by James Axler
“You are no longer the student, but a master,” Brigid praised.
“A master at laying down mayhem,” Grant said. “Domi?”
“Ready,” she answered.
Grant had CAT Beta set up as a cohesive fire team in the trees overlooking the Panthers of Manosha camp. The three of them had brought along an arsenal from Cerberus redoubt that was designed for long reach and maximum destruction.
Instead of Copperhead submachine guns, Domi, Sinclair and Edwards were equipped with SIG AMT rifles, well suited to reaching out five hundred yards, so as to hit those hard-to-scratch spots in Gamal’s base camp. As well, they each had separate grenade launchers, six-shot revolving launchers that would enable them to arc high-explosive shells hundreds of feet into the Panthers’ lair.
Grant wished he and the others had been quicker, but even so, they were moving as fast as possible, while still staying undercover. Their only hope in protecting the Zambians in the redoubt was to strike with surprise, and to completely overwhelm Gamal.
“First target Gamal or his equipment?” Grant asked.
“Both,” Brigid replied. She wasn’t in a mood to mess around. She lined up her Copperhead on the African warlord. “You blow the hell out of his equipment.”
Grant nodded. “Domi, make it rain.”
As soon as he said the feral girl’s name, a trio of hollow pops sounded in the distance. He knew what they were, and Gamal suddenly sat up, realizing, too, that some new racket was on the battlefield. Even as the first grenades took to the sky, Grant and Brigid adjusted themselves, still keeping low behind a thick berm of dirt, and opened fire on Gamal’s truck bed.
Brigid’s Copperhead spit a stream of lead at the African warlord, but even as her bullets reached the man, a sudden surge of lightning filled the air. Obviously, the “clumsy headset” that Gamal wore was more than simply a means of telepathically commanding the kongamato. Streaks of white-blue plasma sparked, punching each of her copper-jacketed slugs to the ground.
Grant’s slugs thundered violently from the mighty USAS-12, and those, too, were intercepted by the lightning arcing from the headgear worn by Gamal, even though his aim was toward the technology. Grant got off only four shots, then let the automatic shotgun hang, reaching for an implosion grenade.
“Zap this....” he snarled.
Brigid moved quickly, putting her hand over his. “Implosion grenade. If he bounces it, it’ll land back in our lap!”
Grant paused, then disarmed the gren. High explosives might have been a good choice, but throwing a hand grenade into Gamal’s lap, for him to lob back, was not the best move.
Even so, Brigid knew that their efforts weren’t for naught, as Gamal suddenly turned his attention toward the muzzle-flashes that lit the jungle not far from him. Hopefully, since he was just a normal human warlord, he wouldn’t have the multifunctioning intellect to continue control over the kongamato and deal with an attack.
As well, his lightning field protected only him, in his throne truck. Grenades landed amid the Panthers of Manosha column, and explosions ripped across the night in a staccato string of violence and devastation. Militiamen screamed as detonations spread shrapnel among them. It wasn’t an all-encompassing rain of thunder, but the rolling blasts of eighteen 40 mm grenades were more than sufficient to switch the force from its standby position to scrambling for cover.
As a result, there were suddenly no more men to hand off satchel charges to the kongamato, who now landed and looked around in confusion.
Brigid smiled, realizing that she had been right about their attack at least distracting Gamal. Now they just had to hope that his lightning field wasn’t powerful enough to swat at opponents farther away.
Gamal stood, looking in the direction of the muzzle-flashes.
“Ah. Finally, the visitors from America make their presence known. How you got out of the redoubt with my fine beasts covering both exits, I shall have to ask. If you survive,” Gamal called.
Grant brought up the big shotgun and fired off the rest of his magazine. Sure enough, the heavy slugs were intercepted by streams of ions, which flared when struck. The electrical field was more than sufficient to stop the shotgun’s metric ton of kinetic energy cold, dropping the fat bullets to the ground.
