Shizuka’s bare feet slapped against the hard surface of the main corridor as she sprinted toward the Cerberus ops room. It was past midnight, and the redoubt was down to a skeleton staff as the facility powered down for the night. As such, Shizuka found the main corridors empty, and she had taken the stairs two at a time to reach the wide ground-level corridor that led to the operations center itself. Sword in hand, she pulled at the large door and rushed into the operations room.
“Where’s Lakesh?” she demanded breathlessly, looking around the large room with its twin aisles of computer terminals.
The room was quiet, its lighting set to a pleasing dimness to suggest nighttime, and Shizuka saw only one figure in the room, sitting over by the mat-trans terminal. “Quickly,” the warrior woman demanded, “it is imperative that I speak with…” She stopped, the words turning sour on her tongue as the other figure in the room looked up at her.
“Hello, Shizuka.” It was Brigid Baptiste, her vibrant red-gold hair framing her head like a halo in the subtle lighting, a thin smile on her lips. She looked, for all the world, like the cat who had got the cream. “What are you doing?”
Shizuka watched warily as Brigid stood and took an unhurried step toward her, that self-satisfied smile never leaving her face. Shizuka calmed her breathing, her eyes on Brigid’s approaching form, using her other senses to check the room. They were alone—she was sure of it, just the two of them in the operations room.
“Where is everyone, Brigid?” Shizuka asked. The woman looked like Brigid, that much was true, but Shizuka could feel the tension in the air, sense something askew, not quite right in the familiar movements of the other woman. The movements were right but the body language seemed aggressive, domineering. She tightened her grip around the hilt of her katana, preparing to defend herself once more.
“They all went to bed, alas,” Brigid said, taking another slow pace toward Shizuka. “Boss’s orders.”
“And Lakesh left with them? Left you alone?” Shizuka asked, shifting her right foot behind her to better secure her balance should she be called upon to fight this woman who looked like her friend. She couldn’t quite be sure, she told herself. It may be Brigid. It may just be her, and her battle with Grant, with the thing that wore Grant’s face, had scared her, made her overly suspicious, paranoid.
Brigid’s smile widened. “Trent’s around somewhere,” she said, “and you just missed Skylar. What’s with the sword?”
“I had a little run-in with trouble,” Shizuka said guardedly. “I think it would be best if I were to speak with Lakesh.”
“No,” Brigid snapped, moving into swift action. Her foot whipped out and she clambered atop the desks as she made her way toward Shizuka at a dead run.
Shizuka brought her left arm up, reaching out toward Brigid in perfect balance for the sword held behind her head in her right hand. She saw the rip on the left side of Brigid’s tunic then, the trickle of blood running across her porcelain skin, the scarlet mixing with the white material of the jumpsuit along its seam.
Suddenly, the sword was swinging through the air, the steel blade whistling a musical note as it arced toward the woman who looked like Brigid Baptiste. At the last instant, Brigid was in the air, leaping high over the blade, her right leg snapping out and kicking Shizuka in the jaw.
Shizuka was silent as the blow hit her in the face, and she staggered back just a single step as Brigid landed across from her. Shizuka watched the redhead spin toward her, readying her next attack. “Brigid,” she said, “if you’re in there somewhere I am truly sorry for what I am about to do.”
Brigid looked imperiously at the shorter woman, and that contemptuous smirk crossed her lips once more. “I reckon you’d be pretty tough,” she said, sneering, “if you came full size.” As the words left her mouth, Brigid was already moving, a whirlwind of punching arms and kicking legs, driving Shizuka back, forcing her to give ground in the crammed walkways of the operations center.
Shizuka cursed herself as she deftly avoided the rain of blows, cursed herself for not being ready to attack. She was a warrior, a samurai born and bred, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to attack Brigid. In her mind she knew that this thing, this familiar face, was her enemy now, but in her heart she wasn’t ready to accept it.
“What are you?” Shizuka cried, swinging her sword toward Brigid, forcing the other woman to back away.
Brigid just smiled, dismissing the question. Her hand touched Lakesh’s desk and came up with a sheaf of loose papers as Shizuka stood a few feet across from her. Instantly, Brigid flung the papers at Shizuka’s face, doing no harm but obscuring the samurai’s vision for just a moment. In that moment, Brigid stepped inside the reach of Shizuka’s katana, rendering the weapon clumsy and near useless, and her fist jabbed out at her opponent’s face, catching the higher ridge of bone above the woman’s left eye socket. Shizuka groaned, head snapping back with the impact.
“Brigid, please,” Shizuka pleaded. “If you’re in there, try to stop this.”
