Chapter 1

  "Ils viennent!" shouted the guardsman wearing the maroon and gray tabard with the arms of the Duke of Burgundy over a mail hauberk. As he struggled with the unfamiliar bolt on top of an Uzi, a triburst of jacketed 9 mm slugs hit him in the face. Two of the bullets punched out the back of his skull and through the peaked steel helmet he wore, spraying gore across the stone passageway.

  Without slowing, Kane pivoted to his left and pulsed another 3-round burst into the face of the guard's partner across the corridor.

  Kane heard a yammer of full-auto fire as his partner, Grant, bringing up the rear a few paces back, sprayed fire down the corridor behind.

  "Good thing this crazy duke keeps his real blasters under lock and key most of the time," Grant called. "Otherwise these medieval screw-heads could get to be a real pain in the dick."

  "They can do plenty harm with their quaint implements," Kane said. His wrists still bore the red marks of the ropes that bound him to the rack from which Grant had rescued him. "Trust me."

  "You might at least thank me," Grant told him. "Remind me," Kane said.

  Then they ran.

  THE MISSION HAD BEEN a goat screw from the get-go. Brigid Baptiste's researches into Totality Concept archives had turned up evidence of a mat-trans gateway having been built in what had been France. It didn't show up on Cerberus redoubt's display of active sites. Lakesh had dispatched his ace operators, ex–Cobaltville Magistrates Kane and Grant, to investigate whether the facility had actually been built and, if it had, why it was seemingly inoperable.

  The pair had jumped into what proved to be a reborn Duchy of Burgundy. As in other parts of the world they had visited, the local authorities had responded to the devastation wrought by the nukecaust by reviving the real or imagined glories of the past. In this case, the local ruler had established himself as a low-tech version of one of the North American barons, decking out his bullyboys in mail armor and arming them with swords, pikes and crossbows. Or his ancestor had; the system showed every indication of having been in place for years, possibly since just after skydark itself.

  Kane and Grant didn't get much chance to appreciate the sociology of the situation. Apparently some local serf or gamekeeper cannier than they were spotted them in the local woods and ratted them out to the duke's men. A party of mounted and well-armored infantry—which Brigid, monitoring them from back at Cerberus, helpfully informed them were once called "hobelars"—jumped them as they crept through some wooded hills a few klicks north of the walled city in which the old archives told them the mat-trans gateway should be located.

  Kane was just barely able to empty a saddle with a triburst before both men had to turn and run for it through the early-autumn afternoon. Kane stepped in a snare trap and was snatched up ignominiously into the air, dangling by an ankle like a captive rabbit.

  "Run for it!" he shouted. Grant dived down a narrow, brushy defile and managed to lose the pursuers in the rapidly gathering dark.

  Kane's first thought was to hose his pursuers with his Sin Eater. His second was to try shooting through the limb that suspended him just high enough so that the fingertips of arms dangling to full extent wouldn't reach the forest floor. With his pursuers rapidly gathering about him and dismounting, he discarded both notions. To shoot would only get him stabbed or hacked to death. With the armored men already behind him, any kills he could score would be nothing but Pyrrhic victories. And while part of him was definitely in sympathy with the coyote strategy of chewing his own leg off to escape a trap, his point man instincts recoiled: as long as he was alive and reasonably intact, there was a chance that his wits would spring him. Crippling himself would only reduce those odds—and even wearing his shadow suit, he stood a good chance of breaking bones in his foot if he bounced a 9 mm jacketed bullet or two off his instep.

  Besides, there was always the prospect of rescue—as long as Grant remained at large.

  Instead, Kane released the Sin Eater, allowing his automatic holster to snap the weapon back into place along his forearm. Then he showed empty palms to his would be captors.

  "I give," he said.

  THE CAPTIVE KANE, arms bound behind him, was bundled inside the walls of the city, and thence into the keep of the citadel. Down a set of stone stairs slick with long use he was frog-marched into an actual dungeon, and on into an equally actual torture chamber. Only then was he stripped. His shadow suit and the Sin Eater in its holster were tossed thoughtlessly aside.

