Shadow Box

“And where would these Sandcats be?” Kane asked.

“Back at the base,” Rosalia said lightly, gesturing toward the depths of the shantytown labyrinth. “If we went there, we could—”

Kane held up a finger to stop her. “No. Nice try, but we won’t be walking into any traps tonight. Now, let’s get moving.”

Kane and Grant urged their charges on as Brigid sank back to cover the rear of the party. What Kane hadn’t told Smarts and Rosalia was that he had his own special transport located outside the ville. They weren’t safe here, and he had feared being overheard, but soon enough the group would be traveling a whole lot faster than the two street thieves could imagine.

IT WAS THREE in the morning by the time the group stopped. The ville was long since behind them, now just a speckling of lighted dots on the far horizon. Ahead and all around, Death Valley and the empty California desert stretched relentlessly onward. Stars twinkled in the night sky, and the cool air seemed to drill through their bones as the group strode across the open sand. Rosalia shook, cold and miserable, hugging herself as she pulled Smarts’s bright frock coat over her shoulders. Smarts himself was cold, too, but he prided himself on being nothing if not a gentleman.

“Where are we heading, señor?” Smarts asked, looking at the distant rock formations, the endless swathe of sand around them.

“We’re almost there,” Kane assured him.

“It has been a long day,” Smarts told Kane. “We could stop. If not for ourselves, perhaps we should consider the ladies?”

“We’re not going much farther,” Kane told him.

Then he raised his voice. “Baptiste?”

Brigid had drifted a little farther behind the others, and she was looking around carefully as they crossed the bleak desert. “It’s just over there,” she called back, pointing with the muzzle of her handgun toward a rising sand dune.

Kane held a hand to stop Smarts and the rest of the party, while Brigid ran toward the dune that she had indicated.

“Be a minute, people,” Kane explained, ignoring the quizzical looks of his captives.

Exhausted, Rosalia sat on the dry sand and shook her head. “Magistrate clowns,” she muttered under her breath.

Hearing this, Grant smiled and caught her eye, shaking his own head in chastisement. “Oh, you are in for such a sweet surprise,” he told her.

Smarts’s head twitched like a bird’s as he watched Brigid disappear behind the dune. “What is going on?” he demanded.

Deciding that there was nowhere his prisoners could run to, Kane placed his handgun back in his low-slung hip holster before addressing the small Mexican. “It’s time we traveled in style,” he said.

Smarts narrowed his eyes, peering at the dune, his head jutting forward, until Brigid reappeared carrying a small case. The case was caked with sand, which Brigid brushed away with her hand as she approached. Smarts realized immediately that this item had been hidden out here, buried somewhere in the empty, featureless desert.

Brigid stopped before them and knelt, placing the case on the ground. Then she began to work at its twin catches. The carrying case folded open and a squat, broad-based pyramid-shaped object was revealed. Made of a dull metal that shimmered with the blurred reflections of the bright stars, the pyramid’s base was barely one foot square, and its peak was about twelve inches above the ground. This was the interphaser.

“What is this thing?” Smarts inquired.

Kane smiled tightly. “A little shortcut,” he said enigmatically.

Smarts gestured around them at the featureless desert. “You left this thing here, yes?” he asked. “How could you possibly find it? It is a—what you call it?—needle in the haystack.”

“Brigid’s our needle finder,” Kane said as Grant helped Rosalia to her feet behind him.

Smarts looked baffled as he assessed the beautiful woman with the shimmering red-gold hair.

Brigid smiled and tapped the side of her head. “I remember things,” she told him.

The Cerberus team had opted to bury the interphaser in its protective carrying case close to where they had first appeared in the desert. This was, on reflection, much safer than carrying the astonishing piece of technology into a covert meeting with Carnack’s merciless thieves and brigands. They had needed no marker for the location. One of the advantages of Brigid’s phenomenal memory was her ability to recall the smallest details of anything she had seen. While the desert appeared featureless and largely unchanging to most people, Brigid would recall the tiniest details, a ridge here, a dead tree stump there. Finding the burial spot for this particular treasure chest was as easy to Brigid as finding the toes on the end of her feet.

