Oblivion Stone

Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.

Mariah looked down at the murky water, watching the silt swirl within it as the many activities there churned sand up in little cloudlike bursts. “Am I going to catch anything?” she asked Clem, wincing and gritting her teeth.

“Only enlightenment,” Clem assured her as Mariah pulled her hand away from his grasp.

In a final rush, Mariah took the last few paces on her bare feet and waded into the flowing Ganges, letting it lap around her bare ankles and calves as she held her shoes aloft. “Eeeee,” she cheered, “it’s warm.”

Sedately, Clem followed her in, feeling the water flowing over his sandals, splashing around his feet and soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He turned to Mariah as she held her pumps over the sun-dappled surface of the water and tentatively waded a little deeper, making her way from a group of local women who were busy washing their clothes. To Clem’s eyes, she looked happy and, for all the activity going on around her, she looked at peace.

Clem called to her as he made his way over to where his companion was now standing hip-deep in the flowing river. “Can’t you feel your sins washing away?” he inquired.

Mariah dipped down and, to Clem’s surprise, ducked her head under the water for a moment before resurfacing and shaking the water from her dark hair. “Oh, Clem, how did you ever talk me into this?”

“I don’t recall,” Clem replied with a laugh. “Did I promise infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss?”

“No,” Mariah said, “you said you’d teach me to scuba dive. And take me dancing.”

Clem shook his head. “I can’t imagine that I would have agreed to the dancing.”

“Are you saying you won’t dance with me, Bryant?” Mariah asked coquettishly, reaching her arms around his shoulders.

Placing his own arms around her waist, Clem pulled Mariah closer and together they danced in the flowing waters of the River Ganges, Mariah’s shoes still dangling from her crooked fingers, while all around them people carried on with their daily chores, oblivious to the couple’s joy.

Mariah was still laughing five minutes later as Clem led her back to shore and they ascended the wide stone steps. “I can’t believe you made me do that,” she said. “I’m soaked through.”

Clem stretched his arms wide and turned his head toward the sky. “The sun will dry you off,” he told her. His own clothes—a light ensemble of shirt and cargo pants—had stuck to him from the soaking that he had received in the river. “I can’t believe I’m back here. I feel like I’m twenty-one all over again.”

Mariah walked barefoot up the steps, her sopping pumps dripping in her left hand. “Me, too,” she said. “With everything we go through at Cerberus, it’s funny to think that places like this still exist. It feels like they haven’t changed in a thousand years.”

“India suffered in the global conflict as much as any country,” Clem told her. “It’s just that New York and Washington, London and Moscow—those locales have been relegated to the history books. While places like this—” he swept his hand about him to indicate the magnificent vista of the wide river “—they’re eternal.”

“Do you really believe in this stuff?” Mariah asked as she and Clem made their way back onto the dusty road that led down toward the steps. “Enlightenment and the washing away of one’s sins?”

Clem smiled. “The belief in a higher purpose, the desire to be a better person—these are universal,” he said. “These are precisely the tenets that Cerberus subscribes to.”

“I didn’t really think of it like that,” Mariah admitted, running her hand through her hair. To her surprise she found that it was almost dry already, thanks to the warmth of the pounding sun.

“Speaking of which,” Clem said, reaching into a sealed pocket of his pants and pulling free an earpiece with a built-in microphone pickup, “it’s about time we were heading back to work. I’ll radio in and let them know we’ll be entering the mat-trans in about twenty-five minutes.”

Mariah nodded reluctantly as she watched Clem place the portable communications device over his ear. Unlike the field teams, she and Clem had decided to forgo the minor operation that inserted the Commtact equipment beneath the surface of the skin. As such, they were both limited to carrying robust, portable units around with them and firing them up when they needed to. Also Cerberus was less easily able to contact them while they were away from home base. On occasions such as this, Mariah reflected, that lack of contact and the privacy it brought wasn’t such a bad thing.

It had been a nice afternoon, Mariah considered as Clem patched his signal through to Cerberus and waited for an acknowledgment. Although she had seen Clem around the base in the Bitterroot Mountains on a number of occasions, where the man mostly served as a cook within the canteen, having forsaken his primary discipline of oceanography, it was only in recent months that they had become close. It had started innocently enough—they had been thrown together by chance to investigate the epicenter of an earthquake. But somehow, Clem’s easy manner and his dry wit had put Mariah at her ease and, more than that, had reminded her of something that most of the Cerberus personnel seemed to have forgotten—what it was like to live in a world without constant fear. Clem was capable and incisive, and he was renowned among his Cerberus peers as a fiercely logical tactician and puzzle-solver. And yet, at times like this, he seemed almost carefree in his utter enjoyment of the world about him. For Clem, it seemed, being cryogenically frozen and learning of the nukecaust were just minor blips in that delightful adventure he called life. And while the rest of Cerberus were geared up to the discovery of new horrors and the unveiling of new conspiracies concerning the ceaseless subjugation of mankind, Clem’s was a very refreshing attitude to have.

