Without access to the techniques of fetal development outside the womb that were practiced in the villes, the conventional means of procreation was the only option. And that meant sex and passion and the fury of a woman scorned.

  Kane had refused to cooperate for a variety of reasons, primarily because he felt the plan was a continuation of sinister elements that had brought about the nukecaust and the tyranny of the villes. His refusal had had tragic consequences. Only a thirst for revenge and a conspiracy to murder had been birthed within the walls of the redoubt, not children.

  And now Beth-Li was dead, killed by Domi and buried in a simple grave out on the hillside. Kane could only pray Quavell's involvement in the lives of the Cerberus residents didn't have similarly tragic consequences.

  AT 0600, they convened in the ready room, which held the jump chamber. Brigid, Kane and Grant had made their preparations the night before, filling flat cases with special equipment, rations and water. All three of them wore the hard suits they had brought down from the Moon. The one-piece garments were fairly tight-fitting and relatively lightweight, barely thirty pounds apiece.

  The hard suits consisted of ten layers of aluminized Mylar insulation interlaced with six layers of Dacron and tough outer facings of a bronze-colored Kevlar, to blunt impacts that might penetrate the microenvironment provided by the suits. They carried the helmets under their arms. Dark bronze in color like the suits, the helmets were made of a lightweight, ceramic-alloy compound. The treated Plexiglas faceplates polarized when exposed to light levels above a certain candlepower.

  Equipped with sealed water dispensers and sipping tubes attached into the interior walls, the helmets allowed freedom of movement for their heads, even though they did limit peripheral vision. They could communicate with each other over UTEL radio systems. Small, secondary oxygen tanks were attached to the back of the headpieces. The design allowed for the venting of exhaled air directly into the environment, much like Scuba gear. Venting from the helmet reduced the collection of moisture on the inner faceplate. The only modifications Kane and Grant had made to the space suits were the adjustment of the seals between sleeves and gloves to permit the addition of their Sin Eaters. The fingers of the gloves were flexible enough to pick up coins from a carpeted floor. Their combat daggers hung in scabbards from web belts. Brigid carried one of the tungsten-carbide rail tols brought from the Moon base and added to the Cerberus arsenal. She tucked the weapon into a holster on her belt. The EVA suits were hot and they each wore formfitting shadow suits beneath them, as well. They were climate-controlled for environments up to highs of 150 degrees and as low as -10 degrees Fahrenheit. Microfilaments controlled the internal temperature. An extremely nervous Philboyd checked the seals of the EVA suits and made sure the oxygen tanks worked. "I admit I don't understand everything about the gateways," he said, "but Mars seems a damn long way for a gateway jump. If it would take nearly half a year to get there by Manta—"

  "Distance is relative when you're dealing with quantum physics," Bry said diffidently from the doorway. "There's no relativistic range limitation on hyper-dimensions. The gateways form interstices and interfaces between linear points, regardless of the distance between them. Utilizing hyper-dimensional space, there is little difference between jumping from a mat-trans unit in Cuba and one in Australia. The same principle applies to the gateway here and the one on Mars."

  No one spoke for a long moment after Bry's pronouncement. Then Grant said, "Hell, why are we bothering with this trip at all? We don't need Lakesh back, not with that dead-on imitation Bry can perform."

  Everyone laughed, including, after a moment of annoyed glowering, Bry. "I've got all the coordinates encoded...all you have to do is shut the door."

  No one mentioned that once Project Cerberus began mass producing the mat-trans gateways as modular units, conventional spacecraft were rendered virtually obsolete since the gateways permitted swift and relatively easy movement of personnel and materiel back and forth from Earth. A mat-trans gateway was installed on the space station Parallax Red, and experiments were conducted regarding the teleportation of gateway components through space along carrier-wave guides placed at equidistant intervals to the projected destination.

  This method allowed travel to the inner planets of the solar system without using conventional spacecraft. The wave guides launched from Parallax Red provided an almost instantaneous method of reaching Mars.

  Gusting out a long, weary sigh, Philboyd said, "I don't know if I should envy you or feel sorry for you."

  "We've been there already," said Kane brusquely. "Feel sorry for us."

  Philboyd gestured toward the helmets under their arms. "You won't need to put those on?"

  Brigid shook her head. "The Cydonia gateway unit is located in a habitat with synthetic gravity and an Earth-normal atmosphere. We won't even need the EVA suits unless we go out on the surface. We're wearing them just in case."

  Philboyd smiled crookedly. "Good luck, all."

  The three people trooped into the jump chamber. Above the keypad encoding panel hung an imprinted notice, dating back to predark days. In faded maroon lettering, it read Entry Absolutely Forbidden To All But B-12 Cleared Personnel.

  Kane used to wonder why Lakesh hadn't removed the sign, but he figured the man probably applied the same reasons to keeping the illustration of the three- headed hound intact. Nostalgia could manifest itself in very curious ways.

  They took their places on the hexagonal floor plates, and Kane pulled the door closed, initiating the automatic jump circuits. He noted that breathing rates increased, including his own.

