by James Axler
Brigid pulled the last of her paper-thin explosive charges and placed it along the chain.
“What’s that going to do?” Grant asked.
“It’ll slow down Vanth and Charun,” Brigid said. “I’ll detonate it by remote control.”
“Did you see that arrow? Or did you forget about the hammer strike?” Grant countered.
“In close quarters, it’ll put them at a disadvantage,” Brigid told him. “Trust me, I’m thinking ahead on this one.”
“Come on,” Kane growled. “The longer we dither here…”
“And the prisoners?” Smaragda asked. “We’re trapping my friends down there?”
Brigid gave Smaragda a shove past the gate. “We’re not forgetting our promise to you and New Olympus. Trust us.”
Domi and Grant ducked beneath the lowering gate, Brigid scurrying through immediately after. She tapped a control on her forearm and the sound of her munition detonating was instantly followed by the clattering of unraveling chains.
From there, it was a hard run back to the surface.
* * *
SMARAGDA SAT IN the forest, her arms crossed, elbows resting on her knees. She felt good to get out of the shadow suit hood, feeling the wind on her face and through her prematurely whitened hair. Though she was physically free from the constraints of the environmentally sealed suit, the world was dark and heavy around her.
The good news was that it wasn’t her fellow Olympian troopers who were accompanying the robotic armor suits. They were not wandering around as mental slaves.
Instead they were corralled, like cattle, their minds hijacked for the purpose of punching a hole through to an alien universe. According to Brigid Baptiste, the flame-haired scientific genius of this expedition, their idle existences would be only a temporary condition, as once the dimensional warp was opened, there would be a need for bodies for the invaders.
“Charun and Vanth are likely Igigi,” Brigid explained. “The nonelevated castes of Annunaki society. However, either by design or accident, their original identities were usurped and overwritten by transdimensional duplicates.”
“If they can overwrite the Annunaki, then what chance do humans have?” Smaragda asked. “You’re saying that my friends will cease to exist, and in their place, in their skins, fiends will appear and become a part of an army of conquest.”
Brigid looked at her, lips sealed tight. Smaragda could see the thoughts churning behind the woman’s eyes, and she immediately felt regret at claiming there was no hope. If there was a human being alive with the brilliance to rescue both her brother soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Italian peninsula dwellers, it was Brigid Baptiste.
“I’m sorry,” Smaragda said quickly. “What would you need me to do?”
“Right now, we’re going to let the enemy come to us,” she said. “Vanth and Charun have been embarrassed, and they are angry. They will come looking for us.”
“But we can tell that they haven’t started with the search parties,” Grant added. “According to Lakesh, who has three satellites looking down on their pyramid, there has been no movement from either of the entrances we’ve encountered. There are other openings, but no activity there, either.”
“You found other openings,” Edwards asked. “Air ducts?”
“Definitely,” Grant confirmed. “Otherwise, things would become unbreathable down there.”
“Given the human and livestock cells, it’s not the healthiest atmosphere down in the pit,” Domi said. Her nose crinkled at the memory of the smell. “But that was one thing Vanth didn’t lie about. They’ve been taken care of.”
“They want all the shells they can get,” Kane muttered.
“Not to mention their squirmy little pale freaks,” Sela Sinclair added. She glanced over to Domi. “Sorry, Domi.”
Domi waved off the mention of the pallid nature of the alien humanoids. “How are we going to handle the two of them and their allies when they do come hunting for our heads?”
“It will depend on who they send after us,” Brigid explained. “We’re lucky to have Edwards as our pack mule…and you already have sufficient less-lethal firepower to deal with thralls sent in place of the standard troops.”
“You think they’ll take a shot at us with the locals and our missing Olympian platoon?” Smaragda asked.
“It’d be the one thing that would stay our hand,” Brigid told her. “And, frankly, even if they send out a mob of human zombies, we’re going to have to remain careful. Rubber slugs still can kill by breaking necks or snapping ribs and puncturing lungs. Also, while rare, tear gas can cause a respiratory arrest.”
