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  "A triple-dipped stupe," Grant reminded him.

  Auerbach acknowledged the reminder with a jerky nod. "They came on us so fast, we didn't have time to use our blasters. Standing Bear led the party. Sky Dog wasn't with them, so we couldn't talk, understand each other's languages. On the march to the village, Beth-Li tried to make friends with Standing Bear. By the time we got here, he decided he wanted to be more than friends."

  Auerbach's brows knitted in anger and resentment. "When I met Sky Dog, he told me Standing Bear had claimed Beth-Li as his property. He named her Little Willow because of the moves she made. You pretty much know the rest of it."

  Grant hissed out an obscenity. "You opposed Standing Bear's claim and ended up dueling him for Rouch."

  Auerbach shrugged. "I don't have to tell you that I lost."

  Kane ran a frustrated hand through his hair. "This is just idiotic enough to be true. Earlier you said something about a plan. Explain."

  Auerbach shrugged again. "Just a suspicion. I think she was testing you, Kane, to see if you'd be the one to come after her." He finally managed to meet Kane's gaze. "I guess you passed it. You not only came after her — you won her from Standing Bear."

  "I would have come after any member of Cerberus if they'd gone missing," Kane replied dourly.

  "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't have fought to win me. Whatever Beth-Li was trying to prove, whoever she was trying to prove it to, I guess she succeeded."

  Face twisting in self-loathing, Auerbach dry-scrubbed his red bristle cut with furious fingers. "What are you waiting for? Kick my ass all the way back to the Darks. I'd do it myself, but I'd take pity on me."

  "You deserve worse," growled Grant. "And you'll probably get it. From your own conscience."

  He eyed Kane quizzically. "Unless you think he needs a blaster-whipping on top of it."

  Kane presented the impression of seriously pondering the notion. At length, he said, "Right now, I'm too hungry to waste my time denting his skull. After we find something to eat and after we hear Baptiste's report on what Rouch had to say, I may reconsider."

  * * *

  Beth-Li Rouch reeled, stumbling the width of the lodge. Only the drum-tight hide walls kept her from falling. The sharp echoes of the slap reverberated inside the tepee.

  "I asked you a civil question," Brigid said grimly, resisting the impulse to shake her stinging right hand. "'Fuck off isn't a civil answer."

  Beth-Li touched her reddening cheek. A glint of fear, then anger appeared in her dark eyes. She had yet to change out of the white doeskin smock, and as her face darkened in fury she looked more like an Indian maiden than before.

  "How dare you?" she demanded. "Who the hell do you think you are? You've got no right to ask me anything!"

  Brigid took a slow, threatening step toward her. "I'm assuming the right and you'll answer me — what were you and Auerbach up to?"

  Rouch clenched her fists, then her teeth. "I don't have to tell you anything. You have no authority over me."

  "Maybe not in Cerberus. But here, it's just you, me and the walls."

  Full lips writhing as if she were going to spit, Rouch demanded, "Get Kane in here. I'll answer his questions, not yours."

  Brigid struggled to bottle up the anger the young woman's sneering attitude invoked in her. "This was all about Kane, wasn't it? You duped Auerbach into going with you so Kane might think you two were running off together. But you didn't plan on meeting the Indians or becoming Standing Bear's Little Willow."

  Rouch uttered a derisive laugh. "You think you're a genius, don't you?"

  "I don't need to be a genius to figure out this stupe scam of yours, Beth-Li. It's so transparent it wouldn't fool a child. And it didn't fool Kane."

  Rouch planted her fists on her hips. "He came after me, didn't he? He fought another man for me. That's the important thing, not whether he was fooled."

  With a sense of shock, Brigid recognized the emotions boiling within her as jealousy, with a strong undercurrent of humiliation. For a moment, her throat thickened and she couldn't speak.

  "Kane won me," Rouch continued. "You don't know what that really means to a man, a warrior like him, do you? No, it's too primal for you to figure out. You're all intellect, sterile and cold." She paused, her smile widening as she added, "And barren."

  Brigid groped for a response, first contemplating denying it, then despite herself demanding, "How do you know that?"

  Rouch waved a dismissive hand through the air. "I was briefed on everybody in the redoubt."

  "By Lakesh?"

  "Who else?" Rouch retorted impatiently. "He brought me there. Face it, Baptiste — your profile and Kane's simply don't match up. They never did, not even before your… accident."

  Brigid narrowed her eyes, to keep Rouch from seeing the tears suddenly springing to them. Only a couple of months before, she had learned she was infertile, due to exposure to an unknown wavelength of radiation in the Black Gobi. She had suffered chromosomal damage, but to what extent and to what degree of permanency was still undetermined. Although Lakesh knew, as did DeFore, the redoubt's resident medic, Brigid had yet to speak of it to Kane. Finding out that Beth-Li Rouch was privy to her condition not only angered her, but it also grieved her deeply.

  "I know Lakesh asked you to stand aside so Kane and I could bond," Rouch went on acidly, "but you didn't. I had to make my own plans. You left me no choice."

  Forcing a note of calm into her voice, Brigid asked, "Are you saying this charade of yours — running away, nearly getting Auerbach maimed, putting Kane at risk — is my fault?"

  Rouch's lips pursed. "I'm saying that since you refused to cooperate with the breeding program, adjustments had to be made. I made them."

  "And part of those adjustments included duping poor Auerbach? You had this in mind for a while, didn't you, when you first seduced him? You used him."

  Rouch shook her head in mock pity. "How can a woman who's supposed to be so intelligent be so naive? Of course I used him. Everybody gets used. Fact of life, Baptiste."

  "What if Standing Bear had seriously injured Kane — or killed him? What would that have done to your adjustments?"

  Rouch's perfect teeth flashed in a grin. "I would've adjusted to that. My life here wouldn't have been too bad. More primitive than I care for, but I already led Standing Bear around by his cock. I'm an adaptable girl."

  "So I've been told," Brigid said with undisguised contempt. "That's why you were brought into the redoubt."

  Beth-Li Rouch wasn't offended by the observation. Agreeably, she said, "One of the reasons, anyway Besides, I knew Kane wouldn't let that stupe savage beat him — not with me as the prize."

  Brigid's anger slowly faded, replaced by a weary resignation. She wanted to sit down, but the notion of doing so in front of Rouch repulsed her. The dark-haired woman noticed the change in her posture and attitude.

  "You think you know Kane," she declared. "But you don't, not really. Underneath it all, he's just as savage as Standing Bear. You're wasting your time trying to convince yourself that he's anything other that what he is — a cold-hearted killer, all iron and ice. Think about all the people he's chilled, all the throats he's cut. You two could never have a future. Deep down, you know it."

  Brigid turned away, running her fingers through her tangled red-gold mane. Rouch softened her tone, striving to sound reasonable, if not sympathetic. "I told you before I don't care if you screw him. But stop standing in the way of the program. Let me carry his seed, bear his children. Stop fighting me. There's no way you can win. Trust me on that."

  Brigid glanced back over her shoulder. "Are you threatening me?"

  Rouch angled a cryptic eyebrow. "More or less. You don't want me as an enemy, Baptiste. Not only do I have Lakesh backing me up — I won't fight fair. I'll get you out of the way one way or the other."

  She took a deep breath and whispered fiercely, "Stop fighting me!"

  Thrusting aside the triangular piece of hide serving a
s the door flap, Brigid said flatly, "I'm tired of fighting period, let alone you, Beth-Li."

  6

  Brigid stepped out into the cool air of early evening. She looked up at the vast canopy of sky, at the fiery colors of sunset tracing the horizon. The gray blue tint of the high sky reminded her of Kane's eyes — a little cold perhaps, but with a hint of passion burning behind them.

  Following a burst of laughter, she found Kane, Grant and Auerbach sitting cross-legged around a cook fire with half a dozen warriors. A rabbit turned slowly on a spit over the flames.

  Kane talked animatedly, using elaborate hand gestures. Sky Dog translated, and the Indians responded with grins and appreciative laughter. Even Grant's normally truculent expression had softened into a smile of enjoyment. Only Auerbach looked uncomfortable, eyeing the fire apprehensively, no doubt imagining the flames dancing on his groin.

  Brigid drew near enough to overhear Kane's account of shooting down a Deathbird during their escape from Cobaltville. She vividly remembered how the chopper had pursued their old rattletrap Sandcat as Domi desperately tried to avoid the .50-caliber bullets and rockets.

  She had no problem recollecting the terror she felt, the almost suffocating sense of doom. Judging by Kane's bright eyes and laughing tones, the ground-to-air duel had been a lark, a grand, exhilarating adventure. The Indians apparently felt the same way, although Standing Bear's face wore a skeptical expression.

  Savage warriors all, she thought bleakly. Although she stood only a few yards away from the cluster of men, she felt separated from Kane by a distance that could not be measured. At that moment, she might as well have been looking at a complete stranger.

  She couldn't help but wonder what the Indians' reactions would be if Kane provided all the details of their flight, the truth behind it, or at least the truth as they understood it.

  Even after all this time, Brigid still couldn't fully accept what she had learned about the nukecaust, or about the Archon Directorate. Until eight months ago, neither Kane, Grant nor Brigid had even the vaguest inkling of the existence of the Archons, let alone the fact that they had influenced the course of history for thousands of years.

  On the face of it, Kane seemed the least likely to have stumbled over the evidence of their shadowy existence and presence in human affairs. After all, he and Grant had served for many years as Magistrates, enforcers of the ville laws and baronial prerogative.

  All Magistrates followed a patrilineal tradition, assuming the duties and positions of their fathers before them. They didn't have given names, but instead took the surname of the father, as though the first Magistrate to bear the name were the same man as the last.

  As Magistrates, the courses their lives followed had been charted before their births. They were destined to live, fight and die, usually violently, as they fulfilled their oaths to impose order upon chaos, obeyed the edicts of the barons who ruthlessly stamped out any sign of rebellion.

  The steady course of Kane's life was interrupted by what seemed a simple enough Mag raid. A slagger named Reeth was smuggling outlanders into Cobaltville with bogus ID chips. Their squad's mission was to flash-blast the Mesa Verde slaghole and serve a termination warrant on Reeth.

  The simple op turned ugly when Kane realized Reeth's operation was too big, too well equipped for a small-time slagger to pull off. His armament and tech were state-of-the-art, and he even had a computer system, a piece of hardware that was usually reserved for the ultra-elite administrators of Cobaltville.

  The Mags' commanding officer, Salvo, served the termination warrant before Reeth could be questioned, but not before Kane saw a strange device the slagger called a gateway. Due to his dislike of Salvo and his rising suspicions, Kane palmed a computer disk.

  Back at Cobaltville, Kane found the disk was specially encrypted, designed to defy normal unlocking procedures. Instead of shrugging the matter off, he was consumed by the mystery posed by the disk.

  He sought out Brigid Baptiste, a high-ranking archivist in the Historical Division. Despite the common misconception, archivists were not bookish, bespectacled pedants. They were primarily data-entry techs, albeit with high-security clearances. Midgrade archivists like Brigid were editors.

  Her primary duty was not to record predark history, but to revise, rewrite and oftentimes completely disguise it on behalf of the ruling elite. Like Kane and Grant, she had believed the responsibility for the nukecaust and its subsequent horrors lay with humankind as a whole. For many years, she had never questioned that article of faith.

  As she rose up the ranks, promoted mainly through attrition, she was allowed greater access to secret predark records. Though these were heavily edited, she came across references to something called the Totality Concept, to devices called gateways, to projects bearing the code names of Cerberus and Chronos.

  Then one day, over a year before, she was covertly contacted by a secret, faceless group calling itself the Preservationists. Over the following few months, she slowly understood that the Preservationists were archivists like herself, scattered throughout the network of nine villes. They were devoted to preserving past knowledge, to piecing together the unrevised history of not only the predark, but also the post holocaust world.

  Whoever the Preservationists were, they had anticipated her initial skepticism and apprehension. To show their good faith, she found an unfamiliar disk in her work area one morning. On the disk was the Wyeth Codex, and that began her secret association with the Preservationists.

  Though Kane could not have known it, Brigid Baptiste was the perfect person for him to have contacted. She was able to unlock the disk he'd retrieved from Reeth's slaghole, and the digital data held far more questions than answers.

  Her curiosity aroused, Brigid didn't devote much time to contemplating the consequences of delving into top secret historical files. The results of her illegal research yielded frightening revelations about the Totality Concept, the Cerberus mat-trans network and the Archon Directorate, which seemed to have been involved in manipulating the course of human history.

  Unbeknownst to either Kane or Brigid, Salvo had placed both of them under surveillance. While Brigid was charged with sedition, being a Preservationist and illegally delving into the database, Kane was taken before a tribunal presided over by none other than Baron Cobalt himself.

  The baron told him that since the end of World War II, elements within the American, Russian and British governments concealed their covert contacts with a mysterious race of entities known as the Archons. The Archons had a standard operating procedure that they had employed for thousands of years: they established a privileged class dependent upon them, and that elite class in turn controlled the masses of humanity for the Archons.

  Kane was further informed that his father was a member of the Trust, and therefore he must accept the tradition, the honor offered to him. Like his father, he would be a member of the elite that ruled society in secret. Other members of the Trust included high officers from all the divisions, including old Lakesh. Henceforth, like them, he would be working for the evolution of humankind.

  Though Kane accepted the offer and even agreed when Salvo told him that Brigid Baptiste must be executed, he didn't believe a word of what Baron Cobalt and the other members of the Trust had told him. Nor was he about to allow Brigid Baptiste to be executed because of his own impulsive curiosity.

  After he rescued the archivist, Kane, Grant and Brigid fled Cobaltville, aided by Domi, the outlander girl who'd been forced to work as a sex slave for Cobaltville Pit boss Guana Teague.

  Though pursued by Magistrates, they managed to make it to the mat-trans gateway at Mesa Verde and transport themselves elsewhere. When they arrived in Redoubt Bravo, once the base for the Cerberus Project, Lakesh was waiting for them with the group of exiles he'd assembled from other villes.

  There, Lakesh told them of his history his great age, and filled in the gaps in their knowledge. He was, in fact, one of the original people who had wor
ked on the Totality Concept projects, specifically Overproject Whisper, which included Chronos and Cerberus. Shortly after the nukecaust, he spent over a hundred years in cryogenic stasis in an installation known as the Anthill Complex before he was revived to help the Archon Directorate's plans for humanity reach fruition. He told them how the nukecaust was not supposed to have happened, but the misuse of the Totality Concept projects caused a probability-wave dysfunction.

  Horrified, Kane, Brigid and Grant demanded to know why the Archons would allow such cataclysmic events to occur. Lakesh detailed the long-range genetic-engineering program in which all nonessential humans were to be reduced to an expendable minority, existing only to be exploited as slave labor and as providers of genetic material. Lakesh described the Hybrid Dynasty to them, telling them that the previous three generations of barons were human-Archon hybrids under the control of the Archon Directorate.

  None of them were convinced by Lakesh's explanation, particularly Kane, until they were introduced to a permanent guest of Cerberus — an Archon named Balam. The creature triggered a primal, xenophobic response in all of them. It communicated telepathically, and according to Lakesh, its mind was somehow linked with all its fellow Archons on a very subtle, unconscious level.

  When Lakesh then showed them Nightmare Alley, which offered overwhelming horrific proof of advanced genetic experiments performed by the Archon Directorate, the evidence was undeniable.

  Active opposition to the Archon Directorate and the ville network was their only option, since all of them had been reclassified as outlanders. Nonpersons, they could never return to Cobaltville and had been the focus of numerous search parties. Exile had become their way of life. Brigid's thoughts returned to the present as Kane lifted his hands, index fingers outstretched and made rapid stuttering noises, imitating the reports of autoblasters. In midstutter, he suddenly glanced up and saw Brigid standing there.

  His sound effects trailed off, and he said to Sky Dog, "I'll be back in a minute."