Angel of Doom

by James Axler

  Kane hoped to keep the situation defused, steering away the concept of the thralls being the danger he was armed against.

  “The cyclops,” the woman answered. “We thought it merely a myth, but it has come to my land. It is an annoyance.”

  Kane narrowed his eyes. “Annoyance?”

  “The creation of those…not like me,” the woman said.

  “You are Vanth, then. That’s who I’m speaking to, right?” Kane asked.

  “Of course,” she replied. “You know me by my husband. Charun. And presumably from your comrade, who managed to elude even my huntress senses.”

  “Yeah,” Kane confirmed.

  “I do not mind your pilot’s evasion of me, nor of his attack against my beloved,” the woman stated. “Charun is a formidable, fearsome warrior, more so in his war paint and battle gear.”

  “War paint,” Kane repeated.

  “You may inform your friend behind the tree that he no longer has to protect you. If you wish to accompany us back, you will come as guests.” Vanth’s voice echoed.

  Grant’s grunt of surprise over the open Commtact alerted Kane that the demigoddess had spoken into his ears, as well, despite a distance of fifty meters.

  “Do you wish to disarm us?” Kane inquired.

  The black-haired spokeswoman shook her head. “There would be no point. You are guests. Not prisoners.”

  Kane nodded. He glanced back quickly to make sure Grant was on his way.

  “We are interested in you two, and the woman who usually accompanies you,” Vanth said as Grant jogged forward.

  “She’s at home. Recovering,” Kane answered.

  “Baptiste was her name.”

  Kane’s lips tightened. He had no real reason to be surprised, though. He had a suspicion about the source of Vanth’s knowledge.

  “Yes. I have heard of you, from the thoughts of others,” Vanth stated.

  “The missing New Olympian platoon and pilots?” Kane prompted.

  Vanth allowed her thrall a smirk, the flex of lips. “Aye.”

  The search group turned as one, more indication of their alien nature, or the alien nature of the consciousness in control of them.

  Grant stood shoulder to shoulder with Kane, watching the group as they proceeded, leading the way down the road.

  “Either we’re heading into the biggest trap in the world, or they think we’re insects compared to them,” Grant mused softly.

  “Seems like a bit of both,” Kane said. “After all, some of our biggest, Manta-mounted weapons couldn’t hurt Charun, so why should guys on foot, with much smaller guns, be such a threat?”

  “I apologize for the damage of your craft, Grant,” a voice boomed from ahead. The two Cerberus warriors looked to see who was speaking, even looking up into the canopy of the trees, just in case Charun himself had flown to greet them.

  It turned out to be one of the men, who slowed, dropping back to walk beside them.

  The man was slender, but he spoke with the timber of a lion, each word bearing enormous weight as it was spoken. The man was equipped only with a sledgehammer, as if in echo of the original Charun himself. Kane wondered if the black-haired woman had a bow of some form, but then recalled that she had been one of the group snuffing out torches with the sun. Brigid’s description of Vanth’s torch flared freshly in his memory.

  It all could have been a coincidence.

  “You came toward us fast,” Grant said.

  A chuckle thumped from a chest too tiny to contain it. “Of course I did. My lover and I felt you breach the dimensions at the Oracle. We thought it enemies, returned to torment us.”

  “Who’d be your enemy?” Grant asked.

  “The gods of the Isles…to the north and to the west,” Charun said. “They sent their one-eyed minions to conquer us, and eventually, the hair-shirted humans who worshiped them came and tore down the empire of our children.”

  “The Tuatha de Danaan?” Grant asked. “Wait, one-eyed…like the Fomori.”

  Kane and Grant agreed to show very little foreknowledge of the Fomori.

  “Yes. A bastard half-breed by the name of Bres…his minions roamed as far as my borders. I enjoyed crushing armies of them with my bride,” Charun added. “Have you heard of him?”

  “Only in respect to the Celtic gods,” Kane answered. “The ones the Tuatha masqueraded as.”

  Charun nodded.

