by James Axler
“You didn’t listen closely, did you?” Brigid asked. She didn’t know if her partners could actually handle the song if she’d spoken it aloud while in the throes of battle with Vanth’s avatar.
“You were sputtering gibberish,” Sinclair offered, “and given what you are translating, we pulled on the hoods and killed the audio feed. Once you stopped moving your lips, we slipped them off. But you were still laying there and sweating up a storm.”
“You were right to do that,” Brigid said. “It was the song of Vanth. I was fighting its effects inside me.”
Domi helped Brigid to sit.
As sore as she’d been in her “white room,” Brigid felt a similar dull ache from where Vanth’s arrows had struck her in the chest. She touched her wrist, taking her own pulse and doing a mental inventory on her body.
“Let’s see if there’s a doctor on duty,” Sinclair suggested.
Before Brigid could say anything, the rest of the Cerberus Away Team members came in.
It was all she could do to lay back, the burning beneath her breastbone a reminder of the brutal battle she’d just fought.
Chapter 8
“You nearly died in your adventure with Enlil and got right back to work!” Brigid snarled at Kane.
“The doctors want to have you wait on your cardiac enzyme results,” Kane responded. “Just to make certain you aren’t flirting with a heart attack.”
“And we let you…” Brigid murmured.
“Don’t get excited, Baptiste,” Kane ordered. “The last thing we need is for you to rush into action. That’s why you wanted us to bring CAT Beta along with us, right?”
Brigid’s lip curled in a sneer.
“Besides, according to Domi and Sela, you had your fair share of adventure before the rest of us, fighting that thing in your mind,” Kane added.
She folded her arms, body language for cutting herself off from him or what he’d say.
Kane knew that when she got into one of these stubborn moods, it would take a shifting of continents to get through to her. No matter how much he repeated that she was the origin of the idea of relying on CAT Beta to make up for weaknesses and injuries among the CAT Alpha team, she was in a snit.
“Baptiste?” Kane asked, trying to draw her out of her grump.
“Go on the mission, Kane. Just go. I brought this onto myself by trying to translate that chant,” Brigid grumbled.
Grant leaned his head into the hospital room. “I’d say she learns fast, but that’s pretty obvious.”
“Once she was the student, now she’s the master of grump,” Kane said back.
“You think this is funny?” Brigid challenged. “Not only am I sidelined, but I’m sidelined because of my damned curiosity!”
“So because you’re mad at yourself, you threw a metal pan at my head?” Kane asked.
“Like I could hit you with such a non-aerodynamic object.” Brigid grunted. “You could duck that in your sleep.”
“Well, thank you for the vote of confidence,” Kane answered as Grant handed him the now-dented bedpan.
“How’s the ankle?” Grant asked.
“I aggravated it in horseplay with Domi and Sela,” Brigid said.
“You have been a busy girl.” Grant chuckled.
“Not another laugh. Not. One. More,” Brigid threatened.
Grant showed her the palms of both of his hands in a sign of surrender. “Not another.”
Brigid sighed and lowered her gaze at herself, reclined in the hospital bed. “How come neither of you get hurt badly enough to miss out on all the fun?”
“We’ll transmit as much information back to you as we can, if we find relics,” Kane offered.
“Go on. Just make sure you know how to program the interphaser,” Brigid insisted.
“We know,” Kane returned.
“Don’t make me hobble out of this bed and come to your sorry rescue!” Brigid added.
Kane backed into the hallway, handing off the dented bedpan to a nurse. “You and your partners have my deepest sympathies.”
The nurse peered around the corner. “Don’t worry. She’s not the first soldier we’ve had to deal with.”
“She’s a beast of a patient…” Grant warned.
“We’ve dealt with Queen Diana when she was still Artem15,” the nurse returned. “She was the definition of the beast.”
“I hear you talking about me!” Brigid spoke over the Commtacts for Kane and Grant, causing both men to wince.
“Aw, crud,” Grant rumbled.
