"That fits in with what we know of Danaan technology," Brigid said, sounding so calm as to be detached. "We've all faced their infrasound weapons before."

  Kane thought back to the harp-like instrument played by Aifa in Ireland and a similar device Sindri had claimed had been found on Mars, a relic of the Tuatha de Danaan. The infrasound wands wielded by the hybrids in the Archuleta Mesa installation and in Area 51 converted electricity to ultrahigh sound frequencies by a miniature maser.

  The Danaan harp had been described as producing energy forms with balanced gaps between the upper and lower energy frequencies. He'd explained that if the radiation within particular frequencies fell on an energized atom—like living matter—it stimulated it the same way a gong vibrated when its note was struck on a piano. Harmony and disharmony, healing and death.

  Sindri had gone on to describe scientific precedents cloaked by myth and legend such as the Ark of the Covenant bringing down the walls of Jericho when the Israelites gave a great shout. He'd claimed the walls were bombarded and weakened by amplified sound waves of the right frequency transmitted from the Ark. Sindri also cited Merlin, who was reputed to be of half Danaan blood, and had "danced" the megaliths of Stonehenge into place by his music.

  "The frequency between seven and eight Hertz can rupture internal organs," Brigid continued. "Seven Hertz is the average frequency of the brain's alpha rhythms, so it can trigger epileptic seizures."

  Both Kane and Grant knew Brigid's clinical attitude masked a sharp anxiety about Domi's welfare. They knew her mind could function in a balanced matrix between horror and analysis.

  "What treatment are you giving her?" Grant demanded.

  DeFore shrugged helplessly. "What you see. An IV drip to keep her hydrated. I'm monitoring her heart rate and blood pressure. I haven't given her an EEG yet, so I don't know about the extent of brain damage, if there is any."

  Grant glowered at her. "Why haven't you?"

  DeFore met his glower with an angry scowl of her own. Sweeping her arms toward the casualty ward, she exclaimed, "I'm a little overworked and a lot understaffed, if you haven't noticed! Domi may be comatose, but she can breathe on her own and doesn't require constant care, which is more than I can say for some of our gunshot victims and burn-trauma patients out there."

  Grant blinked and his stern expression softened, some of his confrontational energy ebbing. "I'm sorry. You're doing the best you can—you always do. We should have been here. Maybe it wouldn't have happened."

  "Or," Quavell spoke up as she sidled up to the opposite side of Domi's bed, "you could have only been additions to the casualty list. None of you has any reason to feel guilt."

  "I don't," Kane bit out. "But I'm feeling an awful lot like I should finish the job I started with Maccan."

  He spun on a heel, stalking out of the room. "I'll be in operations."

  None of them was surprised by Kane's abrupt departure. Kane never stayed in Quavell's presence longer than he absolutely had to and he made it a priority to make sure even that time period never exceeded a minute, if possible.

  His statement to the contrary, Brigid knew Kane did indeed feel responsible for not ending the threat of Maccan when the opportunity had presented itself. He had suggested it, but had been overruled by Lakesh and Brigid, who'd felt Maccan might serve as a valuable source of information about the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan.

  Addressing Quavell, Brigid asked, "Are you sure you should be exerting yourself in your condition?"

  The masklike placidity of Quavell's face didn't alter. "I can only know that by the level of exertion. So far, despite a nagging pain in my lower back, I'm experiencing no ill effects."

  DeFore smiled at her gratefully. "You've been a great help, Quavell. I couldn't have done this without you."

  Quavell acknowledged DeFore's complimentary words with a diffident hand gesture, the hybrid equivalent of a shrug. "It was a task that needed doing and so I welcomed the chance, as some of you have phrased it, 'to pull my freight around here.' Besides, I have a little experience in such matters."

  They realized Quavell was making an oblique reference to the incident when Kane, Brigid, Domi and Grant had inadvertently destroyed the baronial medical facility beneath the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. The barons depended on the facility to bolster their immune systems. Once a year, the oligarchy traveled to the installation for medical treatments.

  They received fresh transfusions of blood and a regimen of biochemical genetic therapy designed to strengthen their autoimmune systems, thus granting them another year of life and power. Grant knew the six-leveled facility in New Mexico had originally been constructed to house two main divisions of the Totality Concept, Overproject Whisper and Overproject Excalibur. One dealt with finding new pathways across space and time, the other was exclusively involved in creating new forms of life. According to Lakesh, after the institution of the unification program, only Excalibur's biological section was revived to maintain the lives of the barons and to grow new hybrids.

  Although all the hybrids were extremely long-lived, cellular and metabolic deterioration was part and parcel of what they were—hybrids of human and Archon DNA. The treatments involved infusions of human genetic material, and the barons relied upon an aircraft to locate sources of raw material in the Outlands, kill the donors, harvest their organs and tissues, and return with the "merchandise," as they referred to it, to the mesa to be processed.

