James Axler - Dark Goddess

“Billy-boy should’ve believed you,” Domi stated. “Fat bastard brought this on himself.”

“What about the people here?” Edwards asked. “What should we do with them?”

Domi cast the big shaved-headed ex-Mag a cold stare. “Let ’em go. Not their fault Porpoise was an asshole.”

“True,” Grant agreed. “But they’re not exactly victims, either. They benefited from Porpoise’s marauding.”

Edwards nodded, wiping at the sweat pebbling his brow. “We can’t leave them to pick up the pieces themselves. They’ll just try to take over Coral Cove.”

Kane exhaled a stream of smoke. “Then we’ll post CAT Alpha here, under your command, for a couple of days. Just to make sure everybody behaves.”

Edwards looked as if he were on the verge of voicing an objection, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Brigid sighed, running fingers through her tangled mane of hair. “Why is it that so many of the deals we broker are ultimately decided at the barrel of a gun?”

Grant shrugged the wide yoke of his shoulders. “That’s the purest form of diplomacy, isn’t it?”

Taking a final puff of the cigar, Kane flipped the butt out into the breakers. “Let’s get to the Mantas. The sooner we launch, the sooner we’re back in the cool mountain breezes of Montana.”

Dourly, Grant said, “Not exactly.”

Both Kane and Brigid eyed him challengingly. “Not what exactly?” Brigid wanted to know.

Grant hooked a thumb in the general direction of the Mantas. “I received a comm. call from Lakesh a few minutes ago. There’s a situation he wants us to check out on the way back to Cerberus.”

“What kind of situation?” Domi asked suspiciously, ruby eyes slitted.

“Possible overlord activity.”

Kane frowned. “Where?”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Grant intoned, “Tennessee…the former barony of Beausoleil.”

Alarm Klaxons warbled with a nerve-scratching rhythm, echoing through the redoubt. Personnel ran through the corridors in apparent panic, but in actuality they were racing to preappointed emergency stations as per the red-alert drills.

Farrell’s voice blared from the public-address system. “Intruder alert! Sealing exterior sec door! Intruder alert!”

Mohandas Lakesh Singh dodged adroitly as he rushed to the operations center. “Coming through!” he shouted in order to be heard over the alarm.

He heard his order repeated on his left by Brewster Philboyd. Lakesh glanced toward the tall man and nodded in acknowledgment. One of the three-score refugees from the Manitius Moon colony, Philboyd was an astrophysicist. In his mid-forties, Philboyd was tall, thin and lanky, and his pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline that made his already high forehead seem exceptionally high. He wore black-rimmed eyeglasses, and his cheeks bore the pitted scars associated with chronic teenage acne.

“What’s going on?” Philboyd demanded.

“Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” Lakesh retorted, squeezing between two people clad in the white bodysuits that served as the unisex duty uniform of Cerberus personnel. “I was in the commissary, steeping my pot of lunchtime tea.”

A well-built man of medium height, with thick, glossy black hair, an unlined dark-olive complexion and a long, aquiline nose, Lakesh looked no older than fifty, despite a few strands of distinguished gray streaking his temples. He resembled a middle-aged man of East Indian extraction in reasonably good health. In reality, he had recently celebrated his 251st birthday.

As a youthful genius, Lakesh had been drafted into the web of conspiracy the architects of the Totality Concept had spun during the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. A multidegreed physicist and cyberneticist, he served as the administrator for Project Cerberus, a position that had earned him survival during the global megacull of January 2001. Like the Manitius Moonbase refugees, he had spent most of the intervening two hundred years in cryostasis.

The central command complex of the Cerberus redoubt was a long, high-ceilinged room divided by two aisles of computer stations. Half a dozen people sat before the terminals. Monitor screens flashed incomprehensible images and streams of data in machine talk.

The operations center had five dedicated and eight shared subprocessors, all linked to the mainframe computer behind the far wall. Two centuries earlier, it had been one of the most advanced models ever built, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed when it was built, using protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.

The information contained in the main database may not have been the sum total of all humankind’s knowledge, but not for lack of trying. Any bit, byte or shred of intelligence that had ever been digitized was only a few keystrokes and mouse clicks away.

A huge Mercator relief map of the world spanned the entire wall above the door. Pinpoints of light shone steadily in almost every country, connected by a thin glowing pattern of lines. They represented the Cerberus network, the locations of all functioning gateway units across the planet. As they entered, Philboyd and Lakesh cast quick over-the-shoulder glances at the map. No lights blinked, so none of the gateway units were in use.

On the opposite side of the operations center, an anteroom held the eight-foot-tall mat-trans chamber. Rising from an elevated platform, six upright slabs of brown-hued armaglass formed a translucent wall around it.

Armaglass was manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century from a special compound and process that plasticized and combined the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.

Lakesh and Philboyd moved swiftly to the main ops console. Two people sat before it, gazing fixedly at the VGA monitor that rose above the keyboard. A flat LCD screen nearly four feet square, it flickered with icons and colors.

Farrell, a shaved-headed man who affected a goatee and a gold hoop earring, rolled his chair back from the console on squeaking casters. The brown eyes he turned toward Lakesh were anxious. “About time you got here.”

Lakesh stepped up beside him and saw that the top half of the screen glowed with a CGI grid pattern. A drop-down window displayed scrolling numbers that he quickly recognized as measurements of speed and positional coordinates. “Status.”

“A radar hit,” Donald Bry answered, inclining his copper-curled head toward a bead of light inching across the gridwork. A round-shouldered man of small stature, Bry acted as Lakesh’s lieutenant and apprentice in all matters technological. His expression was always one of consternation, no matter his true mood.

Electronic chimes sounded each time the bead of light left one glowing square of the grid and entered another. “When did you get the first hit?” Lakesh asked.

“About five minutes ago,” Farrell said. “Whatever the bogey is, it’s not traveling very fast.”

Philboyd eyed the numbers on the drop-down window. “About two hundred klicks per hour. Could it be a Deathbird?”

Bry shook his head. “When it first appeared, the altitude was around thirty thousand feet. The maximum flight ceiling of a Deathbird is about three.”

“It’s not that high now,” Lakesh pointed out.

“No,” Farrell agreed. “And the bogey is slowing down the closer it comes. Straightforward course, too.”

Philboyd adjusted his eyeglasses. “Almost like it’s trying to catch our attention, not evade it.”

Lakesh opened his mouth to reply, grimaced, then said to Farrell, “Turn off the alarms, but lower the security shields. Lock us down in here.”