“We’ll never get rid of her,” Kane added.
“Damned straight,” Brigid concluded.
“Behave, Baptiste. Just because you hypnotized the CAT teams and Myrto to guard against the song of Vanth doesn’t mean you can be lazy. Heal up and join us,” Kane told her before turning off his Commtact.
A moment later he felt Grant slap him in the back of the head.
“What was that…?” Kane began. Then he shook his head. “Brigid wants the last word.”
“Getting so you won’t need these things anymore, partner,” Grant concluded with a laugh.
* * *
THE CERBERUS EXPLORERS and Myrto Smaragda were back at the Oracle, just as the interphaser beamed in from their redoubt. Kane knelt and entered the coordinates onto the small keypad built into the side of the pyramidal device. The interphaser was a means of expanding the reach of the CAT teams beyond the limitations of the mat-trans network in various redoubts. There were weaknesses in utilizing the local matter transmission chambers as the damage to the Olympian redoubt proved.
Their Greek allies literally could not receive or send visitors via the mat-trans, though thankfully the Cerberus Redoubt was able to rescue people trapped behind collapsed tunnels within the Hera Olympiad-ravaged headquarters. Rescue teams, including Kane and the rest of CAT Alpha, as well as CAT Beta, retrieved the injured and the imprisoned and brought them back via the parallax point atop the Oracle peninsula.
Hundreds of lives that could otherwise have been lost were given a second chance. Efforts to retrieve further supplies trapped within the depths went via the same circuit, but not like the hectic, constant matter jumping of those first few days of search and recovery. It was also the only means of getting maintenance teams down to work on the deep underground nuclear reactors, sent in for week-length shifts along with appropriate supplies.
The last thing that Kane and the Cerberus staff wanted was a nuclear meltdown in the Mediterranean, causing loss of life throughout New Olympus and its environs. They had too many friends and there were also too many potential allies out there for them to risk a failure of those reactors.
“We’re still going to have to walk a ways,” Sinclair mentioned. “According to Lakesh, there had been a parallax point on the Italian peninsula until three months or so ago.”
Kane frowned at the idea they had been literally so busy over the past months that the disappearance of a major parallax crossroads was something listed as far down on the priorities of the Cerberus explorers. Only the mention of a danger in the Etruscan countryside sparked the memory of that mystery in Lakesh’s mind. “Three months.”
“The point is turned off?” Smaragda asked. “How is that possible?”
Kane tapped in the coordinates to the interphaser. “Vanth and Charun have to be behind that development.”
Smaragda’s eyes narrowed. “So, they haven’t been awake for long. The stories that we received go back at least six months. What were they doing the first two or three?”
“Waking up. They’ve been asleep for a while,” Grant said. “Brigid said that the worship of Charun and Vanth ended around three thousand years ago. They only woke up recently.”
“Gathering people to power the device that has hijacked the parallax point,” Sela added. “Because there’s no way that you can do something like cut off access to a wormhole without an assload of power.”
Kane frowned. “Gathering up the energy to shut dow
n the parallax point using brains. Human and otherwise, given your account of the birds.”
“Zombified humans is one thing. But the songbirds were downright creepy,” Smaragda responded.
“Brigid did say that Vanth wanted her brain and soul to add to opening a door,” Domi added. “The points are already doors for us. Maybe they want to change where the door opens.”
“To unleash the hordes as a plague,” Grant repeated from Brigid’s debriefing.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that when she hypnotized us, she planted seeds of answers for the questions we’re asking right now,” Sinclair mused, her arms folded.
Edwards chuckled. “Like none of us have learned anything from our adventures?”
“Yeah. We picked Edwards for the Cerberus teams for more than just the muscles he’s wearing on his arms,” Grant added. “There’s some working muscle between his ears.”
“All of our ears, yes,” Sinclair answered. “But we’re thinking about parallax points as doorways that can be hijacked. And the whole ‘dragon roads’ thing as a circuit board that can be rewired.”
