by James Axler
Whichever it was, he hit full reverse on the thrusters, jets blasting out bellows of air to slow his twirling descent, even as his other arm seized fast to the stick, bringing the control surfaces back to level.
With that all going on in the space of a few moments, the inertia of Grant’s insides caused a sour ball of bile to roll up into his throat, acidic taste making him grimace in disgust as the Manta’s crash course with oblivion came to an abrupt halt. It wasn’t like crashing into a wall of stone or an ocean from nearly a mile high, but it certainly was an upsetting experience. He couldn’t see through the gloves of his shadow suit, but he could feel how whitened his knuckles were as he clutched the throttle and collective.
Despite the environmental protections provided by the full-body shadow suit, Grant was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering to the point where he wondered if it would burst through his ribs. Adjusting the thrusters in VTOL mode, he steered a course toward the Oracle. He wanted to set down because he could feel a stream of cold air hissing through the cracked windscreen, hear the flap of torn seals and bouncing metal holding the cockpit’s canopy in place.
In the distance Grant heard a sonic boom and wondered if it was the explosion of Edwards’s ship or the detonation of some other weapon. It might have been the distraction of keeping the Manta on course for its emergency landing, but it took a moment to sink in that Edwards and his ship had gone supersonic.
Whatever Grant had collided with had proved to be more than capable of standing up to the incredible withering power of the jerry-rigged .50-caliber machine guns and missiles on their ships. And since Edwards saw with his own eyes what “ramming speed” accomplished, the big, bald brute went with a balance of raw power and ability. The blast of air parting and then clapping back together at Mach speed was the trick he’d opted for.
“Grant, you all right?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his voice showing far more emotion and concern than the stoic Cerberus warrior had displayed in a long time.
“Yeah. I’ve got my Manta limping to a landing near you,” Grant responded. “Any clue as to how much damage I’m suffering? Systems are still on the fritz here and there in the wake of that feedback blast.”
“You can see it for yourself once you land,” Kane replied, his voice growing harder.
Grant curled his lip. It was likely that it was more than just a scratch. He kept the pace even and steady, knowing that imperfections in the hull would make a renewed effort at supersonic transit a very messy method of suicide. The shadow suit provided a modicum of small-arms protection and had kept him from shattering limbs on short falls or minor crashes, but should the cockpit split open and the restraint belts on the pilot’s couch fail, no amount of non-Newtonian fabric would keep him from being crushed as he hit the ground after thousands of feet of free fall.
“Guys?” Edwards spoke over the comm-link. “How’s Grant?”
“Limping along. What happened to the winged bastard who ran me over?” Grant asked back.
“He took off running after I knocked the hammer from his hands,” Edwards replied. “Do we have contact with New Olympus yet?”
“You got a hammer from him?” Brigid interjected.
“Big bad hammer. It just missed opening Grant’s Manta like a can of rations,” Edwards explained.
“That’s a fair assessment,” Grant added. “He was an ugly cuss, with blue-gray skin and snakes for hair…”
“Charun,” Brigid stated.
“So much for a skeletal boatman,” Grant murmured. “What, we have the cross between Thor and some ugly angel?”
“No, Charun was a god of the dead. Edwards, you going to keep watch over where the hammer landed?” Brigid inquired.
“Damn straight. Once I knocked the thing out of his hands, we got our comms back,” Edwards explained. “So keeping the hammer away from him is, in my humble opinion, a great plan.”
“Good,” Brigid said. “Then we can see if we’re dealing with Annunaki technology or—”
“Charun had some metallic snakes wrapped around his arms that immediately reminded me of Enlil’s ASP blasters,” Grant said, cutting her off. “But these were bigger, thicker. Presumably more powerful. And being wound around his arms, he likely still has them.”
“Confirm on that,” Edwards advised. “We’ll need people on the ground to get to the hammer before Charun returns.”
Grant’s mood was not good as he grew closer to the spire where his compatriots had landed with the interphaser. So much for having the advantage of air superiority, he mused.
