Maccan's response wasn't what Lakesh had expected to hear. It was a laugh, a rising and falling titter with a hint of a sob. The laugh was full of bitterness and even a touch of contempt, underscored by a note of hysteria.

  "Very well," Maccan replied, voice still suffused with laughter, "I won't bother trying to be civilized. Just bring him forward. I'd so enjoy the chance to talk with him again."

  Before Lakesh could frame even a noncommittal response, Farrell rose slightly from behind the desk and shouted angrily, "Kane isn't here right now, but he'll be back directly. You could wait for him, I guess, but there won't be a point to it—because you'll be deader than hell by the time he gets here!"

  During Farrell's maddened rant, Lakesh waved at him, trying to persuade him to stop talking, to not give away any information. But the man was too consumed by pain and rage to have complied, even if he had paid attention to Lakesh's hand gestures.

  "I suppose," came Maccan's voice, unruffled by Farrell's threat, "we'll just have to do this the hard way."

  "That may not be necessary," Lakesh interjected hastily. "Perhaps a compromise is possible. What do you need the interphaser for?"

  "I doubt you'd understand, my friend."

  A strange lilt to Maccan's voice, an almost undetectable change in its timbre, caused Lakesh to peer over the edge of the desk. Domi followed suit, cautiously rising to eye level. At that moment one of the interlopers came charging out of the gate room, a plasma rifle held at waist level, aiming at Domi and Lakesh's position.

  Philboyd rose to his feet, shouting in accusation, "Lazio, is that you?"

  The man tried to alter his aim in Philboyd's direction, but Lakesh beat him to it. The Bushmaster's line of steel-jacketed death tore into the man's head, ripping bloody chunks out of his face. Staggering backward, his finger pressed convulsively on the firing plate of the quartz cremator and a crackling stream of lethal energy burst from the barrel. Raw energy came scorching out in a blue torrent.

  Lakesh dropped behind the desk, pulling Domi with him. Although he had never fired one before, he knew pulse-plasma emitters were designed to operate in rarified atmospheres and so didn't pack much of a kinetic punch. They accelerated and bunched ions into a stream, stripping the particles of their negative charge.

  Since the beam wasn't subject to the effects of wind or gravity, it cut through anything in its path.

  He saw the wild plasma charge slice through one of the Cerberus security detail, carving him open diagonally from right shoulder to his left hip amid a bright shower of blood.

  The invader's finger relaxed on the trigger plate of the rifle as he dropped. By the time the armored man hit the floor, another interloper surged out of the antechamber. It was the scar-faced woman. Without hesitation, Lakesh pulled the trigger of his Bushmaster. The stream of 9 mm subsonic rounds caught the woman in her armored chest with a sound like a sledge banging repeatedly against an anvil and knocked her back into the gate room. Even as she fell, she managed to retrieve the quartz cremator, snatching it by the barrel.

  Her reeling fall seemed to be a signal. The invaders began a surging charge into the operations center, but were hampered by their bulky suits and the relative narrowness of the doorway. Only two could squeeze through at a time, firing their weapons in a wild frenzy as they did so. Bullets and tungsten-carbide pellets ricocheted all over the complex. Fire was directed upward, toward the neon light strips stretched across the high ceiling. Several of them sputtered with a shower of sparks and went out, plunging the command center into semidarkness.

  Philboyd raised his SA-80, pulling the trigger and unleashing 3-round bursts. Farrell lurched upright and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, firing with his own weapon. The blistering full-auto cannonade hammered into the front line of invaders, knocking them off their feet, sending them staggering.

  Banks picked off two men, placing shots through their unprotected heads. They flailed and went down. Two other men got their legs tangled with those casualties. Lakesh managed to drill one through the side of one skull, but his companion struggled free and scooted back into the antechamber on the seat of his hard suit.