Kane stood, looking down at the interphaser. “What’s wrong with that? I mean, it’s not as if Lakesh hasn’t explained that in simple terms for us foot soldiers enough times. Nor Brigid.”
The air around the group began to hum, laser beams spraying out in a pattern around them. The interphaser created a matrix of energy surrounding them, plasma vortices taking on the appearance of mist and fog, lit and glowing under the ray beams shimmering from the pyramidal device’s top. The five people were transformed from solid matter into cohesive streams of atoms that could be slurped through the wormhole. All of this energy was poured out at Cerberus Redoubt, from the long-running nuclear reactors that were the only power source at their beck and call that could open such a wormhole.
The interphaser simply found those crossroads of magnetic lines crisscrossing the surface of the world, and in finding the nexus, beamed those massive energies through the thinning of reality, literally opening a door between universes, folding the space on the other end. To an observer, the effect was sprays of misty Technicolor energy flying outward in sheets, and then five humans clad in skintight black leather materializing, rather than the interphaser reconstructing the bodies of the travelers in their journey across hundreds and hundreds of miles and across two dimensions.
The process was painless, if disorienting for first-timers or those entering an improperly programmed mat-trans. Kane was familiar with “jump dreams” and more than once these very same disconnects from reality actually gave him glimpses into other lives, other incarnations.
The interphaser, however, had cleared up much of that interference that resulted in a nauseating landing or that wave of delirium making the jumpers sensitive to odd psychic vibrations. In a way, it felt less like a dangerous leap into the unknown than it had before, where every redoubt was still an unknown, potentially inhabited by coldhearts or other menaces.
The world phased back into view around the Cerberus adventurers and Smaragda, becoming more and more visible through the “bubble” of laser-lit smoke around them. Within moments they were at a small clearing in a forest, one adorned with stones arranged in a form of henge.
The warriors immediately scanned the surrounding tree line, though part of Kane missed the presence of Brigid to explain to them what this circlet of standing rocks signified. It was already evident to Kane and Grant that the stones meant that ancient peoples knew of the presence of a parallax point in this location. Those with sensitivity to extrasensory phenomena knew to associate these places with a means of contacting the gods.
There was scarcely an interphaser landing point that hadn’t showed some form of marker that it had once been a spot of worship. While there was no real confirmation that the Annunaki threshold jewels operated on the same parallax point principle, this would have been a likely landing point for the overlords themselves as they’d visited the Earth.
Kane remembered that he had his shadow suit hood recording vid, and Brigid was looking over the scene here. Their landing point was not far; only about seventy-five miles from where the major nexus had been before it became a black hole on Lakesh’s observations.
Domi was crouched, her hood down. Though the girl was not averse to technology, there were some things that only her feral instincts could pick up on. Smells and behaviors of local wildlife were as much in the cues she could pick up on instantly as Kane’s own point man’s instinct.
Her ruby-red eyes locked in one direction. “Heavy steps.”
“Beta, disperse. Myrto, go with them. We’ll stay, observe and initiate contact if possible,” Kane ordered.
There was no disagreement among the three CAT Beta members and their Olympian companion as they gathered their effects and disappeared into the tree line.
“At least we’ve got backup out there this time,” Grant murmured, shouldering his war bag. “I’m not picking up anything on the Commtact.”
“Me, either,” Kane returned. “That means something else might be up.”
“Charun and Vanth might have figured that if they couldn’t brainwash Edwards, or get Brigid with their little virus, we might be immune to their subtle ways,” Grant offered.
Kane nodded in agreement. “So they sent Gear Skeletons.”
“Capture or kill?” Grant proposed. “That’s what we have to figure out.”
Kane and his friend went to the tree line, looking for a good hiding spot. “We’ve got the same dilemma here, partner.”
Grant’s lips pursed in thought. “We’ve brought the materials needed to incapacitate the Olympian troops without much harm, but the Spartan pilots…we would have to donate armor to them.”
