Scarlet Dream. James Axler

glanced back at his monitor screen where the warning pop-up continue to blink. “Well-lll,” he began, stretching the single syllable, “either we have a glitch in our monitoring system or a caller has come a-knock-knocking for Mike.”

      Casting aside the paperwork he had been looking at on his own desk, Lakesh strode across the room and joined Brewster at his monitor, running through the alert data that had appeared there. As he read the details, the old cyberneticist’s expression darkened.

      LOCATED HIGH IN THE Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, the Cerberus redoubt was an ancient military facility that had remained largely forgotten or ignored since the nukecaust. The isolation was only reinforced by the curious mythology associated with the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually un-populated; the nearest settlement was found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Native Americans, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

      Hidden beneath camouflage netting, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team within the redoubt. Gaining access to those satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base, but their efforts now gave Lakesh’s team a near limitless stream of feed data from around the planet, as well as providing global communications links.

      Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was exceedingly rare for strangers to approach the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt via the mat-trans chamber housed within the redoubt itself.

      Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans exploited the hyperdimensional quantum stream, transmitting digital information along hyperdimensional pathways. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units, much as a train is restricted by its tracks and the location of its stations.

      More recently, the Cerberus personnel had refined an interphaser unit, which functioned along similar principles but relied on naturally occuring parallax points, intersecting lines of intense energy. Requiring no external power source, these parallax points existed across the Earth—and beyond—and could be exploited by use of a portable device called an interphaser, which could be carried by just one person using an attaché-style case. Although not limitless, the interphaser had the distinct advantage of portability and a wider array of receiver locations.

      Having read the data on Brewster’s screen, Lakesh stumbled back into the empty chair behind him, almost falling as he sat. Several of the other personnel on shift in the command center turned at the noise, expressing concern for their operational leader.

      “Is everything okay?” Brewster asked, although he feared that he already knew the answer.

      “This is very bad,” Lakesh said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Once the decision had been taken to decommission Mike, the redoubt was used as a storage facility for other projects of dubious worth. Which is to say, it became a dumping ground, since the impending secure closure of the site meant that whatever was left there could not be accessed ever again.”

      “What sorts of things?” Brewster asked.

      Lakesh shook his head, feeling weary as the enormity of the breach in redoubt security struck him. “The sort of things the military always involves itself in—weapons, the means of destruction.

      “Sooner or later, all our sins come back to haunt us, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh pronounced, standing once more. “I think we had better assemble a team and investigate this intrusion at our earliest opportunity.”

      ON ANOTHER LEVEL of the hidden mountain base, Kane stood in front of a punching bag hanging on a rigid spring from the ceiling of the communal gymnasium. Kane gritted his teeth as he attacked the hanging bag with a series of swift, bare-knuckled blows: first right, then left, then right again.

      Kane was a powerfully built man, with no-nonsense blue-gray eyes and dark hair cropped short to his collar. Dressed in a black T-shirt and loose slacks, Kane was an outstanding example of physical fitness. His wide shoulders and muscular arms powered his punches with incredible force, smashing the punching bag back on its spring so hard that it rattled in its metal housing. It had been observed that Kane was built like a wolf, sleek and muscular with exceptional power concentrated in his upper torso. He seemed to have the temperament of a wolf, too, for he was both pack leader and a natural loner, depending on the situation.

      An ex-Magistrate, enforcer of the laws of the walled villes that dominated the U.S. landscape of the twenty-third century, Kane was a trained fighter, with a razor-keen mind and exceptional combat prowess. What distinguished Kane among his contemporaries, however, was something he referred to as his point man sense, an uncanny awareness of his surroundings that verged on the supernatural. In actuality, there was nothing unearthly about Kane’s ability—it was simply the disciplined application of the same five senses possessed by any other human being.

      As Kane worked at the punching bag, each mighty uppercut, jab and cross forcing the leather teardrop to shake in its mountings, he became aware of another person entering the otherwise empty gymnasium. Kane’s blue-gray eyes flicked across the room as he looked over his shoulder, his fists still working at the high punching bag. The newcomer was a woman, her body sheathed in a skin-tight white jumpsuit that accentuated her trim curves and athlete’s body. A cascade of curling red locks flowed past her shoulders to the midpoint of her back.

      Brigid Baptiste and Kane shared a long history. Where Kane was a man of action, Brigid’s background was as an archivist. Which wasn’t to say that Brigid could not hold her own in a fight—far from it, as she could handle herself with fists or guns, and she had proved to be a hellcat when riled. However, Brigid Baptiste had one trait that had proved immeasurably useful in the adventures she had shared with Kane: a mental talent known as an eidetic, or photographic, memory, which allowed her to visually remember in precise detail everything she had ever seen.

      For almost half a minute Kane continued to beat at the punching bag, working rhythmically in a tarantella of swift punches as beads of sweat glistened on his skin. As he drilled his final right cross against the leather bag, Brigid Baptiste stopped in front of him, eyebrows raised in an inquisitive expression that betrayed her mocking humor.

      “Feeling a little frustrated today?” she asked as Kane stepped back on the balls of his feet, leaving the punching bag swinging to and fro from its mounting between them.

      Kane looked at her and smiled. “Aw, it had it coming,” he said, indicating the swaying bag as it slowly returned to a static position, waiting for its next opponent.

      Brigid looked at the punching bag and laughed, creases of delight appearing momentarily around her emerald eyes as she did so. “What, did it outsmart you at chess?” she asked. “Again?”

      Brushing a hand through his sweat-damp hair, Kane reached for the hand towel that he had left on a nearby bench. “What can I do for you, Baptiste?” he asked, ignoring her friendly taunt.

      “Lakesh is asking us to meet in the ops room,” Brigid explained as she watched Kane wiping the sweat from his powerful arms. “I don’t know the details yet, but it seems there’s trouble out there in paradise and he wants us ready to ship out in the next hour.”

      Kane tapped at the side of his head, indicating the subdermal Commtact unit that was hidden there beneath the skin. “Guess I didn’t hear the call,” he explained.

      Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the military artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, a deaf person would still be