Dark Goddess

Brigid did not reply, her face expressionless. With the sunglasses concealing her eyes, she might as well have been wearing a mask.

Kane nodded toward her. “Good morning, doll-baby. You’re looking rested.”

Slowly, she lifted the sunglasses and regarded him with dispassionate, emerald-green, jade-hard eyes. “I don’t know what would give you that idea.”

A slender woman with a fair complexion, Brigid Baptiste’s high forehead gave the impression of a probing intellect, whereas her full underlip hinted at an appreciation of the sensual. Her mane of thick hair hung in a long sunset-colored braid, tossed over her left shoulder.

As he sat up straighter in his floating chair, Billy-boy Porpoise’s pudgy fingers pulled a lever that activated a small prop positioned at the rear of the seat. With a faint whir, the chair moved toward the concrete steps at the shallow end of the pool.

Grasping the handrail, Porpoise heaved himself out of the pool, rolls of fat jiggling as he mounted the steps in a slow, careful motion. Water streamed from his balloonlike belly, dripping down his tree-trunk-thick thighs. Although at first glance he appeared naked, he wore tiny Speedo briefs, almost absorbed by the multiple bulges of flabby, wet flesh. His dripping body was totally hairless, heavy pendants of fat creasing his torso and limbs. Barely visible within the folds of the man’s triple chins wealed the trace of an old scar, the memento of a long-ago throat cutting. Sunlight glinted from the multitude of rings on his pudgy fingers.

Brigid rolled out of her chair and swam with languorous strokes to the edge of the pool, effortlessly heaving herself out of the water. She casually padded barefoot toward a buffet table. It required a great deal of effort on Kane’s part to fix his attention elsewhere.

The girl who had offered Kane the drink picked up a multicolored beach towel only slightly smaller than a sail and carefully began patting every part of Porpoise’s skin dry. He smiled at her fondly. “Thank you, Dixie.”

He lifted his arms so Dixie could wipe down the undersides. Each touch of the towel sent little ripples jiggling over the expanse of pink flesh. Trying not to allow his revulsion show on his face, Kane guessed the man stood a little less than six feet tall, but probably tipped the scales at four-hundred-plus pounds.

Reacting to a gesture from Porpoise, the reggae band instantly stopped playing, as if a volume control knob had been turned all the way down. As the girl blotted the swag belly that rolled out and nearly hid his pelvis, the pink man said genially, “I’m a little surprised you came back, Kane…especially after last night’s failure.”

“What failure was that again?” Kane asked in a bored tone, as if he inquired only to be polite.

Porpoise shook his head in good-natured frustration. “It doesn’t matter. It’s enough you kept your word and returned here.”

“It’s not like I had a choice.” Kane nodded toward Brigid, who was examining the items on the dessert cart with great interest. “You baited the hook pretty damn effectively.”

Porpoise smiled. “Thank you.”

“Is that what this party is about? Celebrating that I came back?”

“Hardly. I’m holding it in honor of a former acquaintance of yours who may become a business associate.”

Kane glanced toward Blister McQuade, snapped off a salute with a finger to the brow and called, “Yo, Blister. How you been?”

To Kane’s surprise and great unease, McQuade’s lips writhed back from his broken, discolored teeth in a grin. “Gotcha, Kane. Finally gotcha.”

“You got me?”

McQuade chuckled, a sound like old bones being crushed underfoot. “Well, you’re sure as shit got, ain’t cha?”

“You have a point.”

Turning back to Porpoise, Kane demanded, “Is this whole routine just a trap to turn me over to some smalltime trash like Blister?”

Dixie held up a pink terry-cloth robe and Porpoise thrust his arms into the voluminous sleeves. “Come now,” the fat man said patronizingly. “You and Brigid are bright people. You’re too valuable to me to waste you like that.”

“I don’t get you.”

“You must’ve known when I permitted you to walk in here yesterday that there was a chance I’d take one or the both of you hostage.”

“To force Cerberus to deal with you,” Kane stated. “To trade our freedom for weapons. Like I said to you yesterday, it’s not going to happen.”