“If I’m in there?” Brigid mocked. “I’m all there is, you simpering piece of samurai filth!” She swung her fists again, smacking Shizuka in the face with her left, then her right, then the left again, pounding her senseless.
Shizuka struggled away, pushing out with her free hand, not so much knocking Brigid away as shoving herself back. She concentrated on her breathing, shook her head, clearing it in a fraction of a second. It had been easier with Grant, she realized. The way he had treated her, tried to violate her, and the things he had said, things a lover should never say. But fighting Brigid was different. She didn’t know this woman the way she knew Grant, couldn’t shut off the fear that just maybe this really was her friend—broken, perhaps, but her friend nonetheless. Whatever the answer was, whatever the truth, Shizuka wouldn’t find it if she was dead. Grimly, she steadied her nerve and prepared to battle with Brigid once more.
“I have to warn you,” Shizuka said, “I killed your friend and I’m not afraid now to kill again.”
Pacing between the desks, Brigid circled Shizuka, darting as though to pounce and then stopping, edging back, laughing as Shizuka flinched. “On the contrary,” she mocked, “I think you’re very afraid. I think you’re wetting your little kimono wondering what’s about to happen to you.”
Shizuka’s eyes narrowed as she watched the red-haired woman stalk around the room, waiting for her opportunity. Just then, the door opened and, from the corner of her eye, Shizuka saw the broad figure of Grant step into the ops room. Impossible—she had killed him.
“Grant?” Shizuka asked, her eyes still on Brigid. “Is that you?”
“You know it is, babe.” Grant’s voice, with its deep richness, was so familiar to her.
Shizuka turned then, hoping, willing, praying that it was Grant, the real Grant, come at last to assist her, to protect her whether she asked it of him or not.
Then she saw the man standing before the closed door. Grant had put on a pair of undershorts to preserve his modesty, before following her to the ops center. The dark skin of his bare chest glistened with sweat mixed with red runnels of blood, and besides the shorts, he wore a white bandage taped to his chest, just below his rib cage. The bandage puffed out, stanching the flow of blood from where Shizuka had driven the sword through his torso. As he moved, she saw that his left hand hung limply, twisted in on itself with a white stub showing where the ulna bone now poked through the flesh. He smiled, causing thick liquid to ooze from the hole where his ear had been, but his eyes blazed with a barely contained fury as he held Shizuka’s gaze. “Now, my darling Shizuka, why don’t you come back to bed?” he asked, a red wash of blood showing between his teeth as he spoke.
“Get away from me,” Shizuka spat. “Get away from me, you abomination.”
Brigid shoved one of the chairs at Shizuka then. It raced across the floor on its casters, and the samurai woman deftly avoided it. But the chair’s movement had distracted her for just one precious second, and when she looked up once more both Grant and Brigid Baptiste were upon her.
Brigid high kicked, driving the toe of her boot into Shizuka’s stomach before following through with a brutal left hook to her face as her head sank forward. At the same time Grant grabbed Shizuka’s right hand—the one clutching the katana—in his. He didn’t bother trying to break her grip. Instead, he simply crushed, tighter and tighter, preventing Shizuka from moving the sword, the force of his strength making the bones in her hand crack as they tightened together.
Shizuka cried out, flailing at Brigid with her free hand only to have it slapped aside by the fierce redhead as she renewed her attack. It wasn’t really a fight anymore; now it was just a beating.
It took two minutes before the samurai finally collapsed on the floor, ultimately drifting from delirium into unconsciousness.
“Do you think she’ll wake up?” Brigid asked Grant as she stood over their fallen foe.
“Not for a long time,” Grant responded, assessing the bruised and bloodied face of the woman at his feet, “and by then it’ll be too late.”
“Any idea how we should dispose of her?” Brigid asked. “We could use the mat-trans, but Trent is liable to walk in at any second.”
As if on cue, the ops room door opened once again and Trent strolled in, holding two steaming cups of coffee and smiling amiably. He stopped suddenly, taking in the scene of carnage before him, the scattered files, the askew chairs and desks, the blood and the body.
“What…happened here?” he asked, looking from Brigid to Grant to the bloody form of Shizuka lying on the floor between them.
“Things got a little rowdy while you were gone,” Brigid said, leaning down and reaching for the bloodstained belt of Shizuka’s silk dressing gown.
“Why don’t you come on in and join the party, son,” Grant growled, and he darted forward to fix his hand on the technician’s tunic, yanking the young man toward them.
“What the…?” Trent babbled. “I don’t understand. Isn’t that Shiz—”
Grant viciously backhanded the man, dropping Trent to his knees, silencing his questions in an instant. Then Brigid was behind him, the belt from Shizuka’s robe wrapped tightly in her hands, coiling around Trent’s throat and squeezing tighter and tighter until the technician could no longer draw breath.
