The interphaser had not functioned according to its design and was lost on its first mission. Much later, a situation arose that showed him the wisdom of building a second, improved model.

  A mission a few months ago had brought Brigid Baptiste, Kane and Grant to a Totality Concept installation, the primary Operation Chronos facility. They assumed the installation had been uninhabited and forgotten since the nukecaust of two centuries before. It was not until much later that they learned the place was inhabited by an old enemy, a brilliant but deranged dwarf named Sindri.

  Sindri had told them that during his investigation of the installation, he had discovered a special encoded program that was linked to but separate from Chronos. It was code-named Parallax Points. Sindri had been far more interested in the workings of the temporal dilator than the Parallax Points program, but his tampering with the technology had caused it to overload and reach critical mass, resulting in a violent meltdown of its energy core.

  Lakesh learned that the Parallax Points program was actually a map, a geodetic index, of all the vortex points on the planet. This discovery had inspired him to rebuild the interphaser, even though decrypting the program had been laborious and time-consuming. Each newly discovered set of coordinates had to be fed into the interphaser's targeting computer.

  With the new data, the interphaser became more than a miniaturized version of a gateway unit, even though it employed much of the same hardware and operating principles. The mat-trans gateways functioned by tapping into the quantum stream, the invisible pathways that crisscrossed outside perceived physical space and terminated in wormholes.

  The interphaser interacted with the energy within a naturally occurring vortex and caused a temporary overlapping of two dimensions. The vortex then became an intersection point, a discontinuous quantum jump, beyond relativistic space time.

  Evidence had indicated that there were many vortex nodes, centers of intense energy, located in the same proximity on each of the planets of the solar system, and those points correlated to vortex centers on Earth. The power points of the planet—places that naturally generated specific types of energy—possessed both positive and projective frequencies, others were negative and receptive. He referred to the positive energy as prana, which was an old Sanskrit term meaning the world soul.

  Lakesh had known that some ancient civilizations were aware of these symmetrical geoenergies and had constructed monuments over the vortex points to manipulate them. Once the interphaser was put into use, the Cerberus redoubt reverted to its original purpose— not a sanctuary for exiles or the headquarters of a resistance against the tyranny of the barons, but a facility dedicated to unfathoming the eternal mysteries of space and time.

  However, everyone was nonplussed when one set of Parallax Points coordinates led to a location not just above solid ground, but off the planet itself, on the Moon. All of them knew the stories about predark space settlements, even of bases on the Moon, of course. It wasn't until they activated the Parallax Points coordinate that they learned the stories about Moon bases were far more than folklore.

  "Fascinating device."

  Maccan's comment brought Lakesh out of his reverie. "My compliments."

  Lakesh nodded. "Thank you."

  "But it is more than merely fascinating...perhaps it can serve as the means to my ultimate salvation." "How so?"

  Maccan regarded him gravely. His eyes were now a pale pewter-gray, but Lakesh wasn't comforted. The helmeted man didn't speak for a long moment, as if he were pondering a weighty problem. Then, musingly, he said, "Perhaps I should take you with me, so you may learn the answer to that question yourself...and in doing so help me attain my objective. I promise you'll find it an astonishing experience."

  Lakesh forced himself to stare at Maccan levelly. "I've visited Manitius base. There's not much there you can show me that I'll find particularly astonishing."

  Maccan's smiled widened. "Who said anything about going to the Moon?"

  Lakesh felt his brow furrowing. "Then where?"

  Maccan cast his eyes toward the ceiling and kept his gaze there, as if he could see through vanadium, solid rock and the atmosphere. "The fourth planet from the Sun, Dr. Singh. I called it Lahmu. You call it Mars."

  Chapter 12

  Grant nearly had all the spark plug leads hooked back up to the distributor cap when Kane leaned down and demanded, right in his ear, "What's holding things up?"

  Grant jerked and banged his head on the underside of the jeep's hood. He struggled to keep the wires together and his temper from fraying any further. He speared Kane with angry eyes. "Trying to do engine work when it's damn near dark."

  He glanced toward Brigid, who stood at the front of the jeep, the flashlight in her hand trained on the engine block. "Hold that damn light steady," he snapped at her.

  "I'm trying to," she retorted peevishly, her shoulders quaking in a shiver. "I'm getting cold."

  "We're all getting cold," Kane complained. "I'm hungry, too," she challenged.

  "We're all hungry," he shot back. He sighed wearily. "It might make more sense to leave the jeep here and go the rest of the way on foot:'

  "I warned you about taking the jeep instead of the Hussar or a Sandcat, didn't I?" Brigid asked, an accusatory edge to her tone.

  "Yeah," replied Kane. "But you also agreed it would draw less attention. With what's happened lately, we don't need to make ourselves any more conspicuous in the Outlands."

  Grant snorted but said nothing, returning to his work.

  Kane stepped away, pulling up the collar of his jacket. All of them wore jackets against the chill creeping down from the mountain peaks.

