Scarlet Dream. James Axler

least it’s quick, Kane reasoned as his substance ceased to exist.

      Chapter 3

      Traveling via mat-trans was a little like waking in the middle of the night to the awful realization that you had contracted food poisoning. A moment earlier, one’s life was a restful dream, then suddenly it had turned into a bewildering nightmare, colored only by one’s need to vomit.

      Almost doubled over, Kane took deep breaths as he stood in the mat-trans chamber that he and his companions had materialized in an instant before. His heart was pounding, his stomach was doing some crazy kind of acrobatics and he could taste bile at the back of his throat. For a moment he stood hunched over, staring at the white-tiled floor as he tried to bring himself back to a state of calm.

      The tiled floor at Kane’s feet was familiar, exactly the same as the one that the companions had left in Montana just an instant earlier, dusty white tiles glinting beneath harsh overhead lighting. White mist floated in the air like fog, slowly dissipating as extractor fans began their designated task of clearing the glass-walled chamber.

      While mat-trans travel was possible for humans, it had not initially been designed with people in mind. Rather, it was intended for the movement of matériel, and its application to transporting the human form could be traumatic. Despite the churning of his stomach, Kane was fairly used to this ghastly system of travel, and had made his peace with it years before. Grant, by contrast, had never liked traveling via mat-trans, and he endured it with a determined mixture of bitterness and hostility, even after all these years with Cerberus.

      “Everyone arrive in one piece?” Kane asked, straightening to check on his two companions.

      They stood behind him, one over each shoulder in the manner of a fighter pilot’s wingmen. Brigid Baptiste had her hand to her mouth and was biting down on her knuckle, her skin visibly paler than even its usual near-alabaster hue.

      Realizing that Kane was looking at her for an answer, Brigid nodded, still biting down on her knuckle.

      Across from the red-haired former archivist, Grant had his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed up tight, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts.

      “Grant?” Kane urged, reaching for his other companion.

      “Present,” Grant muttered, his eyes still closed.

      Kane felt his own stomach lurch then, and he gagged for a moment, holding down its contents with considerable effort. “You okay?” he asked once he had got himself back under control.

      Grant opened his eyes, the dark orbs looking bloodshot, focused on some far distant point. “That was…that was really something,” he said through gasping breaths.

      “Lakesh said this was a prototype unit,” Brigid reminded them both. She had removed her hand from her mouth now, but she still seemed unsteady on her feet as she staggered forward, the chunky heels of her cowboy boots clacking loudly against the white tiles. “I guess they didn’t iron out all the kinks on this one.”

      “Guess not,” Kane agreed as he recovered himself.

      The pale transportation gas had almost disappeared now, the extractor fans whirring loudly above the companions’ heads, and Kane turned to face the door. The door was offset from center in a bank of tinted armaglass, its panes colored a golden yellow. When traveling via mat-trans, the differently colored armaglass was one rudimentary way to recognize that a person had actually been shunted to a new location. In the direct manner of the military mind, each location had differently colored glass, a coded sequence that identified each mat-trans and its location. Presumably, when the system was still in its earliest days and the number of units was small, one might say, “I’m going to gold,” which meant the individual was traveling to Redoubt Mike in Louisiana. As a general rule, what a military force seemed to lack in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness. The speed and ease of identification could often be crucial in such situations, where goods and personnel were effectively being shoved through the unknown.

      Still a little woozy, Kane stilled his mind and went into the near trancelike state that put him on high alert, powering his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a flinch of his wrist tendons as he stepped over to the sealed door. The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, and both Kane and Grant had kept them when they had fled from the barony of Cobaltville that they had been tasked to protect years before. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist, in Kane’s case one tucked beneath the unbuttoned sleeve of his darkly colored denim jacket. The holsters reacted to a specific flinch movement of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety feature for the weapon would ever be required, for a Magistrate’s judgment was considered infallible.

      Kane and Grant were schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old and trusted companion, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a wristwatch.

      Kane worked the electronic lock, ordering the others to stay alert as the door slid open. Grant still looked decidedly uncomfortable, but Kane knew that they didn’t have the luxury to wait around if there were intruders on site. “You ready?” Kane asked his old Magistrate partner.

      Slowly, Grant nodded, ordering his own Sin Eater blaster into his hand with a well-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. “Yeah, let’s go crash this party.”

      Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste unfastened her own pistol from its position at her hip, the bulky block of the TP-9 looking large in her delicate, feminine hands. Unlike the two ex-Magistrates, Brigid had not grown up being schooled in the application of weaponry. However, she had learned swiftly as an adult, her eidetic memory allowing her to perfect the techniques of combat far quicker than an average person. Her TP-9 was a compact semiautomatic, a large hand pistol with the grip set just off center beneath the barrel and a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. With its grip so close to the center, it looked a little like a square block, the bottom edge of that square completed by the holder’s forearm. Weapon now in hand, Brigid nodded her own silent agreement.

      Kane stepped into a large, ill-lit room that lay beyond the mat-trans chamber, his companions close behind. As Kane entered the main area of the room, a handful of fluorescent tubes flickered on from hidden recesses in the high ceiling. The lights were widely spaced, lighting the room while still leaving it in a gloomy sort of half light.

      Leading the way in a semicrouch, Kane took two swift paces to the right and dropped to the floor, scanning the room with his eyes, his gun held out in front of him in a steadying, two-handed grip. Behind Kane, Brigid had peeled off to the left, her head ducked down as she swept the room with her own weapon, searching for any targets. At the back of the group, Grant paused just inside the open doorway to the mat-trans chamber, his own Sin Eater held at shoulder height, ready to back up Kane or Brigid and blast any hostile intruders they might flush out.

      The room appeared empty, and after a moment Kane eased himself up from his crouch, never loosening his two-handed grip on the Sin Eater. The room was roughly square in shape, and Kane estimated it to be perhaps forty feet from wall to wall. Beneath the insubstantial illumination, Kane saw a long aisle of monitoring equipment facing the mat-trans cubicle. The aisle was split into two, a gap wide enough for a person to walk through at its center. Still alert, Kane stepped through the gap and peered at the dead equipment there. The aisle was made up of various computers and sensor arrays, including several rather old-fashioned banks of needles and dials alongside the digital monitors. Although the equipment had been shut down long ago, the low lighting would have been ideal for its users, Kane realized, as the majority of these monitors and sensor displays would have been backlit. In fact, other than a visible layer of dust, it looked as if they had been turned off just minutes before.