“Not your usual choice,” Lakesh said as he noticed the Uzi.

  “It’s just a little something for the masses.” She shrugged. “Never know who I’m going to bump into.”

  Worry crossed Lakesh’s features and he began to express his concern but was stopped by Domi’s gentle touch on his arm. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “A little change of scene is all. With bullets.”

  Nodding, Lakesh pointed up to the large map of the world that covered one wall of the ops center. He had set the Mercator relief map to show specific points at his commands, and he flipped a control switch to dim the lights so that his instructions were clear. “Our field team is here,” he explained as a throbbing green circle appeared close to the old Russian border. “The most efficient way to get you there would be by the interphaser, but there’s no energy vortex in the vicinity of our friends.”

  Domi nodded as she looked at the map, encouraging Lakesh to proceed.

  “We’ve located an old Soviet naval base here, just outside a fishing town called Poti.” An amber light sparked to life beside the throbbing green circle, touching on the Black Sea. “Our tests show that a working mat-trans exists in the base, although we cannot be certain that the base itself is empty. We’ll send you to this mat-trans and, if you run into any resistance, you are to jump back immediately. Immediately, Domi—you hear me?”

  Domi saluted playfully. “Aye-aye, skipper.”

  “I’m serious about this,” Lakesh warned her. “Now, Poti is perhaps twenty-five miles west of your final destination, which means you’ll have some territory to cover once you get there. We’re going to try to get a message through to Kane’s team and see if he or Grant can come find you in one of the Mantas. But as you know, we can no longer guarantee the veracity of communiqués in this regard, so it may be that you’re on your own.”

  Domi nodded. “I understand.”

  Lakesh stepped back and reached for a bundle of papers in a sealed, stay-dry pouch. He handed the pouch to Domi. “Here’s a map of the area, as well as a second map showing operational mat-trans units in a two-hundred-mile radius from your landing point, in case you need to exit via a different route,” he explained. “The main map shows the terrain with markings for the best route and your final destination. There may be some climbing involved, I’m afraid, but let’s hope that Kane or Grant can come find you before that.”

  “Yup,” Domi agreed, taking the stay-dry pouch and rifling through its contents.

  “We’ve also included several satellite photographs of the immediate area,” Lakesh told her, “which may be useful if there are any discrepancies between the old maps and the current lay of the land. From our most recent surveillance sweep, the area is mostly unpopulated once you get away from the coast, so you shouldn’t run into any trouble. Shouldn’t doesn’t equate to won’t, of course.”

  “Of course.” Domi smiled.

  Lakesh led the way to the antechamber that held the mat-trans unit. Farrell was already there, prepping the unit for use, and he silently acknowledged Lakesh and Domi as they approached.

  “If there is any trouble,” Lakesh warned her, “I want you back here straight away. Just a swift jump there and back, nothing more. Okay?”

  “It will be fine,” Domi assured him as she zipped up the parka coat and settled the hood down behind her neck, its faux-fur brushing against her earlobes. She stepped into the armaglass-walled unit, and Farrell pulled the door shut behind her, sealing her in the room.

  A few moments later, a rising hum was audible and mist rose from the vents as the mat-trans unit prepared to blast Domi’s atoms across the map and into faraway Georgia.

  Chapter 17

  “God hears the pleas of all of Her children,” Minister Petrovna told the congregation as she stood before them in the cavernous church hall in Poti. She wore the ornate robe of office, a red dress with a golden star-field pattern stitched across it, and the miter that added almost two feet to her height.

  The meeting hall was cold, despite the mild weather outside, and her congregation looked miserable and desperate. They numbered fewer than forty now. The whole town of Poti had been whittled down by disease and famine and the burning hunger they all held inside, and they had pinned their dwindling hopes on God. For Minister Petrovna, at least, business was booming.

  A hand went up in the middle of the gathered group. The hand was attached to a thin arm and the arm belonged to Donatas, a twenty-five-year-old fisherman whose family, the minister knew, was on the brink of starvation. At twenty-five, Donatas looked like a man in his fifties. “When will we eat?” he pleaded desperately. “When will God bring us food?”

