This was one of those days.

  He glanced toward the wall shielding the mainframe computer and its priceless database. The operations complex had five dedicated and eight shared subprocessors, all linked to the mainframe. Two centuries before, it had been one of the most advanced models ever built, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed when it was built, protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.

  The computer served as the bridge between the worlds of predark and postdark. Lakesh took no pride in the fact of having straddled both of those worlds. A well-built man of medium height, with thick, glossy, black hair, a dark olive complexion and a long, aquiline nose, he looked older than his early fifties, despite strands of gray streaking his temples. In reality, he had observed his 255th birthday only a short time before.

  As a youthful genius from Kashmir, Lakesh had been drafted into the web of conspiracy the overseers of the Totality Concept had spun during the last two decades of the twentieth century. A multidegreed physicist and cyberneticist, he served as the administrator for Project Cerberus, and that position had earned him survival during the global megacull of January 2001.

  The Totality Concept was the umbrella designation for American military supersecret researches into many different arcane and eldritch sciences, from hyperdimensional matter transfer to temporal phasing to a new form of genetics. Most of the spin-off, yet related projects had their own hidden installations, like Over-project Excalibur, which was based in a subterranean complex in New Mexico.

  Lakesh strode up the long aisle between the computer stations. The overhead lights in high-ceilinged room automatically dimmed at sunset and came back on to full brightness at dawn. They were bright now, causing Lakesh to squint at the consoles that ran the length of the walls. Indicator lights flickered red, green and amber, circuits hummed, needles twitched and monitor screens displayed changing columns of numbers.

  Only half a dozen people were in the command center, and they resolutely didn’t look at him as he passed. He didn’t know whether he felt grateful for their studied indifference or annoyed by its transparency. The personnel sitting at the stations were all former Manitius Moonbase scientists.

  In the three-plus years since their arrival in Cerberus, the Moon colonists had proved their trustworthiness and ingenuity on many occasions. Most of the people who lived in the Cerberus redoubt acted in the capacity of support personnel, regardless of their specialized individual skills or training. They worked rotating shifts, eight hours a day, seven days a week.

  Primarily their work involved the routine maintenance and monitoring of the installation’s environmental systems, the satellite data feed and the security network. However, everyone was given at least a superficial understanding of all the redoubt’s systems so all Cerberus personnel could pinch-hit in times of emergency.

  Grant and Kane were exempt from this cross training, inasmuch as they served as the exploratory and enforcement arm of Cerberus and undertook far and away the lion’s share of the risks. On their downtime between missions they made sure all the ordnance in the armory was in good condition and occasionally tuned up the vehicles in the depot.

  Brigid Baptiste, due to her eidetic memory, was the most exemplary member of the redoubt’s permanent staff, since she could step into any vacancy. However, her gifts were a two-edged sword, inasmuch as those same skills made her an indispensable addition to away missions.

  Lakesh entered the antechamber at the far end of the command center. The room held the eight-foot-tall mat-trans chamber, rising from an elevated platform. Vertical slabs of brown-tinted armaglass enclosed the six-sided chamber. All of the official Cerberus gateway units in the mat-trans network were color-coded so authorized jumpers could tell at a glance into which redoubt they had materialized.

  Despite the fact that it seemed an inefficient method of differentiating one installation from another, only personnel holding color-coded security clearances were allowed to make use of the system. Inasmuch as their use was restricted to a select few units, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.

  Armaglass was manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century from a special compound that plasticized the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.

  Lakesh took a great deal of pride in the Cerberus unit because it was the first fully debugged matter-transfer inducer built after the prototypes. It served as the basic template for all the others that followed.

  A metal plate on the elevated platform hung open, exposing a confusing mass of microprocessor boards. Donald Bry lay on his stomach, peering into the aperture, the beam of light from the headlamp casting a halo on the circuitry of the internal emitter array. The elastic strap confined his tangle of coppery curls. A collection of small precision tools were scattered around him.

  Bry didn’t look up at the sound of Lakesh’s approach. Instead he said loudly, “No, Lakesh. Like I told you an hour ago and an hour before that, there’s nothing wrong on this end.”

  In his cultured voice, touched with a lilting East Indian accent, Lakesh retorted, “And like I told you an hour ago, I don’t expect you to find anything wrong—only to find a way to circumvent the problem. Come up with a work-around.”

  Bry served as Lakesh’s lieutenant in all matters technical, and occasionally he accused his mentor of forcing him to act as either scapegoat or miracle worker. With a sigh, the slightly built man elbowed himself onto his back.

  Bry stared up at Lakesh, and the light from the headlamp cut into the scientist’s eyes. He flinched, uttering a wordless sound of annoyance. In a tone of aggrieved patience, Bry said, “We’ve got a transit line signal from this unit to the one in Snakefish, but we can’t establish a matter-stream lock. For some reason, that unit is way out of phase with the network. I don’t know how I can possibly work around that.”