“Did you think that I’d sit here, unable to protect myself?” Gamal asked.
Grant sneered, digging for a magazine on his bandoleer “Honestly, I thought you were counting on people laughing at that headgear, so hard that you could shoot them before they recovered, given how ridiculous you looked.”
Brigid let the big man speak, moving away from him in a hope to get a better angle. She didn’t know what weapon could be used to penetrate the umbrella of charged energy that protected Gamal, but so far, he was simply standing there, not directing thunderbolts at Grant.
The optics of her shadow suit suddenly picked up movement in the corner of her eye, and Brigid threw herself to the ground, moments before a swooping predator came close to slamming into her. She rolled in the grass, and realized that Gamal didn’t need thunderbolts.
He had kongamato. And they were nearly as swift and accurate.
More of the creatures were coming down, in attack formation, wings spreading wide to slow themselves, adjust their aim and strike down the lithe, athletic figure who had dared shoot at their master. Brigid brought up her Copperhead and opened fire on one of them. The stubby submachine gun chattered, and while she managed to hammer about 20 rounds into his belly, literally blowing him off course, she’d taken so much time that the other two were able to land, bracketing her.
Brigid Baptiste was poised between two murderous beasts, knowing the instant she turned to destroy one, the other would be atop her.
* * *
KANE, DURGA AND Nathan Longa appeared inside a cavern with a towering roof. Kane blinked as he looked up, seeing that it was not a natural space. Gouges and scours of powerful drilling tools were evident on the distant walls, as well as the ceiling, some seventy-five feet up.
“All right. Now I’m starting to become more impressed with you hairless apes,” Durga murmured.
“You haven’t been in here?” Kane asked.
“No. The Threshold simply picked a spot close to where I remember being,” he explained. “When I was brought here, I was up...there.”
Durga pointed a scaled finger toward the far side of the domed roof of the cavern, at what seemed at first to be a white box. But as Kane squinted, he noticed that it was light burning through a row of windows.
“From the inside of that, this really didn’t look that impressive,” Durga noted. Around them were terrariums, chambers formed of plasteel with metal frames. Lights glowed within, and at the bottom of each were pools of greenish slop.
Nathan stepped closer to one, then jerked backward in shock as a kongamato wing sliced up from the surface of the strange solution.
“Nutrient baths,” Kane said. He’d seen this sort of thing before, in places such as the Anthill and in Greece. These were cloning facilities, where creatures were bred en masse and aged to maturity quickly. Thanks to biological overclocking, the animals created within could be born and sent into battle within the space of a week.
This was the same technology that the barons used to perpetuate their hold over the nine villes, utilizing preskydark technologies to dominate North America.
Kane himself had been part of one of those technologies. The magistrates had been selected from the ablest men, and bred, as per animal husbandry, to produce a template of physical and mental capability. Lakesh had interfered with that process, manipulating Kane’s genealogy so that there was more than a simple spark of duty and obligation to his fellow man.
Aside from the magistrate breeding and education, the barons had vehicles and guns. The traditional magistrate armor was so high-tech tha
t it made Kane, Grant and Edwards into nearly bulletproof human tanks, armed with advanced optics, communications, and weapons that could wipe out the barbarian scum who would not submit to baronial rule. The life of a magistrate hadn’t truly ended up as a continual life of being the barons living will, and as such, they had become lawmen, often protecting even the non-ville residents who lived in teeming shanty towns that sprouted in the shadow of the megalithic villes.
Kane had discovered the truth about the barons, their “advanced evolutionary state” and the need for fresh humans to provide organs and blood to keep them alive, through transplants and transfusions. That was how he’d become a hunted rebel. But now, in a world where the deepest seeds of alien Annunaki DNA sprouted the barons into their true, superhuman forms, places like this, and the now destroyed Anthill and Area 51, were no longer necessary to them.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t those who tried to manipulate them. In Greece, a silver-clad bitch named Hera Olympiad had set herself up as goddess, utilizing hordes of vat-bred muties to create an eternal state of war. And now Durga and the Millennium Consortium had been drawn in by knowledge of these vats. The kongamato would serve as an amazing army, and given some time, without Kane’s intervention, they might even have built a new body for Durga.