Trent blacked out, kicking wildly for a moment before he finally keeled over, his body still at last. Grant looked at the young technician’s unconscious body.
“I was going to suggest we take Shizuka down to recycling, let her get mushed up into compost,” he told Brigid. “Figure she’ll have a friend there now, if she ever wakes up.”
Brigid nodded. “One for sorrow, two for joy,” she said.
Grant began to laugh in agreement, then he grimaced, sucking in his breath through clenched teeth.
“You okay?” Brigid probed.
Grant closed his eyes, letting the wave of pain pass through him. “She got me real good with that pig-sticker of hers,” he growled, his hand pushing firmly against the bandage he had applied to his abdomen. “I actually followed her here by the trail of blood her sword was dripping. That’s my blood, Brigid. Can you imagine that?”
Brigid leaned closer to Grant, removing the bandage with delicate hands. “This needs proper medical attention, Grant,” she said after a moment. “You’re losing a lot of blood.”
“What’s it going to matter?” he asked her, reaching down and patting the bandage back into place over the bloody wound. “If Kane’s done his job, we’ll all be dead in a day or so anyway, right?”
Standing before Grant, Brigid held his gaze with her beautifully clear emerald eyes. “I don’t want to lose you, Grant,” she told him, putting her arms around him and pulling herself close. “We’ve been through too much over the years, leaving Cobaltville and facing the barons and the Annunaki.”
Grant thought back as Brigid held him, old memories slipping into place, masking the flaws in his rudimentary programming. He wondered for just a moment why they had to kill Lakesh. Was the man evil? Was he part of the Annunaki conspiracy to enslave humankind? He had to be; that had to be why. Grant stroked a hand through Brigid’s long hair and she looked up at him and smiled, tears in her red-rimmed eyes. Then she stepped away.
“Almost over now,” he assured her, and she nodded, turning away to hide the tears that began washing down her cheeks.
Slowly, forcing himself to keep moving, Grant hefted the bodies of Shizuka and Trent onto a cart that he pulled from the corner of the ops room. “Someone’s going to notice they’re gone soon enough,” he told Brigid as she sat at her desk, quietly weeping.
“I know,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes as she turned to him. “But like you said, it’s almost over now. Pretty soon it won’t matter what they know—they’ll all be dead.”
Grant nodded silent agreement and began to push the cart and its grim burden toward the exit door. As he bumped the front of the cart against the door to open it, Brigid stood and pointed to the shining sword that rested on the floor where they had beaten Shizuka senseless.
“Take the sword, too,” she said, “and dispose of it. No point tipping our hand if we don’t have to.”
Grant took the katana and tossed it atop the bodies, then he wheeled them out of the room and into the high-ceilinged corridor.
As soon as Grant had left the room, Brigid wrapped her arms around herself and sighed. “Oh, Grant,” she whispered. She was no expert, but Brigid Baptiste’s medical knowledge was sufficient to tell her, just with one look, that the sword wound in Grant’s torso had pierced right through, doing immeasurable and—without swift medical attention—fatal damage. But she knew he was right. The mission was almost over now. Wounds wouldn’t matter after today.
She walked across the room, gathering up the detritus of the battle and replacing it where it had come from, using a screen-wipe cloth to wipe away a few spots of blood from the desks and floor. Her white jumpsuit was stained with red, too, most of it rubbed off from Grant’s body when she had hugged him. She grabbed the suede jacket that hung over the back of her chair, draping it over her shoulders to disguise the bloody jumpsuit, before she got back to work on her report. It was more than a standard field report, however. The text contained a rootkit—a hidden, very pervasive bug that even now was attacking the Cerberus data stream. Pretty soon, Mohandas Lakesh Singh’s pet project would be blind, its air polluted, its staff trapped. And then the endgame could begin.
GRANT PUSHED the cart along the tunnel-like central corridor to the service elevator, and from there he descended with his grim cargo to the recycling plant in the basement of the Cerberus redoubt. When Cerberus was constructed, it had been foreseen that there may come a time where food and water were scarce, where the unit had to be utterly self-sufficient, and so a vast recycling facility had been built in one of the basement areas of the compound. Like any other self-contained military compound, Cerberus had been designed to recycle and reuse as much of its own waste as possible, and to safely dispose of the remainder.