  Kane glanced over toward Grant. "You know, you haven't said it in a long time."

  "Said what?" Grant's tone of voice, like his expression, was flinty.

  "You know," said Brigid teasingly. "What you always used to say before we made a gateway jump. Your mantra."

  Grant tried to shrug, but it wasn't easy in the EVA suit. "I only said it before I got used to making the jumps. They don't bother me now."

  "Oh, really?" Kane arched a challenging, mocking eyebrow toward him

  "Really," Grant grunted.

  The familiar yet still slightly unnerving hum arose, muted due to the helmets. The hum climbed in pitch to a whine, then to a cyclonic howl. The hexagonal floor and ceiling plates shimmered silver. A fine, faint mist gathered at their feet and drifted down from the ceiling. Thready static discharges, like tiny lightning strokes, arced through the vapor.

  The mist thickened, blotting out everything. Shadows seemed to creep into Kane's vision from all corners. The sound of breathing faded, ebbing away into silence. Right before Kane's hearing shut down altogether, Grant's strained, faraway whisper filtered into his helmet. "I hate these fucking things."

  Chapter 17

  Stepping into a mat-trans chamber, losing consciousness, then awakening in another always felt like dying violently and then being born again—violently.

  First the entire universe seemed to explode in a blaze of force. From the hyper-dimensional non-space through which they had been traveling, they seemed to fall through bottomless abysses. There was a micro-instant of nonexistence, then a sharp, wrenching shock and their senses returned.

  Kane stared up at the pattern of silver disks on the ceiling and realized they were diamond-shaped rather the familiar hexagonal configuration, which meant the phase transit had been successful.

  Trying to focus through the last of the mist whisping over his eyes, Kane silently endured the nausea churning and rolling in his stomach. He knew if he waited it out, he wouldn't vomit, but it would take another couple of minutes to regain his emotional equilibrium. No human being, no matter how thoroughly briefed in advance, could be expected to remain unflappable on a hyper-dimensional trip through the gateway.

  By stepping into the armaglass-enclosed chamber for one second a person was in the relativistic here, surrounded by glowing mist, and in the next second, all eternity seemed to cave in. Perceptions changed, time jumped and for a heart-stopping instant, the cosmos at large seemed to stand still. Then the traveler was wherever the transmitter had been programmed to send him. Whatever else, a trip through the gateway was unsettling to the mind, to the nerves and to the soul itself, as Kane had personal reason to know.

  In a hoarse, strained whisper, he heard Brigid say, "It looks like we made it."

  "Yeah," rumbled Grant sarcastically. "I guessed that when I noticed we weren't puking our guts out. This unit wasn't made by Russians, after all."

  Grant always held up their jump to a malfunctioning Russian gateway as the standard by which all mat-trans journeys should be measured. The Cerberus gateway link had been unable to establish a lock on the Russian unit's auto sequence initiators. The matter- stream carrier-wave modulations couldn't be synchronized, which resulted in a severe bout of jump sickness, symptoms of which included, but were not limited to, vomiting, a near crippling lethargy and even hallucinations.

  Kane turned his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the momentary wave of vertigo that blurred his vision. When he opened them, he saw Grant and Brigid carefully hiking themselves up to sitting positions. Fading tendrils of vapor wreathed their bodies, a plasma byproduct of what Lakesh referred to as the "quincunx effect."

  The floor-plate pattern duplicated that of the ceiling. The jump chamber was small, about half the size of standard. The dark blue color of the armaglass walls allowed only the dimmest light to penetrate from outside. "Yeah," Grant concurred, rising first to a knee, then standing. "It looks like the same one I remember." He sounded so phlegmatic about it, Kane couldn't help but chuckle briefly. Grant eyed him challengingly. "I say something funny?"

  Kane shook his head and sat up. "Do you ever?"

  He reflected how he and his friends now accepted the reality of almost-instantaneous travel across the solar system as routine, when only a couple of years before all of their minds had been completely boggled by their first mat-trans jump—a distance of a few hundred miles, from Colorado to Montana.

  After helping Brigid to her feet, Kane sniffed the air experimentally and found it cold, even a little stale, but still breathable. Grant didn't bother, since his sense of smell was seriously impaired due to suffering a broken nose more than once.

  Brigid rocked experimentally on the balls of her feet. "The gray-stators are still working."

  "I guess the transadapts are still pulling pay," Grant rumbled.

  "Let's find out." Gripping the wedge-shaped handle of the door, Kane heaved up on it. With a click, the door of dense, semi-translucent material swung outward on counterbalanced hinges. His Sin Eater popped into his waiting palm. He heard Grant unleathering his own sidearm.

  By half inches, Kane nudged the door open with a boot, pausing to listen. Stepping up beside him, Brigid lifted her left wrist. Strapped around it was a small device made of molded black plastic and stamped metal. A liquid crystal display window exuded a faint glow. The motion detector registered no movement within the radius of its invisible sensor beams.