If Porpoise had possessed eyebrows, they would have arched upward over his scalp. “I think you’re very much mistaken. It’s not so much your freedom I’m bartering with, but your reputations.”

Brigid dropped the pretense of being uninterested in the exchange. She turned around, demanding sharply, “What do you mean?”

“The so-called Cerberus warriors are more than just legends in the Outlands,” Porpoise said, his eyes glinting shrewdly. “You’re symbols, valuable propaganda tools, far beyond your reputations as baron blasters.”

Like “sec man,” the term “baron blaster” was old, deriving from the rebels who had staged a violent resistance against the institution of the unification program a century earlier. Neither Kane nor Grant enjoyed having the appellation applied to them. Their ville upbringing still lurked close to the surface, and they had been taught that the so-called baron blasters were worse than outlaws, but were instead terrorists incarnate.

Regardless, the reputations of the core Cerberus warriors had grown too awesome, too great over the past five years for even the most isolated outlander to be ignorant of their accomplishments, even if it was an open question of just how many of the stories were based in truth and how many were overblown fable.

Kane folded his arms over his chest. “How can our reps be of any use to you?”

Porpoise accepted a glass from the girl and sipped at it appreciatively. “In the three years I’ve run my operation from here, rarely a month has gone by without word of the notorious Cerberus marauders. Even before I settled here, reports were circulating about your group.”

Brigid smiled coldly. “And you thought we were fairy tales?”

Porpoise shook his head. “No, I figured you were real enough. I wasn’t sure how much of what I heard was true or just folklore…like how you assassinated Baron Ragnar, blew up a major baronial outpost in New Mexico, took out a couple of Magistrate Divisions, destroyed Ambika’s pirate empire and royally screwed a big Millennial Consortium operation.”

He raised his glass in Brigid’s direction. “I really must thank you for that, doll-baby. Saved me the trouble of dealing with the competition.”

“All true,” Kane declared flatly. “And that’s just the stuff we let our PR department circulate.”

Porpoise’s eyes flicked back and forth between Kane and Brigid. “I personally don’t care about the other stuff or even it’s true or not. What’s important is if the outlanders believe it.”

Brigid frowned. “Why?”

“Their belief in the tales makes you extremely valuable assets. Once word spreads that you’re working for Billy-boy, whatever agenda Cerberus is putting together will fall apart. They’ll be flocking to me as their new hope.”

Kane opened his mouth to retort, then shut it. Porpoise was far more perceptive than his initial assessment. The Cerberus agenda called not just for the continued physical survival of humanity, but for the human spirit, the soul of an entire race.

Over the past five years, the Cerberus warriors had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.

Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the overlords, all of them wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. Kane often feared that everything he and his friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict, the Armageddon yet to come.

The Cerberus warriors had hoped the overweening ambition and ego of the reborn overlords would spark bloody internecine struggles, but in the two years since their advent, no intelligence indicating such actions had reached them.

Of course, the overlords were engaged in reclaiming their ancient ancestral kingdoms in Mesopotamia. They had yet to cast their covetous gaze back to the North American continent, but it was only a matter of time.

Before that occurred, Cerberus was determined to build some sort of unified resistance against them, but the undertaking proved far more difficult and frustrating than even the cynical Kane or the impatient Grant had imagined. Even two years after the disappearance of the barons, the villes were still in states of anarchy, of utter chaos, with various factions warring for control on a day-by-day basis.

“For the sake of argument,” Brigid said, “let’s assume you’re right, that our colleagues view us the way the Outlanders do. Wouldn’t it make more strategic sense to be known as our ally?”

Porpoise sipped the piña colada. “Not really. From both a personal and business perspective, becoming a Cerberus satellite would be detrimental to my business model. I’ve got a lot of overhead.”

“You’re a goddamn pirate,” Kane rasped impatiently. “Whatever you need, you steal. Overhead, my ass.”

“I’m an entrepreneur,” Porpoise countered defensively. “A visionary. I’m building a colony and when I’m done, I’ll be the major trading port on the gulf. I’ve got big plans—a rut farm, casinos, a major marketplace. But I need personnel.”