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had been instructed to return to Cerberus headquarters, and she arrived ten minutes after that, utilizing the nearest parallax point in the Brazilian forest.
    Lakesh met her as she exited the mat-trans, and his face was a picture of worry. Lakesh—more properly, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh—was the founder and leader of the Cerberus operation, although the latter title had occasionally been a contentious one.
    A dusky-skinned man apparently in his fifties, Lakesh had unusual blue eyes and jet-black hair that was swept back from his forehead with a few streaks of white apparent above the ears. He had an aquiline nose and a refined mouth, and his gaze invariably gave the uncanny impression that he was thinking very deep thoughts. Lakesh wore a white jumpsuit with a blue vertical zipper that was the standard uniform of all Cerberus operations staff. Lakesh looked anxiously at Mariah as she emerged from the chamber, and his words tumbled out in a rush.
    “What state was she in? Was she hurt?”
    Mariah held up her free hand—the other was weighed down with the interphaser unit—to halt Lakesh’s stream of questions. “Whoa, Doctor,” she said. “Let a girl catch her breath already.”
    “I-I-I’m terribly sorry, my dear,” Lakesh stuttered with evident embarrassment. “I quite forgot my manners. How are you? Are you hurt?”
    Mariah stepped across to the polished table in the anteroom beyond the mat-trans chamber door and placed the interphaser upon it. The interphaser looked innocuous enough—just a one foot high, one foot wide, square-based pyramid-shaped device made of a gleaming metal that had odd reflections on its surface.
    However, its design had been refined by Lakesh himself to access preexisting quantum gateways that provided a reliable means of teleportation. It wasn’t Lakesh’s first experimentation into teleports. He had been one of the designers of the original mat-trans system employed by the United States military toward the end of the twentieth century, before the nuclear exchange had brought civilization to an abrupt halt. Lakesh and his creation had survived that terrible onslaught—he by cryogenic suspended animation, his mat-trans device held safely in one of the protective military redoubts that were scattered across North America and beyond.
    “I’m fine,” Mariah confirmed. “A little shook up and a little dusty, but I didn’t sustain any damage.”
    “And how about my dear Domi?” Lakesh wanted to know. It was only natural that he would be the first to ask about Domi, Mariah thought. Although physically her senior by at least thirty years—and actually over two centuries older—Lakesh was in a long-term relationship with Domi. The two of them were very different—he a scientist and what they used to call an egghead in Mariah’s day, she an almost-feral, self-sufficient survivor from the barely civilized areas of the postnukecaust landscape. Still, they seemed happy together and their relationship had stood the test of time so far. Perhaps it was true what they said, Mariah reflected—opposites did attract.
    Lakesh was still looking at her intensely as he waited for her to answer his barrage of questions.
    “She was fine when I last saw her, which was just before she entered the ship,” Mariah confirmed. “That was before the golden shapes appeared in the sky,” she added by way of clarification, “and she certainly gave me no indication that she had become wounded in the meantime. Once the ship took off, I lost whatever contact I had, however.”
    “We’ve had no success hailing her at this end,” Lakesh reported sourly. “She’s not responding to attempts to contact her via the Commtact.”
    “What about her transponder?” Mariah asked.
    Lakesh shook his head. “Negative. Donald traced her movement for approximately two miles before she and the ship disappeared from all tracking devices. It’s as if the transponder simply cut out.”
    “Any—” Mariah began to