The interphaser interacted with naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices to create an instantaneous teleportation system. In simple terms, the little pyramid opened dimensional rifts through which one could travel from point A to point B, despite the two points being dozens, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.

The Parallax Points Program provided a map of these naturally occurring vortices, which could be found around the world and even on other planets.

The success of the interphaser was the combined work of Brigid Baptiste and a Cerberus scientist called Brewster Philboyd, and had taken many months of trial and error to achieve. While a useful device, their interphaser still depended on the location of a parallax point, as opposed to the mat-trans units, which had been installed in military redoubts. As Grant had put it when they had arrived in Death Valley with an eight-mile walk still ahead of them, “What good’s having a personal mat-trans if we still have to walk halfway?”

While Brigid readied the pyramid-shaped device, Kane probed the sand around them with the toe of his boot until he found what he was looking for. He kicked at the sand and used his instep to brush it away until he had uncovered a flat, stone disk. The stone disk was approximately two feet square and showed cuneiform carvings around its outer ring. Brigid stepped across and carefully placed the interphaser unit in the center of the stone ring.

“What is that?” Smarts asked once more, absolutely out of his depth with the progression of events before his eyes.

“We think it was some kind of grave marker.” Kane shrugged. “Probably Navaho or Apache.”

“Or whatever those peoples called themselves way back when,” Brigid added, mostly to herself.

Rosalia took a step closer and peered at the stone circle with the pyramid now protruding from it. Then she looked at Smarts, a quizzical frown on her beautiful brow. “What is all this?” she asked him.

“I admit,” Smarts responded, “to being mystified. Seems the Magistrates don’t want to share their secrets today.”

Kane confirmed with Brigid that the interphaser was ready for use, then he turned to address Smarts and Rosalia. “Okay, here’s the skinny,” he began. “What we have here is a transport network like you folks can only dream of. The whole thing is instantaneous—”

“Like a mat-trans only portable,” Smarts broke into Kane’s explanation with a knowing smile.

“You’ve used a mat-trans?” Kane asked him, intrigued. The mat-trans units were mostly the realm of Cerberus and similar covert outfits who had penetrated the secret military redoubts to access the hidden technology there; their existence was hardly common knowledge.

“I have seen them in action once or twice,” Smarts confirmed.

“Good,” Kane affirmed. “That makes it easier for all of us. Rosie?” he asked, turning to the dancing girl.

She nodded, her face solemn. “I am aware of the mat-trans machines,” she said quietly, “though only through anecdotal evidence.”

“These are smaller,” Kane explained, “and there’s no chamber to enter. But they function in much the same way.”

He encouraged the pair to step forward, closer to the foot-high pyramid resting on the stone circle on the ground. The stone circle was a parallax point, and would work as a secure entry point for their jump.

Grant stepped across from the others, so that the team now formed a rough circle around the interphaser as the stars twinkled in the sky above.

Still kneeling, Brigid tapped out a brief sequence on the interphaser’s miniature keypad. As she stood, a waxy, illuminated cone fanned up from the metal apex of the foot-high pyramid. It had the appearance of mist, with flashes of light swirling within its depths.

Smarts’s jaw opened in astonishment as the cone of light grew larger, taking over not just more geographical space, but, in some way, swamping his mind like the onrush of a migraine, blurring everything around him to insignificance as it overwhelmed his comprehension. A glowing lotus flower blossomed from the base of the pyramid. The radiance stretched into the night sky, filled with sparks of lightning witch fire.

“Just walk into the light,” Kane’s calm voice came to his ears, and Smarts turned from the cone of brilliance to look at the hard face of the ex-Mag. The light was dancing in Kane’s gray-blue eyes, playing across the stubbled chin and sharp planes of his face.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Señor Kane,” Smarts admitted, rising fear in his voice.

Then Grant’s bearlike arm whipped behind Smarts, slapping so hard across his back that the little Mexican stumbled forward. “Man up,” he heard the dark-skinned man say, “you’re going first.”

There was a rush of sensation, energy crackling all around him, colors so bright and vibrant that Smarts didn’t have names for all of them. And then his senses rebelled at the unfamiliarity of the situation, and the next thing Smarts saw was his shadow grow as he stepped out of the cone of light behind him. Then he was joined by his four companions.