They smashed down all around like artillery sh.e.l.ls sending up geysers of tainted water.

"Move!" Kane bellowed at the top of his lungs, but he could hardly hear his own voice and he knew it would was inaudible even to DeFore and Brigid, who stood beside him.

Heeling around, he dashed for the opening of the corridor on the far side of the open piazza. He splashed through the standing water, feeling a slow acidic burn on his hands and cheeks. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw his companions following him.

Kane sprinted into the corridor, glancing swiftly from left to right. It wasn't particularly wide, and water leaked through in many places. He rushed deep into the murk, not wasting time to fumble for his Nighthawk microlight. The specially treated lenses of his Mag-issue gla.s.ses allowed him to see clearly in deep shadow for approximately ten feet, as long there was any kind of light source. Even so, ancient heaps of garbage formed strange shapes, and he flinched from them more than once.

The howl of the wind became a deafening locomotive roar, so loud he felt the vibration in the marrow of his bones. He looked over his shoulder, past his companions, and saw the twister. It was a solid cone of black, bellowing fury, a screaming explosive force that ripped up, then flung away anything not deeply anch.o.r.ed. Dust, rocks, leaves, vines, small squealing things-all the acc.u.mulated violence of the elements landed heavily in the open piazza with the smashing force of a hundred battering rams.

The four people fell flat to the wet corridor floor and clung to one another for several terrifying seconds.

Kane gritted his teeth as the air pressure against his eardrums rose and fell sharply. Then the blast of wind and debris pa.s.sed over them, and it was calm again except for the ominously pelting rain.

Brigid pushed herself to her elbows. "Is everybody all right?"

When she received monosyllabic responses, she crawled forward. "Let's go deeper before the next cyclone gets here."

Kane looked down the dark pa.s.sageway and hesitated. "I'll take point."

Brigid had lost her cap. Pushing her wet, heavy hair onto her back, she said impatiently, "We'll both do it."

The four people rose to their feet just as the air once more filled with a whistling roar. A giant's hand seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h at them, wrenching them backward toward the piazza. Bracing their legs, they bent almost double as they fought the powerful suction. The wind was like a giant scoop that tried to drag them from their shelter and into the hungry maw of the twister.When the drag on their bodies lessened, Kane, Brigid, Grant and DeFore raced deeper into the pa.s.sageway. Brigid and Kane were several yards ahead of their two companions, and when they heard another respite from the storm, they slowed their pace.

The floor pitched downward, slanting into a dark stairwell. Kane patted his pockets for his flashlight, but before he found it, an amber beam shone from Brigid's hand. Casting the rod of luminescence over the concrete steps, she called over her shoulder to Grant and DeFore, "Let's check this out."

She and Kane carefully descended the stairs, and he repressed a sigh of relief when they ended after only ten feet or so. Another black pa.s.sageway yawned before them. "I think we've found the way to the bas.e.m.e.nt," she said. "It'll probably be safe enough to ride out the storm down here."

Kane turned to call up to Grant and DeFore when he heard a dull thumping from behind the right-hand wall. The pounding swiftly increased in volume. Little fragments of mortar jumped from the seams.

Grant heard it, too, "What the h.e.l.l is that noise?" he shouted.

Kane glanced up the short stairway and saw a steady stream of water trickling from a crack in the ceiling at the midway point. Before he could say or do anything, the crack widened and fist-sized pieces of concrete flaked off at the edges and fell to the steps. The tackle became a gush, and Kane stepped backward to avoid being doused. The water didn't smell contaminated, but he didn't care to be splashed.

Then he heard the long, keening blast of the wind again. The air seemed filled with breaking sounds, followed by a long ripping noise that made Kane think the very fabric of reality was being torn to pieces.

It stunned his mind and froze him in his tracks.

As the wail rose to a near deafening level, he saw how the gush of water turned into a foaming torrent. A large section of the ceiling collapsed inward. Kane barely managed to push Brigid backward before a slab of concrete crashed down less than six inches from his toes. A solid column of water thundered out of the ceiling, crested over him and smashed him off his feet.

He was only dimly aware of slamming into Brigid and then both of them were carried away by the deluge. Tons of water and rubble poured through the collapsed ceiling, tumbling them head over heels.

Kane tried to hang on to something, sought to grab Brigid, but he was completely submerged by a tidal wave shooting down the dark pa.s.sageway. Their bodies were buffeted and beaten by the merciless pressure of the water's flow.

