Chapter 1

  Pakistan, the Indus River valley

  The Moon sank beneath the curve of the Sind Desert, leaving a heavy cloak of darkness over the eastern bend of the Indus. The black waters flickered with flares of red, reflecting the discharge of weapons from the skirmish line along the banks.

  Standing on the parapet of the ancient wall, Kane heard the distant reports as a series of muffled thumps and staccato finger snaps. He glimpsed long ribbons of orange and yellow streaking across the river's sluggish current a split second before the sound of the detonations reached his ears.

  As the echoes of an explosion faded, the voice of Decard, husky, hoarse and tight with tension, filtered over the Commtact. "They've breached the outer perimeter, sir! Blown away our cover!"

  "I figured that out for myself," Kane replied dryly. "And don't call me sir. Casualties?"

  "None. We were lucky."

  "Good. Start pulling your people back."

  Decard's voice rose in a strident protest. "But sir— I mean—"

  "That's an order," Kane broke in, an iron edge in his tone. "Do it now. Acknowledge."

  After a few seconds, Decard responded with a weary resignation, "Acknowledged. Will comply."

  Kane understood Decard's reluctance to retreat in the face of the enemy, but he had learned long ago that survival was the touchstone of success in any line of work, particularly his. No one accomplished anything by dying and even less by capture and interrogation.

  He heard another jackhammering fusillade of auto- fire, punctuated by the heavier trumps of the detonating grenades launched by the H&K XM-29 assault rifles carried by Cerberus Away Team Alpha.

  "The Nephilim are crossing the river," Decard said breathlessly. "We're falling back."

  "Roger that," Kane said, striving to sound calm to the point of nonchalance. "Keep your heads down."

  Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact's volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated a subcutaneously embedded analog-to-digital voice encoder.

  Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, as long as a Commtact was worn, he or she would still have a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

  Lifting a compact set of night-vision binoculars to his face, Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.

  The Indus was less than a quarter of a mile away, and in daylight details along the opposite shore were easily visible. Now all Kane glimpsed was the amorphous, armored shapes of the Nephilim and the renegade Magistrates as they flitted back and forth. He was careful not to focus the binoculars on the discharge of weapons, particularly those of the Nephilim's ASP emitters, because the IR optics enhanced the energy bursts to nova blasts of intolerable brightness.

  He knew the river flowing past Hardpan was little more than fifty yards wide and very shallow, a ford used by traders and nomads. All along the banks were marshes and islets overgrown with reeds. Hardpan had itself had once been the site of a fair-sized metropolis. The ruins of old outbuildings were scattered up and down both sides of the Indus. The warm, humid breeze smelled of swamp, raw sewage and the smoke from the fishermen's huts that had been caught in the exchange of fire and burned to the ground.

  Juballah, the Devi of Harappa, stepped up beside him and murmured bleakly, "Soon it will be dawn and we will be overrun."

  The brown-skinned woman's voice reverberated within Kane's head, first as a conglomeration of liquid syllables, before the translation program from the PDA in the pocket of his field jacket fed him the English translation.

  In conjunction with a sophisticated lingual translation program within the PDA, the Commtacts analyzed the pattern of a language and then provided a real-time audio translation. Some foreign phrases and words would not be exact translations, but the program recognized enough words to supply an English equivalent. Conversely, the program supplied him with the appropriate responses in the language it heard.

  Glancing over at the woman, Kane once again wondered why she chose to stand with him at the walls, clad only in the clinging fabric of a red-and-gold silk sari. Her heavy black hair was cut square at her shoulders and artfully streaked with gray. Juballah was not old, but her dark face was that of a matronly aristocrat, locked tight with the stamp of harsh determination. She might have been beautiful, if not for the austerity of her features.

  With an assurance he did not feel, Kane said, "Overlord Nergal isn't interested in taking your city." Although tempted, he didn't add, Because he thinks he owns it already.

  Juballah nodded. "He wants what lies beneath it...and he will not hesitate to destroy Harappa if we stand in his way. There are many legends about the ruthlessness of Nergal and his armies of darkness."

  "If Nergal wanted to destroy your city, he would have done it as soon as he arrived yesterday, not waited until now."

  "Our refusal to allow him entrance may have made him angry enough to do it," Juballah said quietly.

  "We'll take every countermeasure possible to stop him." Kane knew how lame his words of encouragement sounded. To cover his discomfort, he raised the binoculars again, gazing at the armored figures wading through hip-deep water at the shallowest point of the ford. His stomach muscles fluttered in adrenaline-fueled spasms.

