by Sean Ellis
This is the moment I’ve lived my life for, Tarrant thought. Revenge against the offspring of those who betrayed me . . . And I can’t for the life of me remember what it was I wanted to do.
He knew he had only to give shape to his desires—to merely imagine a thing, and it would happen—but that simple action proved elusive. Retribution was purely an intellectual concept with no underlying emotion to incite him to bring the desire to fruition.
Don’t think about it. Let it happen.
He put his hands out over the tabular surface and felt the amplified energy, like a mild electrical shock, dancing across his undead fingertips. Then he let himself fall forward until his palms made contact with the altar.
For a moment, he thought he might come apart, that the power surging through his limbs might rend him to atoms. But because his resurrected flesh was also a manifestation of Trinity technology he endured, and after an instant of unspeakable pain, was lucid once more.
“Vengeance is mine!” he roared, his words reverberating throughout the hollow mountain like a peal of thunder.
Then nothing.
He instantly felt foolish for having the audacity to speak the words attributed to God himself. How droll, he thought. How cliché. The question is: what are you going to do about it?
He searched his memory, trying to find a better answer. It was one thing to have the intent to ravage the world, but quite another to become the architect of such ruin. There was only one event in his frame of reference that seemed to correspond to what he had planned for so many decades, and he drew his inspiration from the words of the man who had made it all possible. The quote, attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist in the development of the first atomic bomb, was itself a paraphrase from another holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, in reference to the Hindu deity Vishnu, and it was that mythic figure, rather than the mushroom cloud of the Manhattan Project, that entered Tarrant’s thoughts as he repeated Oppenheimer’s words: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The Trinity harmonized with the image in his mind and instantly complied, transforming his flesh into the thing he had always believed he wanted to be.
Oh, yes. Now I remember.
Mira felt the tremors of Tarrant’s transformation and knew that the race was over and her enemy had won. Yet she was still alive, and while there was life, there was hope.
She rolled forward, evading the rush of the nearest sphinx as deftly as a bullfighter, and brought her gun to bear. The guardian’s momentum carried it past her, exposing its rear to gunfire, but the incessant stream of bullets had little effect. The animated statue lumbered about for another pass, even as the other two began to careen in her direction.
Because of their mass, the sphinxes’ attempts to run her down were not unlike being chased by automobiles. Once their momentum was invested in a charge, there was little they could do to alter course in response to her evasive tactics. Yet despite her agility, she was at a severe disadvantage. She could not run forever, and even if she could, it would matter little. Tarrant was minutes, or perhaps only seconds, from laying the world to waste.
She saw that the creatures had lined up for a concerted attack, with two moving in from one side and the third intending to pass between them from the opposite direction. It was a clever strategy; no matter which way she tried to run, at least one of the sphinxes would be able to veer off and stomp her into oblivion. Whatever artificial intelligence guided the guardians, it was, like an advanced chess computer, learning from its mistakes.
I can learn, too, Mira thought, holstering her pistol and facing the lone sphinx moving in from her right side. She started running, aiming herself directly at the rampaging figure. It was only about twenty yards away and would close that distance in a matter of seconds, but it abruptly slowed in response to Mira’s sudden offensive, while the pair from behind her increased their speed, still trying to time the precise moment of their engagement. It was exactly what she had hoped they would do.
Instead of trying to dodge the triple-headed charge, Mira maintained her head-on collision course with the lone sphinx, forcing it to slow to what was barely a walking pace. She could feel the vibrations of the remaining guardians as they drew closer from behind, but they were of little concern. If she did not change her course, they would pass by without touching her.
The sphinx seemed to grow larger with its approach. She had not been quite so close to one of them since the battle had started. Her timing would have to be perfect. At the last possible moment, she made her move, not left or right, but up, jumping as high as she could to plant her foot on its breast.
If the charging guardian had been moving any faster, the transfer of kinetic energy at the moment of impact would have broken her bones. As it was, the shock that traveled through the soles of her feet, jarring her entire body, felt like a parachute landing, and she had to struggle to keep her balance as she continued moving.