“So their best shot at us is throwing their captives down our throat,” Kane agreed.
“If they wish to capture us,” Brigid returned. “Don’t forget their other weapons, if they deem it practical to simply exterminate us.”
“We just have to figure out how much Annunaki asshole is part of their DNA,” Kane offered. “If they are anything like Enlil, they’ll snatch us up and drag us before them for hours of gloating and speechifying before putting us out of our misery.”
“If that,” Grant agreed. “Those bastards could talk Lakesh to death.”
Domi pursed her lips. Edwards sat next to Smaragda and leaned close to her ear. “Grant just disrespected Domi’s boyfriend.”
“He can talk and talk,” Domi admitted to Smaragda. Domi still glared at Grant. “Be nice.”
“We’re blowing off steam here,” Kane said. “Right now, all we’ve got planned is waiting for the bad guys to attack us.”
Smaragda looked around. “I wish that Vanth and Charun hadn’t been so thorough in depleting the fauna of the area. If something were coming, we’d be better able to notice for the frightened animals.”
Domi rose to her feet, even as Edwards rested a gentle hand on her shoulders.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got the satellites watching the whole area, and we’re already immunized against the illusion of the black fog by Brigid’s hypnosis,” Edwards told her. “There’s no way we can—”
“Shut up, Edwards.” Domi cut him off.
Kane stood, also looking in the direction where Domi scanned.
“You forgot about the black fog, Baptiste?” Kane asked.
“I did not. I merely discounted it as a form of psychic illusion, transmitted via communicator,” Brigid returned. “But, apparently I was mistaken in the true nature of the Stygian flood. What are you sensing?”
“The birds, which shouldn’t be reacting, are flying back toward the pyramid,” Domi said.
Smaragda scrambled to her feet. “We’ve been wondering if they were being used as spies for those two. What if…?”
Smaragda focused on her memories.
* * *
…THERE WERE BIRDS on the branches of the trees along the road, but they made no sound. They were still, no nervous tics that she’d seen other birds display as they, even in rest, continued turning their heads, making certain nothing was creeping up on them. The visible birds, however, was not what had truly disturbed her.
There were trees, heavy and dense with foliage, but the impunity of nests of hidden birds was not accompanied by the riot of tweets and chirps that warned any intruder of how outnumbered they would be if they dared enter the thicket. The countryside was silent.
Smaragda stepped off the road, closing on one of the closest trees. Her men watched as she slung the rifle, then drew the falcata blade. With a twist, she rapped the spine against a low-hanging branch where a songbird perched.
The creature turned its attention toward her, blinked with eyes slow and gummy, but did not launch. Even the turn of its head was casual, unconcerned, not the flicker movement of a normal bird. Smaragda gave the branch another tap with the spine of her sword. The songbird took a clumsy sideways step further along the branch, then unfurled its wings.
Just before she could tap the branch a third time, the songbird took off, wings flapping powerfully, moving wi
th the natural strength and speed of the creature, the limbs beating with the urgency necessary to keep the tiny thing aloft. It wasn’t as if the songbird was in some sort of debilitating trance. It flew straight and true.
It just didn’t seem to care. The normally skittish creature would have taken off on Smaragda’s approach, let alone stay in place for two raps on its perch…
“Brigid, one bird flew away before the fog first appeared,” Smaragda stated.
Brigid cast her eyes upward, a typical action of those seeking to remember exact details. This only took a moment as the swift-minded woman looked around. “Your notice of the animals and their odd behavior triggered the defense mechanism.”
“Rustling all around us,” Domi said. “All the small mammals I haven’t noticed are back. With a vengeance.”
“No wonder individual bullets didn’t do anything to the cloud mass,” Sinclair said. “Birds and hordes of rodents don’t react to gunfire.”
Smaragda grimaced. “Can these suits withstand the teeth and nails of rats?”
“Within reason,” Brigid said.
The Greek warrior tugged her hood on; the others following suit.