Kane forced his body to relax and go limp, a conditioned response from his Mag training. As he was catapulted along, he struck a hard, unyielding object with his right hip and he grunted involuntarily, sucking in a mouthful of foul, muddy water.

Struggling to control the gag reflex, he swallowed the water lest he draw it into his lungs. He flailed out with his arms, fighting the turbulence, trying blindly to check or even slow his headlong plummet.

Kane strained to lift his head above the roiling, rushing surface. "Baptiste!" he shouted, and noted how the echo of his voice was short. The crown of his cap sc.r.a.ped against the roof of the pa.s.sageway.

A sweeping undertow tangled his legs together and his body dropped vertically. He realized the flood had carried him to a drop-off, perhaps another, deeper stairwell. He didn't have much time to contemplate how far he might plunge.He struck a wall of smooth stone with his head, and the roar of the torrent faded to a faint burbling.

Chapter 3.

Brigid stayed beneath the surface of the floodwaters until the pounding of blood in her temples and the fire in her lungs became intolerable. She kicked upward, dismayed by how much effort it required. Her head broke the surface, and she fought the impulse to suck in great lungfuls of air for fear of inhaling water.

The current carried her around a bend, where the pa.s.sageway narrowed into a flume. She felt her body whipped forward, hurled faster and faster. Through her water-occluded vision, she glimpsed some sort light, gleaming with a pallid glow ahead of her. Her groping hands slapped around what felt like a length of pipe, anch.o.r.ed firmly in the concrete.

She clung to it for what seemed like a long time, head craned back, inhaling air through her nostrils, lips compressed against the water foaming and splashing against her face. Her muscles ached with the strain of resisting the ferocious, incessant drag of the floodwaters. Her fingers lost all feeling, then the numbness crept into her forearms. Finally, her grip loosened and the current s.n.a.t.c.hed her away from the pipe.

She managed to keep her head above the surface for a few moments. Then, the direction of the torrent went from horizontal to vertical and she fell feetfirst, caught in the midst of a waterfall. Frantically, Brigid twisted her body to one side, kicking with her feet, clawing handfuls of water aside. She flailed, lungs aching as she tried to check her plunge into the roaring cataract.

It seemed that she fell only a few feet before the soles of her boots. .h.i.t the bottom. Her knees were jacked up into her midriff by the impact, which drove what little air remained in her lungs out through her mouth in a stream of bubbles.

The water was a brownish-green murk. She had no idea where the surface lay, and she felt a fear she had hoped she would never experience again. Months before she had nearly drowned in the Irish Sea and since that day she had developed a morbid terror, almost a phobia, of dying by water.

Before her fear became panic, she became aware that the movement of the floodwaters had eased.

They slowed and became more gentle. Brigid kicked hard, hoping she was moving in the right direction.

Her lungs felt as if they would burst any second. Then her head rose above the roiling surface, and she gasped in great shuddering mouthfuls of air.

After the cataract, it was like floating injyieaceful but brackish pond. Brigid was conscious of s.p.a.ce around and above her, as is if she were bobbing in a large swimming pool. Blinking hard, she saw a glimmer of light and she stroked toward it. She realized she was outside, in a channel of some sort, with curving concrete walls that sloped upward nearly twenty feet. She felt fairly certain it was a storm sewer. The water was filled with debris. A thick layer of torn foliage and even the bloated bodies of several dead rats floated on the surface.

The water continued rushing around her, apparently pouring into a drain somewhere far ahead. The channel curved sharply a hundred yards ahead her. As the level steadily dropped, Brigid felt solid footingbeneath her boots and she stood. The water reached only to her chest and dropped several more inches in the few moments she stood there, filling her oxygen-deprived lungs with air. She waded slowly toward the nearest wall. By the time she reached its base, the water was barely knee-deep. A portion of the bulwark was shattered, with large chunks of concrete tumbling down into the sewer. Reinforcing rods protruded from the broken pile of stone like rusty, gnarled fingers.

Fingering the water from her eyes, Brigid tilted her head back to scan the overcast green-hued sky. The roar of the storm diminished as if a monstrous locomotive were departing. Even the rain squalls were tapering off.

Brigid straggled up the side of the channel, too exhausted to focus on anything other than reaching the top. Her boots slipped a time or two on the muck-slimed slabs, but her single-minded ascent didn't falter. When she reached the top, she half fell, half lay down, her respiration coming in labored pants.

As she lay there, she took stock of herself, gingerly checking her limbs for broken bones or more severe injuries. She realized that either an overfilled river or even a reservoir had caused the storm surge, and she also understood she was more than fortunate to have survived-she was blessed.

