James Axler Page 15

  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.

  “The trans-comm’s out,” Wynan said, coming back. “Daryl…”

  “I’ll be right there,” Morganstern answered. “Kane, can you hold the napkin in place and stay still?”

  “I’ll try,” Thrush-Kane responded numbly. His plasma matrix was shutting down everything it could inside its own system in order to lower the stresses against the body wrapped around it. As such, physically the infiltrator seemed drunk or impaired by blood loss and concussion. While that had fit in with the results of DeFore’s prior testing, thanks to wireless projection producing those results especially for her equipment, Thrush-Kane felt intensely ill. He looked at Morganstern out of the corner of his eye and noticed that whatever sympathy he felt for the young man had evaporated.

  Kane impersonation subroutine disengaged. That part of his brain was rendered silent, so the emotions of the hero he was attempting to duplicate disappeared. Unfortunately, the core personality, no longer hindered by the spark of compassion built into that subroutine, now felt something completely different. It was lucky for Morganstern that Thrush-Kane felt physically weak and didn’t want to jeopardize his impersonation; otherwise he would have sat up and begun throttling the mathematician right then and there.

  Right now, Cerberus was in a state of turmoil because of the altered command parameters of the environmental systems. The nonlethal set of changes mostly dealt with lighting and room access. There was pounding at the mess hall doors as trapped Cerberus personnel tried to enter.

  Thrush-Kane sat up, having recovered much of his strength after a near breakdown of his inorganic computer. If he was alone in the dining room, he would have been able to open the doors with a whim. However, if he demonstrated such capability now, it would become clear that he was the architect of the emergency power-down.

  His Commtact remained silent, which was another of the results of his invasion of the central core. With doors locked down and the communications systems knocked out, he had thrown the redoubt into complete disarray.

  Thrush-Kane grimaced in regret that he hadn’t been able to directly force a confrontation between the forces of Cerberus and Enlil. Had he been the kind to lay curses against those whom he despised, he would have called down a pox upon Bres for the way he had altered the playing field. The Fomorians could have enjoyed themselves with Kane, testing their worth against that particular champion of humanity. Instead, with the wild hunt called down onto the android impersonator, Thrush-Kane was stuck waiting for the Cerberus heroes to finish their conflict with the Fomorian raiders who tormented the Appalachians.

  Of course, that would allow Grant and his allies to discover the real Kane, who had been left behind. The Thrush Continuum had specifically wanted a means by which to back up its efforts against the renegade Enlil, and so he had been left alive, if hampered by the presence of the Fomorians. Thrush-Kane was now left with a base with a disabled mat-trans unit. If the jump chamber was functional, he risked exposing his ruse. He doubted that the avalanche had done as much to the immortal Bres, a being who claimed to have been alive millennia ago. Why Bres would have engaged in such sabotage of hi
s assault was hard to decipher, unless…

  Thrush-Kane went to check on Brigid Baptiste’s report regarding the entities they’d encountered. The archivist was always good for a thorough chronicle of the events of their jumps, no matter which reality she was from. The infiltrator fought off a wave of desire rising through him.

  Just because the real Kane is too stupid to think of her as his perfect mate doesn’t mean I have to indulge in such idiocy, the impostor thought.

  “Kane?” Morganstern spoke up, interrupting his internal debate. “Kane, you should lie down.”

  “The bleeding’s stopped,” the impostor growled. “I feel better. Besides…”

  Morganstern dared to put a hand on his arm. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a voice called out. It was the nobility of the original Kane templates they had used, the impersonation personality that was the cover against discovery.

  Don’t hurt him, even if it’s only to maintain our cover, the Kane impersonation pleaded.

  Thrush-Kane’s right fist flexed, tendons popping, but he fought off the urge to put his fist through the mathematician’s face. “I’m fine. My balance is good. I’m not dizzy.”

  Morganstern stepped back, noticing the clenched fist. “No offense intended, Kane.”

  The impostor nodded, looking down at his white knuckles. “Sorry. Stressed over the sudden blackout. Have you tried calling anyone over the trans-comm? My Commtact isn’t working.”

  “We’re in the dark, lights and communication,” Morganstern replied. “Wynan already has the access panel off, but the wiring itself is in pristine working order.”

  Thrush-Kane frowned. “You think this could be Enlil making a move against us?”

  Thrush-Kane’s brain suddenly resonated with the voice of Brigid Baptiste as she recorded her log of the Appalachian mission, and had tagged a section regarding her speculations about the Fomorians. Bres is traditionally known as the son of Balor, and the gods, as well as the Fomorians, are their descendants, in a parallel of the mythology of Greece. Whereas Zeus was the son of the Titan Chronus, Lugh, powerful king among the Tuatha de Danaan pantheon, was the grandson of Balor, through Balor’s daughter Ethniu, who from my studies bears a remarkable resemblance to Fand. After comparative studies among mythology and known history as related by Balam, it is quite possible that the Annunaki were the creators of the Fomorians in their battle with the Tuatha de Danaan, and Lugh himself may have been a crossbreed, such as Enlil’s daughter Fand, combining the genetic—