  Minister Petrovna smiled reassuringly. “Soon,” she replied, addressing the whole congregation. “An angel will come from the heavens to bring us God’s bounty. I have seen this in my visions.”

  Petrovna really had seen this in one of her visions, although the validity of the visions of a woman on the very edge of starvation might be brought into question were it not that her congregation was also subject to the same hallucinations due to lack of protein.

  Their coastal town was self-reliant and resourceful in the tough and unforgiving world of the long, postnukecaust recovery. But something had poisoned the fishing waters, a rainstorm that belched toxins into the water and the lands all around. The plants had continued to grow, the fish had continued to swim, but they were bad plants now, bad fish. The contamination was rife, and the vast community had been cut down to a tenth of its number in the space of a few months.

  In such trying times, people turned to Minister Petrovna for advice and salvation, and she had done her best to assure them that all would be well, as their pets and then their children and their old folks wilted away before their eyes.

  Once upon a time, the church hall had been a part of the naval base on the shores of the Black Sea. But the ships had long since gone, the sailors dead and forgotten. The old usage had made way for the new. Minister Petrovna had inherited the church from another minister in a gunfight that had left the man of the cloth bleeding in the street for three days before he finally passed away. By mutual agreement, it was decided that Minister Petrovna clearly had God’s will behind her and that the old man had been nothing more than a fraud and a fool. While she may be the chosen of the Almighty, Minister Petrovna chose to remain heavily armed. As it was written, God protected those who heavily armed themselves.

  The congregation was getting restless, she could tell. They wanted food, not promises. “God’s bounty,” Minister Petrovna called, raising her voice above the hubbub, “is rich and She is generous. She has helped us all to survive for this long—we, Her faithful. This test of our faith is almost at an end.”

  Despite her rhetoric, no one could have been more surprised when, at that very moment, there was a sudden flash of lightning from the stained-glass wall behind the minister. The glass was a smoky violet in color and had been there for as long as anyone could remember. The stained glass surrounded a storage room, just a box with a tiled floor. In all of her days there, Minister Petrovna had never seen the room flash with lightning.

  She paced across to the glass-walled room, watching as a wave of fog seemed to fill the room before parting to reveal a bulky figure inside where there had been no one before.

  Minister Petrovna stood outside the door to the room, her congregation waiting eagerly behind her. As they waited, the figure inside the room made its way to the door and worked the lock from the inside.

  When the door opened, a woman stood revealed, dressed in a bulky, green coat that ended in a fur-lined collar. The woman had short, close-cropped hair and her face was a beautiful combination of high cheekbones covered in smooth, iridescent skin. And the woman was white as snow, her hair and her skin a dazzling alabaster.

  Minister Petrovna knew immediately what the beautiful woman was. “Welcome, angel,” she said.

  AS GRANT MADE HIS WAY back through the wide, sludge-filled ventilation shaft with the medi-kit from his Manta, he heard a voice patching through over his Commtact: “Kane? Grant? Do…read? Ov—” It was Brewster Philboyd.

  “This is Grant,” Grant responded. “I hear you, but the message is coming through broken. I repeat, your message is broken. Please stand by, and I’ll let you know when I’m on higher ground. Do you copy? Over.”

  Grant stopped in the tunnel, the small metal box of medical supplies held loosely in his left hand as he waited for a response from Cerberus.

  There was a brief pause, then Philboyd’s voice came stuttering over the Commtact once more. “…sage received, Grant. Will be wait…ver.”

  Grant sprinted to the low end of the ventilation shaft, shouting for Kane’s attention. As he was lowering himself through the busted grille into the underground Soviet base, Kane appeared in the doorway of the room, microlight in hand.

  “What is it?” Kane asked urgently.