  “It is a pleasure to meet the enemy of our enemies,” Charun stated.

  “Likewise,” Kane answered.

  Then Charun’s puppet rejoined the rest of his group, leaving Kane alone with Grant.

  There was very little wonder that they were being observed from tree branches by perched birds and other mammals. The moment the humans came into view, they had already been surrounded. The tiny, milk-white eyes of the mind-controlled animals followed them with the same penetrating dread.

  Yeah, Grant is right, Kane thought. They think we’re less than insects to them.

  Kane ground his teeth.

  And this time the bastard demigods might actually be right.

  Chapter 12

  Mohandas Lakesh Singh stirred from his too empty, lonely bed with the chirping of his Commtact, an alert that a signal had been received from Kane and Grant.

  “I’m awake,” Lakesh murmured, yawning and looking at the empty space where Domi should have been sleeping. He ran his fingers through his thick, gray hair, matting it back down even as the swift, tight-beam transmission was translated and transmitted via the computers.

  “Contact made. Invited in. Everything mind controlled down to squirrels and sparrows.”

  It was Kane, subvocalizing and sending off the message with all the speed he could.

  Charun and Vanth were so sure of themselves that they didn’t even seem to care about the message transmitted by the two…prisoners? Guests? Visitors?

  Lakesh was full of worry. While Kane and Grant were walking tall through the front doors of Charun and Vanth’s kingdom, his love, Domi, was moving in stealthily, along with the rest of her team and one other. If there was someone who could travel undetected, it was the albino girl, a stalker of both wilderness and urban apocalypse. The same went for Edwards, a Magistrate who’d patrolled through the Tartarus Pits as a lawman in a dangerous fringe town.

  CAT Beta was nearly as skilled and experienced as CAT Alpha, so he shouldn’t have been so fearful for Domi’s safety. Logic dictated that, but Lakesh was someone who trusted as much in intangibles that lay outside the realms of hard numbers and mathematics. Things such as the confluence of luck, a manner of superstition that in the experiences of the Cerberus Redoubt “family” was more than just mystic mumbo jumbo. There was an entire quantum universe out there, one with multitudes of probabilities and realities, and somehow Kane, Brigid and Grant had proved to be the cornerstone of the movement, defying long odds and surviving.

  True, the three of them were merely human, capable of being hurt. Brigid was getting over a sprained ankle. Grant still sported a bruise on his back and Kane himself had escape a serious concussion, or worse, by degrees. And yet their skills had been sufficient to send first the barons and then the overlords scrambling to the winds. They’d held off the invasion and near conquest of the Earth by one of Enlil’s most dangerous sons, as well.

  Through strength, courage and intellect, they had done the best to return humanity to ruling itself, shucking off the manacles of slavery to the alien Annunaki. Yet there were still so-called gods out there, struggling and conspiring to bring down humankind. Vanth and Charun stunk of such alien, monstrous heritage, of the same cruel dreams of conquest.

  The video Brigid had transmitted back to Cerberus, Edwards’s recordings of the missing New Olympian soldiers scanning the Manta’s landing and Charun’s fallen hammer, were proof positive that their powers of mind control were a deadly threat to any and all life forms on Earth.

  Kane’s assertion that even the beasts of the Etruscan countryside were enthr
alled only hammered home that point. It was one thing to have control of hundreds, even thousands, of human minds. Kane and the others knew how to deal with humans, even to the point of being able to take control of the situation without harming the hypnotized.

  But how did you deal with swarms of rats or flocks of attacking birds? Domi had also transmitted the night before, having captured some footage of sheep on one farm that CAT Beta had neared. On enhanced resolution, Lakesh saw into milky, lifeless eyes as rams and ewes went about their life of chewing cud and yet existing as just more observers. Lakesh remembered in his youth, hundreds of years before, when he’d been at a petting zoo.

  There were goats at the petting zoo, and while Lakesh was bored, having to hang around all the “kid stuff”—a pun he’d been pleased with himself over—he watched as one of the animal handlers began to have trouble with one of the rams. The sheep reared up and suddenly went on the offensive, slamming the keeper, a burly, barrel-chested man of six feet. The man collapsed, stunned by the sudden assault.

