Even being in her debt didn't make him more understanding of her, or appreciate her uniqueness. He realized he had never really known her. It hadn't occurred to him they had forged a relationship deeper than he knew or cared to admit.

  Always before, he had tried to make the gap in their ages the reason he didn't want to get involved with her, sexually or otherwise. Domi had been patient and understanding for a year until she'd grown tired of waiting. In truth, Grant had deliberately maintained a distance between himself and Domi, so if either she or he died, or simply went away, the vacuum wouldn't be so difficult to endure. He recalled with crystal clarity what she had said to him a month or so ago when she'd confronted him. "If you can't do it, if you're impotent, then let me know right now, so I can make plans."

  When he angrily denied a physical disability was the reason, she snarled, "Then it is me, you lying sack of shit." Then, with contempt dripping from every syllable, she said, "Big man, big chest, big shoulders, legs like trees. Guess they don't tell the story, huh?"

  That was the last private conversation they'd had. Her angry outburst cut him like the knife she'd turned on Guana Teague. When he remembered the recrimination in her voice, he knew he couldn't make up for anything he had done to hurt her. And he knew he had hurt Domi dreadfully when she'd spied him and Shizuka locked in a passionate embrace.

  Until just a couple of weeks ago, it had been Grant's intent to leave Cerberus and to live in the little island monarchy of New Edo with Shizuka, commander of the Tigers of Heaven, particularly after the arrival of the Manitius base personnel and the hybrid woman Quavell. If Quavell really did carry Kane's child, then the entire dynamic of the struggle against the tyranny of the barons had changed.

  But after being captured and tortured by the sadistic Baron Beausoliel, Grant realized the struggle remained essentially the same; there were just new players on the field. The war itself would go on and would never end, unless he took an active hand in it, regardless of his love for Shizuka and Domi's apparent devotion to Lakesh—a concept he still found a little disconcerting. However, he was in no position to make judgments, or even to comment on it.

  "I just checked on her," DeFore's voice suddenly said from behind him He covered his startlement by asking, more harshly than intended, "And? What are you doing for her?"

  She stepped to his side, apparently not offended by his tone of voice. "All I can, which is very little."

  "What did you do for Brigid when she was comatose a few months ago?" Grant demanded tersely.

  DeFore reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from Domi's forehead. "About what I'm doing for her. The main difference is that I induced the coma in Brigid because of the head trauma she suffered. I'm still not sure what happened to Domi."

  Grant grunted softly. "I see:'

  "What are your plans?" DeFore asked.

  "Plans?"

  "To rescue Lakesh."

  "We leave in the morning, so I'd—" He broke off, leaning forward, gazing into Domi's face. "Something's happening."

  Domi's eyelids fluttered and her eyes moved back and forth beneath the lids. Her lips parted and allowed a groaning sigh to escape.

  "We've got rapid eye movement," DeFore exclaimed excitedly.

  "Is that good or bad?" asked Grant.

  "Good—it means there's some higher brain activity going on. Stay here."

  DeFore whirled away and rushed into the next room. Grant started to pull his hand away, but Domi's fingers suddenly closed tightly around it with a surprising strength.

  Simultaneously her eyes flew open, wide and wild. Convulsions shook her petite form, racked her violently from head to toe. Domi dragged in a great shuddery breath as if her lungs had been deprived of oxygen for a long time. She clawed out with her right hand, finding Grant's wrist and closing her fingers around it as if it were an anchor to life. Her crimson, glassy eyes asked a silent, beseeching question.

  "It's me," Grant told her. "You're in the infirmary."

  Air rasped in and out of Domi's throat as she tried to sit up. She managed only a flailing spasm of arms and legs. Grant held her down against the bed, shouting, "DeFore! She's conscious! She's trying to get up!"

  "Don't let her!" came DeFore's urgent response. "Put her in restraints if you have to!"

  Domi shivered, inhaling and exhaling with deep gasps. She relaxed on the bed, no longer struggling to rise. Finally, she managed to say, in an aspirated whisper, "God...mad god."

  Chapter 16

  Reba DeFore didn't allow Domi to be questioned, but inasmuch as the girl's speech was slurred and her cognitive functions severely impaired, Grant, Brigid and Kane figured she couldn't offer intel any more helpful than that conveyed by Philboyd and the others.

  The three of them waited out in the infirmary proper while DeFore examined Domi. Within a few minutes she brought them her provisional diagnosis, saying Domi was suffering from shock and nerve trauma. Although her prognosis was guarded, she couldn't foresee any reasons why Domi wouldn't make a complete recovery in time.

  Grant and Kane had both been on the receiving end of infrasound jolts in the past and they knew the effects, although painful in the extreme, were transitory.

  "I've given her a sedative," DeFore said in a low voice. "She's not up to eating solid food yet. She's very agitated and keeps asking for Lakesh."

  "What did you tell her?" asked Grant.

