by James Axler
“You heard the lady!” Niklo bellowed. “Heads on swivels, standard perimeter protocols!”
“Movement!” came a cry from their scout up the road.
Smaragda turned and jogged toward the man. Niklo cut her off.
“You talk to home base,” he told her.
Smaragda wrinkled her nose, not wanting to expose any of her men to danger while she was busy on the blower back to Olympus. Even so, she was the one in charge and she was the one whose opinion and authority mattered. This was a chain-of-command decision.
“If things look bad, you hold down the trigger until you melt the barrel laying down cover fire for our retreat,” Smaragda ordered him. “And you make damn sure you come back, or I’m swimming across the Styx and dragging you back to life.”
Niklo smirked, his lined face a road map of seventy years lived in the space of forty, dark eyes twinkling. “Myr, I’m counting on you getting me back from Hades.”
The Olympians, turned into a well-oiled military machine of professional warriors, remained in their defensive positions, alert and ready for trouble. No one was in the line of fire of the other and each had a designated vector to scan and search. Everyone knelt, making themselves smaller targets and bringing their knee and thigh armor up to their chests to bolster the protection of their vital organs against incoming fire.
Thanos—“Tan” to his platoon mates and friends, who seemed to be everyone—looked concerned as he was on the radio. “Not getting a signal. Something is jamming us.”
“How can that be?” the pilot of the Spartan asked. “This radio is designed to transmit across hundreds of miles. It’s predark technology, solid-state and can cut through any interference like a knife through mud.”
Tan shook his head. “Listen to this.”
Smaragda took the receiver. The only sound on the other end was…unnatural.
A knocked-out radio should only receive static, white noise, the pop and crackle of random frequencies and the hiss of electromagnetic radiation pouring off the sun onto the surface of the Earth.
A jammed radio should not be singing in unholy but beautiful tones. She couldn’t bear to listen to the blasphemous signal for more than a few seconds before handing the radio back to Tan. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to put it back to his ear, either.
She tried the helmet comm. “Niklo, come back.”
As soon as she stopped transmitting, there was that song; a high, melodic tone, singing verses in a long-forgotten tongue. But even without understanding the words, Smaragda knew it spoke to something that did not belong on Earth. It was a prayer. What was worse, she knew something was listening and somewhere, beyond the veil of her senses, it was struggling to respond.
“Karlo, Rosa, go grab Niklo and Herc and bring them back. We’re heading back to the boat. If you see anyone or anything that’s not Niklo or Herc, open fire,” Smaragda said.
So much for a mission of peace and mercy. Smaragda didn’t like the idea of sending off her soldiers to retrieve their teammates under orders to kill any strangers. However the singing and the odd behavior of the wildlife around them added up to this road being nothing less than a murder trap.
And she’d led her platoon right into it.
Karlo and Rosa jogged up the road to where Herc, the scout, had called back about movement. Niklo had only been out of radio contact for a minute, but it felt like a lifetime. The only heartening thing was that there had been no sound of gunfire. After all, if Niklo didn’t cut loose with the SAW, that meant there was no enemy force rising to engulf them. The Olympian sergeant would have made any ambush pay for their surprise, and the light machine gun would have been heard for miles.
The silence around them, the damned silence smothering the platoon, ate at her. Smaragda upped the magnification on her helmet optics, scanning the road ahead. It had been midday when they’d stopped, clouds moving in. The day had been growing steadily grayer and dimmer, but now the light was fading even faster, when the sun should be highest in the sky.
Her blood seemed to thicken in her veins as even the high-tech optics in her Praetorian helmet, the same advanced night-vision and telescopic lenses that Kane and Grant had as part of their Magistrate armor suits, showed nothing.
“Captain?” A voice spoke up.
“Movement?” Smaragda asked.
“No. Just…smoke,” Tan said.
Smaragda flipped up the visor on her helmet. There, invisible to the infrared scanners, was a roiling, spreading cloud that billowed out onto the road. She glanced through on infrared again. No one seemed to be inside the cloud, utilizing it as cover or concealment. Who knew if the smoke had some properties that could be filtering out even the body heat of her fellow Praetorians?