After a moment, she pushed herself into a sitting position and glanced up at the dark rectangular outline of a span of concrete stretching above her. She recognized it as a footbridge, probably an old maintenance accessway. Patting herself down, she found her trans-comm unit and rad counter were missing, as well as the Iver Johnson autoblaster in its belt slide holster. Her spectacles were still safe in her breast pocket, and her chron was still strapped around her wrist, but they were no subst.i.tute for a gun.

Kane had cautioned her more than once to carry her side arm in a proper holster, but in her opinion he should have been satisfied she agreed to wear a blaster at all. Her antipathy toward guns had been a minor but continuing point of contention between them for almost two years. At least her Sykes-Fairbairn commando dagger was still securely sheathed at the small of her back.

Brigid made herself stand, conscious of an uncomfortable tingling in her extremities. Her legs and arms ached fiercely, and the left side of her rib cage felt sore and bruised. A sharp pain stabbed into the calf of her right leg, letting her know she had strained a tendon. She had gotten off lucky, though. She hadn't struck her head and possibly exacerbated the injury that had put her in a days-long coma a few months before. And at least the floodwaters had rinsed off the acid-rain residue so she didn't have to worry about burns or her clothes rotting off her body.

Wringing out her sodden, mud-clotted hair and raking it away from her face, Brigid studied the bridge ramp arching overhead. Beyond it, to the right, she saw a metal ladder stretching up from the top of the channel to the bottom of the bridge.

Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called, "Kane!" Her voice sounded hoa.r.s.e and weak, so she cleared her throat, inhaled a deep breath and shouted again, "Kane!"

The word echoed hollowly and eerily, but there was no response. She called for DeFore and Grant, but received no answering hail. She hoped they had avoided being swept away by the flood, but since they occupied higher ground than either she or Kane, she a.s.sumed they had. Still, she had no idea how far she had been washed away from them.Tottering, moving carefully at first to favor her aching leg, Brigid walked toward the ladder, despising the way her boots made squishing sounds with every step. She also despised the way mounting waves of fear over the fates of her friends, particularly Kane, battered at her reason. She reminded herself how Kane had outmaneuvered, ducked and dodged what seemed like certain death many times.

As for Domi, as long as she remained b.u.t.toned up inside the Sandcat, she was sure the girl was safe.

Although Domi occasionally displayed nitwit tendencies, she had a strong sense of self-preservation to go along with it, so it was doubtful she was traipsing through the ruins when the stormfront arrived.

Wryly, Brigid thought it would be wasted effort to end all wasted efforts if they'd traveled so far to find out why Domi hadn't died only to learn she'd been killed by the weather.

A few months ago, during the b.l.o.o.d.y battle among the forces of three barons to occupy Area 51, Domi had apparently perished, literally vaporized in the detonation of an implode grenade. As heartbreaking as the effort was, Brigid forced herself to come to terms with the girl's death. Even Grant seemed to accept it. Only Kane expressed doubt, but he couldn't explain why.

Kane tried very hard to verbalize why he couldn't accept the fact Domi was truly dead. Brigid suggested he was in a form of denial, but he pointed out that implode grens didn't usually vaporize targets without leaving some trace-a spattering of blood, a sc.r.a.p of bone, a hank of hair.

A suspicion lurked at the back of his mind that what he had seen, what all of them had seen, wasn't Domi dying. He was haunted by a subliminal afterimage of an object or movement at the very instant of detonation bobbed at the fringes of his memory, but his conscious mind couldn't a.n.a.lyze it.

On a more visceral level, Domi's death simply felt wrong, as if it weren't supposed to have happened. It was an error, a miscalculation like the alternate event horizon that Lakesh postulated had set into motion the events leading to the nukecaust.

It turned out Kane's suspicions and his a.n.a.logy to the an alternate event horizon both had a foundation in reality. They found out Domi hadn't been killed-she had been time-trawled, apparently by Operation Chronos technology, which focused on the mechanics of time travel.

According to Lakesh, who was the overseer of Project Cerberus, the Totality Concept's research projects were far-flung and involved many nations and just as many secret societies. Although the Totality Concept scientists worked on some remarkable projects, the projects were rarely coordinated.

But then, in 1989, Lakesh conducted the first successful long-distance matter transfer of a living subject through the quantum interphase inducers, colloquially known as gateways. That initial success was reproduced many times, and in the process the gateways were improved and modified. Project Cerberus, once it was moved to Redoubt Bravo in Montana's Bitterroot mountain range, began to ma.s.s-produce the mat-trans units, designing them in modular form so they could be shipped and a.s.sembled elsewhere.