  Kane estimated the Nephilim at fifty, with a handful of former Sharpeville Magistrates swelling the ranks. Leaning over the edge of the mud-brick wall, he watched the members of CAT Alpha running across the open ground between the hastily constructed fortifications. With crackling hisses, balls of plasma streaked through the darkness after them, exploding against heaps of broken masonry, raining shards of rock in all directions.

  Like himself, the dozen members of Team Alpha wore tricolor desert camouflage BDUs, helmets and thick-soled jump boots. Unlike Kane, Personnel Armor System Ground Troop vests encased the team's torsos. Weighing seventeen pounds, the PASGT vests provided protection from even .30-caliber rounds, but their ability to withstand the accelerated streams of protons fired by the Nephilim's wrist pods was unknown.

  The nine men and three women swiftly took up positions behind the cover of stacked rocks and brick, returning the ASP fire with short bursts from their H&K assault rifles. Stuttering roars overlapped as the barrels of the autorifles lipped short tongues of flame. A grenade fired from Decard's RPG-7 lit up the darkness with an eye-searing blaze of orange and red.

  "We've slowed their advance," Decard said over the comm. "At least for a few minutes."

  "Don't let them outflank you and pin you down," Kane replied. "Keep working your way back in."

  "Roger that."

  Globes of incandescent plasma darted from the direction of the riverbank and splashed against the bulwarks of stone amid showers of multicolored sparks. Kane resisted the urge to order the team to retreat into the city of Harappa proper. He had faith that Decard, despite his youth, would know when a full withdrawal was necessary.

  Kane adjusted the chin strap of his own tan-and-brown helmet, wishing not for the first time since arriving in Pakistan that he wore a black shadow suit. He would have been cooler, if nothing else. Standing an inch over six feet, Kane was built with a lean, long-limbed economy. Most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. A wolf's cold stare glittered in his blue-gray eyes, the color of dawn light on a sharp steel blade. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his clean-shaved left cheek.

  The BDU was a departure from the skintight shadow suit he preferred to wear on dark territory missions, but Lakesh had suggested that the more conventional clothing would make him and his team appear less sinister to the people of Harappa.

  Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the overlords, had become the preferred tactic of Cerberus over the past couple of years. As the canvas of their operations broadened, the personnel situation at Cerberus redoubt also changed.

  No longer could Kane, Grant, Brigid Baptiste and Domi undertake the majority of the ops and therefore shoulder the lion's share of the risks. Over the past six months, Kane and Grant had seen to the formation of three Cerberus Away Teams—Alpha, Beta and Delta. At the moment Alpha Team was undergoing its baptism of fire. Led by young Decard, a former Magistrate from Samariumville, none of the troopers had received so much as a scratch during the hour-long firefight down at the riverbank.

  Through the binoculars, Kane studied the approaching Nephilim. Broadly built men who had a look of impassivity about them, they strode forward with the single-minded purposefulness of the march of automatons. That assessment wasn't too far wrong, he reflected sourly.

  Set deep beneath jutting brow ridges, the white eyes of the Nephilim did not blink, nor did their craggy, scaly faces register emotion. Kane knew why. Ovoid shells of alloy rose from the rear of their dark red body armor, sweeping up to enclo
se the back and upper portion of their hairless skulls. From the undersides of the shells, hair-thin filaments extended down to pierce both sides of the Nephilim's heads, a bioelectronic interface that for all intents and purposes turned them into mind-controlled drones.

  Conduits stretched down from inch-thick reinforcing epaulets on their shoulders, connecting to the alloyed gauntlets that sheathed their hands and forearms. From raised pods on the gauntlets rose three small flanges that flared out like cobras' hoods. Red energy pulsed in the gaping mouths of the stylized serpent heads of the ASP emitters.

  Kane tightened the focus of the binoculars, noting that the Magistrates marching among the Nephilim displayed neither their discipline nor fearlessness. Although the Nephilim employed the wrist-mounted ASPs almost exclusively, the Magistrates were armed with the standard-issue standbys of Copperheads and Sin Eaters, neither of which had the range, stopping power or versatility of the XM-29s. Their black polycarbonate armor was far less resistant to damage than the smart-metal alloy worn by the Nephilim.

  Grant's lion-like voice suddenly came over Kane's Commtact, so brusque and loud he was glad he had turned down the volume. "What the hell's going on up there? We hear a hell of a lot of fire."

  "That's because there is a hell of a lot of fire," Kane responded. "As in a hell of a firefight right outside the walls. How's it going down there?"

  Grant's reply was so long in coming, Kane almost repeated the question. "I just asked Brigid for an update," Grant said. "She thinks she has the combination decoded but she needs a little more time to make sure. How close is Nergal?"

  "That depends on how much more time Baptiste wants," Kane said. "If she waits another ten minutes, she can probably ask him for the combination in person."

