Cosmic Rift by James Axler

them.
    “What took you two so long?” Grant asked. He was a huge man with skin like polished mahogany and bulging muscles across his mighty frame that strained at the blue T-shirt and olive combat pants he wore. His head was shaved and he had recently affected a goatee-style beard that circled his mouth in a narrow black line. A little older than Kane, Grant had partnered the man back when they were both Magistrates in Cobaltville, and the two shared a connection that made them seem like brothers, despite their physical differences. Grant’s voice was a rumble like thunder when he spoke, but despite how threatening he seemed, Kane knew when he was just kidding.
    Kane brushed back his tousled hair, which was still a little damp from swimming. “Nothing,” he assured his friend with a wicked smile. “I was just showing Baptiste here what a magnanimous winner I could be.”
    Brigid shot Kane a look, her eyes narrowed in annoyance. “I think you’ll find I was faster than you in every length we raced.”
    “Faster, yes, but look at you,” Kane teased. “You’re exhausted.”
    He was wrong, of course. Both of them were at the peak of physical fitness, and a few lengths of the swimming pool were hardly enough to get Brigid warmed up. In fact, had Bry’s request not come through she would have spent the rest of the afternoon there, challenging herself to be faster, to swim farther and to hold her breath longer. You never knew when such endurance would come in handy.
    Brigid had dressed in a loose shirt over a sleeveless black top and dark pants. The shirt went some way to hide the curves of her figure, but she had still turned heads in the operations room when she entered. Without the time to dry her long hair, Brigid had tied it in a scarf for now.
    Kane had dressed in a pale shirt that was open at the collar and casual pants tucked into a pair of scuffed combat boots. The boots were a carryover from his days as a Magistrate, similar to the ones he had worn when on patrol.
    “It’s good of you all to come so swiftly,” Lakesh said, beckoning the three of them over to his desk. The video camera was still attached there, and Mariah took a few minutes bringing them up to speed on what had happened out near the Juruena River before Lakesh outlined what he had in mind.
    “Working on the assumption that the golden aircraft arrived to acquire the buried spaceship,” Lakesh said, “I propose we put something out there that will encourage them to come back.”
    “You mean bait?” Grant asked.
    Lakesh smiled. “Precisely! We have several alien vehicles in our possession. If we can leave one on show, perhaps drawing attention to it, our scavengers—if that’s what they are—might come to take a look.”
    “That’s a big ‘if,’” Kane groused. “How were you thinking we might draw attention to this if we were to follow through on your plan?”
    “Well, I’ll leave the mechanics up to you,” Lakesh admitted drily. “But my thought was we could stage some kind of elaborate—I don’t know—crash-landing spectacle that might draw the attention of the kind of people who come to pluck buried Annunaki spaceships out of the ground.”
    “Crash landing, huh?” Grant asked dubiously. “We try to avoid those.”
    “Hence elaborately staged, ” Lakesh reminded the larger man.
    “And if we do bring your golden visitors back?” Brigid asked. “What then?”
    “Ah,” Lakesh said, “I was rather hoping you’d be able to...um...work on the fly at that point and see where the situation takes you.”
    “You want us to follow them?” Kane asked.
    “Just to get Domi back,” Lakesh told him. “I don’t want you to put yourselves in unnecessary jeopardy.”
    “Fake a crash landing,” Kane grumbled, ticking off the points on his fingers, “deceive the well-armed strangers, and free the companion we don’t know for sure has been kidnapped.”
    “Nobody said they were well armed,” Lakesh