lakesh, giving the distinct impression that Kane’s response had struck her as juvenile and unnecessary. “It all went fine,” she explained, shirking off the leather satchel and placing it to one side. “We’ll need to speak with the trader again, but everything’s in place.”

“Yeah.” Grant laughed, slapping Kane on the back. “Thanks to Romeo here.”

Lakesh glanced across to Kane, who was looking just a little self-conscious as he busied himself with removing his wrist holster. “Would you care to explain, my friend?”

Kane looked away from Lakesh, glancing around the ops room for a few moments before he replied in a mutter, “Nothing to explain. Just the usual story of bullets, women and, well, mostly bullets.”

Lakesh laughed at that, watching as Kane continued to scan the room. It was strange, but just for a moment, Lakesh saw a side of Kane that he had only really noticed on the few occasions when he had accompanied the ex-Mag on a field mission. If he didn’t know better he would swear that Kane was checking out the room, searching for enemies with that old “point-man sense,” as he called it.

“I’m glad you’re all okay,” Lakesh concluded, “and that we’ve made a new friend.”

“‘Friend’ may be overstating the case a little, Lakesh,” Kane said, “but it is what it is.”

With that, the three warriors marched through the ops room and out into the corridor.

Working at the desks closest to the mat-trans unit, Skylar Hitch tapped Donald Bry lightly on the arm and indicated Kane and his colleagues. “What’s eating them?” she asked in a whisper.

Bry shook his head. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

“They just seemed a little, I dunno, pissy?” Skylar suggested, keeping her voice low.

After a moment’s thought, Bry shrugged. “No one likes traveling by the mat-trans,” he reminded her.

Skylar sat there for a half minute, lost in thought as she looked at the door on the far side of the room.

“Are you okay, Skylar?” Bry asked when he noticed that she had ceased working at the motherboard before her.

“Hmm?” Skylar said, turning to look at him, her eyes coming back into focus. “It’s nothing.” She sighed, rolling her dark eyes and returning to the job at hand.

KANE CHECKED his wrist chron as the three of them strode, shoulder to shoulder, down the wide corridor that stretched the length of the Cerberus redoubt. “It’s 12:34 local time,” Kane told his colleagues, his jacket and holstered Sin Eater slung over one shoulder.

“One, two, three, four,” Brigid stated, smiling as she broke down the time into separate numbers. “That’s lunchtime.”

“Then we should eat,” Grant stated practically.

They slowed, purposefully looking around the twenty-foot-wide corridor as they realized that they were its sole occupants. The vast corridor was carved directly into the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high stone roof. The air never really seemed to heat up here, and it often felt more like working in a mine shaft than being inside a high-tech military facility.

Brigid stopped walking, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she brought to mind the floor plan of the redoubt. After a moment, her emerald eyes reappeared and she pointed to a doorway a few paces behind them. “This way,” she said. “Stairwell B.”

Kane nodded. “Lead the way, Baptiste,” he encouraged as the redhead pulled at the door handle.

The door didn’t move and Brigid turned and smiled with embarrassment. Then she pushed the door to open it and the three of them walked through.

THE CANTEEN WAS BUSY when Kane, Brigid and Grant entered the room. The lunchtime rush had begun, and the cooks and serving staff were busy trying to keep the lines moving as almost forty people waited to be served, trays in hand. Several friendly faces turned to acknowledge the three newcomers as they entered the room and Kane nodded back—albeit self-consciously—in return.

At the far side of the room, Domi sat with Shizuka, the lone occupants of a long table. The remnants of a late breakfast remained on the table between them. Domi rested back in her seat, keeping her back to the wall while Shizuka faced her, bemoaning some of the more mundane political aspects of her leadership of the Tigers of Heaven.

“Sometimes,” Shizuka was saying, her eyes on the water jug that stood a few seats along from her in the middle of the table, “I wonder that there might be more to life than politics and war. And by more, quite naturally, I truly mean less.”

Domi nodded, enjoying the company of the fascinating warrior woman whose background was so unlike her own. The two hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but they had a healthy respect for each other. Domi certainly felt more comfortable around Shizuka than she did around many of the big brains who resided at Cerberus on a permanent basis.

As Shizuka took a sip of her green tea, Domi noticed the new arrivals and waved them over. “I think lover boy’s returned,” she told Shizuka with a meaningful wink as Kane, Grant and Brigid spotted her and approached the table.

Shizuka’s eyes flicked delicately to the silvered surface of the water jug that sat just beyond her grip once more, then she smiled indulgently at the albino woman. “You’re slowing down, Domi,” she said. “I saw them enter almost a minute ago. Everything after that was just distraction.”

Domi shook her head, a cardsharp solidly outplayed. Shizuka’s eyes went back to the water jug as she watched the three figures approach, and unconsciously her left hand reached beneath the table to where her katana rested in its scabbard.

“Hey, guys,” Domi said, gesturing to the empty, molded seats of the table. “How did everything go?”

Kane looked at the albino woman for a long moment, blue-gray eyes like steel lingering over her small frame before affixing on the quiver of arrows that she had propped against the wall behind her. “It went fine, Domi,” he stated. “Planning a hunt?”