Dark Goddess. James Axler

failure was that again?” Kane asked in a bored tone, as if he inquired only to be polite.

      Porpoise shook his head in good-natured frustration. “It doesn’t matter. It’s enough you kept your word and returned here.”

      “It’s not like I had a choice.” Kane nodded toward Brigid, who was examining the items on the dessert cart with great interest. “You baited the hook pretty damn effectively.”

      Porpoise smiled. “Thank you.”

      “Is that what this party is about? Celebrating that I came back?”

      “Hardly. I’m holding it in honor of a former acquaintance of yours who may become a business associate.”

      Kane glanced toward Blister McQuade, snapped off a salute with a finger to the brow and called, “Yo, Blister. How you been?”

      To Kane’s surprise and great unease, McQuade’s lips writhed back from his broken, discolored teeth in a grin. “Gotcha, Kane. Finally gotcha.”

      “You got me?”

      McQuade chuckled, a sound like old bones being crushed underfoot. “Well, you’re sure as shit got, ain’t cha?”

      “You have a point.”

      Turning back to Porpoise, Kane demanded, “Is this whole routine just a trap to turn me over to some smalltime trash like Blister?”

      Dixie held up a pink terry-cloth robe and Porpoise thrust his arms into the voluminous sleeves. “Come now,” the fat man said patronizingly. “You and Brigid are bright people. You’re too valuable to me to waste you like that.”

      “I don’t get you.”

      “You must’ve known when I permitted you to walk in here yesterday that there was a chance I’d take one or the both of you hostage.”

      “To force Cerberus to deal with you,” Kane stated. “To trade our freedom for weapons. Like I said to you yesterday, it’s not going to happen.”

      If Porpoise had possessed eyebrows, they would have arched upward over his scalp. “I think you’re very much mistaken. It’s not so much your freedom I’m bartering with, but your reputations.”

      Brigid dropped the pretense of being uninterested in the exchange. She turned around, demanding sharply, “What do you mean?”

      “The so-called Cerberus warriors are more than just legends in the Outlands,” Porpoise said, his eyes glinting shrewdly. “You’re symbols, valuable propaganda tools, far beyond your reputations as baron blasters.”

      Like “sec man,” the term “baron blaster” was old, deriving from the rebels who had staged a violent resistance against the institution of the unification program a century earlier. Neither Kane nor Grant enjoyed having the appellation applied to them. Their ville upbringing still lurked close to the surface, and they had been taught that the so-called baron blasters were worse than outlaws, but were instead terrorists incarnate.

      Regardless, the reputations of the core Cerberus warriors had grown too awesome, too great over the past five years for even the most isolated outlander to be ignorant of their accomplishments, even if it was an open question of just how many of the stories were based in truth and how many were overblown fable.

      Kane folded his arms over his chest. “How can our reps be of any use to you?”

      Porpoise accepted a glass from the girl and sipped at it appreciatively. “In the three years I’ve run my operation from here, rarely a month has gone by without word of the notorious Cerberus marauders. Even before I settled here, reports were circulating about your group.”

      Brigid smiled coldly. “And you thought we were fairy tales?”

      Porpoise shook his head. “No, I figured you were real enough. I wasn’t sure how much of what I heard was true or just folklore…like how you assassinated Baron Ragnar, blew up a major baronial outpost in New Mexico, took out a couple of Magistrate Divisions, destroyed Ambika’s pirate empire and royally screwed a big Millennial Consortium operation.”

      He raised his glass in Brigid’s direction. “I really must thank you for that, doll-baby. Saved me the trouble of dealing with the competition.”

      “All true,” Kane declared flatly. “And that’s just the stuff we let our PR department circulate.”

      Porpoise’s eyes flicked back and forth between Kane and Brigid. “I personally don’t care about the other stuff or even it’s true or not. What’s important is if the outlanders believe it.”

      Brigid frowned. “Why?”

      “Their belief in the tales makes you extremely valuable assets. Once word spreads that you’re working for Billy-boy, whatever agenda Cerberus is putting together will fall apart. They’ll be flocking to me as their new hope.”

      Kane opened his mouth to retort, then shut it. Porpoise was far more perceptive than his initial assessment. The Cerberus agenda called not just for the continued physical survival of humanity, but for the human spirit, the soul of an entire race.

      Over the past five years, the Cerberus warriors had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.

      Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the overlords, all of them wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. Kane often feared that everything he and his friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict, the Armageddon yet to come.

      The Cerberus warriors had hoped the overweening ambition and ego of the reborn overlords would spark bloody internecine struggles, but in the two years since their advent, no intelligence indicating such actions had reached them.

      Of course, the overlords were engaged in reclaiming their ancient ancestral kingdoms in Mesopotamia. They had yet to cast their covetous gaze back to the North American continent, but it was only a matter of time.

      Before that occurred, Cerberus was determined to build some sort of unified resistance against them, but the undertaking proved far more difficult and frustrating than even the cynical Kane or the impatient Grant had imagined. Even two years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, of utter chaos, with various factions warring for control on a day-by-day basis.

      “For the sake of argument,” Brigid said, “let’s assume you’re right, that our colleagues view us the way the Outlanders do. Wouldn’t it make more strategic sense to be known as our ally?”

      Porpoise sipped the piña colada. “Not really. From both a personal and business perspective, becoming a Cerberus satellite would be detrimental to my business model. I’ve got a lot of overhead.”

      “You’re a goddamn pirate,” Kane rasped impatiently. “Whatever you need, you steal. Overhead, my ass.”

      “I’m an entrepreneur,” Porpoise countered defensively. “A visionary. I’m building a colony and when I’m done, I’ll be the major trading port on the gulf. I’ve got big plans—a rut farm, casinos, a major marketplace. But I need personnel.”

      “Personnel?” Brigid echoed, a contemptuous undercurrent in her tone. “Slaves, more like it.”

      Porpoise snorted disdainfully, blowing orange froth over the rim of the glass he lifted to his lips. He gestured expansively to the people assembled at poolside. “Do they look like slaves to you?”

      Eyeing the naked, docile Dixie, Kane remarked, “Now that you mention it—”

      “Enough.” Anger entered Porpoise’s voice. “The colony I’m building will be self-sufficient