  “I’ve just had a message from Cerberus,” Grant explained, passing the medi-kit across to Kane. “Sounds urgent. I’m going topside to get a proper signal. Will you be okay taking care of Brigid?”

  Kane flipped open the lid of the medi-kit, glancing at the supplies inside. “I’ll be fine,” he assured Grant. “Any idea what they want?”

  “Dunno,” Grant said, shaking his head. “Just heard Philboyd trying to raise us. Breaking protocol, so I’d assume it’s pretty urgent.”

  “You want me to come up and speak to him?” Kane asked.

  “Stay with Brigid,” Grant told him. “It’s where you want to be. If they need to speak to you I’ll shout down. Okay?”

  Kane thanked his friend and urged him to get going. “Baptiste seems stable anyway,” Kane added as Grant clambered back through the broken grate of the air shaft.

  “Good,” Grant acknowledged as he disappeared into the huge ventilation pipe once more.

  DOMI OPENED HER EYES, and found herself slumped on the floor of a mat-trans unit. Beyond the armaglass walls, she could see figures moving.

  Carefully Domi righted herself, forcing her muscles to move as she climbed up from the tiled floor. All around her, wisps of smoke were dissipating where the mat-trans unit was powering down, and she could see battered boxes and crates full of ammunition and books on the far side of the room. Mat-trans travel was an altogether unpleasant experience. Domi stood in the middle of the chamber and took and held a deep breath, letting her nausea pass. Then she made her way to the door and disengaged the lock to let herself out.

  She was greeted by a crowd of people, at least thirty of them that she could see, all of them looking tired and disheveled. Standing at the front of the group, smiling benignly, was a middle-aged woman wearing a long red dress and a tall hat.

  “Welcome, angel,” the woman said, staring at Domi in wonder.

  Behind the woman, the crowd shushed to silence, and Domi realized that everyone in the room was watching her, awaiting her next move, their feral eyes glinting and sharp teeth displayed.

  Despite Domi’s assurances to Lakesh, it wasn’t fine. Not by a long shot.

  BRIGID BAPTISTE WAS STABLE, hanging limply from one of the lightning-white pipes in the part of the astral complex that she had come to think of as the torture chamber. It was the second time in an hour that she had been made to hang like this, a chain wrapped tightly around her wrists, binding them together and causing her to lose the feeling in her fingers. Or was it an hour? she wondered. Was it a day, a week, a year? She knew now that this place disrupted a person’s sense of time, and the thought that she might have been hanging there for months rather than minutes, that Kane and Grant had perhaps deserted her decaying body, worried her greatly.

  No, she told herself, they would never leave her like that. Kane would find a way to transport her back to Cerberus and have Lakesh and Reba DeFore look at ways to keep her alive until she woke up.

  But how did one wake up from this astral weapons factory? Was it even possible to do so?

  She remembered the strange concave wall with its permeable surface. It had seemed that she could pass through it, but she hadn’t put that to the test. Perhaps it was a valve, a one-way filter that she had traveled through but could never use for a return trip.

  “Damn!” she grumbled to herself as she hung there, completely still, conserving her energy. Djugashvili would know, surely. But what if Djugashvili did know, and what if it transpired that there was no way to return? What if Krylograd, the astral factory or whatever they were calling this place, what if it was fundamentally flawed, a dead end that could never be escaped? What if that was the reason that the Soviets had never revealed the existence of the Death Cry?

  DID THAT WOMAN IN THE crazy hat just call me an angel? Domi wondered as she spun into the crowd behind the lady in the red dress. It seemed a pretty crazy thing to say, but maybe it was a mistranslation from the Commtact. She couldn’t hear what the woman said after that; her words were blotted out by the rising cheer from the crowd.

  The crowd certainly seemed pleased to see Domi; they greeted her with open arms. But there was something sinister about the whole occasion, an undercurrent that Domi felt instinctively.

  “Look at her beautiful fingers,” a disheveled woman close to Domi cried as the crowd pawed at her, pulling at the parka she wore.

