Scarlet Dream. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

      Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.

      Kane peered around the room for a moment, his eyes searching before he turned back to his partners where they waited at the desks. “Was I meant to bring the interphaser?” he asked.

      “No interphaser this time, buddy,” Grant advised in his deep voice.

      Lakesh gestured to the doorway in the far corner of the room. “Ah, yes, you weren’t here when I explained this, old friend,” he told Kane. “We’ve used our remote access to power the receiver unit at Redoubt Mike,” he stated briefly.

      Kane felt a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

      Brigid smiled brightly as she looked over her shoulder, encouraging Kane to follow her toward the armaglass cubicle that dominated a corner of the operations room. “Oh, yes. We’re going via mat-trans for this one,” she told him. “Old school.”

      “Oh, great,” Kane muttered sarcastically as he followed his two companions through the doorway into the ancient mat-trans unit. “If there’s one thing I miss, it’s doing things the really shitty way.”

      “We’ll briefly activate the outdated system by remote,” Lakesh told Kane as he peered through the open doorway. “It’s risky, but every second counts, so the closer we can get you to the site of infraction, the better.”

      “Right blindly into the thick of it, huh?” Kane said, shaking his head. “Yeah, that plan can’t go wrong.”

      “For our security, the mat-trans will power down immediately after you’ve materialized at Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh said to assure him. “Which means you’ll need to comm us when you’re ready to return.”

      Kane nodded irritably. “Got it.”

      Kane closed the door, locking the three companions in the ancient mat-trans chamber and enabling the jump sequence. Donald Bry’s fingers worked the computer keyboard and the trio were reduced to their component atoms, digitized and sent across the quantum ether to the receiver unit in far-off Louisiana.

      At least it’s quick, Kane reasoned as his substance ceased to exist.

      Chapter 3

      Traveling via mat-trans was a little like waking in the middle of the night to the awful realization that you had contracted food poisoning. A moment earlier, one’s life was a restful dream, then suddenly it had turned into a bewildering nightmare, colored only by one’s need to vomit.

      Almost doubled over, Kane took deep breaths as he stood in the mat-trans chamber that he and his companions had materialized in an instant before. His heart was pounding, his stomach was doing some crazy kind of acrobatics and he could taste bile at the back of his throat. For a moment he stood hunched over, staring at the white-tiled floor as he tried to bring himself back to a state of calm.

      The tiled floor at Kane’s feet was familiar, exactly the same as the one that the companions had left in Montana just an instant earlier, dusty white tiles glinting beneath harsh overhead lighting. White mist floated in the air like fog, slowly dissipating as extractor fans began their designated task of clearing the glass-walled chamber.

      While mat-trans travel was possible for humans, it had not initially been designed with people in mind. Rather, it was intended for the movement of matériel, and its application to transporting the human form could be traumatic. Despite the churning of his stomach, Kane was fairly used to this ghastly system of travel, and had made his peace with it years before. Grant, by contrast, had never liked traveling via mat-trans, and he endured it with a determined mixture of bitterness and hostility, even after all these years with Cerberus.

      “Everyone arrive in one piece?” Kane asked, straightening to check on his two companions.

      They stood behind him, one over each shoulder in the manner of a fighter pilot’s wingmen. Brigid Baptiste had her hand to her mouth and was biting down on her knuckle, her skin visibly paler than even its usual near-alabaster hue.

      Realizing that Kane was looking at her for an answer, Brigid nodded, still biting down on her knuckle.

      Across from the red-haired former archivist, Grant had his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed up tight, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts.

      “Grant?” Kane urged, reaching for his other companion.

      “Present,” Grant muttered, his eyes still closed.

      Kane felt his own stomach lurch then, and he gagged for a moment, holding down its contents with considerable effort. “You okay?” he asked once he had got himself back under control.

      Grant opened his eyes, the dark orbs looking bloodshot, focused on some far distant point. “That was…that was really something,” he said through gasping breaths.

      “Lakesh said this was a prototype unit,” Brigid reminded them both. She had removed her hand from her mouth now, but she still seemed unsteady on her feet as she staggered forward, the chunky heels of her cowboy boots clacking loudly against the white tiles. “I guess they didn’t iron out all the kinks on this one.”

      “Guess not,” Kane agreed as he recovered himself.

      The pale transportation gas had almost disappeared now, the extractor fans whirring loudly above the companions’ heads, and Kane turned to face the door. The door was offset from center in a bank of tinted armaglass, its panes colored a golden yellow. When traveling via mat-trans, the differently colored armaglass was one rudimentary way to recognize that a person had actually been shunted to a new location. In the direct manner of the military mind, each location had differently colored glass, a coded sequence that identified each mat-trans and its location. Presumably, when the system was still in its earliest days and the number of units was small, one might say, “I’m going to gold,” which meant the individual was traveling to Redoubt Mike in Louisiana. As a general rule, what a military force seemed to lack in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness. The speed and ease of identification could often be crucial in such situations, where goods and personnel were effectively being shoved through the unknown.

      Still a little woozy, Kane stilled his mind and went into the near trancelike state that put him on high alert, powering his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a flinch of his wrist tendons as he stepped over to the sealed door. The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, and both Kane and Grant had kept them when they had fled from the barony of Cobaltville that they had been tasked to protect years before. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist, in Kane’s case one tucked beneath the unbuttoned sleeve of his darkly colored denim jacket. The holsters reacted to a specific flinch movement of the wrist tendons, powering СКАЧАТЬ