  He briefly considered trying to take out his captors and make a break for it. He let that notion go, as well. They were too many, too big, too well armed and much too alert.

  Instead he was strapped naked onto the massive wooden frame of a rack and his wrists and ankles tied to ropes wound around spools at either end. These were rapidly cranked until his limbs and body were drawn out taut by a pair of torturers who, while not tall, were broad and obviously professional. They then stepped back, the windlasses held in place by cams, while he was questioned in a thin, acerbic voice by an equally thin, acerbic man in a gray gown and tight-fitting white cowl. Obviously a white-collar type, possibly the chief torturer.

  Unfortunately, he only spoke and understood what Kane took for some dialect of French. Kane tried to give appropriate answers. There was no point in dissembling, especially when the price for being caught would be disassembly, of him. However, once the fact that he was called Kane was established, pretty expeditiously, the torturer in chief took all his answers as lies, and issued appropriate orders to his bare-chested underlings.

  Things got interesting. Kane had a chance to marvel at the elasticity of the human body as the rack was tightened gear tooth by gear tooth. It took a long, deliberate time to become uncomfortable.

  Then it did, all at once. Despite the subterranean chill beneath the low, groined ceiling, Kane popped a sudden sweat.

  Questions were asked. Answers were rejected. Kane's arms and legs were pulled to the point of agony and beyond. Another turn of the wheel would certainly dislocate Kane's shoulder or hip joints, if not both.

  Eardrum-popping noise filled the torture chamber. The hooded man's sunken-chested body shivered violently. A scarlet mist formed behind him in the thick, humid air. At the same instant, three stains, appropriately burgundy in color, darkened the front of his gray robe.

  He slumped to the smooth flagstones as if his bones had dissolved.

  Another triburst. Kane looked down the scarred and pallid length of his body to see the torturer by his feet spinning down clutching his throat, which geysered red with the characteristic spray of a severed artery.

  The unmistakable figure of Grant loomed over Kane. The remaining torturer uttered an incomprehensible screech and plunged at the erstwhile Mag, swinging a three-foot iron bar with both hands in a wild overhead stroke.

  The huge black man jammed the blow with a burly forearm beneath the wrists. "You obviously—" he punctuated his words with a single shot from his Sin Eater "—do not know who you are fucking with."

  He let the man fall. Sin Eater at the ready, Grant turned his head this way and that, sniffing the air. His broad, often-broken nose wrinkled.

  "Smells like shit in here."

  "Maybe the inconsiderate bastards neglected to put individual flush toilets in the cells," Kane said, grunting only slightly at the exertion of speaking.

  HIS BARE FEET mottled blue and pink, the lower half of his shadow suit pulled up to his waist, so that the torso, hood and arms dangled down the backs of his thighs like molted skin, Kane raced past the bodies of the men he had just shot. Behind him, Grant paused to face back the way they had come, fishing in a pouch on the rip-stop harness he wore over his own shadow suit.

  A knot of armed men had appeared at a T-junction behind them. Grant bowled a matte-finished gray sphere the size of the shooter marble down the corridor toward them. The micro grenade detonated right where the lead man was about to plant his lead foot.

  The chain-link smock he was wearing probably saved him from being disemboweled. That may or may not have been a good thing, since the mail did nothing to prevent his legs from being torn off, one at the hip, and the other just below the knee. He fell, screaming and spurting blood. Dazzled and deafened, his comrades tumbled back away over each other out of sight. They dragged at least one more badly wounded man with them.

  "Is it just me," Grant demanded, "or is the world overrun with re-enactors?"

  Kane's only response was to keep running. Grant turned and followed his comrade around a corner, digging in his micro-gren pouch again. This time he came up with a couple of tiny balls of a bilious yellow-green hue. He quickly activated them, working slider switches set in the low raised belts around their middle, which were designed to be worked by feel but impossible to activate by jostling.

  "Let's see how they like this action," he said. He bowled them down the corridor.

