Outlanders 9 night etern.., p.1
Outlanders 9 Night Eternal, page 1
Chapter 1
Kane moved in the darkness like a wolf, padding soundlessly through the cavernous corridors of the Cerberus redoubt. He went shoeless because he liked feeling the chill metal against the soles of his feet. The cold was real, a tangible that he clung to at the moment.
Yesterday hadn't been real. And none of the days that had made up yesterday had been real. His mind told him that, and it almost got a little easier to believe after the few hours of sleep he'd had. His chron showed 4:13 a.m. local time, meaning there'd been damned few hours of rest.
When he took a deep breath, he could still smell the death around him from those lost yesterdays. It blended in perfectly with the odor of spent cordite and burned ozone. When he closed his eyes, he could see Brigid's and Grant's blood-encrusted heads rolling toward him, their last expressions filled with pure horror—and C. W. Thrush stood beyond them, the pistol in his hand spitting yellow lightning in the darkness.
Thunder had crashed against Kane's chest and he'd died. At least, as Lakesh had pointed out during the debrief afterward, one of Kane's selves had died.
It had been Lakesh's fault that Kane had perished, a victim of C. W. Thrush and the Third Reich, which had controlled the world—that particular world—for almost three centuries. But that Kane had deserved to die, since that self had served the forces of darkness. Kane had to keep reminding himself of that, as well, working to keep at bay the insanity that the lost earths—or alternate worlds—brought with them.
Yesterday hadn't been real, he reminded himself as he strode through the corridor. Not to him.
At least, not to this version of him.
He kept his eyes open, sweeping the corridor with his trained gaze. He relied on his pointman's senses to warn him of any danger. The chance of danger in the redoubt had dimmed when they'd freed Balam, then followed his quest, which had netted them the facets of the Chintamani Stone. Those facets, however, had only led to the greatest danger Kane had ever faced.
He forcibly pushed out his breath, relaxing his nerves and muscles, the way they'd trained him back in the Magistrate academy. He wanted to throw things, but the wound in his hip kept him even from the exercise floor in the redoubt where he and Grant sometimes went to work out their frustrations with Lakesh and his half-truths and full-blown machinations. Lakesh spoke out of both sides of his mouth, Kane knew, balancing lie and truth to achieve whatever effect he wanted.
Finally, his journey ended up where he knew it probably would—the ready room beside the mat-trans chamber that Lakesh had ordered altered to work with the trapezohedron that had birthed so many legends of his world. He felt a tightness across his shoulders and through his chest as he stared at the mat-trans unit.
Thick brown armaglass walls enclosed the hexagonal chamber, separating it from the control center lying just beyond. With the Project Cerberus technology that had created the mat-trans network, most of the world lay open to Kane and his group. Anywhere was just an eye blink away.
But with the Chintamani Stone linked to it, whole worlds were easily within reach. Kane had been to one of the alternate worlds. Two others remained yet to explore. He forced himself to breathe out, reminding himself that the conference table was of his world, not some other Kane's.
Except he didn't know that for sure. What if, when he'd thought he'd been returning to his own world, he'd ended up instead on still another Kane's world— one that was more closely akin to the one he'd ventured from but still wasn't home?
That thought had finally kept him awake, unable to return to sleep.
The air was still in the room, and the hum of the computers in the redoubt's control center was the only audible sound. The lighting was dim. Even with the door at his back, Kane knew when he wasn't alone anymore.
"Can't sleep?"
Kane turned smoothly toward the feminine voice, relaxing slightly. A rogue female, Beth-Li Rouch, was still within the complex, and he'd yet to figure out the possible extent of her duplicity. She'd given him the gunshot wound he carried at present. "Slept enough," he growled.
DeFore, the complex's medical expert, stood in the doorway swathed in the early-morning shadows. She was stocky and buxom, with bronze skin that made her ash-blond hair stand out even more starkly. As usual, she wore her hair in intricate braids and the formfitting bodysuit that was the usual attire by the redoubt inhabitants. Her face was chiseled and didn't reveal anything that might have been on her mind.