  The goat continued its attack, biting at the keeper’s cheek and ear, coming away with blood all over its snout, the human’s face slick and red from such injuries.

  That was one goat, only needing to use its horns once. The Italian countryside was full of such similar livestock, and the threat of all those jaws and teeth, formerly only meant for slicing tough grasses and twigs, suddenly became dark and deadly. Rats were equally as imposing, should they swarm and attack. There were tales of sewer workers who suffered countless lacerations and infections from stumbling into a nest full of the rodents.

  Brigid had told Lakesh, as she’d told her compatriots in New Olympus, that Vanth promised to unleash those trapped beyond the dimensional doors to her home “world” like a plague of locusts.

  Maybe the threat of invasion wasn’t a physical one but one of alien control. At this moment Charun and Vanth both appeared to be superhumanly strong examples of humanoids, but what if they were simply ideas? Concepts? What if they were spirits hurled across the gulf of the multiverse divides, finding their homes inside the flesh of two unfortunates?

  What if the parallax point they were trying to breach only needed the merest of pinpricks in terms of an opening? The invasion wouldn’t come in the form of living bodies, hurtling through a schism, a tear in time space, but a leak. Millions of alien minds flowing through a wormhole as if it were a vent in a dam? Thousands of ghosts or thought packets hurtling through per second, each seeking out the closest vacated central nervous system?

  Brigid relayed that Vanth was seeking all of these minds for power, but what if the opening of that door was two ways? The emptied shells of the living, stripped of their intellect and free will, their emotions, their souls, would punch a hole through universes and then provide safe landing areas for those millions of invaders.

  Lakesh shook his head at the concept.

  “Boss, you got the message?” Bry asked.

  Lakesh nodded, despite the fact that Bry was halfway across the redoubt. “Yes, yes, friend Bry. I have received the message. Have you relayed it on to Domi and the others?”

  “Coded and direct-burst transmission made,” Bry answered. “Hopefully, it cut through so fast our Italian bogeyman didn’t hear a thing.”

  “There is that hope,” Lakesh responded. “Though, as you may have heard, Kane isn’t particularly convinced that Vanth or Charun is concerned about our interference or communication.”

  “You got that from six or seven words?” Bry asked.

  Lakesh chuckled. “It’s all in the tone. Plus, I believe he’s been taking lessons from Domi in being succinct.”

  “That’d do it,” Bry answered. “Are you coming to the command center?”

  “I’ll be there in a bit. We’ve got more information to go over, don’t we?” Lakesh said.

  “Yup. Vid of the first contact rode in on the same info dump,” Bry responded.

  Lakesh nodded. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed. For someone who had lost over 150 years of aging and cryogenic suspension, and all accompanying ailments and aches, he still felt tired and achy being roused from his slumber. Lakesh knew, though, that his sleep was never as relaxing as when his beloved little Domi was curled against his side. She was at once a calming influence in her presence and a cause of worry with her absence.

  He’d be much happier, much more secure, when everyone was back home.

  The trouble was, if they had never gone out there in the first place, menaces to humanity would eventually seep their way back to Cerberus Redoubt.

  There was duty putting them all out there in the line of danger.

  It was a duty that not even Lakesh would feel right shirking.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME they had traveled along the road toward where Charun and Vanth had set up their shop, Grant and Kane were tired. It’d been a brisk four-hour march, one that didn’t show on the faces of their ensorcelled escorts, but was evident in the slowing of their step and limps that showed up on some.

  Kane, younger than his partner, was not feeling as tender as Grant, but even so, he didn’t think he had it in him to walk all the way back to their initial landing point. The reverse trip would take at least six hours at a saner pace, but the godlings wanted to meet the two human emissaries from Cerberus.

  When the escort finally stopped walking, they were on a rocky, barren seeming countryside, with no sign of life, save for sprigs and individual blades of grass.

