Cosmic Rift Read Free Page A

enemy, she was also a crack shot and wouldn’t hesitate to use the weapon if danger called.
    Domi’s companion was unlike her in almost every way. Mariah Falk had been born in the twentieth century and had trained to be a geologist before enlisting in a government research project that had placed her on the moon. While there, Mariah had been put into suspended animation and had missed the most significant event of the twenty-first century—the nuclear holocaust that had rewritten the maps and left civilized society as little more than a memory smoldering in the ashes.
    That was two hundred years ago, and since then, the world had moved on quite a bit. Mariah had been awakened in the twenty-third century, along with a number of fellow experts, when a Cerberus exploratory team had ventured to the Manitius Base on the moon, and she had soon been invited to lend her services to Cerberus for the betterment of mankind.
    Mariah was a woman in her late forties, relatively speaking, with a narrow frame and a thin face. Her short, chestnut hair was streaked with white here and there, and there were lines around her eyes that spoke of her easy nature and ready smile. Though perhaps not conventionally pretty, Mariah was genial and a natural at putting people at ease.
    Most people, that was—she and Domi had a little history dating back to when Domi had been forced to shoot her in the leg to prevent her from moving. While the shot had saved Mariah’s life, it still rankled that Domi hadn’t found a less aggressive way to save her skin. When it was cold—which, thankfully, Brazil wasn’t just now—the ghost of that bullet still caused her leg to ache as if the devil himself was inside it, strumming on the bone like it was a tea-chest bass in one of those old skiffle bands her dad had liked to listen to.
    Unlike Domi, Mariah was dressed conservatively in a white jumpsuit twinned with a simple jacket, the latter doubling as a hold-all with voluminous pockets across the chest and arms. Mariah carried no weapons; she had been trained in basic firearm use like all Cerberus personnel, but she remained uncomfortable around guns and considered them very definitely a last resort. Which was why Domi was here with her—while Mariah employed her expertise as a geologist to scrutinize the immediate area, Domi assumed the role of bodyguard.
    Domi was an odd choice, perhaps, to an outsider, but her keen senses, determination and combat prowess, not to mention a somewhat fiery temper, made her every bit as protective and dangerous as a well-trained bullmastiff.
    Mariah was here—“here” being a secluded delta of the Juruena River a good seventy miles from the nearest human habitation—taking rock samples and testing the soil composition via a portable spectroscope attached to her laptop computer. The Cerberus mainframe, a database tuned to numerous remote sensors and satellite relays, had detected something out of the ordinary in the radiation content of the region.
    “Find anything?” Domi asked, her shrill voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts.
    “It’s too soon to say,” Mariah responded automatically. She had always been methodical rather than prone to great leaps of intuition—her would-be lover, Clem Bryant, had been the intuitive one, and all that had ultimately gotten him was killed. “Radioactivity is certainly higher than we’d expect for this kind of area,” she confirmed, gesturing vaguely around her.
    The area was overgrown, with trees bending down toward the river under the weight of their leaves, and mossy grass vying for space along the banks. Colorful birds flitted between the trees, small as a child’s hand, their shrill calls joining the incessant insect buzz that hummed in the air.
    The area was the very definition of remote. If there had once been human habitation anywhere nearby it had almost certainly been exterminated by the nuclear exchange that had almost destroyed the northern part of the American