by James Axler
“So, maybe it is a good thing that we have Brigid coming in to join us, so we can better understand what’s going on,” Grant returned.
“Vanth would explain much better,” Charun admitted. “I was more engaged in protecting our borders from the minions of the overlords.”
“Which makes you damn fine in my book,” Grant noted. “Enlil and his bunch never have been friends of mine.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Charun responded. “Even in my time, it was an ancient saying.”
Charun motioned to allow Grant to take the lead up the ladder. Without hesitation, Grant was up the rungs and out of the hatch on the peak. The wake of the Manta bisected a cloud, smearing the white fluff of it behind, creating a streak on the afternoon sky. He enjoyed watching one of these machines in action, even from thousands of feet away, its sheer velocity and nature. When not engaged in stealth mode, it was a vulgar, glorious display of the true scale of human creativity.
It was one thing to punch through dimensional walls, to squirt your atoms through a wormhole halfway around a continent, but really, Grant was a pilot. He’d been flying the Deathbird iteration of the AH-1 Apache gunship for decades, and nothing felt like the sensation of skimming over treetops at 150 miles an hour. With the discovery of the Mantas from the moon base, all dreams of velocity and agility were increased exponentially. There was no sense of movement in a mat-trans, no thrill with it.
Even the Deathbird was still a magnificent flying machine that moved and felt like an extension of his body, an amplification of himself.
Watching from the sidelines, he was still impressed with the sleek, transorbital plane.
Charun was up through the hatch and standing beside him. A glance at the giant told Grant that he was interested in the Mantas, too.
Charun followed it intently. He’d encountered the—to him—alien craft, and though he wore a harness that let him take to the skies with inhuman ease and wielded a hammer capable of splitting a Manta in two with a direct hit, the scram jet was wondrous to Charun. There was a sense of respect for the humans’ tinkering.
The approach was clean from Grant’s more clinical thinking, observing Kane’s handling of the Manta. There was a difference between him and his younger partner. Whereas the Mantas were a joy, a drug to Grant, to Kane they were merely another means of transportation. There was no flourish, no excitement in his tearing between orbit and atmosphere.
Grant had to give Kane props for being precise and always in control, but that was no way to truly fly. Charun, with his wing harness, was someone who was more along the lines of what he experienced as a pilot.
Of course, all of this could have been projection, but Grant could see Charun nodding at the same points that he’d approved of in Kane’s handling of the Manta. The scram jet switched to Vertical Takeoff and Landing mode, its engines swiveling so that it could hover and land on the clearing on the hillside.
Charun’s head whipped around and Grant could feel the giant’s tension increase.
“What’s wrong?” Grant asked. He let his Sin Eater slide into his hand. Charun was suddenly on the defensive and he could see the demigod’s hands flexing open and closed, sorely missing the hammer he should have had.
“We’ve got intruders,” Charun stated. “They’re coming in.”
Grant was frozen in doubt for a moment but he kept his thoughts of CAT Beta deep within the back of his mind, buried under other mental processes. There was a threat, bringing Charun out of his curiosity, making the giant wish for a weapon. That wouldn’t be Domi and the rest. The albino girl was a ghost when she wanted to be, just as stealthy as Kane himself.
No…someone was approaching, out in the open, and they were on a warpath.
“Should we have Kane take off?” Grant asked.
“No,” Charun stated. “This should be nothing for me.”
“But you’re all itchy, ready to fight,” Grant added.
Charun glanced at the machine pistol in Grant’s fist. “As are you…”
“Your instincts kicked mine off,” Grant replied.
“They come from that way,” Charun stated, pointing down the hill. “I cannot quite tell the number of them…it is as if there is more than one mind or spirit per intruder.”
Grant tilted his head.
Kane and Brigid were running forward, both of them with their weapons out, but leveled at the ground so as not to accidentally shoot someone as they rushed forward.
“What’s going on?” Kane asked.
“Charun sensed intruders,” Grant explained. “Coming from that direction.”