  Planting his hands on his hips, Lakesh paced the jump chamber, glaring balefully past its open door to the interior. The polished metal floor consisted of a pattern of interlocking hexagons. Although the gateway represented Lakesh’s lifework, he often wished it were otherwise.

  A device that could transmit matter—particularly soldiers and weapons—was a more important offensive weapon than America’s entire nuclear stockpile. However, matter transmission had been found to be absolutely impossible to achieve by the employment of Einsteinian physics. Only quantum physics, coupled with quantum mechanics, had made it work beyond a couple of prototypes that transported steel balls only a few feet across a room.

  But even those crude early models could not have functioned at all without the basic components that preexisted the Totality Concept.

  As the project’s overseer, Lakesh experienced the epiphany and made that breakthrough. Armed with this knowledge, under Lakesh’s guidance the quantum interphase mat-transinducers opened a rift in the hyperdimensional quantum stream, between a relativistic here and there. The Cerberus technology did more than beam matter from one spot in linear space to another. It reduced organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmitted it along hyperdimensional pathways on a carrier wave.

  In 1989, Lakesh himself had been the first successful long-distance matter transfer of a human subject, traveling a hundred yards from a prototype gateway chamber to a receiving booth. That initial success was replicated many times, and with the replication came the modifications and improvements of the quantum interphase mat-trans inducers, reaching the point where they were manufactured in modular form.

  Even then, the mystery of the origin of the technology that made the entire system viable haunted Lakesh. It would be many years before he came across the shocking fact that although the integral components were of terrestrial origin, they were constructed under the auspices of a nonhuman intelligence—or at least, nonhuman as defined by late-twentieth-century standards. Nearly two centuries would pass before Lakesh learned the entire story, or a version of it. Within a year, the proper terminology for the process was replaced in favor of the Cerberus network, or the Cerberus gateways.

  To streamline the mass production of the quantum interphase mat-trans inducers, the project was moved from the Dulce, New Mexico, installation and headquartered in a redoubt on an exceptionally remote mountain plateau in Montana’s Bitterroot Range. Only a single road stretched up from the foothills to the plateau, bordered by sheer cliffs that had been carved when acres of mountainside collapsed during the nuke-triggered earthquakes of nearly two centuries ago.

  The trilevel, thirty-acre facility built into the side of a mountain peak was constructed primarily of vanadium alloy and boasted design and construction specifications that were aimed at making the complex a secret community of at least a hundred people. The redoubt housed two dozen self-contained apartments, a cafeteria, a decontamination center, a medical dispensary, a swimming pool and holding cells on the bottom level. Redoubt Cerberus was an organized masterpiece of impenetrability.

  The plateau holding the redoubt and the road leading up to it were surrounded by an elaborate system of heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision video cameras and motion-trigger alarms. In the unlikely instance of an organized assault against the installation, an electric force field energized with particles of antimatter could be activated at the touch of a button. A telemetric communications array was situated at the top of the peak.

  Although official designations of all Totality Concept–related redoubts were based on the phonetic alphabet, almost no one stationed in the facility referred to it as Bravo. The mixture of civilian scientists and military personnel simply called it Cerberus.

  Bry’s voice brought Lakesh back to the matter at hand. “Anyway, there’s no need to stress out. The biolink transponders show the away team is in good health. You need to stop worrying before you give yourself a coronary.”

  “I’ve been telling Lakesh the same thing for years,” a deep female voice said from the doorway. “He never pays any attention until he collapses.”

  Chapter 8

  Recognizing the voice immediately, Lakesh turned to face Reba DeFore. “I’m not worried as much as I am single-minded, Doctor.”

  Buxom and stocky, DeFore wore the one-piece white coverall common throughout the redoubt as a duty uniform. She was brown-eyed, and her dark bronze flesh tones contrasted sharply with her ash-blond hair, worn loosely about her shoulders for once instead of being caught back in a severe French braid.

  “You become single-minded to the point of obsession when Domi goes out on a mission,” DeFore replied. As the chief medic of the Cerberus redoubt, she always spoke her mind. “With Brigid, Kane and Grant on their own mission, she’s the most qualified.”

  “I’m quite aware of that,” Lakesh said stiffly. “But she and her team are overdue by nearly five hours. Since the mat-trans unit in Snakefish is apparently malfunctioning, my worries are quite genuine.”

  “You haven’t figured out the cause yet?”

  “No,” Bry spoke, his tone waspish. “But it’s not for lack of Lakesh pushing me.”

  DeFore frowned at Lakesh. “I thought you knew more about the gateway system than anybody alive.”

  “Obviously,” Lakesh retorted dryly. “But that doesn’t mean an unprecedented malfunction could occur, something I or anyone else who worked on the network had never encountered before.”

  “Dr. Singh,” Evanovich called from the control center. “We’ve finally got some images on the sat uplink.”

