Reality Echo. James Axler

and soil peeling off the slope under a sharp wave of energy released by Grant’s explosive setup. The crackle deepened into an all-pervasive rumble, the thick clouds sucked down along with the avalanche as the rapidly descending mass of the mountainside created a vacuum. Trees snapped and exploded under the shock wave, but as much as Brigid focused on the receding landslide, even with the telescopic optics in her shadow suit, trees she knew to be four and five feet in diameter resembled nothing more than twigs and pencils as they toppled and pinwheeled through the turgid mass. The avalanche’s height was not the only thing that grew. It widened, spreading like a fan of rocky devastation. The rumble became less of a constant storm of sound engulfing them as the mass tumbled down to the valley below, but Brigid could still feel it vibrating up through her legs.

      “Was that good enough?” Grant asked Kane.

      Brigid turned and looked at her partner. His steely eyes held a cold rage in them that she had rarely seen before. Whatever evil they had inflicted upon him, it had inspired a similar fury in him. The rage faded as the landslide crashed to the bottom of the valley, settling a thick fog of debris over the floor. He nodded slowly, tentatively so as not to aggravate the pain of his head injury.

      “For now,” Kane said. “Now put me down. I can walk the rest of the way back.”

      Grant sighed and let Kane stand on his own two feet. Brigid could see traces of his earlier wobble, but the brief respite had steeled the man’s determination to walk on his own power.

      Epona and the scouts waited in a line, just farther up the slope. Epona remained silent, the shadow suit’s telescopic vision showing her features cast in dread awe of the power that Grant had unleashed, carving a horrendous scar along the side of a mountain. The scouts, on the other hand, had their rifles raised in the air, cheers for the thunderous blow struck against their Fomorian enemies echoing from on high.

      “For now?” Brigid asked.

      “I said these things are incredibly tough,” Kane answered, his voice taut and brittle with annoyance and pain. “We might have killed some of them and wrecked whatever equipment the Thrush Continuum provided for them, but this isn’t over yet.”

      Grant sneered. “Shit. If a black hole couldn’t kill that android freak, dropping a mountain on him won’t be more than a minor inconvenience.”

      “Something’s really eating at you, Kane. What’s the big worry?” Brigid asked.

      Kane grimaced. “Because the Thrush that’s down there, working with Bres and Balor and the rest of those monsters, he’s wearing my face.”

      Grant and Brigid shared a glance, then stared at their wounded comrade.

      Kane held out both hands to Grant, a near universal symbol of surrendering himself into restraints. “And just so we’re sure that I’m not some kind of preprogrammed fake that just thinks I’m the real deal, I want you two to bind me up and make damn certain I’m not some android infiltrator sent to murder everyone in Cerberus.”

      Standing on a silent, gouged mountainside, watching Grant seize Kane’s wrists roughly to put a plastic cable tie around them, Brigid Baptiste felt as if the avalanche were just a rug, pulling her whole world out from underneath her.

      Chapter 4

      Reba DeFore looked over Kane in the observation room of the Cerberus redoubt sick bay. In silence and darkness, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, Domi, Brigid Baptiste and Grant sat on the other side of one-way glass. No one wanted to speak as DeFore took blood samples, fingerprints, retinal scans and cheek swabs with practiced precision.

      DeFore was a stocky woman with tanned skin and ash-blond hair, which she usually wore in braids. This day it was pulled back into a bun beneath her surgeon’s cap. She had served as the redoubt’s chief physician ever since its inception by Lakesh. Her knowledge of anatomy had been bolstered by years of all manner of practical application, from meatball surgery to delivering the half-human spawn of a Quad Vee hybrid in mid-transformation. While the redoubt’s personnel had all been trained in first aid, DeFore’s scientific knowledge of the human body and how it worked was remarkable. Of course, if DeFore’s talents hadn’t been impressive, Lakesh wouldn’t have recruited her for his rebellion against the tyranny of the baronies.

      Kane rested on the table, poked and prodded, subjected to all manner of probes in DeFore’s collection of equipment. Lakesh and the others sat on the other side of the glass, not speaking, barely even breathing loudly as they awaited word on whether or not the man on the table was or some transdimensional construct sent to infiltrate their base.

      “You know, there is the possibility that Thrush could have mentally reprogrammed a Kane from a different casement,” Brigid spoke up at the end of the second hour of examinations.

      DeFore had been consistently handing off samples to her staff, Manitius base medical experts who had been upgrading and redesigning technology since relocating from their station on the moon. Where in the late twentieth century processing genetic markers could be measured in months, the new machinery they had developed pared the analysis to hours. She’d called up a readout on the screen, and the preliminary testing showed identical matches for several gene pairs, though the process had only been forty percent complete. “They’d be identical down to a genetic scale, but—”

      “We know what we’re dealing with when it comes to Thrush, dearest Brigid,” Lakesh said, cutting her off. Lakesh rested his chin on the knuckles of his fist. Though born on the Indian subcontinent, the scientist had entered his third century of life with blue eyes, replacements for his original orbs, which had failed due to their advanced years and the rigors of the cryogenic sleep that had extended his existence. More than 250 years old chronologically, the brilliant scientist had been restored to the relatively youthful age of his early forties, thanks to the incredible technology of the Thrush Continuum, wielded by Sam the Imperator. With a touch and an infusion of nanotechnology robots into his physical system, the ravages of age, countless surgeries to replace failing organs with harvested or cybernetic replacements, and the stresses of surviving under the iron rule of the hybrid barons had been erased.

      The one thing that hadn’t been returned to “normal” as he’d seen it, was the fact that his eyes were still blue. It was because they had their own genetic code from an unknown donor. The cataracts that had started to develop, however, had been eaten away, nanites transforming the damaged tissues into healthy, vital, young tissues.

      If Sam had the power to undo two centuries of aging with a touch, constructing a living man, an exact duplicate with memories and behavior patterns to match the original, wasn’t outside of his capabilities. DNA, blood testing, fingerprinting, all of that would only prove that the Kane they were looking at was biologically human, not a cleverly built android duplicate.

      Lakesh turned to Grant. In the darkness, his dark bronzed features looked particularly grim, illuminated by the light filtering through the window. Grant’s brow was wrinkled with the same worries that Brigid had just voiced. Of all the people in the room, though, Grant had known Kane the longest. The two men were as close to brothers as could possibly be without sharing a single parent.

      Grant was probably riddled with worry over not being able to tell if his closest friend on the planet had been subverted by a doppelganger. Sure, as they came through the mat-trans chamber, Bry had stated that the three signatures were nonanomalous, but that was merely a machine. Grant had been a Magistrate, and he lived his life dependent on senses and instincts that weren’t susceptible to the whims of electronic failure or alteration of computer code. Being told by Kane that he himself doubted the veracity of his existence had cast the same shadow over Grant’s observational abilities.

      “All right, Kane. I’ve checked everything in our medical file on you,” DeFore said. “There are no artificial constructs within your body, except for the Commtact implant on your mastoid. Your retinas and fingerprints are identical. I checked with Brigid, and your hair and beard growth are identical to what they were when you first headed off into the woods. Your bones are normal. Your reflexes are suboptimal, but that’s to be expected with a concussion. Blood chemistry shows no variants