Kane was perfectly content to blow her off and ignore her. He had his own agenda despite being tied to Lakesh and Cerberus.
"Having second thoughts about going through that thing again?" DeFore asked.
"No." Kane made himself answer. It sounded better, more sure, when he said it.
She walked around in front of him, trying for eye contact again. "You're certain?"
Kane looked through her gaze, not meeting it at all. He'd learned how to do that, too, in the training he'd been given to become a Magistrate in Cobaltville. He concentrated on the brown armaglass walls of the mat-trans.
Despite his surly manner, DeFore sat down on the edge of the conference table. "There's a fresh pot of coffee in the cafeteria. I know because I made it. We could go there."
"If I wanted to go there," Kane stated brusquely, "I'd have gone there. And if I'd wanted company, I'd have found Grant."
"Grant's sleeping," DeFore said.
"I'd have woken him. It wouldn't have been the first time.''
DeFore folded her arms across her big breasts and returned his angry glare full measure.
"It's not like you to be so social," Kane declared, particularly suspicious since he and DeFore had in the past shared vigorous differences of opinion.
"Must be the company." DeFore shifted in the chair and it squeaked. "I find myself positively inspired this morning."
"What are you doing up anyway?"
"I was talking with Lakesh."
"Till four in the morning?"
She nodded. "I'd have talked to him longer if he'd permitted."
Kane gave her a cruel smile. "Care to tell me how he kicked your ass out of his face?"
DeFore's eyes flicked over Kane, taking him in from head to toe the way she normally did when he came back from a mission that she knew had gone awry. Since he'd shown up at the redoubt and joined forces with Lakesh, she'd patched him up a number of times. "We were talking about you, Grant and Brigid pursuing an investigation through any of the other alternate earths."
Kane paused, considering. "Lakesh is all in favor of it."
"I'm not," DeFore said without preamble. "I think it's too dangerous."
A bitter laugh rose to Kane's throat. "I don't know why you would. Hell, we all got chilled on that last earth, and we're still here." He tried to make it sound light, as though it were nothing. But he felt it hanging in the air.
"Are you ready to step into another alternate earth in just a few hours?" DeFore lifted a doubtful eyebrow.
"Yeah," Kane agreed. "Ready." He paused, letting his guard down a little as he turned away from some of the anger and fear staring him in the face. "Just not too happy about it."
"What did it feel like?" the woman asked. "What?"
"Getting killed." DeFore didn't pull any words.
Kane turned away from her intense gaze. Put him across a table with a slagger already pointing a blaster at him, Kane knew he'd still gamble that he'd be able to pop his Sin Eater and chill the slag before he was chilled himself. He'd done it before. But thinking about getting into the mat-trans unit again left him cold. "I didn't get killed," he said.
Still, the phantom shock and pain of the bullet smashing through his chest burned through his memory. As a Mag for Cobaltville, he'd been wounded a number of times. But this had been different. He hoped that the phantom pain was from one of those instances rather than the one he'd had yesterday.
"For all intents and purposes," DeFore said, "you did. If you want, I can show you the EKGs and EEGs from your time in the mat-trans unit. For an instant in there, you flat-lined. All of you did. Brigid and Grant flat-lined ahead of you."
Kane shook his head. "We didn't die."
DeFore paused. "Not this time. My argument to Lakesh, however, was about the next time. What about then?"
BRIGID BAPTISTE LUXURIATED in the warm bath and tried to convince herself not to feel guilty.
The bath was an extravagance, something her training and upbringing guided her not to do. The lilac- scented water and scented candles that burned in the darkness above her made it almost a sin.
Deep in the water, she tried to relax. Dreams had plagued her sleep, images from the lost earth she'd visited with Grant and Kane yesterday, and from even further back, when she'd first met Kane and had fled Cobaltville. Before her exile, she'd been an archivist, and her eidetic memory had been a boon in searching through all the files kept in Cobaltville's Administrative Monolith. If she saw it, she remembered it.