Her own momentum nearly carried her all the way over, and she had to throw herself flat on the sphinx’s broad back into order avoid crashing back down onto the floor. She spread her arms and legs wide to stabilize herself against the violent tremors of the monster’s ponderous movements.
Confusion overcame the sphinxes. Their enemy had effectively vanished, but the collective consciousness that governed them reasoned that she still had to be there somewhere. As the creatures milled about aimlessly, it began analyzing the input from the pressure sensitive floor pads, trying to figure out where Mira had gone.
She didn’t doubt that the guardians would eventually realize that one of them was marginally heavier than the others, but then getting off the game board was only the first step in her hasty plan. Her bullets had done little more than tickle the stony creatures, but there were other weapons in her arsenal. She delved into her backpack and brought out the grenade launcher.
The other two sphinxes had passed by in the instant of her leap, and had continued some distance before slowing and commencing a sort of holding pattern. She took aim at the most distant of the pair. They were both closer than she would have liked, perhaps too close. The fuze mechanism of the grenades required them to travel a minimum of ten meters before arming. Still, there was no guarantee that the explosive would go off at such close quarters. Of course, if it did, the shock wave from the detonation might very well kill her.
Nobody lives forever, she thought mordantly, and pulled the trigger.
As the spherical bomb hurtled toward its intended target, Mira rolled sideways and dropped back onto the floor. All three guardians abruptly ceased moving and swung their heads in her direction. Then one of them ceased to exist.
The explosion shook the entire level, and reverberated down the chasm. A deadly hail of stone fragments radiated away from the blast, driven by a wall of air compressed to the hardness of concrete. The force knocked both of the surviving sphinxes down, and Mira felt as though she had been punched in the gut, even though she had taken cover at the last instant. For a moment, smoke occluded her view of the damage, but as it cleared, she saw an enormous crater where one of the guardians had stood. Before it could recover, she scrambled onto the back of the nearby sphinx and reloaded.
Two to go.
The thing Tarrant had become was only peripherally aware of what was occurring on the penultimate level below. The spider-web fractures that had crept up the stone walls, hinting at the possible collapse of the cavern, mattered little to it. Agartha was merely the womb from which it would be birthed in order to annihilate all life. If the mother did not survive, it was of little consequence.
The figurative pregnancy, however, had not quite come to term. The Trinity, in answer to his final directive, had begun augmenting that original shell, stripping raw material from the city walls and reorganizing it into a simulacrum of organic matter in order to feed the embryonic monstrosity.
He had grown. Already his bulk had filled the pagoda, splitting apart the weakened polygonal walls. Remarkabl
y, the ruin of the temple did nothing to halt the metamorphosis. The relic had served merely as a catalyst, commencing the chain reaction, and was no longer necessary to the final outcome. But the volume of the structure’s interior was not the limit of Tarrant’s evolution; he was going to have to be a lot bigger if he wanted to rip lightning bolts from the sky in order to ravage entire continents. The transformation had barely begun.
A second sphinx disappeared in the aftermath of another high-explosive grenade. The orderliness of the eleventh tier was gone now, replaced by broken stone and blast craters. In addition to the shattered remains of the two guardians, large chunks of the ceiling and walls had crashed down onto the lattice of tiles, shattering the sensitive grid and effectively blinding the remaining sphinx. It meandered away from Mira and headed for the largest of these sensory voids, incorrectly reasoning that she must be hiding there. A moment later, a chunk of rock the size of a pick-up truck dislodged from somewhere overhead and erased it from existence. The impact caused a ripple effect, and the floor beneath Mira’s feet pitched and rolled, throwing her about like so much refuse.
Although the peril of the guardians was gone, Mira would have preferred that to the danger she now faced. The collapse of the cavern was a random game of chance, and it would take only one unlucky moment to end her life. She recognized that her grenades had contributed the geological instability, but knew that there were other factors at work. She didn’t even have to look to know that something Tarrant had done with the Trinity was tearing Agartha apart.
DiLorenzo had not moved since his collapse. Mira sprinted to the center area where he lay and knelt at his side. “Wake up, sleepy head.”
He shifted in response to her insistent prodding, but did not stir. She frowned and drew back her arm to slap him. Before she could deliver the blow, however, a sudden impulse prompted her to lower her hand and dip her head down until they were face to face. “Let’s try this first, sleeping beauty.”