The elevator doors pulled back and Grant pushed the cart along the empty corridor, through the twin doors into the recycling plant room. As soon as Grant walked into the plant room, the stench assailed him. Food and chemical waste were piled upon a slow-moving conveyor belt that gradually trudged to a deep pit where metal teeth would sort it, crush it and dispose of it. The system was automated, requiring only occasional supervision by a human operator. The machinery rumbled and groaned, hissing steam and grumbling out a mechanized symphony as the conveyor trudged twelve feet and the metal teeth began grinding the next mass of trash, mashing it into smaller, more manageable blocks and spewing these out before finally beginning the long process of sorting it and extracting needed nutrients and other components of interest. Despite the masses of rotting food, there were no insects in the room that Grant could see—this deep down in the concrete Cerberus compound, deep into the mountain itself, it had been almost entirely overlooked by everyone. There were no gaps or doors to the outside world, no way for a fly to find its way this far into the secure military base.
Grant looked down at the worn, stained conveyor belt that led to the grinding teeth. It was a drop of ten feet from the level he stood at, and he saw the remains of today’s dinner and lunch and breakfast piled there, along with similar remains from the day before. With a grunt of effort, he wheeled the cart to the end of the walkway, as close as he could to the grinders, and rocked it on its wheels until it finally tipped over, dislodging the two bodies and the bloody blade of the sword over the side.
“This man’s work is never done,” he muttered as he watched the bodies drop over the side of the walkway and plummet for a moment until they slapped against the mush of trash that was spread over the surface of the now-static conveyor belt.
“Goodbye, Shizuka,” he snarled, shoving the cart over the side, too, before he turned away from the walkway’s edge and pushed through the exit doors.
As Grant left the room, he heard the whir of machinery hum as the conveyor belt trundled another few feet forward, dropping the next lot of waste over its side and into the waiting jaws of the grinder, ripping the cart to pieces in a matter of seconds.
IT WAS A LITTLE LATER, almost 1:00 a.m., when Grant found Kane standing alone on the plateau outside the entrance to the redoubt, puffing on a cigar as he examined the clear night sky overhead.
“Hey,” Grant said, “what are you up to?”
Kane turned to him, offering a smile to his longtime partner as he pulled the cigar from between his teeth. “Nothing much, just counting the stars.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a cigar for Grant, passing a little silver lighter along with it.
Grant clipped the end and sheltered the flame from the wind as he lit the cigar, taking a few swift drags to get the cigar going. “What do you think it’ll be like up there,” he asked, “when we get to Heaven?”
Kane shrugged, peering at the stars once more. “Like here, I guess, only with better cigars. Do you remember those ones we used to get back in Cobaltville, back when we did Pedestrian Pit Patrol? Man, I really miss those.”
Grant nodded, even though Kane had turned away, thinking about their times together, feeling the memories fade into place. “I don’t think it will be long,” he said, his voice low.
“What’s that?” Kane asked, turning once more to look at his friend. He seemed to notice the bandage across his friend’s ribs for the first time. “Hey, Grant, what happened to you?” he asked, concerned.
“Me and Shizuka had a fight,” Grant explained. “She stabbed me, did some other damage, too.” He held up his left arm, showing Kane the ruined wrist joint. “I don’t think I’m going to last to the end. I’m sorry.”
Kane looked at Grant, seeing the scabs, the wounds, the broken wrist. “You’ve been a good soldier, and before that a good Magistrate and always, always a good friend,” he said. “Heaven’s going to be everything they promised us. Baptiste and I will be with you before you know it.”
Grant took another long drag on the cigar, feeling the heavy smoke fill his throat and lungs. “Did you get every thing you wanted done, Kane?” he asked as the blue-gray smoke coiled around him.
Kane nodded. “In forty-eight hours everyone here will be dead, friend.”
Grant coughed then, hacked as he tried to draw another drag from the cigar. As he did so, he felt the pain pulling again at the spot just above his belly, where the point of Shizuka’s katana had pierced his body. He walked a few paces in a circle before sinking down and sitting on the packed soil beneath him.
“You want me to do anything?” Kane asked, realizing that his old friend was in pain. “Get anyone?”
“We’ll all be dead soon enough,” Grant replied, looking up at the stars. “Then we can finally enter the Dreaming for all eternity.”
Silent, Kane stood watching as the cigar held by his oldest friend burned slowly down to a stump in his curled fingers, and the white material of the bandage turned a deeper and deeper shade of red.
Once Grant’s cigar had burned itself out, Kane turned and walked back inside the redoubt, closing the door behind him. Accessing the emergency controls, he sealed them. Not even a nuclear attack would open them now.
DECIMAL RIVER LOOKED UP from his screen in the outback cavern. “We’ve lost one,” he said, “but our door is now open.”
Silently, Broken Ghost nodded acknowledgment, and Cloud Singer followed suit. Soon they would travel through the Dreaming World and enter Cerberus via the mat-trans gateway. And then they would finally execute Lakesh for his crimes against the Original Tribe.