Scarlet Dream. James Axler

programmed into them to decipher a dialect.

      “You didn’t miss anything,” Brigid assured Kane. “I told him I’d come find you.”

      Kane fixed Brigid with his most mischievous look as he slung the towel over one shoulder. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

      In reply, Brigid leaped from a standing start, high into the air, and kicked the punching bag that hung between them, making it rebound so hard that it almost clipped Kane in his smugly smiling face.

      “You wish,” she told him as she landed in a graceful crouch.

      Despite their outward antagonism, Kane and Brigid had the utmost respect for one another and they shared a very special bond. That bond was known as anam-charas, or soul friends, and it referred to a connection that transcended history itself. No matter what form the two found themselves in, no matter the nature of their reincarnations throughout eternity, the pair would remain unequivocally linked, tied together by some invisible umbilical cord that meant they would always be there for each other. Some had interpreted this link to mean that they were lovers, but the anam-chara bond was something more than that—the friendship and love of siblings or respectful contemporaries, with Brigid the yin to Kane’s yang.

      While Kane and Brigid had been partners for a long time, there was a third integral member of their group, as well. Grant was also an ex-magistrate and had been Kane’s original partner in his Magistrate days. Grant was as much Kane’s brother as any blood relative. Together, the three of them formed an exceptional exploration group who seemed able to handle themselves in any given situation. Which was fortunate, as the situations they encountered while working for Cerberus had ranged from the improbable to the outright impossible.

      FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Kane strolled into the operations room dressed in a clean shadow suit, his hair still damp from the shower he had taken on leaving the gym.

      As Kane walked through the doors beneath the Mercator map with its multicolored lines of light, Lakesh stepped forward to greet him. “I am glad you could make it so quickly, Kane,” he said briefly.

      As with Brigid Baptiste, Kane had known Lakesh for a long time and he recognized when the formidable scientist sounded worried. Behind Lakesh, Brigid and Grant waited along with several other personnel who were prepping the mat-trans for use. The mat-trans chamber was located in an antechamber at the far corner of the large room, well away from the entry doors. The unit itself was situated within a small, eight-foot-high cubicle surrounded by armaglass walls tinted a brown hue. The door to the unit operated using a numeric key code, and the use of the unit was monitored by a computer terminal located just to the side of its entry door. Right now, Lakesh’s deputy, the copper-haired Donald Bry, sat at the mat-trans terminal, a look of deep concern on his features. Normally, Kane would not take Bry’s expression as a reliable indicator of the situation. The man was a compulsive worrier and Kane struggled to recall an instance when his brow wasn’t furrowed beneath his untamed mop of copper curls. However, the atmosphere in the room was such that Kane knew immediately that he had entered a serious situation.

      “Well, I aim to please,” Kane replied as Cerberus weaponsmith Henny Johnson rushed over to arm the ex-Mag for the field. “What’s going on?”

      Briefly, Lakesh outlined the situation regarding the intrusion alert at Redoubt Mike and how the Louisiana redoubt potentially contained any number of decommissioned weapons along with its outdated mat-trans unit.

      “This may be a simple glitch in our system, or in Mike’s,” Lakesh concluded, “but there’s an adage that I think applies here—it is better to be safe than sorry.”

      “I quite agree,” Kane said as he strapped a familiar wrist holster to his right arm and checked that the Sin Eater pistol that Henny handed him was fully loaded.

      Henny glared at Kane as he checked the pistol, as if offended that he would, for even a moment, believe she might send him out into the field with equipment that wasn’t fully prepared. She was a small woman, five foot five with blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below her ears.

      “What’s wrong?” she asked as Kane placed the compact pistol snugly in its wrist holster and shrugged the sleeve of his black denim jacket over it to conceal it. “Don’t trust me anymore, cowpoke?”

      Kane glanced up at the armorer. “I trust you, Johnson,” he said, “but I’d also expect you to double-check my work if your life was about to depend on it.”

      “Thanks… I think,” Henny said as she passed Kane a handful of spare ammo cartridges and flash-bang globes for use in the field.

      “Well, then.” Grant’s voice rumbled from where he sat, perched on the edge of one of the computer desks. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Grant was a huge man, well over six feet in height and broad like an oak door. A little older than Kane, he was a solid wall of muscle, with skin like polished ebony and a gunslinger’s mustache curling down from his top lip. Grant wore his hair cropped so close to his skull that he seemed almost bald, and he had placed a dark woollen cap over his head now, pulled low so that it met with his thick eyebrows, enhancing his permanent scowl.

      Like Kane, Grant had dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits beneath his long, Kevlar-weave black coat. Though they appeared to be made of the thinnest of material, the tight-fitting one-piece shadow suits acted as artificially controlled environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

      Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.

      Kane peered around the room for a moment, his eyes searching before he turned back to his partners where they waited at the desks. “Was I meant to bring the interphaser?” he asked.

      “No interphaser this time, buddy,” Grant advised in his deep voice.

      Lakesh gestured to the doorway in the far corner of the room. “Ah, yes, you weren’t here when I explained this, old friend,” he told Kane. “We’ve used our remote access to power the receiver unit at Redoubt Mike,” he stated briefly.

      Kane felt a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

      Brigid smiled brightly as she looked over her shoulder, encouraging Kane to follow her toward the armaglass cubicle that dominated a corner of the operations room. “Oh, yes. We’re going via mat-trans for this one,” she told him. “Old school.”

      “Oh, great,” Kane muttered sarcastically as he followed his two companions through the doorway into the ancient mat-trans unit. “If there’s one thing I miss, it’s doing things the really shitty way.”

      “We’ll briefly activate the outdated system by remote,” Lakesh told Kane as he peered through the open doorway. “It’s risky, but every second counts, so the closer we can get you to the site of infraction, the better.”

      “Right blindly into the thick of it, huh?” Kane said, shaking his head. “Yeah, that plan can’t go wrong.”

      “For our security, the mat-trans will power down immediately after you’ve materialized at Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh said to assure him. “Which means you’ll need to comm us when you’re ready to return.”

      Kane nodded irritably. “Got it.”

      Kane closed the door, locking the three companions in the ancient mat-trans chamber and enabling the jump sequence. Donald Bry’s fingers worked the computer keyboard and the trio were reduced to their component atoms, digitized and sent across the quantum ether to the receiver