  They bounced against the far wall of the crossing corridor and burst with loud pops. Instantly a fog bank of a revolting pallid shade similar to the grens themselves walled off the whole end of the corridor. The double amputee's screams died in a choking, gagging gargle. They heard the liquid surge of puking, and then strangling sounds as the injured man began to suffocate on his own vomit.

  The micro grens contained a fast-acting nausea gas, with a kicker of oleoresin capsicum—pepper gas. They also contained an aerosol dye. The pair carried the gas grens in both visible and invisible models, depending on whether it would be more deleterious to their enemie
s' morale to see what was making them throw up or not. In this case the whole point was delay, so a visual barrier was definitely indicated.

  Kane and Grant turned and ran.

  The subterranean corridor took several more doglegs, apparently at random. Then the two came up against a massive oaken door, iron-bound and set in what appeared more recent masonry than the surrounding walls. The door was secured by a huge, rusty, iron lock.

  Kane braced and aimed his Sin Eater at the giant ancient lock. "Stand back," he said.

  "Don't you even think about that!" Grant exclaimed. "I'll shoot you myself."

  Kane grinned and stepped back, lowering the black machine pistol. "Just fucking with you. You've got some mini-pencil charges in your pouch, don't you?"

  "Yeah." Grumbling, Grant stepped forward, digging in his pouch yet again. He came out with an object not unlike an old-fashioned medical capsule, about two centimeters long and about five millimeters thick between thumb and forefinger. He crushed the end with a quick pressure, and thrust it into the padlock's keyhole.

  Both men stepped hastily back. "I hope Brigid is right about this gateway being shut down on local manual override," Grant said. "Meaning, we can turn it on. Because our only other way out of here is to die a lot."

  "She is," Kane said. "She's always right. That's one of the many things that pisses me off about her."

  Grant gave his partner an odd look. "None of my business, but hadn't you two better get things worked out between you one of these days?"

  "And why would that be, partner?" Kane asked blandly. Grant shook his head in disgust. "Point men. They're all crazy."

  Kane grinned.

  The pencil charge went off with a sharp crack. The lock popped open.

  Grant started forward. Kane stopped him with a gesture. "Uh-uh," he said. "Let me do the honors."

  Grant scowled more deeply. "Why?"

  Kane stepped forward smartly, twisted free the broken lock. "Because I'm the point man," he said. He opened the door.

  Inside was another door, this one vanadium steel, still shiny despite the passage of years. The wooden door had concealed a smaller entrance. A keypad was set in the wall beside the newly revealed door. Whistling tunelessly through a taut grin, Kane tapped out a quick combination.

  The door slid open with a whisper of sound.

  Inside lay darkness. "Light," Kane said.

  Wordlessly, Grant handed him a Nighthawk microlight. Shining it out the bottom of his left fist, which he held up by his ear, Kane stepped through the door and took a rapid step to the right to clear that fatal funnel of the doorway.

  Almost immediately, lights came on within the chamber, amber and dim. "Bingo," Kane said to his partner, who was covering their back trail.

  Grant peered over Kane's bare shoulder. Through the door he could see a large open chamber. In the midst of that was a smaller chamber with walls of sea-green armaglass. He could also see part of what appeared to be control consoles in white synthetic. As was usual in the case of a mat-trans gateway that had been protected from the elements, everything appeared pristine. The Totality Concept had built for the ages.

  "Okay, what have we got here?" Kane positioned himself in front of the control console, pressed buttons. Display lights glowed alight in response. "Signs of life. That's a promising start."

  He entered commands, typing a bit tentatively; his hands were more accustomed to gripping weapons than punching keys. That was one thing about being a door- kicking, dreg-bashing, hard-contact Magistrate for the baronies: you didn't have to screw with a lot of paperwork. Not like the Intel bunch.

  Grant looked in all directions as a sudden thrumming filled the air in the chamber, felt rather than heard. "It's alive," Kane said.

  At the same moment an insistent pounding sounded from the door. It came mutedly through the thick alloy.

  "So the thing still works," Grant said. "After two hundred years."

  Kane shrugged. "The rest of them do. Why shouldn't this one?"