That photographic memory was a curse now. Images, complete with sensory impressions, flipped through her mind like a cheap nickelodeon. The most recent images included her "death" on the other earth. A chill touched Brigid even through the warm water surrounding her. Tightness filled her burning lungs as she remembered how she and Grant had been killed. They'd glossed over that during the debrief afterward with Lakesh. And Lakesh had returned the favor, she knew, by glossing over the medical feedback DeFore had gotten from the biolink monitors.
As a trained archivist, though, Brigid knew misinformation often began with reticent truths, then grew into speculative transitions as someone worked to record the event. No information was sometimes better than partial information.
Aside from her death, there were other recollections from her time in that casement, as Balam and Lakesh had insisted on calling the alternate earths. She remembered how she and Kane had been able to take over the lives of their counterparts on that casement.
Their counterparts had been drawn to each other, and they'd ended up making love. Or having sex. Brigid still wasn't sure what to call it exactly. She remembered plainly that it had been at once smoldering and erotic, somehow steely and tender. And it had been performed in a hot rush.
As she lay under the water, she remembered how Kane's hands had roved over her body, touching her jawline, her breasts, his thick fingers reaching into her deepest recesses and setting fire to every desire she thought she'd set aside when she'd been accepted as an archivist at Cobaltville. The head ruled the body; thinking came before emotions. There could be no other way in her chosen line of work.
She saw the dim light of the scented candles above her, but she felt her nipples swelling in erotic tension, felt her body blossoming at the memory. Her pulse throbbed inside her head, picking up speed as she recalled Kane's heat as he'd filled her. Her body tightened in its desire, blindly seeking release. Her hand slid along her thigh, knowing it would be so easy to trigger the memory into a sensation that would sweep her away now.
With the discipline that had pushed her up in the ranks of the Cobaltville archivists, drawing the attention of Lakesh, the head archivist, she resisted. She pushed the burning desire to the back of her mind, walling it away, telling herself that it was actually being eradicated. The emotion she felt was too confusing. Self-gratification wasn't taboo to her way of thinking, but involving Kane in it in any way was too far over the line.
She rose from the water, sucking in steamy breaths. She gazed at her candlelit image in the darkened mirror beside the big tub. Her reddish-gold hair strung down her back, picking up highlights from the candles. She stood up from the water, taking pride in the fact that her body was leaner and harder than it had been while she'd been at the Administrative Monolith. Tall and generously curved, she held a woman's shape on long, athletic legs. Even in the darkness, her eyes blazed emerald.
She toweled off, rubbing her body briskly to remove the last of the chill that seemed to have taken root in her body. Finished with the bath, she pulled the plug and watched the water drain for a time, focusing on it to marshal her thoughts.
The water went down into a natural limestone filtration system built under the redoubt. Once the water passed through and the chemicals, including the lilac scent, had been leached out, the water returned to the complex's water supply.
Built over two hundred years ago as part of the Totality Concept—the American government's clandestine research program—the Cerberus complex had been constructed to last close to forever. It had been designed to be the home of at least a hundred people. The actual population now was barely double digits. And shrinking, Brigid couldn't help thinking, remembering the losses they'd had.
Returning to her living room, she took a seat at the comp-equipped desk against one wall. There were few personal items on the walls, but she'd chosen reference books that she enjoyed leafing through on occasion. With the gift of her memory, she never had to look at a book more than once. But sometimes she liked to hold them while thinking. It felt good for her hands to have something to do.
She took a pair of glasses from beside the comp monitor and put them on while she switched the monitor on. The screen juiced with an electric pop, and she got to the menu the complex used. As senior archivist for Cobaltville, Lakesh had had access to a number of books, treatises and documents, including electronic ones. He'd made certain Cerberus had benefitted from his bounty.