  “This doesn’t look like any ancient temple to me,” Grant said, looking around. Since the parallax points were places where reality thinned sufficiently to allow them to receive communications, or even direct visits from the so-called ancient gods, humankind quickly grew into the habit of building shrines and temples at such places of power. This hill, while fairly flat and pyramid-like in shape, was nothing special. Then again, the fact that Grant immediately thought “pyramid” might have been a cue that the hill was not what it seemed.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Kane agreed. “But you can feel the vibes, can’t you?”

  Grant glanced at his younger friend. “Not particularly, but the first thing I thought when I saw this was pyramid.”

  “A buried pyramid, like Xian in China? But this is nowhere near that scale.”

  “Let’s keep heading toward the apex. That’s usually where the actual center of power is on these things,” Grant suggested.

  Kane nodded and followed his partner. As they neared the peak, there was a faint rumble, the scraping of stone on stone as the point of this pyramid was pushed aside. The two men stopped, watching a long, powerful arm finish opening the top, then climb up and out of the hill. It was the same being he’d seen two days earlier, tall and long of limb, with muscles packed like tightened cables along his powerful frame. He did not have his batlike wings, but then, there was the possibility that those appendages were simply part of a flight harness.

  This was Charun, his features much less twisted and distorted, the war paint having gone away. This was a god who was receiving visitors, not a captor.

  Grant hoped that the situation would remain so.

  “Greetings.” Charun spoke, his voice sotto voce and rumbling through the air about them.

  “Vanth was not kidding about war paint,” Kane observed.

  The giant’s mouth opened into a smile. Charun still possessed tusks, but his face was not twisted in the semblance of rage. His skin was still coated in a fine patina of scales, meaning that his heritage was not much different from an Annunaki’s, but his blue tint may have been a racial variation. Grant was used to being the tallest man in the room, but even he had to look up to Charun as he strode closer, towering at least two heads taller than him.

  The Etruscan godling extended a big, beefy hand, and Grant accepted the offered handshake. The last time Grant remembered his hand being so small in someone else’s was when he was a child, holding hands with his father. Th
e giant was far too cordial, too smiling, to be at all concerned by the Cerberus pair’s presence as Charun moved on to Kane.

  “Welcome to our home,” he said. He swept an arm toward the open top of the hill. “Mind you, be careful. The ladder was built for people of our size, not smaller. While it certainly will not collapse under your weight, you might not be able to grip it as firmly as one of us.”

  “Why…thank you,” Kane said.

  “Did you take the Manta down that shaft?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, no…there is an alternate entrance,” Charun said. “However, we’re going to keep that location secret from you.”

  “Understood. You don’t need rats crawling in your back door,” Grant agreed.

  Inwardly, he felt bad for referring to CAT Beta as rats, but the alluded-to entrance was exactly what those four would need to penetrate into the depths of the Etruscan gods’ pyramid.

  Kane paused, looking down the ladder. “I didn’t think that pyramids had been built in Europe. There’ve been plenty in Asia and South America…and naturally in North Africa…”

  “There are more in what you humans used to call Bulgaria. A whole complex of them,” Charun stated.

  Kane was first down the ladder and Charun motioned for Grant to go next.

  The huge demigod was correct about the sturdiness of the ladder, as well as the thickness of the rungs. However with their non-slip gloves and boots, there was little to fear from losing his grip and hurtling down the ladder. He took a glance up, and saw Charun following. Thankfully, the loin piece that the giant wore was a one piece that covered anything beneath, folded over a belt in the front and in the back.

  “We’re entering an ancient pyramid in Italy, and the only thing I can worry about is an alien up-skirt,” Grant said into the Commtact for Kane to hear.

  There was a snort, both above and below.

  “You are welcome, Grant!” Charun exhorted.

  “Busted,” Kane added.

  “Good ears,” Grant said aloud.

  “Having spent time inside the brains of you humans, I can pity the dullness of your senses,” Charun called down. “And I can understand the disgust at some of the appearances of your own bodies.”