  “Give me some room,” Domi said. “I can’t breathe.”

  The crowd ignored her. They were probably unable to understand her words anyway, Domi realized as they huddled closer.

  The woman in the hat and the red dress was shouting again, giving instructions to the mob. “Everybody will get a piece of the angel,” she assured them. “Hold her down,” she said as she produced a meat cleaver from somewhere in her long, layered dress, “while I make the first incision.”

  The disheveled woman who had been admiring Domi’s fingers suddenly pulled at the albino woman’s wrist, yanking her closer and snapping her teeth as she tried to bite Domi’s pinkie finger.

  Domi made a fist and the woman’s sharp teeth clamped down on a knuckle. Across from her, a man was trying to pull Domi’s left arm behind her back, trapping it. Domi bent, loosening the man’s grip and rolling him over her shoulders.

  Cannibals, she realized, or something very much like. She’d touched down in a great big gathering of the vile bastards. And it was clear that they were hungry for albino meat!

  GRANT STOOD BESIDE THE broken ventilation grille as he spoke to Cerberus over the Commtact. Brewster Philboyd had been replaced by Lakesh, who explained the situation in brief.

  “We have significantly more than just communication problems,” Lakesh told him, “and it seemed judicious to send another agent to join you in the field. Over.”

  “Understood,” Grant acknowledged, before waiting for Lakesh to give him the details. “Over.”

  “Domi has jumped to a mat-trans unit in the old naval base in Poti. The coordinates have been forwarded to the Mantas. Do you think you can track her down, Grant? Over.”

  Grant thought about it for a few seconds. “Couldn’t you patch through her transponder signal?” he asked. “I could lock in on that and pick her up in next to no time. Over.”

  There was the standard pause over the Commtact as the communication was bounced from the satellite to the Cerberus redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains and back. “That may be problematic,” Lakesh explained. “We can try, but we’ve been having trouble with the transponder signals,” he admitted. “Over.”

  Grant thought of Brigid and the conversation he had been having with Kane not so long ago about the apparent discrepancy of her condition and the transponder data’s interpretation. “Patch it through,” he decided, climbing into the cockpit of his Manta, “and I’ll assume it’s with a pinch of salt. Over and out.”

  As soon as the communication with Cerberus was finished, Grant hailed Kane, hoping the signal would penetrate into the underground bunker enough to explain the situation. “Kane? I’ve got a rush job on,” he stated. “You hear me?”

  Kane’s voice came back to him over the Commtact, stuttered with asthmatic pauses. “—eceiving y——at’s happening?”

  “Domi’s here,” Grant said as he went through the pre-flight routine. “I repeat, Domi’s here. Needs a taxi service to pick her up from the airport. I’ll be back inside an hour,” Grant told him. “Do you copy?”

  “One hour,” Kane replied. “Gotch—”

  With that, Grant powered the Manta into the skies and headed west toward the blip on his heads-up display that represented Domi’s location in the coastal town of Poti.

  VOICES FROM THE DOORWAY made Brigid look up. The two sentries who had brought her there had taken up posts outside the open door. Now they were talking to another man, and as Brigid listened she recognized the voice of Yuri, the young lab technician. A moment later, he walked through the door carrying a bottle of ammonia and a roll of gauze.

  “I wanted to take another look at your wounds,” he explained quietly, offering Brigid a shy smile.

  “That’s very kind,” she told him, struggling to keep her head raised to maintain eye contact. Her muscles were screaming with pain from fatigue and discomfort.

  The lab assistant removed the cap from the ammonia before placing a balled rag over the top and tipping it upside down. Once the rag was soaked he began dabbing at the cut above Brigid’s eye, cleaning the wound of debris. It stung, but Brigid endured it in silence.

  Once Yuri had finished cleaning the wound, he examined it closely, nodding with satisfaction. “It shouldn’t cause you any trouble,” he told her, keeping his voice low, “just a bit of swelling. You have another cut on your cheek,” he told her as he added ammonia to a new cloth.