  DeFore shook her head, her dark eyes troubled. "I lied to her. I said he was just fine and would be in to see her tomorrow morning. Once she wakes up from a normal sleep pattern, she ought to be able to think more clearly and understand what really happened. Right now she's still out of it."

  "When you tell her the truth," Brigid murmured dolefully, "we'll be gone. And she might be so angry she'll try to follow us."

  DeFore's full lips compressed in a tight, determined line. "None of my patients will be taking walks. Besides, she'll be suffering from vertigo and blurred vision for days to come. Even if she could see, she won't have the coordination to whistle and walk at the same time. No matter how mad she gets, she won't be going anywhere." With that, she returned to the adjoining room.

  "Mad," Grant echoed quietly. "The first thing she said was 'mad god.'"

  "She was obviously referring to Maccan," Brigid interjected.

  "You think?" Grant snapped sarcastically. "I just wonder if she meant mad as in pissed, or mad as in fused-out."

  Kane snorted. "You saw the pointy-eared son of a bitch decapitate Megaera and then play dodge-ball with her head. What do you think?"

  Grant bared his teeth angrily. "He's not a god."

  "No," Brigid agreed. "He only thinks he is. And that makes him more dangerous than a real one, in my opinion. He's got that much more to prove."

  She turned and left the infirmary. After a moment Grant trailed after her. Kane felt too keyed-up to go to his quarters and sleep, so he checked in on Farrell. He knew the man had never liked him much, due in the main to his background as a Magistrate and a misunderstanding a couple of years ago in which Kane had thrown him headfirst into a wall.

  Now Farrell seemed genuinely happy to see him, but Kane figured he was probably glad to have any visitors, just so he could talk about his heroic actions during the incursion. He had already heard Philboyd's version of it, but he listened politely to Farrell's, a little surprised to find not much variation between the two tales.

  "I wish you'd been here," Farrell said in conclusion. "It might've gone down a little different. But we still gave as good as we got."

  Sourly, Kane reflected that unless Maccan's home was shot to pieces and an object of great value stolen from it, then Farrell was living in an optimist's dream, but he decided not to tell him that.

  "We've debriefed Philboyd," Kane said, "and it sounds like you and he saw pretty much everything the other one saw in the firefight. Do you think Auerbach witnessed anything you two didn't?"

  Farrell's goateed face twisted in a grimace of disgust. "Unless it was the puddle of his own piss he was squatting in, no way. The bastard hid under a desk after he ran out of bullets."

  Kane smiled wryly. "Some people just aren't cut out to be warriors. Good thing we are, right?"

  Farrell gingerly touched his thickly bandaged and elevated leg, wincing a little as he did so. "Yeah," he said bleakly. "Good thing."

  Kane patted him encouragingly on the shoulder and left him He started for the exit, then remembered he intended to ask DeFore to put together a first-aid kit for them by the next morning.

  Born into a raw, wild world, outlanders were accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive in the post-nuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great-grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semi-barbarism. They were tough and vicious and quite possibly the last genuine human beings on the planet.

  Sneered at by the elite of the villes, viewed as little more than expendable dray animals, outlanders were an endangered species. As a Magistrate, Kane had chilled dozens of them in the performance of his duty, but he had murdered more than their bodies. He had destroyed their spirits, as well.

  Peering into the adjoining room, he expected to see the medic at Domi's bedside. To his surprise and unease, he saw Quavell there, apparently standing vigil. The hybrid woman dabbed at Domi's discolored forehead with a moist cloth. The albino girl, now under the comforting influence of sedatives, murmured to her in wordless gratitude. He had killed them, body and soul, because he was carrying out the will of the barons—the hybridized god-kings who had inherited the Earth from their human cousins whom they scorned as "apekin." The hybrids, at least by their way of thinking, represented the final phase of human evolution. They referred to themselves as "new humans" and empowered themselves to control not only their immediate environment, but also the evolution of other species.

  Kane watched the two women for a moment, struck again by their resemblance to one another and how their vast differences had actually brought them together, as if completing a circle that began at opposite poles. The barons did so by planning and creating wholesale alterations in living organisms, changing evolutionary patterns to suit themselves. They considered themselves the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, as high above ordinary hybrids as the hybrids were above mere humans.

  Unlike himself, Grant and Brigid, the only life path Domi abandoned when she'd joined Cerberus was the marginal existence of an outlander, and later, as Guana Teague's sex slave. As unaware as Kane was of their existence until she joined Cerberus, Domi learned to hate the barons with the same zeal that he did. Despite how mad the entire tale of Archon-human hybrids seemed initially, they grew comfortable with it and eased into hating the hybrid dynasty and the baronial oligarchy. They woke up hating the hybrids and the barons and they went to bed hating the hybrids and barons.

  Domi had had difficulty grasping the new concepts or quenching the fires of her hatred. Although she despised the breed of so-called new human on general principles, she reserved her most unregenerate hatred for the breed of old human that willingly served them. As far as she was concerned, they were worse than traitors to their own kind; they were groveling, submissive lap dogs and deserved no mercy. When she encountered them, she offered none. Waif-like in appearance she might be, but Domi had proved time and again that she was anything but a child.