Now, however, another force had control of the cloned hordes. Kane knew that it had to be the queen, that voidlike psychic entity that had tried to crush him and seduce Durga. There was another of the queen’s seductees out there, and from Grant and Brigid, he presumed it was Gamal, leader of the militia called the Panthers of Manosha. Together, the queen and Gamal threatened a ragtag assembly of Zambian soldiers and millennialists in a facility connected to this one.
“There’s a lot of these baths between us and the control room,” Durga said.
“Then let’s get moving,” Nathan grumbled. He clutched Nehushtan, an artifact entrusted to the Longa family for generations, whose ownership was reputed to go back through King Solomon and Moses to the high priests of Atlantis, which put it firmly as an artifact of Annunaki or Tuatha de Danann origin. The staff had performed many miraculous deeds over the past few days, reaching into the dreams of Kane, enabling feats of great strength, agility and prowess, even bringing Nathan back from the point of death and returning the quadriplegic Durga to his prime, in fitness and strength. Kane was glad to have the stick on his side, though he remembered how it had drawn up memories of a prior incarnation, giving him doubts as to whether he ever wanted to wield the staff himself.
He took the lead, the other two men falling into line behind him. After Durga and Kane awoke from their queen-induced coma, Grant had arranged for weapons to be provided to them. Right now, Kane had his Sin Eater in its hydraulic forearm holster, ready to burst into action at the slightest thought. Andthanks to Grant, he had backup for it—a deadly little Copperhead submachine gun, and a Colt .45 automatic, which he wore in a holster on his hip.
Durga had his own Copperhead, and Nathan had a Zambian militia rifle, a G3, as well as his own little Detonics .45 auto, a copy of which Durga also had. Each of the three men was also equipped with hand grenades and spare ammunition. It made for a lot of firepower, but as they moved among the “growing chambers,” where newborn kongamato twitching in their nutrient baths, it suddenly didn’t seem like such an overwhelming advantage.
“So far, it doesn’t look...” Durga began.
“Shush,” Kane snapped. “Don’t tempt—”
“...as if we’ve been noticed,” he finished.
Even as the Nagah prince spoke those last words, the three men heard the hydraulic hiss of chamber lids opening. With their seals broken, the nutrient baths and the organisms growing within filled the air with a nauseating stink.
Nathan started coughing uncontrollably. “That screwed us,” he grumbled.
“Move!” Kane ordered, and the young man from Harare was at full speed an instant later, running with incredible grace and agility.
Sure, now Nehushtan’s active, Kane thought as he dug in and followed as best he could. Durga was hot on his heels.
“I didn’t know your superstitions had merit,” the Nagah prince panted.
Kane grimaced. “Maybe start paying attention to me in the future.”
Durga suddenly tackled Kane, ropy arms winding about his legs and forcing him to the ground in a graceless tumble. Kane was about to curse the Nagah when he saw the kongamato perched atop his growth tank, struggling to regain his balance after missing its attack. Kane extended his hand and the Sin Eater popped into his grip, finger hooked to catch the trigger. In a heartbeat, the machine pistol roared, spitting lead into the winged beast, holes blasting through its chest and conical face. The creature thrashed under the multiple impacts, then toppled backward, splashing into the green nutrient slop that had nurtured it to physical adulthood.
Durga pulled his .45 and fired at a second of the vat-bred kongamato, the handgun’s message accompanied by the thunderous bellow of a fat slug parting the air. One shot, two shots, three and the second of the attacking beasts fell, but this one smashed to the floor, blocking their path between the breeder containers.
Kane pulled himself up, then reached out for Durga’s hand. “Come on.”