Dewitt- her photographic memory, Brigid wasn't quite a walking, talking encyclopedia. While being extremely knowledgeable about a great number of things, there were some she wasn't complete expert on, including theories of quantum mechanics. Though she was conversant with everything Lakesh had brought up when talking about the casements, she wanted to know more.
She accessed the electronic media available to her and began browsing the selection. She found it unusually hard to focus on the subject matter.
Images spun in the depths of the monitor, memories from even further back than her first meeting with Kane. She saw him again, a young man of nineteen or twenty, sword in his hand as he charged to rescue her from the men who held her captive.
He'd died that time as well, she remembered.
The mouse lay inert in her hand, the cursor blinking back at her steadily. Kane had worn another name then, but she remembered the other name she'd had for him best: anam-chara. In the Gaelic tongue, it meant "soul friend." And the dreams they'd had during different mat-trans jumps and crisis points suggested that they'd lived past lives, each continually intertwined with the other in some manner, never knowing romance.
That, however, couldn't be said about the casement they'd visited yesterday. She ran her fingers through her hair and tried hard not to think about what that episode meant. But the images and the sensory impressions of Kane's hands on her wouldn't leave.
Maybe it's just too soon, she told herself. She breathed easily. She was glad she and Kane hadn't discussed the issue any more. For all his fighting prowess—or maybe because of it, Brigid wasn't sure—Kane thought first with his emotions. That was alien to everything Brigid Baptiste held dear.
To survive, one needed a clear head. She worked hard to keep hers that way.
Still, she wondered if a case could still be made that she and Kane hadn't been physically intimate with each other. Or would be again.
That was what had kept her up most of the night, she knew. Jumping to another casement, another lost earth, she had to wonder if she'd be just as lost to herself as she had been the first time.
There'd only been flashes of memory in the other casement until she'd made love with Kane. Then she'd completely taken over her other self’s body, only separating out again till her other self died.
If she did exhibit some control in the new self she was going to jump into today, she had to wonder if it would take making love with Kane again to reawaken her in that other casement. And what if their other selves were bitter enemies? Would it take a conscious effort to have sex with each other to put them in control again?
Her mind continued whirling, stray thoughts licking out to pluck at her emotions. Forcibly, she returned her attention to the list of selections on the comp screen. What she needed was a book on sex and quantum physics. The search was frustrating. She earmarked five books she wanted to look at, then leaned back in the chair. It creaked in the quietness of the room, barely audible over the humming comp.
She thought of Grant, remembering how Kane had talked to the big man and brought him to his senses. Sex hadn't been involved in Grant's awakening, but it had been linked to Kane, as well. She made a mental note to discuss the matter with Kane. Maybe the focus was on Kane because the Chintamani Stone had locked on to him. Sex might not have anything to do with the reawakening process; it might only involve Kane and them coming together again in whatever world lay at the other end of the next mat-trans jump.
She switched the comp off, then retreated to her bedroom long enough to get dressed in a bodysuit. Then she made her way to the library, intending to spend her time reading, hoping she might find another clue to what was going on in the other casements.
C. W. Thrush remained a constant on those other worlds, and as such he was a constant threat. He'd killed them all once, but spared their lives on another earth. She had no doubts he would never be so merciful again.
"THE THING THAT BOTHERS ME MOST, is that Thrush is going to be out there waiting for us," Grant began.
"You afraid?" Domi challenged.
"Be a fool not to have some reservations, now, wouldn't I?"
"Don't think that way. Think you going hunting instead."
Lying on his bed in his room, Grant rolled his head over and glanced at Domi, who was sitting on the trunk at the foot of his bed. He stood six feet four in his stocking feet, broad across the shoulders and thick through the chest. Gray showed in his short hair at his temples, but the down-sweeping mustache showed coal-black against his coffee-brown skin. Scars covered his body, most of them acquired back when he'd been a Magistrate in Cobaltville. Keeping a baron's peace was not an easy thing; living as an exile was fraught with even more danger. A cast encased his right leg from ankle to just below the knee. He wore a pair of blue silk shorts and a white tank top out of deference to his company.