“Should we open fire?” another soldier asked, nerves jangling in his voice.
“On what?” Smaragda asked. “We might just end up cutting Niklo and the others apart.”
“But they’re not on the infrared,” Tan noted.
“Retreat,” Smaragda ordered.
“Smoke’s closing in on the road behind us,” announced the Spartan at the back of their formation. “I’m going to…”
“Stay put!” Smaragda commanded. “Don’t enter the smoke.”
Every instinct told her to open fire into the infection of black ink spilling onto the road on either end, bracketing them in.
Smaragda wouldn’t risk the lives of her men in a friendly fire incident.
“GS 26, knock us a road through the trees, now!” Smaragda ordered.
The suit in the center of the formation reacted quickly, plunging into the woods. Large, brassy arms wielding unimaginable strength pushed against trunks, shoving trees out of the ground, roots snapping. Branches shattered against the suit’s broad shoulders and Smaragda waved her men into the gap being created by the bulldozer-like robot. She stayed at the back of the group, watching as the walls of inky, foreboding smoke began to close in on where they used to be. It was as if the clouds were only following the road, forming perfect columns, not spreading out into the forest and upon the path that Skeleton 26 pushed through. Smaragda continued stepping backward, minding the exposed roots and splinters left in the robot’s wake.
She kept the muzzle of her rifle aimed at the wall of darkness and turned sideways, skipping back after her men.
“Niklo, I’ll be back,” she whispered. “If you’re alive.”
Silently she repeated that thought. Leaving soldiers under her command behind, in a lurch, was as bad a defeat as seeing them fall in bloody heaps.
“Everyone comes home.” Smaragda repeated the motto of the Praetorians. “Sooner or later, we’ll be back for you.”
A scream split the air. She whirled and looked down the trough cut through the woods. Of the three Spartans in the unit, she could only see one, the other two having disappeared behind a wall of darkness that intercepted them. Of the fifteen soldiers she’d pushed into retreat in the wake of the Spartans, she saw only six, and they were in full retreat.
The mighty robot’s shoulder guns opened up onto the shadowy smoke as it lunged for the brass giant. The flash and flicker of muzzle-blasts did little to dent or illuminate the choking, inky fog that seemed to grow tentacles with which to entrap the robot.
Smaragda shouldered her rifle, but realized that opening fire into the fog would mean that she could be blindly gunning down fellow soldiers taken captive by the cloud. She wanted to yell for a cease-fire from the robot but, watching the giant fight for its life, she noted that tracer rounds struck the smoke, then bounced off the cloud.
GS 26 lashed out with its battle-ax, the edges heated to steamy white by elements inside the gigantic weapon. The ax seemed to fare better, lopping off solid hunks of the darkness, but only if they were slender tendrils. Anything thicker than a human torso caught the ax, forcing the Spartan to struggle and wrench the blade free.
Tendrils whipped out, snatching up another of her men.
Smaragda lunged, drawing h
er falcata and slashing at the tentacle of living night. Blade met alien smoke and it was as if she tried to chop a tree branch. The solidness of the tendril of cloud rattled her arm, tendons popping as she put enough force into the swing for a follow-through.
The soldier in the fog’s grasp turned ashen, eyes wide with horror. He breathed out, wisps of frosting moisture escaping from his lips.
“Run!” he rasped. “Get away! Live to…”
Another whip of darkness wrapped around the Praetorian’s head and, within moments, he was wrenched off of his feet and into the smoke as if he was never there.
Lashing smoke fingered out toward her, but she swatted the pseudopods aside, scrambling into retreat.
The Gear Skeleton still fighting the fog disappeared; one hand reached up, clawing at the air in the hope of grasping some anchor, but the robotic claw stilled and was sucked into the darkness.