Kane turned his head toward the forest that was pointed out. Brigid glanced down, too, but then returned her attention to the Etruscan giant. Her emerald eyes were wide as she looked at the titan from head to toe. Then she glanced at the hatch in the peak, blank-faced servants arriving carrying capsules the size of small melons in their hands.
Charun turned to the first servant, plucking the “ball” from his hand. He swung it up over one shoulder and Grant watched as straps suddenly stretched out from the capsule, winding around his chest. Then came the wings; crushed buds the size of Grant’s forearms began unfurling into leathery wings, like those of a gigantic bat or reptilian pteranodons.
“The magic disappears when you look upon it up close, no?” Charun asked. He picked up another of the capsules and pressed it to his face, this one becoming the tusked, terrifying mask that, at this range, Grant could tell was the “war paint” Vanth had referred to. It was not much different from the shadow suit Grant himself wore. This one, however, put itself onto Charun, spreading down and increasing the unhealthy blue-corpse pallor of the titan. In a way, this was also close to what he saw when Enlil began armoring his Nephilim warriors with those little buds of smart metal.
“Nope, not a bit,” Grant replied. “Pretty fantastic.”
Charun flexed, feeling more himself as he “suited up” for war. There were still four more servants, all with their eyes empty, faces impassive as mind-controlled drones. Each held a different-colored capsule.
Charun picked up one that unfurled in his hand, forming a long metallic rod of great strength as it finished transforming. He plucked a second, stabbed it atop the shaft and it quickly formed a crosspiece, anchoring to the handle of the hammer. Charun took each of the last two, sticking one on either end of the crosspiece, each capsule forming into a deadly alloy wedge that was the last of the hammer’s formation.
Brigid observed this, as well, and Grant intended to ask her, later, if he was right in the assumption of this technology resembling that of the Annunaki, especially the corrupted armor node that had turned Helena from a silver-skinned goddess into a rampaging engine of destruction.
“Let us gird our loins, Kane and Grant!” Charun bellowed. “The enemy is upon us!”
Grant saw Charun lift his hand, pointing toward an object hurtling up from the ground. It was a two-hundred-pound chunk of stone arcing into the sky, hurtling straight toward the Cerberus expedition and Charun.
Chapter 15
Kane saw the flying stone, and grabbed Brigid Baptiste by the wrist, pulling her down the hillside. Moments later Charun took a half step and swung his hammer, the head connecting with the two-hundred-pound missile loud enough to make Kane regret not pulling his hood up to protect his hearing. The impact was a direct slap in the face, pressure waves splashing against him and making him lose his footing on the rocky hillside.
“For the glory of Styx!” Charun bellowed, and Kane wasn’t certain if his shout was even louder than that alien-tech hammer striking the granite slab that nearly crushed them.
With that pronouncement, Kane watched as Charun’s “fake” wings glowed slightly and he launched into the sky, his tusked mouth a rictus of glee and ferocity, his insane hammer crackling with arcs of lightning across its head and shaft.
“You two okay?” Grant asked.
Kane blinked and shook his head. “My ears are rin
ging from that battle cry. Where did he knock the stone?”
Brigid pointed down the hill. “You mean the powdered gravel cloud he turned it into?”
Kane looked to see wisps of dust settling on the hillside. Well, we can eliminate our friends as being behind this attack, he mused. Even Edwards couldn’t toss a two-pound rock like that, let alone two hundred pounds.
Charun flew forward toward the launch point of the slab of stone when his course jerked violently upward. A smaller, faster rock must have flashed at him faster than his reflexes could allow, and Charun somersaulted, tumbling through the air toward the ground.
“The antigravity elements of his flight harness will cushion his fall, but he may have suffered considerable trauma from the rock hit,” Brigid noted. “We need to get to his side and protect him.”
“You sure you know where he landed?” Kane asked her.
Brigid nodded. “I’ll steer you from up here.”
Kane looked down to her ankle. “Right. You’re not rushing anywhere on that ankle.”
“Hurry,” Brigid admonished. “There’s tree movement. Something quite large is smashing through the forest toward him.”