“Run or fight?” Sinclair asked.
“Lay down tear gas and wait to see if they want to dare it,” Kane returned. “Their instincts might make them turn away.”
Grant and Edwards, both armed with the less-lethal loaded shotguns, opened up, firing into the forest surrounding them. Ferret rounds burst on impact with tree trunks, releasing the eye-burning gases. Kane and Sinclair rolled conventional tear gas grens, adding to the wall of choking, blinding smoke. Safe in their fully sealed environmental suits, they would be fine.
The only downside of their tear gas plan was that eventually the clouds would dissipate and the throngs of small creatures would make their way through.
Even now, Smaragda focused her suit’s optics and saw the fluid, seething swarm. It was an easily identifiable black cloud behind the pepper-spray mist, blotting out the trees behind. It was also a solid entity.
“This is not good,” Brigid said. “I was afraid of this. If Vanth and Charun could construct a cyclops or Fomori-style entities, then they could alter the biomass available in the form of birds and small mammals into…that.”
“Oops?” Sinclair asked.
Brigid nodded. “A terrible miscalculation and assumption on my part.”
“We’re also locked off from communication with Cerberus,” Sinclair added. “Fortunately, if Vanth or Charun are releasing their songs, the filters are keeping it out of our Commtacts.”
A tendril stretched through the tear gas cloud, lashing toward the Cerberus teams, and Smaragda opened fire with her rifle. The assault weapon chattered, flames belching from the muzzle. Edwards and Grant were also cutting loose, punching the ferret rounds into the lunging tentacle. The pseudopod of inky darkness twisted, losing its stretching momentum forward, and the shotgun shells shot out hot streams of gases from their tear-gas reservoirs. All of this sent the rubbery limb into retreat, back beyond the cloud.
By now, everyone was up, armed, ready to fight for their lives.
“Climbing,” Domi announced, pointing toward a tree trunk that was now enveloped in the tarlike biomass of the Stygian horror. The blob surged upward as if it was under pressure, and Smaragda couldn’t imagine how such a thing could exist without a skeletal structure. She then realized that it likely did have more than sufficient skeleton and muscle mass, considering it had the bone structures of millions of small creatures.
Kane fired on the branch, his Sin Eater chopping at the bough and snapping it off before the black abomination could loom above the group of adventurers.
“Retreat! Sela!” Kane shouted.
With that, Sela Sinclair whirled with her Taser in hand. There were lengths of the boneless mass behind the group, as they truly were facing an amorphous entity. Sinclair fired her Taser, and the tongs of the neuroelectrical weapon stuck in the inky skin of the creature. A pull of the trigger and a hundred thousand volts suddenly flowed into the bulk of the creature.
Black tendrils thrashed violently and the two arms of darkness suddenly retreated, making an opening for the Cerberus warriors to escape through. Smaragda paused long enough to turn and fire the gren launcher under her rifle’s barrel into the body of the beast.
It was a flash-bang gren, and while there was no shrapnel put off by the 40 mm shell, what it did produce was a thunderous blast and a blazing bright light. The light wouldn’t do anything to an organism that apparently had no visual organs, but if there was one thing Smaragda knew about sound, it was that it was amplified in fluid bodies.
The shock wave of the flash-bang gren was deeply muffled by the bulk of the creature, but the keening wail that unleashed from the entity made up for it. Smaragda whirled and followed the others as they charged through the forest. This was all too familiar to the horrors that had gone before, her wild charge to escape the monstrosity the first time she’d encountered it.
She couldn’t help feeling like a failure now, but as she watched the Cerberus warriors pause and continue shooting at the bloblike abomination, she realized they were leading this thing to a position where they could counter it with strategy and intelligence.
Feeling a spasm of hope, Smaragda rushed forward, leaping over a flailing pseudopod and landing in Edwards’s arms.
“Come on, whitey, we’re going to show this snot ball how we treat monsters,” he told her. His smile was just one more thing giving her a hope that they could rescue her brothers in arms.