Smaragda turned and raced off a side trail between the trees. Whatever the smoke was, it seemed to have trouble flowing through and around the trunks of the forest. She swerved and wove, bounding over fallen logs and branches. She regretted lifting the visor so that she could see the midnight horror that expanded onto the road as leaves and fronds slapped and slashed at her face and eyes. She struck a tree trunk at full speed while half blinded by a leaf raking her naked eyeball.
The impact jarred her, but she seized the trunk, using it to maintain her footing.
She glanced back and saw that there were three tentacles winnowing their way around trunks, stretched out at far back as she could see through the trees. Smaragda raised her M-16 and opened fire. Rifle rounds shattered the eerie silence that had fallen in the wake of the last Spartan’s disappearance, but they did nothing to dispel the living darkness stretching and seething after her.
Smaragda turned and ran again, having paused only to slide down her eye shield, leaving the advanced optics out of the way.
Smaragda ran for as long and as hard as she could.
Within an hour she was at the coast, on her knees, her chest burning, shoulders aching, trying to vomit but having nothing to spit up.
Twenty-two people were now gone.
She was the lone survivor.
She pulled off her helmet and, for a moment, thought something else had come after her. A sheet of white spilled down over her eyes and she screamed in shock.
Then she realized why she was so stunned.
Before the smoke her hair had been as dark as a raven’s feathers.
Now the tresses that she could see were as pale and wispy as silken icicles.
Trembling, Smaragda looked around for the boat that had brought the expedition.
“Live to tell what happened,” she said in a terrified murmur.
“Live to tell what…happened…” she repeated.
Tears drenched Smaragda’s cheeks as she struggled to her feet.
Chapter 2
Domi crouched deeply as she faced off with the man in black. Perfectly balanced in her hand was the handle of one of her favorite knives, its flats gleaming under the harsh lights. She was a small woman, hardly five feet in her bare feet, and Domi was almost constantly barefoot. Her body looked thin and frail, her complexion was white as bone and her hair was wispy, silvery and trimmed short so as to provide little more than peach fuzz for an opponent to grab on to. Most startling about Domi was her eyes, ruby-red gems that denoted the cause of her pale flesh and translucent hair.
The girl was an albino. And yet she was facing off against a man a foot taller and easily a hundred pounds heavier than she was, her muscles tense, ready for battle. In the centuries before skydark, the cataclysmic nuclear Armageddon that drove humankind to the brink of extinction, albinos had been considered frail. Indeed, as a child, she had been, but surviving in the deadly world outside of the villes, in the harsh wilderness between tiny islands of civilization, had hardened her.
She was thin of limb, yes. But her muscles were corded tight and had strength and swiftness within them, making her akin to a panther. Her “claws” were her knife and her “bite” was a deadly little .45-caliber Detonics Combat Master, which she didn’t have access to now.
The big man in front of her was powerful, armored, and even inside that armor, had a lightness on his feet, bouncing on the ground in a taunting dance, making it apparent that he expected her to charge him. He was dangling himself as bait, waiting for her to commit to an attack before he turned it around.
Domi was a survivor, though. Before she’d begun to learn how to read under the tutelage of Lakesh and Brigid Baptiste, her school had been expanses of desert or gnarled, predator-stalked forests. Her teachers had been the cruel and the powerful, seeking to use her as meat or pleasure or, in some grisly cases, both. And the feral albino girl had been a quick student, passing every test thrown at her.
This was not the first time she’d faced the armored brute in front of her. His head was encased in a glossy but tough helmet, shielding his face and preventing her from seeing if he was blinking or shifting his glance. Without a view of his tells, Domi was partially blinded, at her usual disadvantage. With nothing to betray her enemy’s thoughts, and even his body language distorted by the bouncing dance he shuffled, all of her usual cues as to where or when to strike or even to defend were gone.
The brute lunged. He had his own blade, twice the length of Domi’s, almost a short sword that looked normal-size in his massive fist. The movement startled the wild girl, but even when reflexively responding to the sudden rush, Domi’s body reacted with speed and agility. The edge of the knife whistled through the air and she could feel the brush of wind off its cold, unyielding dagger on her bare upper arm, the lethal edge missing her by fractions of an inch.