“Funny,” Clem mused, his rich voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts, “I can’t seem to get any response from Cerberus. I hope they’re not sleeping on the job.”

“With Lakesh in charge?” Mariah asked. “They’re lucky they’re allowed restroom breaks!”

“Quite,” Clem agreed, removing the earpiece and looking it over. “I wonder if perhaps the river water has got into my equipment.”

“Aren’t they waterproof?” Mariah asked.

“They’re meant to be,” Clem said thoughtfully, turning the earpiece over on his open palm. “It certainly appears to be sealed tight.”

Mariah reached into her own pocket and pulled loose the earpiece that she had stowed there. “Do you want to try mine?”

Clem nodded, plucking Mariah’s earpiece from her grip. In a moment he had the earpiece hooked over his ear, and was engaging its pickup mic. “This is Clem Bryant calling home. Come in, home.” He waited a moment, stopping at the side of the road as a cart drawn by a donkey and laden with ripe melons trundled past. There was no response from the earpiece.

“Anything?” Mariah asked as a half-dozen chickens went rushing past, herded by a shirtless boy who appeared to be no more than ten years old.

“Nothing at all,” Clem mused, and his tone was irked. “It’s very unusual for two comm devices to go offline at the same time like this. In fact, I’d estimate the odds are up in the hundreds of thousands against.”

“Me, too,” Mariah agreed. “That hardware is old but it’s military solid. Do you think maybe something else has happened? Perhaps Cerberus doesn’t want us back.”

Clem looked pensive as he considered what to do next. “I’m going to keep trying them while we return to the mat-trans. If there’s no response by then, we may need to consider our options more thoroughly.”

Mariah nodded as she replaced the white pumps on her feet, feeling the water in them squelch against her toes. Whatever else you might say about Clem, she thought, he was certainly a man who didn’t ruffle easily.

THE MAT-TRANS UNIT at the end of the Cerberus ops center was just winding down, clouds of mist being sucked away by hidden filters beneath the hexagonal chamber. The door hissed back on its hinges, and three familiar figures stepped out into the antechamber only to find themselves facing a veritable wall of armed guards.

“Hey, guys,” Kane said, dropping the sword and raising his empty hands as he saw the wall of firepower arrayed before him. “It’s us.”

Beside Kane, Grant and Brigid were also raising their empty hands to shoulder level where they could be seen, and all three of the Cerberus field team were wondering just what was going on.

A mellifluous voice called to Kane from somewhere behind the wall of armed guards and, a moment later, Lakesh came brushing past the guards to greet the three of them. “I’m frightfully sorry about all this,” Lakesh began as he grasped Kane’s hand in a solid two-handed shake. “We’ve had a major glitch with the communications relay, causing us to lose contact with everyone out in the field. Precautions will remain in place until we can track who’s entering via the mat-trans, I’m afraid.”

Kane nodded as Lakesh made a path through the wall of armed guards toward the main area of the control room. He saw Edwards sitting with his own field team in one corner of the room. The military man’s face was red with anger and he was complaining in loud terms to his teammates about having his own people pointing guns at him on his arrival at the redoubt.

“Some welcome this is,” Edwards snorted. “If I’d wanted this kinda aggravation every time I walk in the door, I’d’ve got married.”

Edwards’s teammates agreed with the man, used to his bluster.

Kane and his crew strode beside Lakesh toward the Cerberus leader’s own desk.

“Our Commtacts ceased working about an hour ago,” Grant explained. “I was talking with Kane at the time and suddenly—nada—the line was dead.”

Lakesh looked from Grant to Kane to Brigid, concern marring his features. “Did everything go okay?” he asked.

Kane nodded. “Got a little hairy for a while, but you know us—managed to play things by ear.”

“And what about the artifact?” Lakesh quizzed. “An alien chair, wasn’t it?”

“It’s Annunaki, all right,” Brigid confirmed as she removed her dark hat and tossed her lustrous hair back over her shoulders. “I think it’s an astrogator’s chair, used for navigation in starship travel.”