Truth Engine Read Online Free PDF Page A

announced, “and they’ll go down.” He didn’t need to shout. Instead, he hadautomatically engaged the hidden subdermal Commtact unit that was connected to his mastoid bone.
    Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. Grant, Kane and the other members of the Cerberus field teams had Commtacts surgically embedded beneath their skin, a relatively minor operation that allowed them to keep in real-time contact in any given situation.
    Kane picked up on Grant’s advice, jumping over the nearest desk as another volley of stones whizzed across the room at him. He was on the slingshot bearer in an instant, high kicking the guy in the face. It felt like kicking a wall, and Kane staggered back with a grunt.
    The man stared at him, eyes burning from beneath his hood. “This is the future,” he stated, his voice eerily calm. “Submit.”
    Kane thrust his right fist forward, slamming it up into the stranger’s gut. “Sorry, that ain’t going to work for me, buckaroo,” he growled as he unleashed a burst of bullets into him.
    The man keeled over as the blast took him, dropping to the floor like a discarded bag of compost even as the woman Kane had just shot clambered to a standing position behind him.
    â€œPoint-blank them,” Kane instructed, looking abouthim to catch the attention of the other Cerberus personnel in the room. “It’s the best way.”
    Then he was back facing the woman who had tossed stones at him just a half minute before, the one he’d thought he had dispatched. Kane whipped the Sin Eater up, driving it toward her face, but she moved fast in the flickering overhead lights, slapping the muzzle of the blaster aside even as Kane squeezed the trigger.
    His shots went wide and she drove a powerful fist at his jaw, connecting with such force that his ears rang. When Kane looked up, the woman’s hood had dropped back and he saw her face for the first time. She was older than he had expected, with lined skin and crow’s feet around her eyes—probably in her late forties or early fifties. There was a blister dead center on her forehead, and Kane found his attention drawn to its ugliness for a distracting instant.
    The woman grabbed a small lamp off the nearest desk, its cable sparking as she wrenched it from the socket and swung it at Kane’s head. He regained his composure just in time, using the muzzle of his Sin Eater to deflect the projectile. Then he drove the pistol forward and blasted a stream of bullets into the woman’s throat and upward, peppering her face. He did not like doing this, but there was something eerily wrong with these interlopers, who acted with such single-mindedness that they seemed to be automatons.
    Somewhere behind Kane, Brigid Baptiste had found herself trapped between two of the slingshot-wielding strangers. As the one to her left flung a handful of tiny stones at her face, she dropped to her knees, feeling them pull at her hair as she managed to duck just in time. The stones struck the other attacker like buckshot, knocking him to the floor. Then Brigid kicked out, striking the firstman behind the ankle and bringing him to the ground. As he fell, Brigid whipped up her semiautomatic, blasting a stuttering burst of bullets into his torso.
    Behind her, a third assailant had grabbed something from one of the debris-strewed desks, and she turned just in time