  The other invaders retreated into the gate room. Farrell continued firing, keeping the trigger pressed down, not relaxing the pressure until the magazine cycled dry. Then he howled in fury, "Get out of our house, you stupe bastards!"

  When a bullet fired from the gate room came too close to him, Philboyd wrestled the man down behind the desk again, throwing Lakesh a feeble grin. "Hell of a party."

  Lakesh felt a swell of pride at the bravery displayed by Farrell and Philboyd. He felt less kindly disposed toward Auerbach, who cowered under a nearby desk, hugging his knees. He heard a commotion from the antechamber. Judging by the profanity, as well as the meaty smack of blows being struck, he guessed that Maccan and his warriors had not expected such fierce resistance. Apparently, George Neukirk had underestimated the resolve of the Cerberus residents and was the target of the vituperation

  "Maccan!" Lakesh called.

  "Right here," came the smooth reply. "I don't plan on taking my leave anytime soon."

  "That's a shame, because you're losing people," Lakesh pointed out, trying to sound reasonable and not gloating. "Far more than is necessary."

  "I'm not keeping score," the man retorted breezily. "All I know is that I don't have the interphaser."

  Tamping down his anger, Lakesh shouted, "You're not likely to get it, either. The part of the installation where it is kept is completely sealed off from this section. You're basically trapped."

  Maccan replied with his peculiar laugh. "I don't see it that way. Besides, I've been basically trapped before. You might have heard of my prison. It's called the Moon."

  "I know about your imprisonment. But from what I was told, it was self-imposed captivity."

  "Indeed? From where or whom did you hear that?"

  Lakesh started to tell him how he had learned of the man's life during his research into Celtic histories, specifically the areas that dealt with the Tuatha de Danaan, but he decided the time wasn't proper for a scholarly discussion.

  "It doesn't matter," Lakesh answered. "Tell me why you need my interphaser."

  Maccan did not answer for so long, Lakesh was on the verge of repeating the question when he retorted, "I need it to help me take a long, final look in the mirror...to step through the looking glass."

  Lakesh felt his eyebrows crawl toward his hairline. "Do you even know what my interphaser is?"

  The reply, when it came, was cold and heavy with contempt. "Of course I do. It's a device constructed on the scientific principles my kind gave to your people, millennia ago."

  "If that's the case," Lakesh countered sarcastically, "then what do you need mine for? Build one yourself."

  "I don't have the time or patience," replied Maccan.

  Lakesh replayed Maccan's enigmatic comment about mirrors and looking glasses and despite the situation found himself intrigued. "Mirror symmetry," he blurted. "Is that what you're talking about? The mirror-matter theory?"

  Maccan only sighed heavily. "I suggest you give me what I want, Lakesh. I'll answer all your questions then."

  "That's not going to happen."

  "Oh, dear Dr. Singh," Maccan announced confidently, "I believe it will."

  Domi rose to her knees and a single shot fired from the gate room plucked at her hair. She didn't take cover. Her hand dipped into the war bag and brought out an Alsatex concussion grenade, a flash-bang.

  Lips peeling back over her teeth in a silent snarl, Domi waited until another target presented itself. For a fleeting second a man peered around the edge of the door. Her finger caressed the trigger of her Combat Master and one round took off the top of the interloper's head in a mist of blood.

  Outraged cries came from the gate room as the corpse stumbled back from the doorway. Domi lunged forward, tucking and rolling and coming up under a desk.

  Lakesh focused on the doorway to the anteroom. A tall, lean shadow shifted. "Domi!" he cried. He wasn't sure of her location.

  "What!" Domi responded peevishly.

  "Don't take unnecessary chances—"

  Domi made no reply, but she rose and ran at an oblique angle for the gate room, the flash-bang gripped in her left hand. She slipped the spoon and hurled it through the doorway in one smooth motion. The grenade exploded a heartbeat later with an eardrum- piercing bang and an eruption of dazzling white light.

