James Axler - Terminal White

“Our love is rock and rock never breaks,” the devoted repeated as a mantra from where they knelt in the gravel outside the temple doors.

Kane shook his head in despair as he and Brigid emerged during a cacophonous explosion. “Poor deluded saps,” he muttered, disgusted by their devotion.

Some of the pilgrims appeared terrified by what they had witnessed, while a few bore tears of joy on their smiling faces as they praised the return of the demigoddess. The tears mixed with the relentless rain, washing from the heavens with disinterest.

Kane and Brigid joined the worshippers outside the temple, and when the next explosion rocked the sacred site they were ready. During the general confusion, Kane and Brigid slipped away, taking a route across the fields, staying low to the ground and hidden by the overgrown wildflowers from a casual glance. Behind them, the other pilgrims and the acolytes bowed their heads lower, imagining what must be going on inside the temple grounds. They were dumb, in Kane’s opinion, but it wasn’t their fault—the barons had kept people dumb, drummed out their curiosity. The barons hadn’t wanted people—they had wanted devoted automatons who would worship and praise them. Here was their legacy.

Brigid and Kane walked in silence for a while, just creating as much distance from the site of the temple as they could. Finally, Kane turned to Brigid, worry creasing his brow.

“You know, for a moment back there I thought you’d turned sour,” Kane admitted, the concern clear on his face.

Brigid shook her head. “Never. Never again,” she promised.

It was all they needed to say, but they had needed to say it. Brigid had been changed once by Ullikummis, possessed by her dark self, the creature called Haight. She had turned on Kane and their allies, shot Kane in the chest while he was defenceless. The wound between them would always be there, but they worked every day to get past it, to erase its memory.

Kane and Brigid were anam-charas, soul friends, their destinies entwined throughout all of time. No matter what form they took, no matter what bodies their souls wore, they were destined to always find one another, watch over one another, protect one another. It wasn’t love, not in a carnal way, anyway—it was something deeper and more transcendental than that. Their friend Domi had once asked Brigid if the anam-chara bond was like they were brother and sister, and Brigid had laughed. “If Kane were my brother he might listen to me once in a while,” she had said. Beyond that, she had never been able to explain what the bond really was; she only knew it was theirs and that it was eternal.

They trekked for an hour before reporting in to Cerberus to request their ride back home. By that time they had reached a dirt track running between two vegetable fields, carrots to one side, potatoes to the other, a distant farmhouse looking out toward them.

“Grant, this is Kane,” Kane said, activating his Commtact. The Commtact was a small radio communications device that was hidden beneath the skin of all Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtact could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funnelled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the additional effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf they would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

The radio link molded below Kane’s ear spoke with the familiar voice of his partner. “Hey, Kane, how did it go?” Even over the Commtact relay, Grant’s voice was deep as rumbling thunder.

“We bewildered and destroyed,” Kane replied. “Just another day at the office.”

Grant’s laughter echoed through Kane’s skull from the Commtact.

“Triangulate on our position and give us a ride,” Kane said. “We’re all set to go home.”

The triangulation was easy. Kane, Brigid and all other Cerberus personnel had a biolink transponder injected into their bloodstream. The transponder used nanotechnology to relay a subject’s position and detail their current state of health to a satellite pickup station, which then delivered that information to the Cerberus redoubt in the Montana mountains. This technology along with the Commtacts allowed Cerberus to remain in constant touch with its personnel while they were in the field, and it could be accessed by the operations staff to home in on an individual to deliver aid.

In this case, that aid came in the form of a Deathbird, a modified AH-64 Apache helicopter, that arrived over the field of potatoes, shaking their fluttering leaves in its passage. The Deathbird featured a turret-mounted chain gun, as well as missile armaments—and it had been on call in case the mission went sour.

Kane and Brigid watched as the Apache dropped down to the ground, landing gently on the dirt strip between fields, its rotor blades whirring in a blur. As soon as it was down, the two Cerberus rebels hurried toward it in a crouched run, keeping their heads and limbs well below the height of those rotating blades, even though they knew there was room to maneuver below them. Too many times, the drag created by the rotors had wrong-footed a man and created a shockingly swift accident as the fast-spinning rotors became like knives cutting the air.

Kane drew back the side door. Brigid tottered inside with Kane just a couple of steps behind her. As soon as Kane was in, Brigid shouted, “Clear!” and the helicopter ascended into the skies once more.

Piloting the craft was a large dark-skinned man in his late thirties, with a shaved head and gunslinger’s mustache. He was wearing a shadow suit that matched those worn by his passengers. Though large, the man was all muscle—accentuated by the tight fit of the shadow suit—without an ounce of fat on his body. This was Grant, who had served as Kane’s field partner all the way back to their days as Magistrates and with whom he had been partnered ever since. Grant was a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, as well as being trained in the use of most ballistic weapons. He was also a phenomenal pilot—Kane would argue he was the greatest pilot that Cerberus would ever know...excluding himself, of course.

“So, you guys pick up anything good while you were shopping?” Grant asked in his rumbling-thunder voice as Kane drew the side door closed.

Kane shrugged. “Trouble, a few stones. The usual.”

“Stones,” Grant muttered, shaking his head. “Like we’ve not had enough of that for one lifetime.”

Kane and Brigid had to agree.

* * *

THE TRIO ARRIVED back at the Cerberus redoubt two hours later. The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in the Bitterroot range in Montana, where it was hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base which had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust of 2001. A peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains in the years since that nuclear conflict, with their dark, mysterious forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now, the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago.