Reality Echo (15 page)

It would take Kane an hour and forty minutes to get Epona and return to the mountaintop. He figured that would be about the amount of time it would take for Cerberus to feel as if they had successfully contained a possible impostor and sent Grant and Domi to deal with the ancient race of mutants. Given Grant’s and Edwards’s size and Magistrate training, both men would be loaded for far more than bear, with grenade launchers and heavy antitank rifles in their gear. Ideally, to deal with the Fomorians, Kane would have opted for something like the mobile armor suits utilized in New Olympus, but Lakesh and Brewster Philboyd were working on modifications of the basic gear skeleton layout. As much as the New Olympian pilots were skilled at the use of the high-tech battle armor, they had sacrificed much to be able to utilize the suits. The original cockpits had been designed for smaller than human servitor races, like the Trans-adapts, so a human had to be an amputee to handle the current cockpit layouts.

Increasing the size of the suits and the control chairs had been one idea, but the accompanying extra mass took up room that the war armor had originally been redesigned for sensor and weapons systems. While there were suggestions of forearm mounts replacing the shoulder weapon pintels, akin to the Magistrates’ Sin Eaters, there was controversy whether the arm mounts reduced the effectiveness of the gear skeletons. Part of the success of the Olympian fighting armor was that they could do chores and act as heavy-lifting equipment. The shoulder guns had been out of the way, letting them be fighters in addition to being superhuman laborers.

Thus, Philboyd had been studying the designs in order to make smaller versions of the big combat suits.

Here, on a mountainside, wrapped in canvas, Kane wondered what it would be like to be plugged into such a thing. He had worn other types of uniforms—Magistrate armor, battle dress uniforms, the high-tech shadow suits. He couldn’t imagine donning an articulated exoskeleton.

Time enough to make such speculations later, he reminded himself sternly.

Check on Epona, and then try to reach the parallax point before Grant and the others come back to clean up the Fomorians left over from the landslide.

Kane fitted his stone knife into the notch at the end of his cane. Even on a stealth run, the use of its flesh-piercing point would mean the difference between discovery and evasion.

It was time to see if he could rescue a witch.

Cerberus

Daryl Morganstern was in the middle of laughing at Wynan’s joke when Thrush-Kane approached him. Where Morganstern was a bit shorter than Brigid, Wynan was a mere five foot seven with black curly hair contrasting with a pale, rusty brown coloring. For a moment, the infiltration cyborg was reminded of the antithesis of Kane and Grant, with Morganstern’s “Grant” being small, scrawny and big eared. A smile flitted across his lips at the concept that Brigid Baptiste had found her own means of getting together with a different take on her
anam-chara,
this time opting for a variant who was more brain than brawn. Thrush-Kane didn’t know whether Wynan was the scientist’s first or last name, since he wasn’t called anything else.

“Hi, Daryl?” The android made his halting introductory statement, removing as much of the bass, and by extension the menace, from his voice.

“Oh, uh, Mr. Kane,” Morganstern replied. He hastily reached up and pulled off his glasses, folding them to put them in the pocket of his shirt.

“Don’t worry about your glasses,” Thrush-Kane said.

Morganstern looked down at his breast pocket, then chuckled nervously. “Oh, I wasn’t afraid that you’d hit me. I just didn’t need them right now.”

Wynan raised his hand meekly. “He uses them for magnification purposes. Reading small print, working with tiny devices…”

Thrush-Kane tilted his head, stooping so as to meet Morganstern eye to eye. “Daryl, this isn’t high school, and I’m not some kind of jock here to push you around.”

“Forgive me if my nerd senses were left tingling, okay?” Morganstern said.

Thrush-Kane sighed and rested a calming hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to talk. Man to man, friendly, and here in the middle of the mess hall. I’m not going to haul you off to some secret corridor and punch you bloody.”

“But don’t worry about implying that all I’m interested is in carnal relations with Brigid?” Morganstern asked hastily, a tremor shooting through his body.

“What?” Thrush-Kane tried to process that sudden exclamation, and realized that for all the intellect the young man had, he still had been ostracized. It took a few cycles of mental calculations to realize that Morganstern was indignant over the earlier remark about “how many moves until mate.” The android brain directed his clone body into a sigh. “I’m sorry about that joke. It was mean, and it was crude, and it was just locker-room talk.”

“From talking with the Magistrates, they sounded just like football players, except with guns, not balls,” Wynan spoke up. When this drew Thrush-Kane’s gaze, he inched back out of the conversation.

“All right. So this seems exceedingly like your old high school—”

“And college,” Morganstern spoke up.

“Like all your school days,” Thrush-Kane amended. “You want to stop interrupting me?”

Morganstern nodded so fast, Thrush-Kane wondered if he’d begun to have a seizure.

“Relax, both of you,” Thrush-Kane told them. “I’m here on Brigid’s behalf. She’s my friend, and I’m just interested in who she’s interested in.”

“Our fields of common ground are very small,” Wynan spoke up. “I could demonstrate via a Venn diagram—”

“Is she dating you, Wynan?” Thrush-Kane inquired.

Wynan held his bare wrist up under his face and looked at it as if he was examining a watch face on it. “Whoa, is that the time?”

“I’m not chasing you off,” Thrush-Kane told him with a sigh.

“Yes, sir,” Wynan answered.

Humans, the infiltrator thought, putting his face into the palms of his hands. It was a wonder that they had evolved as far and survived long enough to have built his original iterations, what with their surfeit of neurotic tendencies and insecurities. “I’m not a sir, Wynan. I work. Lakesh might make you call him sir—”

“But, Kane, we
respect
you,” Morganstern said. “Why can’t you let us show you some honor?”

Thrush-Kane raised an eyebrow, surprised. “Honor? Respect…”

“Don’t you think you deserve respect?” Wynan asked.

Thrush-Kane searched, looking for the man’s sense of humility. The thing was, Kane existed in a world where he’d fought to escape an artificial caste system, where honor was bestowed because of genetic purity. Kane himself had been specifically bred by Lakesh, and for a while, at least according to the female Kane of an alternate casement, had resented the idea of such manipulation.

“Everyone deserves respect. I’m just not a ‘sir’ type of person,” the doppelganger finally answered. All of this was way off the normal path that the infiltrator had intended to follow. He’d come here looking for something that would give him an insight into the mathematician Morganstern’s thought processes that would have assisted in the creation of an encryption algorithm. Without a means of deciphering the equation that Morganstern had utilized to secure Cerberus redoubt’s computer security, Thrush-Kane’s plasma matrix computer brain couldn’t hack into it. He was counting down to the moment when the mat-trans was going to send Grant, Domi and CAT Beta back to the Appalachians.

If the explorers got there, then there was a likelihood that the real Kane would hook up with them. With the discovery of his replacement, access to computer records would be shut down. When that happened, any
chance of uncovering clues as to the location of Enlil would disappear. The effort to plant him in the redoubt would have been all for naught.

Spending time coddling the feelings of a couple of nerds new to the Cerberus operation was something Thrush-Kane didn’t have time for. He had eight minutes, and even at his remarkable intellectual computational speeds, he’d have trouble reprogramming the mat-trans with a blind jump destination. It was just a stroke of luck that the Thrush Continuum, through its knowledge of Annunaki technology and studies of Lakesh’s prior quantum physics theories, that the android already knew the proper coding necessary to operate the mat-trans.

Morganstern tilted his head at the expression of humility presented by Kane. “I’m sorry. What would you like to be called?”

“By my name. Kane’s good enough,” the false man answered.

“All right. So what do you want to talk to me about?” Morganstern asked. He pushed a napkin toward Wynan, and Thrush-Kane caught a glimpse of it. One look was all that was necessary to burn the image of the napkin into his mind, and already a subroutine was flipping the napkin upside down and deciphering the mathematician’s handwriting.

“About Brigid. I just wanted to make some assurances that you don’t have to worry about any jealousy,” Thrush-Kane said. “I want her to be happy, and you
seem to have something in common with her that I really can’t give her.”

“I’d just assumed…” Morganstern began.

Thrush-Kane had already started working the equation on a subprocessor. Operating at two million calculations a second, the plasma matrix brain hurtled along in an attempt to translate the kind of thought processes that went into the purpose of the scribblings he’d seen. Deciphering the napkin was difficult, to the point that the doppelganger’s brow furrowed in concentration.

“You’d assumed that the two Spandex-clad superheroes of the redoubt had something going, right?” Thrush-Kane asked.

“Wynan mentioned that you were more of a roguish space captain than a man of steel,” Morganstern admitted. “However, it’s hard not to think of you and her as anything but a couple.”

The mention of science fiction brought up correlations in the plasma matrix memory of the android. The napkin’s equations were a means by which wormholes in space time could be theoretically located and operated, but in a manner totally different from the means by which Lakesh’s own calculations had opened the doors to matter transfer.

Morganstern’s equations explored hyperspatial existence, which had not been a discipline that had been followed in many dimensions. Thrush was aware of a particular casement that was hyperspatial in nature, but the
mathematics required to maneuver in such an environment assumed logical leaps that still needed justification.

“Brigid and I care about each other, that much is true,” Thrush-Kane said, his struggles growing easier now that he realized that Morganstern was working to apply a valid but understudied theory and applied equations to the special cases of physics necessary to operate in a different environment.

It was the tiny sliver of information that gave the android everything he needed to penetrate the algorithm that had protected Cerberus’s encryption. Now, having made that correlation, he was able to return to the task that Kane himself would have taken, which was assauging the concerns of a man who was interested in Brigid.

Morganstern’s face grew ashen in response to Thrush-Kane’s statement about how much Kane and Brigid cared about each other. The infiltrator suddenly felt a pang of regret, and immediately worked to clarify it. “We’re friends. And that’s all we are.
Anam-chara,
if you understand Celtic lore.”

“Soul friends, that’s what she said,” Morganstern answered. “But going by what she’s said you’ve told her, you’ve known each other across multiple lifetimes.”

“Yes,” Thrush-Kane responded. The impostor suddenly seemed lost. Why in the flying blue hell did he give a damn about what this mathematician felt?

Because that’s what Kane would do, came an answer.
It was straight from the memory core dedicated to behavior parameters and information to continue his impersonation of the real Kane. The man we are supposed to be is not greedy. If anything, he’s selfless, capable of sacrificing himself if it means others will survive. His role in the world is to risk everything to make sure humankind survives, be it recovering ancient technology or warding off conquerors from other universes.

“We’ve known each other, but there’s only been one reality we’ve found where we’ve been anything close to romantically involved,” Thrush-Kane continued. “That was an alternate future that we have avoided.”

“The laws of causality state simply that your choice merely caused a branching in the scheme of things,” Morganstern said. “That time line still exists, though we are currently not involved in it anymore.”

“And right now it’s irrelevant,” Thrush-Kane continued. The impersonation memory banks were in full control of his mind now. All the other functions of his plasma matrix not devoted to the ruse or the operation of his body were directed toward crunching the equations necessary to delve into the Cerberus command system. As it was, the android brain began to overheat. Morganstern’s equations were good, but the infiltrator was working against more than just one mathematician. Bry’s mastery of computer security, bolstered by the efforts of the lunar base programmers, was something that was taxing his computational capabilities. The infiltrator realized that this much effort was overclocking
the semiorganic blob residing in his reinforced skull, and it was beginning to have an effect on him.

“Kane?” Morganstern asked.

Thrush-Kane rested his forehead against his palm. “Sorry. Didn’t think my head was hit that hard.”

“Wynan…” The mathematician spoke up.

The little scientist was already at the trans-comm unit. “We need a team to the mess hall, stat. Kane is suffering delayed effects of head trauma.”

Morganstern tilted Thrush-Kane’s head backward and pressed a napkin beneath his nose. “Tell her we’ve got a nosebleed!”

“Nosebleed?” Thrush-Kane asked, pushing Morganstern away for a moment. He tried to access his self-diagnostics, but none of the command structures of his own brain were working. The effort necessary to wirelessly hack into the redoubt’s computer mainframe had seized up every non-essential process.

Thrush-Kane looked at his hand as it came away from his nose. His palm was drenched in red, and he knew that his prior self-diagnostic assessment had been off. When Bres had struck him in the head, it was with an amount of force that had somehow transmitted through his nigh-unbreakable skull.

“Head back,” Morganstern grunted. “I used to get these all the time. But then, I hadn’t been smacked in the head by a mutant.”

Thrush-Kane allowed his body to be manipulated by the scientist.

“Brigid was right. You’ve got a damn hard skull,” Morganstern mentioned. “But whatever hit you weakened you.”

That’s because Bres was as calculating a bastard as I am, Thrush-Kane thought. He kept silent, minimizing the need for his plasma matrix to do anything but ensure his survival. A nosebleed was a minor emergency, and had he been truly human, it would have been an indication of a subcranial hemorrhage. For the clone body wrapped around a semiorganic skeleton, however, it was simply an instance of blood vessels draining. Without his internal self-diagnostic routine, there was no way to know the cause of the organic damage. A touch to his brow, just above his nose, revealed an intense point of heat. Luckily, everyone present was too concerned about the blood pouring out of his face to take note that their “Kane” was now running a fever of 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Simple logic informed the infiltrator robot that Bres’s blow had damaged the cooling processes of his semiorganic brain. When the heat overwhelmed blood vessels in the sinus cavities, the tissues had dried out, crumbled and blood vessels flooded his sinuses.

If DeFore and the medical staff investigated him too closely, they’d see the kind of overheating damage released by an out-of-control android brain. No human’s skull could overheat that much without outright killing its owner. Thrush-Kane had to do something to shut things down. The dominant personality called upon the subbrains, looking for a response.

We have successfully penetrated redoubt command code, came the answer. Emergency diagnostic process running to minimize and return plasma matrix to normal operating procedures.

“Too late for that now,” Thrush-Kane slurred. “Turn out the lights….”

“Kane?” Morganstern asked, holding a napkin up to his nose. The bleeding had slowed now that the android’s brain was aware of the overclocking problem. “Turn out what lights?”

The mess hall suddenly went pitch-black. Screams filled the room with the sudden plunge into darkness, and since the redoubt was built into the side of a mountain, there were no windows to admit natural light. Emergency lights came up within a few moments, but for the expanse of the mess hall, there were a half dozen twin-bulb units that offered a reddish-orange glow. It wasn’t the most ideal of illumination, but at least the oppressive weight of absolute darkness no longer crushed in on the Cerberus residents.