  Then both Kane and Domi had been apprehended while penetrating Area 51. Whereas he was imprisoned by the forces of Baron Cobalt, Domi had actually been rescued by an insurrectionist fifth column made up of humans and hybrids, led by Quavell, whom Domi had been restrained from killing some months before during the Archuleta Mesa mission.

  Over a period of time Domi realized that her hatred of the hybrids and barons was derived primarily from what Quavell referred to as "negative conditioning." To end the war between human and hybrid, Quavell explained, the conditioning had to be faced and overcome by both factions.

  Domi had remembered conversations between Lakesh and Brigid Baptiste about how the similarity between Balam's folk and the hybrids and the traditional myth-images of demons accounted for the instant enmity that sprang up between humans and the so-called Archon.

  Lakesh opined that since ancient depictions of imps, elves and jinn were more than likely based on early encounters between Balam's people and primitive man, humans weren't capable of reaching an accord with creatures who resembled archetypal figures of evil.

  Even by crossbreeding with humans, the hybrids were still markedly different from humankind. But as Quavell pointed out, different was not the same as alien. She herself confessed that her own race viewed humans as savages, little more than bloodthirsty apes who were incapable of transcending their roots as killers. She had other experiences with humans, as well, specifically with Kane. While Quavell's group of insurgents had found Domi, Baron Cobalt sentenced Kane to what amounted to stud service.

  The mission that destroyed Archuleta Mesa had also virtually wiped out the genetic-engineering division of the vast facility. What remained of the place, both in personnel and machinery, was transferred to the much larger Area 51 facility. The necessary equipment and raw material to implement procreation had yet to be installed. Baron Cobalt had unilaterally decided that the conventional means of conception was the only option to keep the hybrid race alive.

  Since the baron held Kane responsible for pushing the hybrid race to the brink of extinction, he made it his task to repopulate it, as well. Kane wasn't the first human male to be pressed into service. There had been other men before him, but they had performed unsatisfactorily, due to their terror of the hybrids.

  Kane's sense of surprise was still fresh when he recollected how Quavell, during one of their scheduled periods of copulation had confided to him that not every hybrid agreed with the baronial policy toward humanity. He was even more surprised when she'd helped him and Domi escape. Both of them were forced to reassess everything they'd thought they'd known about the barons, about the hybrids.

  Quavell suddenly sensed his presence in the doorway and lifted her eyes, her crystal-blue, penetrating gaze fixed on his face. Her expression remained the same, one of a calm, almost serene detachment. Resisting the impulse to withdraw, he nodded to her instead. She didn't react for a long moment, then she returned the nod with just a hint of the arrogant hybrid superiority he had learned to despise.

  In a soft yet firm voice, Kane said, "Quavell, you and I need to talk."

  "Indeed."

  She started to move toward him, but he checked the movement by hastily interposing, "When I get back."

  Kane turned and left, hoping he didn't appear to be in a hurry. His mind wheeled with memories, fears and conjectures. He recalled how Quavell had reacted when he'd questioned her in Area 51, as if it were truly possible for humans and hybrids to procreate. Although she claimed they were chromosomally compatible, she had admitted the procedure was still experimental.

  Then Quavell had smiled at him in a way he could only interpret as coquettish. One of her long fingers traced the faint scar on his left cheek and she whispered, "But some of us here—me, at least—find the process of trial and error very enjoyable:'

  The most recent memory of Quavell was not hazy in the least, though he wished it were. He still recalled with shocking vividness his first sight of her, nearly two months before, sitting in Lakesh's office when he had entered to brief him about the events that had occurred on the Moon. Kane would have imbibed battery acid before admitting that it was the closest he had ever come to fainting dead away. As it was, his knees had almost buckled, but he was able to attribute his weakness to the injuries inflicted upon him by Maccan.

  According to Quavell, she had made the long overland trip from Area 51 in a stolen Sandcat, all alone. She'd traveled as far as the foothills of the Bitterroot Range to the encampment of Sky Dog. The shaman brought her the rest of the way to the mountain peak on horseback. Both Kane and Lakesh were still skeptical of certain details of her story, particularly how she knew the location of the redoubt. She offered only a vague explanation about learning of it from either Kane or Domi during their period of imprisonment in Dreamland.

  She had refused to name which one of them actually made the revelation. Neither Kane nor Domi admitted to telling her or anyone else about Cerberus. Still and all, Quavell had provided them with information about the current state of the baronies following the Imperator War, although little of it could be confirmed.

  Quavell's presence in the redoubt made Kane distinctly uncomfortable, since the entire situation evoked unpleasant memories of Lakesh's abortive plan to turn Cerberus from a sanctuary to a colony. To that end, babies needed to be born, ones with superior genes.

  Making a unilateral decision, Lakesh had arranged for a woman named Beth-Li Rouch to be brought into the redoubt from one of the baronies to mate with Kane, to ensure that his superior abilities were passed on to offspring.

 

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