Chapter 22
“Baptiste, what’ve you got formulating in your head?” Kane asked as he ran, keeping pace with Brigid.
That day of therapy for her ankle and the bindings had worked wonders, because she was easily at the lead of the pack. Her injured foot held up to this frantic gait, and there was little distracting her from the task at hand.
“So far, we have confirmed that heat and sound have negative stimulus on the creature,” Brigid stated.
“Something hot and loud. Guns have both—”
“But the creature had been struck at near muzzle-contact range with the light machine guns mounted on a Spartan war skeleton,” Brigid returned. “If the dark thing couldn’t be warded off by the temperatures generated by an M-240 firing on full-auto, then we need something more.”
“Dark thing?” Kane asked. “So why are they reacting so badly to the tear gas rounds? Those shouldn’t be burning as hotly as muzzle-blasts.”
“Then it has to be something in the tear gas itself,” Brigid replied. She glanced back and saw the others following. She immediately began a mental breakdown of the ingredients for the gases used in those rounds.
Brigid immediately corrected herself on the presence of the pepper-based, oleo-resin in those CS canisters. Pepper spray and 2-chlorobenzomalononitrile had similar inflammatory effects on eyes and mucus tissues, but the cyanocarbon of tear gas was a different compound entirely. For one thing, OC spray was capsicum mixed with ethanol, which dried it out into a waxy resin. Subsequently, that material was carried in a solution called propelene glycol, which could cause severe allergic reactions but was not dangerous. CS gas, however, was dissolved in methyl isobutyl ketone, an organic compound that may or may not have been the active ingredient causing clastogenic mutation in mammalian cells.
Studies were not conclusive by 2001, which was when the world went to hell. But Brigid Baptiste found one focus point on the potential dangers and toxicity of CS gas. Clastogenic alteration was a chromosomal change, genetic damage.
The creature behind them was made up of avian and mammalian creatures, the sum total of thousands, perhaps millions, of mice and other rodents, as well as songbirds. If one portion of the aerosolized cyanocarbon could have a drastic adverse effect on the mammalian part of the alien entity, then there was little doubt that it was a direct injection of the tear gas via ferret shells that had caused the organism pain.
&nbs
p; “We thought it was pained by breathing the tear gas,” Brigid said, loud enough for all to hear as they made their way to an open field. “That is not the case.”
“Direct injection?” Edwards asked. “Because nothing short of punching a ferret shell into the bastard seems to cause it to react…Myrto’s flash-bang trick notwithstanding.”
“Correct,” Brigid responded. “We need to make this thing ingest the CS. It has a chromosomal effect on mammals, and this creature is at least thirty percent mammalian.”
“And because the creature itself is a manipulated biomass, anything that hurts its DNA hurts the process making it a whole entity,” Sinclair agreed.
“Simple. Shoot it,” Domi concluded.
“Load up,” Grant ordered. He plucked his hand gren from his belt and whipped it full-force toward the semifluid entity. “I’ll give it something to chew on.”
The small egg-shaped bomb spiraled through the air, bouncing off of the pudding-like skin of the blob. It rebounded into the air above the amorphous atrocity, and on its way back down, erupted full-force. Several ounces of hi-ex and a metallic core created pressure and heat, as well as a sheet of high-velocity splinters. Cut and slashed violently, the amalgamated mass shuddered and partially retreated to the tree line. There was a brief moment of respite as the battered blob seemed to observe its prey, trying to figure out an approach that would not cause it injury.
Kane handed off one of their remaining hand-thrown tear gas canisters to Brigid. He’d dumped the load of his shotgun onto the ground, leaving the neoprene baton slugs in the dirt while replenishing the magazine tube with more CS shells. The antibarricade ammunition might not have had the volume in it that the canister or a 40 mm gren held, but so far, those shotgun-launched rounds had managed to burn and deter the alien gestalt.
Brigid suddenly watched the thing collapse upon itself, disappearing as if its bodily cohesion burst apart.