Kane glanced at Grant and the two partners took off down the hillside, running and jumping.
“He mentioned more than one opponent,” Grant said. “But apparently only one of them was big and strong enough to act as a living piece of antiaircraft artillery.”
“Let’s hope that’s the case,” Kane answered. He glanced back and saw that Brigid was hard on their heels, not quite as fast due to their longer strides, but she wasn’t going to be left in the dust. “What’re the odds we’re going to run into our old cyclops pal?”
“I’d say they were even. One chance in one,” Brigid said over the Commtact. “I doubt even Balor could cause such sway among healthy trees.”
Kane grimaced, bounding down the slope. He was glad for the protection offered by the non-Newtonian nature of the shadow suit.
The main element of protection in the space-age polymers was that the fibers were fluid in nature until the moment an object struck them. The design was first discovered at the end of the twentieth century, enabling skiers to better handle high-speed impacts and crashes on the slopes. One moment the skintight uniform was flexible and supple, but when something like a collision occurred, the fibers became an almost steel-hard plate, blunting impact and preventing serious trauma. Taken to the extent of the moon base scientists, the shadow suits could even stave off light small-arms fire from anything short of a full-powered rifle.
More than once Kane had been saved from a deadly blow hurled by a foe of inhuman strength, the polymers blunting rib-splintering punches. His enjoyment of the shadow suit’s protective properties, however, was extended toward the fact that he could slip and crash to a knee and not have the skin torn or split by bashing against a rock, nor would the sharp impact penetrate the cushioning effects of the polymers and cause a leg fracture. The soles of his boots also kept him from feeling it when he landed on a sharp stone that would have even given a conventional combat boot a puncture. The sides of the boots also would keep his leg rigid within normal range of movement, preventing a sprained ankle or a badly flexed knee.
The suits were made for all-out on terrain such as this, and Kane was going to need every bit of personal disregard to get to the fallen Charun in time.
The familiar bellow of “Hate you! Kill you!” reverberated off the trunks in the forest, making the cyclops seem even more deranged at this point.
Or maybe old One-eye was growing crazier, especially after being put down by Kane and Grant earlier. Failure and frustration were powerful motivators, but they also tended to make those who suffered such embarrassment crazier.
When you went up against eighteen feet of titan who was berserk and pissed off, chances were that you got to see just how good your fancy space suit could do against fists carrying tons of force. As Kane and Grant wove between the trees, Kane could make out a flowery fountain of light; infrared cameras picking up a flare of power that could only have been Charun’s hammer.
“Just what the hell is all that light?” Grant asked. “Some kind of fire wall to keep the cyclops and his friends at bay?”
“Or maybe it’s just pumping out another kind of energy and our suits can’t quite identify it,” Kane responded. “Just that there is a lot of it.”
“Great,” Grant murmured. “Well, I’m glad we sealed the suits. I don’t need to be hit with hard radiation.”
“Kane’s right,” Brigid called from above. “I’m trying to determine the output of the hammer. The readings are either pure gibberish or it’s putting out the equivalent of a miniature sun down here. Light, radiation, magnetism…”
Kane looked through the fiery glow, seeing something massive swing down against the fountain of light. They were a hundred yards away, but the cyclops had reached Charun first and wielded another tree like a club. But when the huge log crashed down, it burst apart in the hands of the two-ton titan.
“Die!” the beast roared.
Kane unleashed his Sin Eater, slowed to a kneeling position and aimed at the figure in the distance. The cyclops was a big, easy target as they’d closed another twenty yards, well within the range of the Magistrate machine pistol. He pulled the trigger, ripping off a burst of 9 mm slugs toward the huge assailant.
The cyclops slapped at its chest, growling at the impact of the bullets. Kane frowned as he realized that as powerful as the Sin Eater was, capable of punching through the armor of a Deathbird or the windshield of a Sandcat, it had done nothing more than to annoy the giant.
The angry titan turned and its singular, bulging eye locked on Kane.