  He heard nothing, so he pushed the door wide and saw what he expected to see—a small room with cream-colored walls, a cabinet with shattered glass doors and dark bloodstains on the floor. The last time he'd seen the room, Sindri's chief lieutenant, the venomous transadapt David, lay bleeding to death at the base of the jump chamber. Apparently a few of his brethren had attended to his body and done what they could to scrub away the mess.

  Kane took the point as he usually did, carrying his helmet under his arm. He walked carefully, heel-to-toe, leading with his Sin Eater until he reached the open doorway. The room beyond was small and dimly lit, more of a foyer. A turnstile security checkpoint occupied most of the opposite wall.

  Brigid came to his side, performed another motion- detector sweep and, one at a time, they pushed through the prongs of the checkpoint and into a narrow tube- tunnel. The passageway was very quiet, as if upon entering they had stepped into a vault that hoarded only silence. Kane eased out into the shaft, walking heel-to-toe in the characteristic way of a Mag penetrating a potential kill zone.

  The right-hand walls were perforated at regular intervals with large, round iris hatches. The first hatch they came to opened into a partitioned office suite filled with desks and computer terminals. Tacked onto a bulletin board near the door were dozens of memos, each one bearing the legend By Order Of The Committee Of One Hundred.

  The second hatch opened up into a big room, that contained a raised dais supporting a lectern that looked out over ten rows of chairs. They knew it was the council chamber of the ruling committee of the colony. All three of them recalled what Sindri had told them about the governmental setup of the Cydonia colony, which had actually gotten its start on Parallax Red.

  In the late twentieth century, shortly after the photographic discoveries of the Monuments of Mars by the Viking Mars probe, construction had began in secret on a space habitat located in LaGrange Region 2 on the far side of the Moon. Originally the project had been a covert joint undertaking between America and Russia, under the authority of the Totality Concept's Overproject Majestic. Parallax Red, envisioned as an elite community with a maximum population of five thousand, was intended as a utopia for the best of Earth transported into space. The station provided a jumping-off point for the colonists building the permanent outpost on the Cydonia plains of Mars.

  However, because of the chaos engendered by the nukecaust and the damage the space station sustained by Russian killer satellites, both the fledgling Martian colony and Parallax Red were forgotten. The personnel of the station had had no choice but to move permanently to Mars. They'd formed a caste-based society built on the labor of the transadapts.

  They'd also explored their new home world, particularly the mile-high D&M Pyramid, named after DiPetro and Molenar, the two NASA photoanalysts who'd discovered it on the Viking transmissions. The massive pyramid served the Tuatha de Danaan as the cornerstone of their ancient culture, and within it the colonists came across the leavings of their once- mighty science, all of it based on sound and vibration. They'd found a small harplike device, which was a microscopic version of a truly gargantuan instrument occupying the uppermost level of the structure.

  The pyramid was more than a monument—it was a gigantic broadcasting tower, transmitting a frequency too subtle for human ears but deadly to the Archons. Sindri had referred to it as a song that played eternally, blanketing the entire planet, penetrating every nook and cranny of Mars and forming an invisible sonic wall that forever barred Archon entry.

  Sindri had theorized the true purpose behind the Cydonia colony in the twentieth century was to locate the source of the song and stop it. He'd believed the Archons supported and abetted a Terran colony on Mars, so by proxy, they would still conquer Mars, reclaiming it from the Tuatha de Danaan. Brigid, Kane and Grant had learned much later that Sindri's overall theory was wrong, although close to the truth in some particulars.

  In any event, as the twenty-first century became the twenty-second and edged toward the twenty-third, the transadapt population of the Cydonia Compound had continued to grow, eventually outnumbering the human population by at least three to one. Only their much shorter life spans had prevented them from completely controlling the colony.

  One of the descendants of the original human colonists devoted his life to divining the purpose of the Danaan infrasound emitter in the pyramid. Micah Harwin postulated that the device transmitted not a signal, but a frequency that blanketed the entire planet. As it turned out, solving that mystery became Harwin's only reason for living.

  When Sindri was born, genetic testing determined that he was the offspring of a transadapt mother and Harwin. He possessed far more Earth-human characteristics than transadapt, except for his short though perfectly proportioned stature. Sindri's mother died shortly after his birth and his father was exiled from the Cydonia Compound for the crime of miscegenation.

  Making the D&M Pyramid his home, Harwin experimented with the frequencies of the Danaan transmitter and accidentally—or intentionally, no one really knew—altered the harmonics so that the human colonists became infertile over a period of time. It was Sindri himself, as an adult, who had discovered this and brought it to the ruling committee, urging an exodus back to Earth before the entire human population of the colony became extinct.

  Rather than accept Sindri's proposal, the dwindling number of human colonists had devised a plan to ensure they would not eventually be outnumbered or outlived by the transadapts. Having already instituted a form of apartheid by segregating the transadapts into their own habitats, the humans used a medical treatment disguised as necessary vaccinations to make the transadapts barren. Since the transadapts had been engineered to have shorter life spans than humans, it was conceivable that they could all be dead within a single generation.

  Sindri had led an open, bloody revolution against the human population of Cydonia. At the end of a month, all of the human colonists and three-quarters of the transadapts had perished by violence.

 

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