  "Why doesn't he just use his damn ships?" Grant demanded. "He could level the city with them."

  "I don't know," Kane answered. "Maybe he has a sentimental attachment to this place."

  The Commtact accurately conveyed Grant's snort of derision. "I can't imagine why."

  "Me either." Turning on the narrow parapet, Kane swept his gaze over the city. What Harappa lacked in beauty was more than made up for by its mathematical symmetry. The buildings were mainly houses, constructed of mud bricks dug out of the banks of the Indus.-

  No lights showed in the windows of the squat and low buildings. A broad patchwork of lanes ran between the dwellings. There were places for pens and livestock and small gardens. No animals or people stirred on the streets. Most of the inhabitants had fled when Nergal's three sky disks arrived the afternoon before.

  The main thoroughfare ran straight through the city and ended at a time-eroded pile of stone that might have been a palace or temple—three thousand years ago. A colonnade of square, squat pillars ran across its front, and a pair of heavier ones stood at its entrance on either end of a half-built stone wall. Wooden scaffolds rose at various points around the temple as it underwent restoration. Although Kane couldn't see the entrance from his vantage point, he knew Grant and Brigid Baptiste were within a vault beneath the structure.

  Kane started to turn, saying to Grant, "I'll have the CAT pull back inside the walls, and we'll start working our way to you."

  "Copy that."

  Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a globule of plasma jetting toward him from the darkness, like a fireball launched from a catapult. Grabbing Juballah around the waist, he wrestled the woman down just as a kaleidoscopic bolt of colors and energy bit a deep notch out of the top of the wall. Fist-sized chunks exploded from the wall, and Kane felt a wave of heat slapping against the back of his neck. Gravel rattled on his helmet. The Devi cried out something the PDA couldn't translate and Kane was just as glad.

  "The ship!" Decard yelled angrily.

  Quickly, Kane pushed himself away from Juballah and climbed to one knee, fanning away the smoke as he peered toward the Indus. A featureless disk of molten silver rose vertically into the sky, its configuration and smooth hull reminiscent of a throwing discus used by athletes—if the discus was twenty feet in diameter and coated with mercury. Perfectly centered on the disk's underside bulged a half dome, like the boss of a shield. Three of the ships had landed the afternoon before, sinking out of sight behind the crest of a low ridge on the far side of the Indus.

  As the craft took to the air, Kane realized with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach that the fourteen-hour-long siege was about to come to a decisive end. Whatever had prevented Overlord Nergal from taking an active hand in the engagement was no longer an issue. Kane had survived so long by taking nothing for granted, so the sight of the airborne silver disk didn't surprise him. He had known that the overlord would eventually tire of exchanging ineffectual shots across the Indus.

  "Break off the engagement and withdraw the team," Kane ordered Decard tersely. "Pull all the way back and make for the vault. We're out of here."

  "Yes, sir," Decard responded. "I mean—"

  "Just do it," Kane broke in impatiently, eyes fixed on the disk.

  He hefted his own Copperhead, knowing the abbreviated subgun would be less than effective against the ship, composed as it was of smart metal. The Copperhead was under two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, the extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing for one-handed use.

  Optical image intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts, but Kane knew from experience a long or short burst wouldn't do much more than ding the hull of the disk ship.

  Hauling Juballah to her feet by her wrists, he said, "We're about to be seriously overexposed. Let's get to cover."

  As the pair ran along the narrow walkway to the stairs leading down to the street, Team Alpha sprinted through the open gate in an orderly deployment of personnel and firepower. The raised portcullis was made of black iron bars and set between two flanking towers, but lowering it would make no difference to either the oncoming Nephilim or the sky ship of Overlord Nergal.

  At the foot the stairs, Kane paused to call Grant. "We're on our way back to you. Nergal is finally using his air support."

  "Acknowledged," came his longtime partner's response. "I think we're about done."

  "Yeah," Kane replied dourly. "Us too."

  He waved the team and Juballah onward into the city, but Decard and Halloran dropped back to stand beside him. A fair-skinned man of medium height and build, Decard breathed heavily as perspiration glistened on his flushed face.

  "We couldn't hold them," he snapped bitterly.

  "You weren't supposed to," Kane retorted, casting an anxious glance through the open gate. "You knew that."

  "With all due respect, sir," Halloran challenged, "then what was the point of this?"

  Halloran was not very tall, but her full-cheeked face beneath the overhang of her helmet showed the intense expression of a veteran warrior. She was actually a cartographer and a raw recruit on her first away mission, forgetting the chain of command in the excitement of battle.

  Coldly, Kane answered, "Your team bought us time and that's all I expected. Let's move out."