He grit his teeth. Of course they had air superiority. Edwards’s Manta still was in perfect condition, and as long as the strange, hammer-like device was out of the hands of their enemy, their weapons systems would operate and they could communicate with each other. And from the way that Edwards seemed dead set on protecting the airspace over the fallen weapon, it occurred to the CAT Beta ex-Magistrate that the hammer was special.
Maybe the winged humanoid had access to powerful arm blasters, but there were bigger and more impressive tricks in his lost tool bag.
Grant frowned, swinging the wounded Manta closer to the ground, making the decision to land near the puddle of molten secondary orichalcum. There was more flat ground and he didn’t want to damage the wings or harm his friends with too clumsy of a landing. The henge stones would likely add to the damage of his wounded aircraft, making repairs even more difficult.
Soon he was in range so that he didn’t even need the telescopic zoom on his helmet to inform him that three Gear Skeletons, one adorned as a “hero” suit, two others as Spartans, had arrived at the base of the ramp leading to the top of the oracular spire.
The giant exoskeletons spread out, forming a perimeter in which Grant could set the Manta down. Even as they did so, they extended their arms upward to cushion the descent of the craft in case it had suffered more damage and couldn’t extend its landing gear.
Grant kept up his vigilance upon landing. The last thing he needed was to get sloppy, no matter what kind of help he had available to him. Even so, when he felt the powerful robotic hands latch on to the hull of his Manta, Grant was relieved.
Unfortunately the big man realized that such relief was only temporary. This was only his first encounter with a winged monstrosity powerful enough to engage an armed Manta. Another godlike being, different in some ways from their usual Annunaki opponents, but still formidable, still extremely dangerous.
He hoped that Charun was alone, but even as he did so, he realized that things were never that easy.
* * *
EDWARDS DIDN’T HAVE to search too hard for where the hammer went down. It had produced so much energy in its shield against the twin machine guns on his Manta that it left a smoke trail and its landing produced a highly visible scar on the countryside. So far, his systems were continuing uninterrupted, but that didn’t mean the winged enemy wasn’t trying to slip back into Greek airspace after being driven off.
However, he didn’t want to waste any more of the Manta’s endurance than necessary, so he swung the aircraft low over the crater. As he did so, sensors in the Manta’s cockpit measured the width and depth of the dent the hammer had made in the ground. It was only two feet in depth, and little more than two and a half feet wide, but it was a crater carved into solid rock.
Edwards was no expert at mathematics, but he’d seen large bombs go off before and placed the power of the hammer’s impact equal to about twenty-five kilograms of plas-ex. That was merely from falling from a great height, not being thrown.
Now he could see why even a glancing blow had almost crushed Grant’s Manta.
Edwards landed the ship and used the shadow suit on his forearm as a keyboard and monitor to gather the crater’s information and transmit it to the others. If anything, Brigid Baptiste would want to see the physical environmental effects of the artifact. It might be only pure trivia, but it could also give the brilliant archivist some form of scale from which to de
termine just what they were up against.
Edwards got out of the cockpit and jogged closer to the hammer, letting the optics in his shadow suit faceplate continue to record information about the hammer. As he closed with it, he could see that the handle was fully two meters in length, and it was not made from any material he recognized. It was dull, not resembling the polished brass of secondary orichalcum or any other natural alloy the Cerberus explorers had encountered.
No, that was wrong, Edwards thought. There was a woodlike grain to the handle, but the shadow suit’s analytical optics were not registering it as anything carved from a tree that he’d ever seen. He frowned. He’d seen something made of wood but not wooden before, and he wished he’d had a hint of Brigid Baptiste’s photographic memory at times such as this.
“Brigid,” Edwards called.
“Thank you for the camera footage of the artifact,” she answered. “What are you going to ask about?”