  He stepped away from the console and gestured grandly at the green-walled jump chamber. "Shall we?"

  "You said to remind you."

  "Right. Thanks for saving my ass."

  "Anytime."

  THE FIRST THING Grant became aware of upon returning to the here and now was a deep, ragged voice intoning "I hate this, I hate this, I hate this."

  He realized the voice was his. He was almost afraid of jumping. This hadn't even been that bad a jump: similar to being torn apart in five dimensions at once, wound onto spools, then flushed down the cosmic crapper. Nothing special at all.

  "—is he?"

  Grant realized another voice was speaking. He forced himself to roll onto his back—he wasn't even aware of having fallen down—and pried his eyes open. Brigid Baptiste stood at the entrance of the mat-trans gateway in Cerberus redoubt, dressed in an issue white bodysuit, a worried look in her green eyes.

  "I said, where's Kane? Didn't he jump with you?" "Yeah. Of course he did." Still disoriented, he was irritated at being asked such a silly question.

  "Then where is he?" Even in his befuddled state, he could hear barely suppressed panic thrilling through the archivist's rigidly controlled voice.

  "What you mean? He's right—"

  With a grunt of effort, Grant rolled over.

  He was alone in the mat-trans unit.

  Chapter 2

  "There is no sign of him," said Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, founder of Cerberus redoubt and recruiter of the ragtag band who made up the only known organized resistance to the schemes of the hybrid barons to dominate humanity. Gazing up at the big world map on the wall of the command center and carefully not looking at Brigid Baptiste — he shook his head. "He appears to have fallen completely off the planet. I am so sorry, my very dear Brigid."

  Domi, dressed in her customary shorts, middie top and red stand-ups, and Grant, still in his shadow suit, stood in the control center with Brigid and Lakesh. Brewster Philboyd was at the control console.

  Brigid's face was ice. Her eyes strained toward the giant screen until it seemed to her emerald laser beams should shoot from them and make the big board smoke, as if somehow to bum through the layers concealing Kane from her.

  Why am I so cold inside? It's not as if I even particularly like the man. And even as she thought the words, she knew them as hollow as the feeling inside her belly. Like or not, indeed any emotion or lack thereof notwithstanding, they were what the jump dreams had revealed them to be so many months before. Anam-chara. Soul-friends, their destinies bound inextricably together not just through years but lifetimes.

  "He's not dead," she said.

  "How can you be so sure?" Lakesh asked.

  She looked at him stonily. "I'd know."

  "Perhaps he's looped," the erstwhile Moon base tech suggested. "Caught in some eddy of the space-time whorl." "Bite your tongue," Grant growled.

  "After all, the gateway had been out of use for centuries," said Collins, who monitored environ ops. "It might well have malfunctioned."

  Lips pressed together to form a thin line, Brigid turned a pale green and swayed. But Lakesh was shaking his head. "No, my very good friend, I do not believe so. After all, once friend Kane brought the station in Burgundy back online, we instantly achieved telemetry with it. We were able to monitor both ends of the jump. We recorded no sign of malfunction at either end."

  "Could his biolink transceiver have gone out?" Philboyd asked.

  "Impossible," Lakesh said. He shrugged. It was an uncharacteristic gesture for him — acknowledging lack of omniscience and omnipotence. "It is almost as if he has simply ceased to exist."

  Both Brigid and Grant snapped their heads around to stare at him. He held up placating hands. "Ah, no, my friends. Please forgive me; this is as trying for me as it is for you. I do not in fact believe that our excellent Kane has in fact ceased to exist. Nor do I believe that he is caught in a chronon loop."

  "Then where on Earth is he?" Brigid snapped.

  Lakesh showed her a thin smile. "Dear lady, you have answered your question even as you asked it. In all truth, I believe him to be, in fact, on Earth."

  The others broke into a babble of questions and interjections. "As to where he may be, other than on this planet and still contemporaneous with us, I cannot conjecture. Nor, frankly, can I say what leads me to believe this. As with Brigid, I simply have an intuition, which concurs with hers — I likewise believe he yet lives."