  Lakesh hurried past DeFore. Bry made a move to rise, but Lakesh snapped over his shoulder, “Keep working.”

  Lakesh walked to the main control console. Evanovich, a blond Moonbase émigré in his forties, obligingly gave up his chair. Lakesh sat before the big VGA monitor screen, and his hands played over the keyboard as though he were a concert pianist.

  Across the right side of the screen scrolled a constant stream of figures, symbols and numbers. Near the bottom left corner was a curving sweep of blue-green, mottled with wisps of white.

  “There’s the Pacific coast,” he murmured. “So far so good.”

  “Wait,” Evanovich said.

  The view on the screen tightened, penetrating the haze, and more details began to show. Forests appeared as ripples of green texture. At the touch of another key, the country leaped upward. A tapestry of dark, oasis-spotted sand swelled on the screen.

  The perspective on the screen changed, rushing downward, through a sky flecked with scraps of white clouds. The plummet halted over a place that was flat and bare, but held structures in the center of it.

  The image was slightly out of focus, but Lakesh saw a series of small, outlying constructions arranged in a circle around the bulk of a larger building. Rearing out of the sands was the suggestion of a wall.

  Lakesh stared unblinkingly and then swallowed hard. “Ishvara,” he murmured hoarsely in Hindi.

  Coming to stand behind him, DeFore asked, “What is it?”

  Lakesh nodded toward the image on the screen. “This explains why we can’t establish a lock on the Snakefish gateway.”

  Leaning forward, DeFore squinted. “I don’t see anything but old ruins.”

  “Exactly,” Lakesh said quietly. “Those ruins are what is left of Snakefish.”

  “What?” DeFore moved closer. “That can’t be.”

  The view was one of solemn desolation. Dust hung in the afternoon light. Everything looked as if a giant hand had reached down from above and crushed everything into the ground.

  Musingly, Lakesh said, “It appears as if most of the ville has collapsed in on itself, fallen into a giant cenote.”

  “What the hell is that?’ the medic demanded peevishly.

  “Colloquially known as a sinkhole…a depression in the surface topography that occurs when the bedrock is removed.”

  “I don’t see any sign of the Admin Monolith,” DeFore said.

  Lakesh touched several sections of the screen with a forefinger. “There and there—and there. The entire building collapsed, carrying the mat-trans unit with it. No doubt it is buried under tons of rubble. The power source is still functioning, still feeding us a live signal, but there is no way the gateway can be activated now, even if it were dug out.”

  After a thoughtful moment, DeFore said, “At least our team managed to make it out.” She nodded toward the medical monitor station. Lakesh followed her gaze.

  On the screen he saw an aerial topographical map of what used to be the state of California. Superimposed over it flashed four icons. The telemetry transmitted from Domi’s, Edwards’s, Falk’s and Philboyd’s subdermal biolink transponders scrolled in a drop-down window across the top of the screen.

  Everyone in the installation had been injected with the transponders, which transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponder was a non-harmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis. The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it down to the redoubt’s hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetric signals using special human biological encoding.

  All of the icons, including Domi’s, glowed a steady green, much to Lakesh’s relief.

  “Without access to the satellite uplink in the Admin Monolith,” Lakesh said musingly, “they’re incommunicado.”

  Swiveling in his chair, he addressed a trim black man seated at a console and wearing a headset. “Friend Banks?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “No signal from our away team in Malaysia?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Keep trying to raise them over the Manta’s sat-comm channels. As soon as you get a response, patch me in.”

  “You got it.”

  DeFore laid a comforting hand on Lakesh’s shoulder. “Everything is under control. You can relax.”

  He forced a laugh and patted her hand. “I don’t know if I would agree with that assessment, Doctor. It is certainly no coincidence that the ville of Snakefish falls down when our people are there investigating why other villes had fallen down.”

  DeFore arched an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that the earthquakes were intentional? Artificially induced?”

  He nodded. “I am.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Very much so. Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy within a limited region of the rock strata due to tectonic stress. When stresses in rock masses have accumulated to a point where they exceed the strength of the rocks, it leads to rapid fracture. The fractures usually tend to travel in the same direction and may extend over many miles along a certain fault zone.

  “An artificial means of inducing earthquakes was experimented with many times, from the excavation of bedrock to the detonation of underground nuclear devices.”

  “That doesn’t seem very efficient,” DeFore commented.

  Lakesh shrugged. “Anything that changes the local fault field and can produce a fracture or a slippage can trigger an earthquake. Another method was the electromagnetic excitation of quartz mineral deposits through use of microwaves. The extent of the damage we see in California seems due to a deep-focus slippage.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a pattern to describe quake zones that dip into the Earth at a forty-five-degree angle.”

  Skeptically, DeFore asked, “How could something like that be artificially induced?”

  “I have my theories.” His tone held a dark undercurrent of foreboding.

  DeFore caught her breath, hesitating before asking. “You don’t suspect that one of the overlords is behind this, do you?”