  Lakesh felt the concussion even at the distance that separated him from the anteroom. Hoarse screams of people blinded and deafened interwove with the echoes of the detonation.

  Domi sprinted back across the operations center as a barrage of gunfire erupted from the antechamber. The fusillade wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, but was meant only to prevent any of the Cerberus personnel from staging a concerted assault. It worked insofar as keeping Lakesh and the others hunkered down, but Domi was at risk from wild shots.

  Bullets peppered the floor and the desks around Domi, ricocheting off steel and vanadium. The gunfire was like a continuous roll of thunder in the enclosed space. Banks and several other people provided the Outland girl with covering fire until she dived to safety under a table.

  Wild rounds struck the Mercator projection map spanning the opposite wall, crashing into it with a metallic clangor and a tinkling of glass. The network of lit lines shorted out, the tiny bulbs exploding. A spray of bullets tore gouges in the surface of a desk very close to Lakesh's arm, splinters stinging his hand. He ducked beneath it, biting back swearwords in three languages.

  The barrage continued and Lakesh saw Philboyd grimace each time another burst of shots rang out. None of the arrivals from the Moon base had combat experience and Lakesh's was exceptionally limited, as well, restricted to a couple of missions over the past year or so. He knew from the reports made by Philboyd, Nora Pennick and a few others that a paramilitary organization had held the reins of power on the Manitius colony in the years following the nukecaust.

  Even before the atomic megacull scorched across the Earth, the Manitius Moon base had been divided into two castes—the support personnel with the military among them, and the scientists. The scientific staff of the base tried to come to terms with the reality that they were forever marooned, that they could not expect any rescue missions. They attempted to convince the other inhabitants of the Moon colony of the same thing, but were never quite successful.

  Unsurprisingly, the scientists composed the elite of the new postnuke society and for a few years following the conflagration, the two groups had dwelled in peace, practicing a form of democracy. But over a period of time there were many disagreements, which finally boiled over into dissension. The military and support people reached the conclusion that since scientists had brought on the holocaust, they should have no part of the new lunar society.

  After a few months of being essentially isolated from the rest of the colony's population, the main technical staff decided to enter cryostasis, both as a way to spare the base's resources and to hid from the new regime.

  When the fire from the gate room tapered off, Lakesh raised his head and voice. "Neukirk! George Neukirk! Are you still alive in there?"

  He heard a faint, surprised murmur of voices, then Neukirk shouted, "What do you want, Lakesh?"

  "I want you to leave. Get back in the jump chamber and go."

  "Back where we came from?" Neukirk's tone held a note of mockery.

  "Not necessarily. I don't care where you go, but it's inadvisable to stay here much longer."

  "Leaving before we get what we came for isn't part of the plan."

  "But getting yourself and your friends killed is?" Lakesh challenged. "You've seen the armory here. We could lob high-explosive grenades in there, or use rocket launchers on you any time we cared to. Did you tell Maccan about that?"

  Lakesh spoke the truth about the materiel available in the Cerberus armory. The big room was jammed with glass-fronted cases holding M-16 A-1 assault rifles, SA-80 subguns and Heckler & Koch VP-70 semiautomatic pistols complete with holsters and belts. Bazookas, tripod-mounted M-249 machine guns and LAWs lined the walls, as well as several crates of grenades. Every piece of ordnance and hardware, from the smallest-caliber handblaster to the biggest-bore M-79 grenade launcher, was in perfect condition.

  All of the armament was of predark manufacture. Caches of materiel had been laid down in hermetically sealed Continuity of Government installations before the nukecaust. Protected from the ravages of the environment, nearly every piece of munitions and hardware was as pristine as the day it rolled off the assembly line. Over a period of years Lakesh had smuggled out all of the weaponry from the largest COG facility, the Anthill in South Dakota.

  Neukirk responded with a derisive laugh. "You could do that, but you won't."

  Lakesh tightened his hands on the Bushmaster. "And why not?"