Domi’s swift sidestep planted her left foot down hard for support, bracing her so that she could kick up with her other leg, the knee striking the big knife-man in the side. She’d aimed instinctively away from the bulletproof polycarbonate shells that shielded his abdominal muscles and into the ballistic cloth side panel. The impact was more than sufficient to elicit a grunt from behind the opaque black visor of her foe’s helmet.
Domi brought her knife around, finding a brawny shoulder and stabbing into it. Even as she plunged the blade down, she wrapped her other arm around his, snaring it tightly to give her leverage on him and to make her harder to reach with his free hand. The armored brute lurched erect and Domi’s feet left the ground. Now she was riding a bucking beast, and just to make certain he couldn’t shake her free, she wound her muscular legs around his forearm and wrist.
Suddenly the brute not only had to deal with the bulk of his armor and the throbbing pain of her stab, but also the unbalancing, unsettling weight of the feral girl.
“Dammit!” Edwards shouted as he toppled off balance, bringing them both down to the exercise mat.
Domi stabbed again at the ballistic cloth between the polycarbonate plates that would have provided protection against slashing, stabbing steel. Fortunately for the former Magistrate, Domi’s knife was a blunt-edged aluminum copy, meant for training. Even though its edges were soft, rounded, unable to cut anything softer than mud, when you stabbed someone with the tip, it still was hard, unyielding metal slamming into soft flesh.
And it hurt, much to Edwards’s dismay.
“I thought these things weren’t supposed to injure you,” Edwards grunted as Domi slithered off his arm.
“Not normally,” Domi replied, her verbiage clipped as she was still brimming with adrenaline from the training session. “But ’m not normal.”
“You can say that again, runt.” Edwards looked her over. He was used to her dropping pronouns and adjectives while stressed or energized for combat, so was not worried about her suffering some sort of episode or being too out of breath. Indeed, the comment about her not being normal showed she still retained her wits, sense of humor and a significant skill at wordplay.
“Still, I’m damned glad I was wearing armor,” Edwards added, giving h
er a poke in the shoulder with his fist. “Just too bad you found the kinks in it, little cheater.”
“Was the point,” Domi answered, rubbing her knuckle-brushed upper arm. She smirked at his accusation of cheating. “Pardon pun.”
Edwards grinned, pulling off his helmet. His hair was a close-shaved scruff around his melon-size head, showing off his bullet-bitten ear. Though the Magistrate armor was designed to be environmentally adaptive, beads of sweat still formed thanks to the exertion and condensation of Edwards’s breath inside the helmet.
When they’d met at first, and were being assigned to either run or be a part of the Cerberus Away Teams, Edwards had bristled at the concept of working “beneath” such a young, tiny female.
That was dozens of sparring matches ago, across the past several months. Since then the brawny former Magistrate had come to respect Domi. There were times when she sounded barely more educated than a toddler, and she always looked like a frail wisp of a creature, but there was strength and intelligence in there.
It wasn’t the kind of phenomenal intellect as displayed by others such as Brigid Baptiste or Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who boasted unique scientific and mathematical acumen. It was more the wisdom and agility of mind showed by fellow former Magistrates Kane and Grant. It was knowledge that didn’t involve splitting atoms, but observation of her surroundings, instincts that helped her react and respond to danger at speeds beyond even the most trained soldiers that Edwards knew of.
Being under her command, even if it was a mere three people in the whole Cerberus Away Team, was no threat to his abilities, his prodigious strength and paramilitary Magistrate training. His teammate, the beautiful and bright freezie Sela Sinclair, was another sharp mind and strong woman Edwards had learned to respect.
The Magistrates had been a strictly masculine community, a group of men who were of similar size, similar strength, each picked and groomed from even before birth to become part of the hybrid barons’ elite enforcers. They had been forged as rough, macho and gung ho, their individuality limited by the stripping of their first names. Edwards had been born Edwards, as his father before him and that father before him. His mother had been a donor, a handpicked maiden chosen to bear a healthy child, to mix with the genes of a soldier and warrior to produce an ideal fighting man.