The cobra man’s amber eyes flashed with momentary confusion, but he took the proffered help, pulling himself to his feet. Right now, surrounded by quasi-alien humanoids, the two men needed each other, so the spoiled blood between them had to be forgotten.
Suddenly, a flash of light split across the dome of the chamber.
“Longa reached the control room,” Durga said. “And he’s run into the security systems.”
Kane narrowed his eyes. “Security?”
“Move!” Durga ordered.
The urgency in his voice made Kane turn on his heels and leap over the corpse of the fallen kongamato.
Nathan needed help, and fast.
* * *
JONAS GRABBED ONE of his fellow soldiers, using a handle built into the collar of the man’s vest to support his weight, rather than grabbing an arm and potentially dislocating it. The kongamato’s assault had died out, but the killer beasts had taken their toll. Utilizing hurled satchel charges and their natural agility, they’d managed to turn the opening of the redoubt into a hell zone of rubble and pain. Most of the injuries hadn’t come from the overpressure force of the actual explosives, but from concrete and rebar hurtled at bulletlike velocities.
Lomon stayed at the front, after having taken a brief respite to tend to the newly awakened Kane and the snake man. He was busy sifting through the aftermath of the mayhem, looking for anyone who still survived, holding on by a thread. Just to make certain that he wasn’t caught helpless, Lomon had his big G3 rifle.
Jonas handed off the injured man to a fellow soldier, who transferred him to a cot. Even as Jonas did that, he made sure to keep his eyes on Lomon. They had survived this conflict so far, but there was no guarantee that they’d make it to the end.
Shuka already had lost most of his right hand, fingers crushed beneath a falling section of roof. Jonas remembered his knife cutting through flesh, because the carpal bones had been smashed to splinters. Shuka had transferred his handgun to his left hand, and what was left of the other was wrapped up in gauze and strips of a blanket.
Blood was being lost by the gallon. Men had died, but nearly everyone among the Zambians had picked up an injury, be it a broken eardrum from overpressure, or lacerations from flying rubble. Jonas himself was limping, a length of rebar having struck him in the knee. Had it been head-on, he would have been speared right through the patella, but as it was, putting weight on his leg was painful.
He glanced back into the redoubt as he heard the sudden crackle of gunfire.
“What the hell?” he asked. Already he was moving quicker, hop-limping to the intersection where he’d h
eard the sound. He shouldered the FAL rifle, both hands on the weapon, ready to engage in combat. Something had come through the back way.
That would be the only reason there would be shooting back here.
Staggering along, he saw a four-legged shadow amble into the open. Even from this distance, Jonas could recognize the gorillalike arms and shoulders of the beast. The kongamato must have made it through the booby traps at the bottom of the redoubt.
Jonas snapped up the front sight and triggered two quick rifle rounds into the thing. High-velocity bullets smashed the creature’s shoulder and jerked it to the floor, a mist of blood and tissue remaining in the air thanks to the explosive exit of the deadly rounds. Jonas turned back. “We’ve got a breach! Form a line!”
He continued limping forward, knowing that the surviving millennialists would be in desperate straits, if not all dead.
That was when he noticed Makoba, the giant who had been recruited to the consortium. Looking relatively healthy, with eyes agleam, he stood withhis AK-47 grasped in one massive fist.
“Makoba! Get over here now!” Jonas shouted.
The big African bandit-turned-gunman-and-guide broke into a jog, closing the distance between them.
“Are you all right?” Jonas asked.
Makoba looked down at him. The millennialist was a full head taller, yet Jonas could see strands of metal glinting through the man’s thick, nappy hair. “Why should I not be?”
“The kongamato. They must have made it in. You saw the thing I shot,” Jonas replied.
Makoba glanced back at the bullet-shattered corpse in the corridor. He turned his head to look at Jonas.
Something felt very wrong about this.
“I’m out of ammunition for my rifle,” Makoba said. “Do you have any?”
“Not for that,” Jonas answered. He took a step back, not liking how the millennialist was crowding his personal space.