“The handle. It looks like some kind of material I’ve seen before, but I can’t place it. I’m hoping…”
“The Cedar Doors we encountered underground in Iraq,” Brigid responded. “In mythology, they were the gates to an entire Cedar Forest, whose fruit, when eaten, would provide immortality. Unfortunately said eternal existence came in the form of zombie-like reanimation and was not full of cedar trees as we understood them.”
Edwards took a deep breath of relief. “That’s what was bugging me. So, this is fake cedar? Or a petrified tree material?”
“It is possible,” Brigid answered. “But I would prefer a closer look.”
Edwards grunted. “I’ll babysit this thing until we can get a recovery team here.”
“Do not attempt to move it yourself,” Brigid admonished. “Who knows—”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to get zapped by any security systems built into a hammer that can punch a hole in rock like fifty-five pounds’ worth of TNT,” Edwards murmured. “And while I don’t know the kind of heat that could incinerate two ounces of armor-piercing shell, let alone a whole volley…” Edwards trailed off, hoping for her to give him a bone of information.
“Even that calculation is beyond my current knowledge,” Brigid interjected. “But the melting point of lead is 328 degrees Celsius.”
“That’d be nice if I were shooting a handgun, but the Fifties fire tungsten-cored bullets.”
“Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-two degrees Celsius,” Brigid offered. “Oh, my.”
“Ten times hotter than you thought?” Edwards asked.
“Ten point four-three-three rounded to the nearest hundredth, but, yes,” Brigid said.
Edwards could hear the smile in her voice as he demonstrated at least a semblance of mathematical skill, so that the big brawler showed that he wasn’t a complete drain on the brains of the assembled Cerberus Away Teams. “This is very disconcerting.”
Edwards nodded, even though he knew the head-bob wouldn’t translate over the Commtact. But if he gave voice to his personal fears, he would lose more than a little of his appearance as a tough guy. Even so, he couldn’t disagree with Brigid’s own outwardly calm evaluation. The hammer’s powers were formidable, easily as dangerous as the glove that Maccan utilized in his attack on Cerberus, maybe even worse, since it was a larger item.
Edwards’s curiosity led him nearer to the deadly hammer, examining the crater even more closely. For all the force of its impact, it stood flatly on its head and had not penetrated the bottom of the bowl. This set the hairs on his neck on edge, because that was not how it should have been naturally. He recorded this, and transmitted it to Brigid.
“Edwards, do not approach any closer,” she warned.
“It fired off something like a braking rocket, didn’t it?” Edwards asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “Which means that the artifact, indeed, has some manner of autonomy.”
Edwards took a couple of strides backward, but even as he did so, he recalled the shape of the head. It was not the normal shape for a sledgehammer, nor was it a stylized T shape with Celtic carvings enmeshed on the sides, as the holy symbol for Thor that Edwards had seen before. This was a more crystalline structure, semitransparent, flat-sided but held in place by webbing forged from molten metal. It was a hexagonal prism, with a pair of hexagonal pyramids forming the caps on each end, as if it were a gigantic piece of quartz.
Except this quartz was bloodred and glowed from within as if possessed by a hellish flame at its core. The whole thing had an eerie electricity that made Edwards’s skin crawl, even behind the protection of his shadow suit. As he was fully environmentally enclosed within the high-tech garment, his instincts were on maximum alert simply due to the crackle of energy he felt in the air.
Brigid Baptiste, as usual, had been correct in her assessment. He’d gotten too close to an entity that could protect itself with the same facility it had protected its wielder from the heaviest “small arms” that had ever been developed. Edwards flexed his forearm and the Sin Eater automatically launched into the palm of his hand, ready to spit lead. He didn’t think it would be any more effective than the heavy machine guns he’d fired earlier, but Edwards was not going to go into death without a fight.
The throb of dread in the air lessened the further he backed from the alien weapon.
“Okay. If I don’t mess with you, you won’t mess with me,” Edwards murmured. As he spoke he could feel a tickle in his forehead, right from the spot where the inhuman Ullikummis had inserted the seed of his flesh into his brain. With that action, the ancient stone godling had gained total control of Edwards, turning him from a protector of Cerberus into an oppressive, dangerous marionette. The feeling was still raw inside his skin and spirit.