The technicians of Operation Chronos used the mat-trans breakthroughs of Project Cerberus to spin off their own innovations and achieve their own successes. One such Operation Chronos practice was known as "temporal peeping," the ability to peer through a gap in the chronon structure into a future date.

Regardless of the relative truth of Lakesh's story-and Brigid had very little reason to doubt him-it wasobvious Domi herself had been "trawled," but by an unknown agency and for a purpose still unrevealed.

All they knew was where the action had been engineered.

A few months before, while pursuing another objective entirely, Brigid, Kane and Grant had come across an installation on one of the Western Isles. The facility had apparently housed a major component of Operation Chronos. There was something ominous about all of the Western Isles and this one, named Thunder Isle by its nearest neighbors, the inhabitants of New Edo, was extremely disturbing.

According to what they had been told by the ruler of New Edo, Lord Takaun, a cyclical phenomenon occurred on the island. Lightning seemed to strike up, accompanied by sounds like thunder, even if the weather was clear. Takaun had no explanation for it, but he knew that on the heels of the phenomenon often came incursions of what the more impressionable New Edoans claimed were demons. Brigid was shown the corpse of one such demon, and she tentatively identified it as a Dryosaurus, a man-sized dinosaur.

She was able to identify other artifacts found on the sh.o.r.es of Thunder Isle-a helmet from the era of the conquistadors and a stone spearhead that resembled a Folsom point, so named for Folsom, New Mexico, the archaeological site where the first one was found. It was evidence of a prehistoric culture many thousands of years old.

According to Takaun, the phenomena had been very sporadic for the past five years, occurring only a few times. Recently, a new cycle had begun and it was happening with far greater regularity.

When she, Grant and Kane went to Thunder Isle, all of them glimpsed another dinosaur, far larger and more vicious than the Dryosaur. In fact, it killed a group of Magistrates they had been tracking.

Once inside the installation, they found video ev- idence that Domi had been trawled at the precise instant before she was swallowed by the full lethal fury of the grenade, and then suspended in a non-corporeal matrix. Brigid activated the instruments that retrieved the girl, but she had no recollection whatsoever of what occurred. They themselves saw no one in the installation, but it showed signs of recent habitation.

All of them had pondered the mystery during the intervening months, but they could only speculate.

Then, less than ten days ago, the sensor link at the Cerberus redoubt showed activity in the gateway unit in Redoubt Echo, which in itself wasn't unusual. Over the past year the Cerberus network had registered an unprecedented volume of mat-trans traffic. Most of it was due to the concerted search for the renegades from Cobaltville, but there had also been the appearance of anomalous activities, signatures of jump lines that could not be traced back to their origin points.

Certainly, there were any number of unindexed and ma.s.s-produced modular gateway units. Years ago, when Lakesh had used Baron Cobalt's trust in him to covertly reactivate the Cerberus redoubt, he had seen to it that the facility was listed as irretrievably unsalvageable on all ville records. He also had altered the modulations of the mat-trans gateway so the transmissions were untraceable, at least by conventional means. However, the gateway in Redoubt Echo wasn't anomalous. The unit was an indexed part of the Cerberus network, and Lakesh believed the activity was connected to Operation Chronos- primarily because Chronos had been headquartered in a subterranean facility in Chicago, at least for a time.

Brigid reached the ladder and before she began climbing it, she called Kane's name several times. Afterwaiting for a response and not receiving one, she slowly pulled herself up the rust-eaten rungs, wincing at the twinge of pain in her left side, an indication of strained or even ruptured intercostal cartilage in her rib cage. The ladder led to the iron circle of a manhole cover at the underside of the bridge. When she reached it, she hooked her right arm over the top rung and pushed up against the thick metal disk with her left. It didn't budge.

Gritting her teeth, she pressed her shoulder against it, trying not to shove too hard because she couldn't guess what lay on the other side. Rust showered down from the rim, stinging her eyes and coating her wet hair with a fine powder. Finally, the heavy cover shifted and by levering with her legs, she managed to shoulder it aside with a prolonged grinding noise.

Brigid struggled up, panting from the exertion, and crawled out onto the surface of the walkway. To her left, the bridge disappeared into a round tunnel with the number 88 stenciled above it in black paint. To her right, it stretched into an open alleyway. Beyond that, she was able to make out a street.

The wind still gusted intermittently but powerfully, and she had to lean into it. As she climbed to her feet, a blur of movement caught her eye from the mouth of the tunnel and she pivoted toward it, reaching for the dagger at her back. She froze in surprise as a tall figure stepped from the shadows cast by the tunnel overhang.