  Quavell, who'd been stationed there at the time, had reported that the destruction of the Archuleta Mesa had done more than smash the baron's ability to sustain their lives. It had also taken away their future by destroying the incubation chambers. Only twenty- three infants remained out of two thousand. The war between old and new human, Quavell had declared, was over. The old humans had won simply by killing the babies of the new humans.

  "Where's Auerbach?" Grant demanded, not wanting to be reminded of the mission. "I thought he was your assistant."

  DeFore's lips pursed as if she tasted something sour. "From what I hear, he didn't exactly comport himself in a way that would earn him medals for bravery. So he was assigned to burial detail, attending to the dead."

  Brigid glanced toward Quavell. "Did you see the weapon Maccan used on Domi?"

  She shook her head. "No, I was in a section of the redoubt sealed off from the command center?'

  "From the description of the effects," Grant stated, "it sounds like an infrasound weapon, like the wands you people used in the Archuleta Mesa."

  Quavell's small mouth twitched at the mention of the Mesa, but she calmly replied, "It does indeed. But I have never heard of an acoustic weapon in the form of a fashion accessory. Directing infrasound is difficult because of the long wavelength produced. If the weapon is activated by the person holding it, protecting them from the sonic backsplash would be very chancy undertaking."

  Grant waved away Quavell's observations. "I just want an idea of what we're dealing with here."

  He took a long, final look at Domi and turned away. Half to himself, he asked, "What the hell did Maccan want with the interphaser?"

  "'MIRROR SYMMETRY'?" Kane echoed incredulously. "What the hell does that mean?"

  Philboyd straightened from beneath the master ops console and snapped in exasperation, "How the hell do I know? You asked me what I heard and I'm telling you. For what it's worth, it seemed to mean something to Maccan."

  Kane put his hands on his hips and slowly surveyed the shambles of the command center. He hadn't allowed the shock he felt upon first sight of the ruins to show on his face. He struggled to control the feelings of disorientation and the overwhelming sense of being violated. It hadn't occurred to him until he saw the extent of the damage to the redoubt and its personnel how deeply he had come to regard Cerberus as his home.

  The master operations console was one of the very few control stations still intact. The flat, four-foot VGA monitor screen had miraculously managed to come through the battle without incurring so much as a scratch.

  The rest of the big room hadn't been so fortunate. Only a few status lights flickered on the instrument boards, and the center itself was unsatisfactorily illuminated by a tangled netting of extension cords and naked light bulbs. People scurried to and fro, broken glass crunching underfoot, carting away destroyed consoles and computers or trying to jury-rig the ones that had only been damaged.

  Many of the panels were just empty squares or rectangular holes in the console casings. Philboyd, Bry and a couple of other tech-heads labored to replace the unsalvageable boards with wired-together switch boxes and automated controls. Wegmann stood atop a ladder, spot-welding a piece of the Mercator projection map back into place. Although the ventilation system still functioned, the odor of burned metal, cordite and even scorched human flesh hung in the air, coating Kane's tongue with a foul tang.

  "Any other witnesses?" Kane asked. "What about Maccan's people?"

  Philboyd paused in the splicing of wires to a hastily constructed switch box. "They took their own casualties with them, their dead and wounded."

  "Did you know any of them?"

  "By name, only one, a jerk named Lazio. A couple of others I'd seen around from time to time. A scarfaced bull dyke by the name of Shayd seemed to be acting as Mac's lieutenant, though I could be mistaken."

  Kane narrowed his eyes. "Bull dyke?"

  "Twentieth-century slang for a macho-acting lesbo." Philboyd's voice acquired a patronizing tone. "You know, a female homosexual."

  Kane gestured to a video camera bracketed high in a corner. "What about spy-eyes?"

  Philboyd shook his head. "They went on the fritz as soon as Maccan made his first power glove blast, almost like they were hit by an EMP."

  Dry-scubbing his hair in frustration, Kane asked, "So the whole crew all went back to the Moon—Mac, Lakesh and the bull dyke?"

  Bry, overhearing the question called from the mat-trans control console, "I've just about finished rebooting the main gateway CPU. Once it's back online, I'll try the transit-line-trace program to see if we can't locate where they jumped to."

  Philboyd returned his attention to his wire-splicing task. "If they were going back to the Moon, couldn't they have used the interphaser?"

  Kane nodded. "Yes. That's how we first got there, with the interphaser. The mat-trans unit on the base was down at the time."

  "So," intoned Philboyd musingly, "the vortex node coordinate on the Moon is encoded in the interphaser's targeting computer and memory?"

  "Yes," Kane said again, a little irritably. "Lakesh explained all of that to you weeks ago—" Then he comprehended and declared, "So if they were just going back to the Moon, they wouldn't have needed the mat- trans. The fact they needed the gateway unit indicates their destination was..." He trailed off, eyeing Philboyd expectantly.

  Philboyd met his gaze and ventured, "Someplace else?"

  Kane barely checked the angry impulse to backhand the supercilious astrophysicist across the face. "I'm not in the mood for your wit, Brewster."

  "Neither am I," Philboyd countered, just as angrily. "We've got a lot of good people dead here, some of whom were my friends and all of whom were my colleagues."