Whatever the source of the odd reminiscent feeling, it made him angry, reminding him of his violation by another alien mind as well as his failure as a protector of freedom. As much as he fought, he’d still ceded his will to something else, no matter how powerful. That even Brigid had likewise been changed and abused by the same godling didn’t help, as she’d found a way to fight Ullikummis’s control. Edwards hadn’t.
It still didn’t matter that the would-be conqueror was no less than the son of Enlil, nor engineered to even greater abilities than a standard Annunaki overlord. Edwards had fallen, and he still hadn’t felt as if he’d washed that stain from his spirit.
And right now, he felt as if the alien artifact in front of him saw that stain, smelled the stink of failure upon him, and saw an opportunity.
Edwards grit his teeth and settled in, standing guard. The anger spurred by the shame he felt made him wish someone would try to steal the hammer.
He wouldn’t even have minded going into battle against the winged monstrosity when it returned for its property.
Chapter 5
Perched on the nose of the parked Manta, his Sin Eater retracted into its forearm holster, Edwards knew he’d be waiting a while for someone to show up for Charun’s fallen hammer. Even at this distance, thirty yards from where it’d cratered the rocky hillock, its emanations whispered promises of ancient evil up and down his spine.
He checked his wrist chron, a display built into the forearm of the sleek, body-conforming shadow suit, actually. Brigid had contacted him again, alerting him that they would be on his position in about two hours. The big Magistrate passed the first hour and a quarter thinking about the brief, brutal aerial chase and battle he’d undergone. At supersonic speeds, even a few seconds of movement translated into miles of ground to cover, especially since there were a couple of ranges of mountains between him and New Olympus.
Even with the mighty strides and leaps of the Gear Skeletons, it was unlikely that there would be an arrival within the next thirty minutes.
Edwards started to inform himself not to take aerial combat so far away from friends who could come to his aid, but his common sense kicked in. The whole purpose of air support was to distance aerial combatants from troops on the ground. Getting the horrific C
harun as far from his compatriots was the best thing to do. He couldn’t have anticipated the presence of a powerful artifact in need of recovery.
For a moment he saw that he had two shadows on the ground, looking past the wrist chron. Edwards squinted, then looked back up into the sky. Up there, somehow, had appeared a second brilliant sun, blazing white and hot. He scrambled to his feet, standing on the front of the Manta. The machine pistol snapped down into his fist, ready to go into action, but the strange, glowing disc was not moving. He put on his shadow suit’s faceplate and hoped for the visor to screen and filter out the blinding light as well as analyze the object in the sky.
The range was ten miles and it was advancing quickly.
He activated his Commtact microphone. “Guys, wherever you are…”
Nothing. No response, not even static. He turned his gaze back to the sky. For all the polarization of the lenses, necessary for use on walks outside the Manitus Moon Base, he could not make out a detail in regard to the blazing comet looming ever and ever closer to him. But in the space of fifteen seconds it had closed to nine miles. He couldn’t get details about the shape of the object, only its range, and there was no guarantee that it was right.
Edwards turned to open the cockpit, but the command signal to remotely open the canopy was jammed. He was in a complete blackout. He ground his teeth behind the faceplate and looked back at the hammer. “You wouldn’t be alone, would you?”
The hammer didn’t speak, but it didn’t have to. There was a new malice hanging in the air; a smug sense of superiority that proved annoying in humans but was infuriating when it came from a supposedly inanimate object.
Edwards tried to open the manual hatch, a backup in case of the failure of the remote access. The only problem with that was that now the hatch was shut; immobilized by a force so strong that even using his foot-long fighting knife he couldn’t budge it open. He bent the blade by sixty degrees and gave up for fear of losing an important survival tool or causing himself injury should the blade shatter. In frustration, he gave the cockpit a hammering blow in an effort to somehow override the Manta’s security systems.
