Cradle Of Destiny

“Which? Gilgamesh is a rather—”

“The other one,” Edwards cut Brigid off.

Brigid stepped closer to the large man. “Perhaps it’s a residual memory?”

“From when Ugly Commish took me over?” Edwards asked.

Brigid nodded.

Edwards closed his eyes, as if looking inside of himself for answers. “I don’t know why I’d remember anything.”

With that, he opened a small pill bottle and downed a couple of pills without benefit of a splash of water from his canteen. “Not everyone can remember everything like you, Brigid.”

Brigid smirked at the subtle jab, then turned back to see Falk dig a little more furiously at the ground. The geologist’s spade hacked at rocklike sand that disintegrated as the steel of Falk’s tool smashed into it. Nervousness set in on the older woman’s features. “What’s wrong?”

Falk tugged on a length of stretchy fabric. Brigid knelt next to the woman, tugging it from deep, hard-packed sand. As soon as she touched the leatherlike material, Brigid knew what it was. She had never worn it, but Kane and Grant had donned the long, armored dusters, one sleeve outsized to accommodate the folding Sin Eater blaster. Domi recognized the jacket sleeve, as well, and her stomach twisted. Edwards had not brought his duster.

“This is a Magistrate jacket,” she pronounced. “How long has it been here?”

“Given the density of the sand, it’s hard to say,” Falk hedged.

“That’s a lie,” Brigid answered. “How long has this been trapped here?”

Falk looked at Brigid, swallowing before she dared to answer.

“It’s been here for nearly five thousand years,” Falk answered.

Brigid looked down at the uniform embedded in the stone. “We need to dig deeper. See what else is in there.”

“I haven’t found any skeletal remains,” Falk replied.

“They might not have been buried here with the clothing,” Brigid answered.

Domi could tell from the stress and urgency in her friend’s voice that one of the Cerberus people was going to be lost in the depths of time.

The question was, who would go missing?

Chapter 2

Gongs reverberated throughout the Tigers of Heaven dojo in the heart of New Edo. Though the transplanted Japanese had access to technology such as radios, they were also traditionalists. Alarm Klaxons produced by loudspeakers were not an improvement over the classic padded hammer striking a gigantic dish of bronze. The loud, air-shaking noise drew attention and focused it like few other sounds could.

Instinct pushed Grant and Shizuka to grab their weapons, the big ex-Magistrate sliding the Sin Eater holster over his thick right forearm. Shizuka slid her katana through a single loop of the sash around her waist, slung a quiver of ya arrows over her shoulder, and scooped up her kumi samurai bow. Every member of the Tigers of Heaven was trained in the arts of the samurai, so that even with a wild supply of automatic rifles and handguns, they were still deadly with their “primitive” weaponry. The penetration ability of a ya launched was insufficient to spear through the polycarbonate plates of full Magistrate assault armor, but Shizuka’s aim was quick and accurate enough to slip her deadly arrowheads in the gaps between those panels and through the Kevlar and Nomex underneath.

Still, the exchange of technologies and ideas between New Edo and the Cerberus redoubt had been enough for the Japanese archers to utilize shafts and bows of carbon fiber over a laminated wood core, and stiff nylon supplemented turkey and swan feathers to make the ya fly true. While Grant himself was a man who appreciated powerful firearms like the Sin Eater or his Copperhead, Shizuka had been teaching him kyudo, the samurai’s “way of the bow.” His upper-body strength was more than sufficient to handle a kumi with an eighty-eight-pound draw and keep the bowstring nocked and on target with very little vibration. It was a slow process, however. Grant was familiar with the basics of marksmanship, but it was akin to the early six months of training that he had been given on the dangerous, lightning-fast Sin Eater machine pistol. He could hit a bull’s-eye given a few moments, but he was not adept at utilizing the bow in combat. Shizuka, on the other hand, could nock, draw and launch a ya shaft in the space of a second.

A 20-round, full-auto machine pistol firing armor-crushing 240-grain 9 mm slugs would have to do for now, Grant mused. He paused and looked at his folded Magistrate trench coat. Shizuka had already slithered into the bamboo-and-polymer-plate armor, and Grant was loath to go into action without some protection. He had left behind the shadow suit at Cerberus redoubt, but the protective long coat was sufficient armor, its leatherlike material interwoven with polycarbonate strips and ballistic-resistant cloth, and extremely comfortable. The duster fluttered as he picked it up, whirling it like a cape around his shoulders as he shrugged into the roomy but supple garment.

“You really need to wear that with your shadow suit,” Shizuka spoke up. “You look magnificent with your coattails flapping.”

Grant managed a smile. “I sometimes worry about snagging this thing.”

“Have you ever?” Shizuka asked.

Grant thought about it for a moment as he and the samurai commander prepared to rush to the Tigers of Heaven’s small fleet of motorized launches. “Nope, but I don’t wear this much.”

