Cradle Of Destiny. James Axler

Bronda’s left eye, pinioning his brain.

      Shizuka heard the ugly crunch of neck bones disintegrating, and she turned to see Grant rise from Lonmar’s corpse. The samurai wondered why Grant would have killed an unconscious man, but her eyes fell to the bloody scalps hanging off the millennialist’s belt. The broken neck was swift, painless justice, sparing the murderer potential reprisals in the form of torture.

      Grant’s eyes met hers, and he jerked his head toward the entrance that the two millennialists had been guarding. Other cold-blooded killers were crawling the halls of the Operation Chronos laboratory. If there had been hostages, their captors would have been alerted by the brief stutter of automatic fire. Grant was spurred on by the impetus of imperiled lives.

      With the silence and grace of a jet-black tiger, the big Cerberus warrior slipped through the side access.

      Chapter 3

      With Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta broken up, Kane pulled in the remaining third of Domi’s team, Sela Sinclair, to join him on an emergency jump to Thunder Isle. Right now, in the mat-trans chamber, Donald Bry and Daryl Morganstern were busy trying to override the lockout placed by the Millennial Consortium hijackers at the Operation Chronos facility. Kane didn’t doubt Sinclair’s ability. The woman had fought for Cerberus redoubt for a year, proving herself as brave and skillful a warrior as any he had met. Sinclair had been born in a different time, an air force security officer whose training had been geared toward protecting United States military bases from terrorism. She was a freezie, a cryogenically preserved relic from centuries in the past, and upon awakening, she had sided with Kane, Brigid and Grant in battling another temporally displaced set of opponents.

      Kane was in his shadow suit, the high-tech polymers conforming to his lean, wolflike musculature like a second skin, except this skin would protect him from hard vacuum decompression and intense heat or cold, though it could not redistribute kinetic shock from small-arms fire. Due to its high-tech composition, the shadow suit did protect its wearer from hard impacts such as falls and even punches from foes of great size and strength.

      Kane preferred the shadow suit over his old Magistrate armor. It provided him better mobility and superior comfort. It also hid easily under other clothing, being low profile and formfitting. He didn’t mind being able to ignore the biting, frostbite-inducing chill of arctic winds or the blazing, mercilessly hot suns of deserts in nothing more than the shadow suit and its hood. Other features, such as camouflage and protection from radiation, were simply icing on the cake.

      Sinclair wore another shadow suit, identical to Kane’s, but her forearm was not adorned with the Magistrates’ weapon and badge of office, the folding Sin Eater machine pistol. Rather, Sinclair had her Beretta M-9 pistol hanging on a pistol belt, along with a collapsible combat baton, a fighting knife and various bits of security kit that gave her a continuity of force from mild restraint to lethal response that compensated for the relative lack of size compared to big, muscular men like Kane, Grant or Edwards. There was no doubt, thanks to the curve-hugging properties of the shadow suit, that Sinclair was athletic and strong, but without the feral ferocity of someone like Domi, she had to supplement her strength and skill with an assortment of equipment that would give her an edge against the rare opponent whose greater might was matched with fighting ability.

      Kane, after years of adventuring with some of the most dynamic women on the planet, had no doubt that a woman with training and experience could handle herself quite well in almost as many situations as he could. But he also appreciated Sinclair knowing her limitations and adapting strategy and preparations for them. Kane himself knew that he was not the strongest or the most skilled warrior on the planet, nor was he the smartest. That was one of his strengths.

      Grant had relayed some wisdom from the Tigers of Heaven from a swordsman named Musashi, one of the most celebrated samurai warriors in the history of Japan. Musashi had said that “to know one’s limitations is to be limitless.” Kane had innately understood that, and it was what had carried him and his allies to victory over gods, armies of cultists and other threats to humanity’s tenuous existence in the dangerous world that existed in this postapocalyptic time. That bit of philosophy passed on from a swordsman hundreds of years ago was simply a confirmation for what Kane didn’t have the words. Right now, however, he was more interested in the limitations of technology.

      Because the mat-trans unit on Thunder Isle was part of the Totality Concept, a Continuity of Government program in the event of an apocalyptic event, it would have been easy to pop into the Operation Chronos facility if it weren’t for the fact that the mat-trans was on total lockdown because of the millennialist’s attack. Kane had suggested using the interphaser, a unit that acted in concert with natural vortices of magnetic energy.

      The Thunder Isle facility was constructed around such an intersection of magnetic force lines, often called Ley Lines by western alchemists or Dragon Roads by Asian geomancers. The interphaser would drop them somewhere in the control room. While the sudden appearance of Kane and Sinclair would give them some advantage, there was no way to know if they would emerge in a murderous crossfire.

      “You will end up in their mat-trans, which could easily be put under guard. You’d be gunned down—” Lakesh said.

      A glare from Kane cut him off.

      Right now, Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man for running the functions of the Cerberus redoubt, was working code and math together with Clem Bryant and Daryl Morganstern. Bryant wasn’t a computer expert or a mathematician like Bry or Morganstern, but he had rapidly become one of the premier scientific problem solvers. His field of expertise had been oceanography, something that was not immediately necessary in the struggle against the Annunaki and other forces threatening the freedom of humanity. He’d originally become the chef for the redoubt, but his ability to think outside of the box had granted Lakesh and the others the spark to reach conclusions.

      The three men were an odd amalgamation, from the slender, rust-haired Bry to squat, pudgy-faced Morganstern to tall, goateed Bryant.

      Kane looked to Sinclair. “We could just take a Manta…”

      “No good,” Bry said. “Grant’s already in motion, from what I heard over his Commtact.”

      “Lakesh, we don’t have time to dick around,” Kane said. “Just jump us in. No one has a gun that can punch through the armaglass chamber doors.”

      Sinclair managed a smile. “I do have something that could help us with that.”

      With that announcement, she drew a flashlight from her well-stocked utility belt.

      “Flashlight,” Kane noted.

      “I’d show you what it does, but it’d take you a few seconds to get over the strobe setting,” Sinclair answered.

      “What kind of candlepower does it put out?” Kane asked.

      “Ten thousand,” Sinclair said. “It’ll still be sharp enough to leave a millennialist seeing spots for about fifteen seconds.”

      “That should buy us enough time to get out into the open,” Kane returned. “Lakesh?”

      The chief scientist of Cerberus frowned, but his decision process was quickened simply because of the swiftness of Kane’s decision. The former Magistrate was a man of action, but also one with an uncanny danger sense that had kept him alive in conflicts against menaces powerful enough to erase the solar system. “Bry, can we send them?”

      Bry nodded and he and Morganstern exited the mat-trans unit. Kane and Sinclair entered the armaglass chamber with swiftness and purpose.

      Kane wasn’t going to let Grant, his partner and best friend in the world, disappear into history without a fight.

      GRANT AND SHIZUKA STALKED through the entrance into a well-lit corridor. The millennialists were too savvy to allow stretches of shadows to obscure the approach of enemies. It didn’t matter, since the hallway was empty of sentries, which made this approach all the more suspicious. For a brief instant, Grant wished Kane, with his uncanny point man’s sense, was by his side instead