  "I don't doubt that if Grant or Kane or even Baptiste were here, they'd agree to a collateral-damage tactic like that. But they're gone and that's why I chose this time to act. Didn't that occur to you?"

  Angrily, Lakesh shouted, "Why the hell are you so sure I won't take the same action as they would?"

  "A couple of reasons." Neukirk's voice purred with patronizing amusement. "First of all, you're a humanitarian. Secondarily, you'd risk destroying your life's work."

  "My jump chamber?" Lakesh demanded incredulously. "Don't be ridiculous?'

  Despite his tone, Lakesh did take a great deal pride in the Cerberus mat-trans unit, since it was the first one built after the prototypes. It had served as the basic template for all the others that followed.

  "Not just that," Neukirk retorted impatiently. "The entire redoubt and everyone in it. By the time you drive us out or kill us, Cerberus will be useless to you, either as a sanctuary or a home. By the time we're done, we'll turn it into a mortuary. I can guarantee that."

  "You crazy son of bitch!" an enraged Philboyd yelled. "Why are you doing this? All of us who were trapped on the Moon are finally back on Earth. We have a chance for a future—"

  "This isn't the kind of future any of us want!" a sharp female voice shouted. "You destroyed what we had going up on the colony!"

  "All you had going for you," Philboyd shot back, "was an insane suicide pact, struck between a couple of insane aliens who thought they were gods!"

  Lakesh didn't involve himself in the argument. The situation was definitely a stalemate, but he didn't doubt George Neukirk's conviction. He had also accurately gauged Lakesh's feelings about the Cerberus redoubt and the people in it.

  He heard a short, warning hiss from where Domi had taken cover and he peered around the corner of the desk. She had removed a CS gas canister from her war bag and held it up, eyebrows raised toward him meaningfully. He shook his head, indicating she should wait.

  The girl scowled at him and shook her head in response, rising to her feet. She sidled along the wall toward the doorway. Lakesh watched her progress, a chill hand of dread stroking the base of his spine. He also felt more than a little angry. He seriously doubted Domi would have so blatantly disobeyed an order from either Kane or Grant under like circumstances.

  Maccan's voice cut through Philboyd's and Neukirk's argument. "Enough of this! Decide on a course of action, Lakesh! My followers and I have nothing to lose, therefore everything to fight for. Give me what I want or prepare to wade in blood—yours and mine."

  Lakesh waved frantically to Domi, shaking his head and mouthing, "No!" Domi merely narrowed her eyes, pinched away the gas gren's pin and hurled it with a looping overarm throw. It passed through the doorway, trailing a little stream of acrid vapor. When it struck the floor beyond, it erupted with a loud pop and spewed a billowing plume of white smoke. Almost immediately the gate room was engulfed by clouds of roiling vapor.

  Yells and shouted commands became incomprehensible as the gas seared eyes, lungs and nostrils. The interlopers coughed and gagged, groping for whiffs of fresh air. Two of them opened up with their autoblasters at the doorway. One of them raked the ceiling, blowing out more of the light strips. Gloom shrouded almost all of the operations center.

  Lakesh could barely see flame wreathing the stuttering muzzles through the blinding smoke, but the bullets smashed into the computer stations, chips of plastic and shards of glass flying in all directions. Slugs bounced from the walls beating a drumroll on the vanadium alloy sheathing Banks, Farrell, Philboyd and the other defenders didn't return fire. They ducked down behind their shelters.

  Dark shapes shifted through the planes of gas, fanning out of the gate room. The chemical vapors wafted into the command center, and Lakesh heard Domi cough then choke as she tried to suppress it.

  The result Lakesh feared became a reality when the invaders used the CS gas cloud as a screen to cover their charge into the operations complex. The security detail triggered their weapons, but those nearest to the gate room coughed and gagged as they inhaled the gas, their eyes tearing from the touch of it.

 

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