“I’ve got his attention,” he said to Grant as nearly twenty feet of rampaging humanoid lunged straight at Kane. “Flank him!”
The gigantic creature’s long strides accelerated it toward Kane, and once more, the Cerberus leader was astonished at the kind of velocity that a living freight train of muscle could achieve. He held his ground, firing single shots ineffectually into the titan’s bulk until the last moment.
Within three of the massive strides of the cyclops, Kane hurled himself aside, diving out of the path of two tons of opponent. At that point, the creature had far too much momentum to stop and turn on a dime. The tree Kane had had at his back disintegrated as the titan plowed through it, branches and splinters flying from the devastated trunk.
Grant’s Sin Eater roared as he pelted the cyclops with full-auto bursts.
Kane could see blood spattering under bullet impacts, but the creature seemed more annoyed than injured by them. Then again, the guns were designed to put humans down decisively, not organisms the size and mass of an elephant.
The cyclops spun and tried to slow, skidding on wide, log-size feet that dug up mounds of soil. Even that wasn’t enough, so it reached out its long, massive arms and sank its fingers into the ground.
Finally reaching a halt, the cyclops glanced between Kane and Grant, who were both reloading their spent side arms.
“We had to run down here without anything bigger than our Sin Eaters,” Grant snarled.
“You’re welcome to run back and grab something,” Kane offered. He took aim at the giant’s singular eye and pulled the trigger.
The cyclops must have had incredible prescience and reflexes, because the large palm of the man-beast’s hand rose, blocking the salvo that Kane launched. The skin on the thing’s palm was torn up by the burst, but blood merely trickled from the ravaged flesh. There didn’t seem to be too much in terms of muscle or guts that were usual in the hands of a humanoid. He’d slashed at enough hands with his combat knife over the years.
He fired again, hoping to penetrate further, or at least to keep the cyclops occupied. The ring of the high-velocity jacketed slugs on metal reached Kane over the rattle of the Sin Eater.
“Brigid, he’s got a metal skeleton,” Kane said over the Commtact.
As he tol
d her, the cyclops reached out with his other arm to snatch a bough off of a tree.
“This is as I feared,” Brigid pronounced. “Especially when you described the physiology of the beast to me.”
“It’s a Gear Skeleton?” Kane asked, whirling and throwing himself out of the path of the hurled branch. The wood striking the ground dug in to half its length, then split up its center.
That would explain a lot of things, especially considering Kane wasn’t certain that an actual humanoid skeleton could support such strength and stresses as this twenty-foot cyclops would put on it.
Kane rolled to his back, aimed and fired, his burst striking the forehead of the giant, missing the thing’s centered eye by mere inches, skin splitting under high-velocity impacts. It roared in discomfort, which meant that, somehow, there was living flesh wrapped around the orichalcum bones of that horror. And if there was living flesh wrapping the giant…
Grant appeared in Kane’s peripheral vision, hurling a gren at the big creature. This time, the cyclops wasn’t charging with the speed and force of a rhinoceros. Having overshot his target on more than one occasion, the giant had decided to take things slower, steadier, relying on a step that could take it twelve feet casually to outdistance its foes.
The gren caught the giant’s attention and it whirled, clasping it in his fist.
“Stupid…”
Before the epithet that the cyclops intended could form on its lips, the gren detonated in a brilliant flash. Twenty feet of monstrosity rocked back on its heels then toppled, shaking the earth beneath Kane’s feet, almost sending him back onto his ass.
“I thought you were griping about us only going after these things with only our side arms,” Kane grumbled.
“That’s why I decided to make a gren one of my side arms,” Grant answered.
Kane picked up a wink and a grin from the normally grouchy Magistrate.
“Hurt Feem! Hurt Feem!”
Kane and Grant looked out into the forest. Their conflict with the cyclops had eaten up some time, time enough for the other intruders that Charun had detected to catch up with their gigantic leader. They saw the twisted, bulky, lurching things that had been called the Fomori when they’d encountered them in the Appalachian Mountains. They were big, but nowhere near the size of Charun, let alone the cyclops they called “Feem.”