Kane chuckled. “A cloud in every silver lining. Don’t ever change, buddy.”
The large Magistrate had a shotgun out. Loaded with less-lethal loads, mainly neoprene slugs that would punch with enough force to stun and bruise, but against the Sandcat panels enveloping the Spartan pilots it might as well have been a handful of marshmallows to be hurled at the giants. There was one saving grace, though, but they didn’t know if it would work.
Under the pump on Grant’s and Kane’s less-lethals were Taser units. Each of these little electric guns fired twin prongs via compressed air at a target. On humans, the barbs would stick in clothing or stab shallowly in skin, and the fine wires attached to the tines would ferry forward a powerful pulse of voltage, capable of freezing a person’s muscles and nervous system, effectively paralyzing them.
The theory, as devised by Sela Sinclair and Brigid Baptiste, was that maybe, if the electrical current somehow connected to the Spartan war bots, their pilots would be affected. The pilots commanded the powerful robotic suits through a cybernetic node installed at the base of their spines, so that the mighty Gear Skeletons could actually conduct the electrical shock of the Tasers.
“If it’s one or two, we’ll be fine. If it’s all three, we’re going to have to get creative while one of us reloads,” Grant noted.
“Or if we miss,” Kane offered.
Grant narrowed his eyes.
“This is a new system for us,” Kane added. “So we won’t be as good and accurate with it as we are with our usual arms.”
“If I can hit targets with a bow and arrow, I might be able to compensate with Taser tongs,” Grant grumbled.
“Hush, I can hear the stomps of a Spartan closing,” Kane returned.
Kane knew he didn’t have to say anything. Grant might have been famous for his gruff, grumbling nature, but when it came time for serious work, there were few people quieter than he.
The two men slithered deeper into the cover of the tree line, eyes open, ears peeled for the approach of the robot or robots.
There was also the potential that the Spartans weren’t alone. Who knew how long the two mysterious godlings had been ready for an arrival by the Cerberus contingent? There had been hours between the time Edwards
was picked up, the debriefing, and then finally the very hectic night in the wake of Brigid’s battle against the deadly song of Vanth.
So far, things seemed in the clear. Neither Kane’s cunning nor Domi’s feral instincts had been tripped by the presence of soldiers camouflaged among the forest surrounding the little clearing. The only signs of an enemy presence were the leaden footsteps of the robot approaching. Enemy ambush was not close enough to be on the agenda, but then, these two Etruscan entities had lived as contemporaries of the Annunaki overlords. Maybe they were other Igigi, or they were an entirely different species, but whatever the case, they didn’t survive the intrigues of the dawn of humanity by being easy to predict.
Then again, wits and cunning often did wonders for Kane and his allies in dealing with deadly overlords. One of the problems of being a being with access to armies and nearly magical technology was a tendency to overlook the scrabbling little apes and their resourcefulness with nothing more than twigs and pebbles.
Too often, in Kane’s observation, these “gods” forgot that they were mortal, flesh and blood as the rest of the planet. Enlil and his surviving brethren had learned that lesson at the cost of more than a couple of their fellow Annunaki. Brigid mentioned that there were similarities between the hypnotic song of Ereshkigal and that of Vanth. Vanth’s version, however, had a much more mathematical base, she’d told him, which made it into an aggressive, human-brain-based piece of malware.
If these bastards can nearly give Baptiste a heart attack, then they definitely are in full Annunaki range of powers, Kane thought. He remembered his own psychic duel with Enlil in India, one that had almost crushed him mentally and physically. Kane never claimed to be any great shakes mentally, and that he survived the telepathic conflict instigated by Enlil seemed merely stubborn resolve and dumb luck rather than anything else. Vanth’s attack against Brigid still weighed on Kane’s nerves.
There was nothing more that he would like to do than wring Vanth’s neck, should she show. Kane and Brigid were anam-charas, and harm to one was literally harm to both.
Bide your time.