  The clouds had lowered around the Bitterroot Range, bringing veils of mist and a more persistent drizzle. It cut down on visibility, not that there was much to see as twilight deepened, a sea of russet and indigo flowing down from the western sky. The last few minutes of sunset were strikingly beautiful.

  Sunsets always were spectacular in the Outland, due to the pollutants and lingering radiation still in the upper atmosphere. Full night would fall swiftly, like the dropping of a curtain, and the crags above them would be swathed in deep shadow. A deep, thickly wooded gully yawned below the crest of the hill on which the jeep had stalled. The forest blazed with orange, red and gold late autumn colors. The tall trees were fir and pine and aspen. The shadows between them were very dark and ominous.

  On their left, beyond the tree line, rocky ramparts plunged straight down to a tributary of the Clark Fork River almost five hundred feet below. The ancient two- lane highway wended its way up toward the chain of mountain peaks that comprised the Continental Divide and formed the natural boundary between Idaho and Montana.

  Standing at the front of the jeep, Kane looked up in the general direction of the distant mountain peak that sheltered Cerberus and sniffed the wind. His pointman's sixth sense reacted unpleasantly to its chill, moist touch. Something was in it, a faint scent of fear. He couldn't pin down the reason for his apprehension, since he and his friends were pretty much back on their home turf.

  The three of them were two and a half long, hard days from Crescent City. Other than a skirmish with a group of scavengers who coveted their vehicle, the return trip had been relatively quiet. Now Kane almost wished they had given the jeep over to them, since about an hour had elapsed since it had sputtered, shuddered and finally died altogether.

  Well over two hundred years ago, before the world had died in a nuclear inferno, the vehicle had started life as a mil-spec Army jeep. Since then it had been pieced back together at least a half dozen times by people with various degrees of skills and limited access to parts.

  Metal patches welded over the body showed signs of rust, ripped open in places by dents and dings. Kane and Grant had captured it from a band of Roamers who'd been traveling too close to the Bitterroot Range a few months back. The encounter had resulted in some of the new bullet holes decorating the wag's body.

  But the vehicle provided good cover for the overland journey, not quite as attention-getting as a Sand- cat or the Hussar Hotspur available in the redoubt. The downside of traveling in a less conspicuous vehicle like the jeep was the exposure to the often lethal elements around hellzones, the least of which were the showers of acid rain.

  Fortunately the weather had held on the return trip, and when they skirted hellzones, their instruments showed tolerable levels of ambient radiation. Only twice did they come near orange or warm regions. The far western inland states had, for the most part, been spared multiple direct strikes.

  For a day, the jeep rolled steadily along old Interstate 199 through lower Oregon, before cutting over to Route 12, which carried them through part of Idaho and then into Montana. They passed piles of overgrown rubble that had once been towns. A few old buildings still rose at the skyline, then broke with ragged abruptness. Other than the scavengers with whom they had exchanged shots and insults, they saw no people and fewer animals.

  The had stopped briefly at the permanent encampment of the Lakota/Cheyenne where they were welcomed as friends and heroes, before continuing on to a road that cut through the foothills of the Bitterroot Range and then began a steady incline.

  The old, two-lane blacktop wasn't simply steep, it was treacherous; the greater the elevation, the more painstaking the drive became. The road stretched up from the foothills and when it plunged into the Bitterroot Range proper, it turned into a twisting, inhumanly rugged hellway. It skirted dizzying abysses on one side and foreboding, overhanging bluffs on the other. The jeep's engine strained and labored not just to climb the path, but to stay on it.

  Ascending through the foothills, they kept the ridgelines between them and the flatlands, although even Grant, the most pessimistic of the team, doubted anyone was trying to track them. The past year, particularly the battle of Area 51 and the siege of Cobaltville, had taken its toll on most of the baron's resources. Where the Magistrate Divisions had once been able to fill their ranks with generation after generation of warriors, they were now in the position of badging new blood far too soon. In the wake of the Imperator War, the Mags were too concerned with putting down sporadic rebellions in ville territories to engage in a concerted search for three renegades.

  The journey to the mountain plateau was always nerve-racking, so much so that Grant insisted he be the one to drive, not wanting to trust his life to Kane's sometimes impatient piloting. Brigid sat in the back seat apparently not in the least disturbed by the violent jolts or the whine of the overstressed V-8. She resolutely stared at her lap.

  After leaving the Indian camp, they had lost a little time down below, clearing away, then recamoflauging the narrow track cut through the rockfall that blocked the highway as it entered the foothills Two years before, they had used an explosive charge to trigger an avalanche and thus make the road impassable to all but the most foolhardy of intruders, and then only those who cared to make the trek on foot.

  In the interim, an alliance had been struck with Sky Dog and his band of Sioux and Cheyenne living out on the flatlands. With their help, a narrow and easily disguised path had been forged through the fall. The undertaking had required a week of hard labor and the judicious use of demolition charges, but the warriors had been eager to help. If it hadn't been for Grant, Kane and Domi, a squad of Magistrates would have slaughtered the entire settlement. The Amerindians also received a fully operable war wag in the bargain.