It was a woman, judging by the billowing cloud of wind-whipped gray hair that swirled around the bony mask of her face. Brigid stared into the expressionless ice-blue eyes of the woman before her. She became aware of her trembling hands, her thumping heart and the sour taste of fear in her suddenly dry mouth.

The woman was dressed in a billowing black robe, the wind plucking at the frayed hem and the belled sleeves. She didn't speak or even make any motion to leave the tunnel. She merely stared un-blinkingly at Brigid with no apparent emotion in her cold eyes. Brigid checked the movement to draw her knife and returned the stare, wondering briefly if the woman lived in the access tunnels of the city and was afraid to step out even into overcast daylight.

Brigid opened her mouth to voice a greeting, but a preternatural thrill suddenly tickled the b.u.t.tons of her spine, causing her shoulders to quiver in a shudder. Biting back a curse, she whirled swiftly. Four dark figures stood at the end of the bridge, blocking her way to the alley.

They were tall, lean men, as gaunt as cadavers. Two of them appeared taller even than Grant. From throat to fingertip to heel they were clad in one-piece black leathery garments that fitted as tightly as doeskin gloves. Even their heads were hooded in tight black cowls. They bore odd devices in their hands, rods of a sleek, gleaming black alloy more than two feet long. They were tipped with spherical k.n.o.bs of a dull, silvery metal, slightly smaller than fowl's eggs.

It was their faces that struck into her heart a sudden spasm of terror-or rather their lack of faces.

Beneath the tight-fitting black cowls, their visages were smooth, featureless ovals.

Chapter 4.

Brigid reacted with the speed born of an antipathy to having anything that remotely resembled a weapon pointed at her. She lunged toward the raised side of the ramp, whipping the dagger from its sheath in thesame swift motion.

Almost at the same time, a rod in the hand of one of the black, faceless figures emitted small click, as if a piece of wire had broken inside of it. Light glinted dully from the round object that sprang from the end of the rod. Brigid caught a brief glimpse of spindly silver spider legs unfolding as it flashed by her head, missing her by a finger's width.

The little device zipped over the old woman's right shoulder and disappeared into the gloom of the tunnel behind her. No flicker of emotion disturbed her calm, expressionless face. Fisting the Sykes-Fairbairn knife, Brigid bounded toward her, snaking an arm around her wattled neck and positioning the point of her knife over the woman's carotid artery. She felt a little guilty about using an elderly woman as a hostage and a shield, but this was a matter of survival, not a matter of ethics.

One of the black-clad men-Brigid a.s.sumed they were men, since she saw no bulges characteristic of femininity-extended his slender rod before him. Brigid moved her dagger so the tapered tip dug into the old woman's flesh but didn't break it. She cried out in an unfamiliar tongue, speaking in a deep, harsh, uninflected voice. The faceless man halted immediately and lowered his baton.

"Thank you," Brigid said quietly into her hostage's ear. "Now tell me who you and your friends are."

The old woman's lips barely moved. Her reply sounded like the rustle of old parchment, and the words were blurred by an unidentifiable accent. "I am Megaera."

The name rang a distant chord of recognition within Brigid's memory, but she didn't want to spare her attention from the men in black and the old woman to flip through her mental index file. "My name is Brigid Baptiste. I mean you no harm."

"I know that. We mean you no harm, either."

"Then why attack me?" When Megaera didn't immediately reply, Brigid added, "You're not one the Midnites, are you?"

Megaera sighed as if bored. "Your words are meaningless."

Brigid gave the gaunt, faceless men a swift visual examination. With a twinge of embarra.s.sment she realized they did indeed have faces, but their fea- tures were completely concealed by masks. The masks were delicately shaped to closely fit long-jawed, narrow faces from hairline to chin. But although the masks bore the contours of human faces, they were modeled without any features whatsoever. They only presented blank ovals of some sleek, smooth substance. The effect was very eerie and she wondered how they could possibly see.

"We met a man who had been mutilated," Brigid said, a sharp note entering her tone. "He was castrated and he wore one of those little spiders that your friends shot at me. Do you expect me to believe you know nothing about that?"

"I expect nothing from you," Megaera answered with the same bone-chilling serenity. "But I do know everything about it."

"Then perhaps you'll share what you know."Megaera's slight shoulders lifted in an attempt at a shrug. "He was a sinner. A fornicator. When he confessed his sins, the appropriate justice was meted out, no more, no less."