  "Due," Kane shot back, "to the actions of one of your friends or colleagues. I was told George Neukirk set Maccan free."

  "Neukirk was never my friend," Philboyd argued. "He hardly qualified as a colleague. But he probably did kill one of my friends when he let Mac loose. It was Eduardo's week to stand watch on Mac."

  Kane glared at Philboyd, who to his consternation didn't flinch. After a moment of taking deep, calming breaths, he realized the man probably hadn't slept or even eaten since the invaders left. He was simply too tired and his nerves too frayed to be intimidated by Kane, as he might have been under normal circumstances.

  Forcing a note of patience into his voice he didn't feel, Kane said matter-of-factly, "Brewster, I need to know everything you saw and heard so we can come up with a strategy to recover both Lakesh and the interphaser. Anything, no matter how trivial, could be of enormous help."

  Philboyd frowned, but in concentration. "I know that, Kane. I'm trying. But I'm so tired—"

  "Got it!" Bry's triumphant cry cut through the command center.

  Kane turned his head toward him. "Got what?"

  Bry's fingers tapped the keyboard of the computer station. "The transit-line trace. I'm pulling up the program now. If they jumped to a gateway that we have indexed, I'll be able to get a lock on them."

  "If not?"

  Bry shook his head somberly. "Then we're screwed." He jerked his thumb over a shoulder toward the Mercator map. "We won't be able to access the master index until the main data infeed is repaired."

  Kane walked over to stand beside the slightly built tech. He watched silently as the program came online, machine language blurring over the screen, the drive units humming purposefully. "Is the system itself working?"

  "I've completed a level-four diagnostic. Everything from the auto-sequence scanner to the coordinate lock shows green. It's operational."

  The bright outlines of computer-generated images flashed on the screen. Three-dimensional geometric shapes, circles, spirals and squares appeared and disappeared. The graphics were, of course, simplified representations of a hyper dimensional pathway. Actual reproductions were impossible, beyond the capabilities of either human or electronic eyes to see.

  A broken, glowing line raced across the screen, brilliant orange against depthless black, piercing the floating shapes. It scrolled back and forth until it literally filled the monitor.

  "Oh, no," Bry said in a stunned whisper.

  "What?" Kane demanded impatiently.

  As soon as he said it, the lines faded from the screen, replaced by bright green words "Destination lock achieved." In the lower left-hand corner, a rectangular window flipped through a dozen sets of numeric sequences. The words "Cydonia Compound One" flashed in the window.

  Kane kept his expression and voice studiedly neutral. "Does the intercom still work?"

  Bry nodded. "Yeah, I guess so:'

  "Have Baptiste and Grant meet me in the cafeteria in ten minutes." He glanced over at Philboyd. "Brewster, have you eaten this evening?"

  Philboyd shook his head. "I had some toast this morning, nothing since. Why do you ask?"

  "I want you to join us, too:'

  Philboyd narrowed his eyes in consternation. "I'm busy, Kane. If I don't get our uplinks back online, we'll be deaf and dumb to anyone else who might come calling."

  Kane knew Philboyd referred to the eavesdropping system Bry had established through the communications linkup with the Comsat satellite. It was the same system and same satellite used to track the subcutaneous transponder signals implanted within the Cerberus personnel.

  Bry had worked on the system for a long time and had managed to develop an undetectable method of patching into the wireless communications channels of all the baronies in one form or another. The success rate wasn't one hundred percent, but he had been able to eavesdrop on a number of the villes to learn about baron-sanctioned operations in the Outlands. The different frequencies were monitored on a daily basis. Without being able to tap into the channels, the combined Magistrate Divisions of three villes could march up the road to the redoubt and they wouldn't realize it until they knocked at the sec door.

  "It's going to have to wait," Kane said, a steel edge slipping into his tone.

  Philboyd opened his mouth to voice an objection, but Kane lifted a peremptory hand. "I wasn't inviting you, Brewster. This is mandatory."

  "What's so damn important?" Philboyd demanded impatiently.

  "You're going to help us plan our next field trip." "To where?"

  Kane turned on his heel. "To Mars."

  Chapter 14

  The Cerberus redoubt had an officially designated briefing room on the third level. Big and blue-walled, it was equipped with ten rows of theater-type chairs facing a raised speaking dais and a rear-projection screen. It was built to accommodate the majority of the installation's personnel, back before the nukecaust when military and scientific advisers visited.

  Since Kane's arrival in the redoubt, it had only been used once, when the entire staff had been addressed. Generally briefings rarely involved more than a handful of people, so they were convened in the more intimate dining hall. This time Kane chose the cafeteria for the meeting primarily because he was hungry. He knew his friends would welcome the chance to eat something other than the MREs they had subsisted on for the past five days.

  As usual when anticipating the end of an away mission, Kane had promised to treat his gullet and palate to a real man-size meal upon returning to the installation. And as usual, although he felt on the verge of starvation, his stomach had shrunk from eating the concentrated rations for the past few days.

 

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