The two lovers exited Shizuka’s Spartan dwelling and at the railing saw the gong ringer, his brawny arms and shoulders glistening with sweat as he swung the hammer to alert the city. As the gong was centrally placed, everyone could quickly get their bearings by the row of lanterns mounted on the support beam that the great bronzed dish hung from. Grant could see that the lantern indicating trouble on Thunder Isle had been ignited.

“Shit,” Grant muttered.

“We’ll get to the boats,” Shizuka said. She pulled her radio from its place on her sash. Now that the Tigers of Heaven had been alerted, they would be waiting for indications of who should respond and where they should go. “Nagumi, harden the perimeter in case this is a diversion. Ichira, Honda, bring your squads with me to the island. Full force.”

Grant knew that “full force” was not inconsiderable. Twelve samurai warriors with composite armor, high-tech bows and arrows and thousand-folded pure steel blades with nearly monomolecular edges were easily a match for Magistrates with submachine guns, grenades and bulletproof armor.

Grant and Shizuka took their places aboard the Gamera-maru, the same vessel that the two of them and their samurai allies had been on when they’d prevented an assault by the barons on New Edo when the island colony was first discovered by the Cerberus explorers. It was unofficially the flagship of the New Edo fleet, and as such, it had been upgraded with new motors on the aft. While the engines had been designed for twentieth-century inflatable rafts called Zodiacs, they had easily been adapted to the rattan-hulled craft. The increase in speed from traditional outboard motors had been dramatic, enabling a quicker response to a crisis on Thunder Isle.

Grant perched on the bow of the Gamera-maru as the twin Mercedes engines pumped out hundreds of horsepower, producing rooster tails of white, frothy spray, writing the massive energy impulse in twelve-foot-high jets as the craft accelerated from its berth. Two other craft, each laden with a quartet of Samurai, as well as their crews, had started only moments apart, but that was sufficient for Grant and Shizuka to achieve a twenty-foot lead on the other boats.

The two archers assigned to the Gamera-maru strung their bows, the composite nature of their laminated-wood-and-carbon-fiber cores building enormous potential energy. The mist of seawater coming over the rail of the speeding sea craft wouldn’t affect either the resin-lacquered bows or the inelastic cord, which couldn’t be warped by absorption. A bowstring that stretched under any conditions lost efficiency in transferring the potential energy of the bow to the arrow. Pig tendons and horsehair were two of the materials that the Tigers of Heaven had used, and even late twentieth-century polymers provided by Cerberus hadn’t improved on the archers’ capabilities.

The boat archers used larger bows than Shizuka wore, as they were not expected to wade in close. The Japanese warriors had called them “two-man bows,” as they were the height of one man riding on the shoulders of his friend—about eight feet tall, given the average diminutive stature of the Asians.

“Grant,” Kane’s voice crackled over his Commtact from a thousand miles away. “Bry told me you were on the way to Thunder Isle. Don’t go ashore.”

“Too late. We’re on our way to a four-gong emergency,” Grant answered. “Why?”

“Baptiste just called me to say she found one of our off-duty Mag coats buried under around five thousand years of sand in some sort of tomb,” Kane told him. “Thunder Isle’s one place we know of that has an operating time-travel machine….”

“Mag coats?” Grant asked. He looked at the armor-laced duster, its tails flapping from his hips. “I’m wearing mine right now.”

“Damn it, Grant,” Kane growled. “Baptiste thinks one of us—”

“Well, if she found the damn duster buried for a few thousand years, then we’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole,” Grant answered, cutting him off. “Nothing’s going to change that. Did she find any bones sticking out of the sleeves?”

“No, but she only found a piece of it sticking out,” Kane replied. “That doesn’t mean our carcass isn’t nearby.”

“Let me know if she finds any bones. Otherwise, what’s happened has happened,” Grant said. “We’ll be jumping at shadows every time we get called here.”

“Grant…” Kane’s voice was laced with frustration, but Grant knew that there were people in danger; otherwise the alert wouldn’t have sounded on New Edo.

“Kane, we can discuss this all you want later, right now, people who are our friends may be dying,” Grant grumbled. “Or am I worth more than them?”

Grant knew that Kane’s answer would be a hard choice. The two former Magistrates were closer than brothers, bound by blood, sweat and tears, but Kane was driven by the same selfless urge to protect innocents that had made them the finest enforcement team in Cobaltville.

“You don’t have permission to die,” Kane said. “If you do, I’ll drag you back to life and beat you to death again.”

“It’ll take a lot to get me out of your life. If I don’t see you for five thousand years, you’d better behave. Remember, the more you complain, the longer you live, and five millennia ain’t going to be shit off the bitching I’ve done,” Grant answered.

There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the Commtact. “I’ll hold you to that.”