  As always, Kane felt strangely regretful about leaving the band of Lakota and Cheyenne whereas Grant and Brigid were only too happy to continue the trip to Cerberus. Brigid was ville-bred and the rough life on the plains didn't appeal to her. In that, she was much like most of the other redoubt personnel, particularly the Moon base emigres. They were accustomed to an artificial environment and rarely did any of them stray more than ten yards from the edge of the plateau.

  Grant, though accustomed to hardship during his Mag days and after, made no bones about his preference for a bed over a fur robe spread on the hard ground. He also didn't find herb-and-bark tea much of a substitute for coffee.

  Kane felt a strong affinity for the wild and free people and their unfettered way of life and he wasn't sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the vision he had glimpsed a couple of years before during a bad mat-trans jump. At the time he had dismissed it as a hallucination caused by an out-of-phase transit feed connection. Lakesh had explained that when the modulation frequencies between two gateway units weren't in perfect sync, jump sickness would result, a symptom of which was startlingly vivid hallucinations.

  The hallucinations Kane had suffered weren't dreams—they were more like glimpses of past lives, vignettes from his soul's journey over the long track of time. In one of the visions he had seen himself astride a pony, feathers in his long, streaming hair as he galloped down on the bluecoat soldiers in a place called the Greasy Grass. The soldier's chief had been named Pahaska.

  It wasn't until much later, delving secretly into the redoubt's database, that he learned Greasy Grass was what the Lakota called the Little Bighorn and Pahaska's wasicun name was Custer.

  Kane wondered how such obscure historical details, which weren't in his conscious storehouse of knowledge, could bubble to the surface during a bout of jump sickness.

  Regardless of whether he'd really lived a past incarnation as a Plains Indian, Kane would occasionally suffer from redoubt fever. Then he would requisition one of the vehicles to drive down the treacherous mountain road to the foothills to Sky Dog's encampment.

  No one had ever asked what he did down there among the Amerindians, where he was known and admired as Unktomi Shunkaha, which meant Trickster Wolf. It was a name the band of Sioux and Cheyenne had bestowed upon him, first conceived as something of an insult. It became synonymous with cunning and courage after he orchestrated the Indians' victory over a Magistrate assault force.

  Kane knew Brigid and the others wondered if he had a willing harem of Indian maidens who always looked forward to a visit from Unktomi Shunkaha, but everyone knew better than to inquire about it. That restraint didn't keep Brigid from scrutinizing the babies in the encampment to see if there were any with blue eyes among them.

  The loud bang of Grant slamming down the jeep hood caused Kane to jump and spin around, biting back a startled curse. Grant met his irritated gaze with one of mild amusement. "If it was only a plug, then it should be fixed."

  They all climbed back aboard. Once settled in behind the wheel, Grant turned the ignition key. The jeep engine roared to life, running smoothly and without a single stutter or stammer. Grant experimentally pressed down on the accelerator a time or two to race the engine. When it continued to run without hesitation, he engaged the gears and set off up the road again.

  "With luck," Brigid said, speaking loudly to be heard over the engine, "we should be home before the Moon rises."

  "Almost be better if we didn't," Grant responded over a shoulder. "Then our visibility would improve?'

  Grant turned on the headlights, the jeep skirting the crumbling edge of the road. The ground looked solid but it was deceptive. Even the vehicle's four- wheel drive might not be enough to get them free if the road began to collapse under its weight. Twisting the wheel in one direction then turning it the other, Grant rode the brakes, all the while watching for familiar landmarks.

  Grant guided the jeep expertly with gravel rattling beneath the wheels and chassis, traveling along the high, far side of the road to avoid the crumbling edges. When the highway swung in a wide curve along the backside of a ridge, Brigid, Kane and Grant released their pent-up breath in a long exhalation of relief.

  "About the worst is behind us now," Grant commented. "We should be in comm range. Give 'em a holler."

  Kane picked up the trans-comm from the seat. Thumbing up the cover of the palm-size radiophone, he pressed a key, held it up to his ear and spoke into it. "This is Rover. Do you read me, Cerberus? Acknowledge."

  Kane repeated the request, but only static filtered out through the unit. He spoke twice more, but received only a hash of crackles and pops. Irritably he folded down the unit cover. "Could be the cloud cover blocking the signal."

  Brigid leaned forward. "Try again when we're closer. You'd think they'd be expecting us."

  "Lakesh didn't seem too enthusiastic about this mission in the first place," said Kane.

  "That's probably because he didn't come up with it," replied Grant. "He still wants the final say on all ops."

  Brigid interjected, "He had a point about this particular mission. It wasn't a strike against either the barons or the imperator. We hurt Baron Snakefish by accident, not by design. And since he's an ally of Sam, he'll more than likely resupply Snakefish's ville with anything he lost."

  "It's a new war," Kane argued. "We have to come up with new strategies."

 

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