Her lips met his, and for a moment he remained as unresponsive as a department store mannequin. Then his eyes flew open and he jerked away involuntarily, his sleep-dimmed eyes squinting to come into focus.
“Mira? Damn, did I pass out again?” He raised his head gingerly. “You changed your clothes. . . . Did you just kiss me?”
In spite of the urgency of their situation, she laughed. “I was afraid you hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed. Remember, I’m a detective. Powers of observation.” He grinned. “I’ve been having the strangest dream. . . .”
His eyes darted past her and grew wide as he began to realize that he was no longer where he thought he was. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
As if to underscore his revelation, a noise like a sonic boom rattled the cavern. The terrace that had previously been occupied by the pagoda split in two, with one half shearing away and sliding toward the next level down.
The slab that calved from the larger mass was itself the size of a small mountain, and if the sound of its tearing loose was loud, then there was no standard of comparison for the noise that accompanied its crash. Another undulating wave rippled across the floor, throwing tiles about like dust motes.
As the tremor rolled toward them, Mira threw her arms around a barely comprehending DiLorenzo and held him tight. The floor lifted beneath them, then abruptly dropped. Mira felt a sharp pain in her ribs, and for a moment, could not draw breath, but in the instant before their collision, she saw something else had descended from the twelfth level; a towering shape that moved independently of the avalanche of stone. Her glimpse lasted for only a heartbeat before a tremendous cloud of dust engulfed them, completely blinding her, but it was long enough for her to recognize the gigantic figure.
“No,” she said, when the din subsided and the only sound she could hear was DiLorenzo coughing. “It’s no dream. It’s a nightmare.”
EIGHTEEN
Though the creature he had become was only in its infancy, Tarrant had already grown to colossal proportions. He was now arguably the most massive living organism that had ever existed, surpassing the greatest whale in the ocean and even rivaling the tallest Sequoia redwood. The latter comparison seemed more appropriate to his anatomical structure, for his body no longer resembled anything mammalian. As he grew, trying to match the vision of Shiva he had imparted to the Trinity, his physiology raced to adapt. A human heart, with a volume of less than half a liter, could scarcely supply blood to the extremities of an entity that was now over three hundred feet in height, so it had to grow, bulging and stretching deep within the recessed hollow of his chest cavity. Likewise, in order to distribute essential oxygen and other nutrient through a circulatory system more than a thousand times longer than that of a normal human, his blood supply had to increase, and did so rapidly as his skeletal structure also expanded and changed in response to the new biological imperative.
The bipedal design which served Homo sapiens so well was impractical for this new life form. No less than six legs now sprouted like tree roots from the base of its towering trunk, spreading out like fingers to give it stability. Tarrant’s head and face had all but disappeared, for the evolutionary alterations that were remaking the landscape of his body had caused little change in his brain, and therefore required no commensurate growth of the cranium. His eyes however had grown larger, migrating to the front of his torso, and beneath them two ragged nostril holes, covered by a thin membrane, pulsated with each gargantuan inhalation. His mouth was gone, because he no longer needed to eat or digest food for growth or sustenance. Instead, several brilliant tendrils of energy, like violet lightning bolts, coruscated from his body to atomize raw matter from the cavern floor and walls and transform it into the base material for his continuing regenesis. His redundant digestive tract had already atrophied and been assimilated by his reconfigured anatomy. Likewise, his organs for speech—a pitifully inefficient means of communication for a creature of his psychic puissance—had shriveled away.
The changes were not limited to the physical. His elevation to god-like status had wrought equivalent changes to his ego. Though cognizant of where he was and what had transpired in the journey to this pinnacle, he was only marginally aware of the two figures huddled on the floor below, covered in the dust of the city’s ongoing collapse. They were as insignificant to him now as insects.
It had not yet crossed his elevated mind that some insects have a deadly sting.
DiLorenzo gaped in disbelief at the mountainous pillar of flesh that shifted ponderously across the shattered floor, certain that what he was witnessing was some kind of hallucination triggered by the choking cloud of dust or a lingering after-effect of his long catatonia. His credulity was further taxed when a series of loud explosions occurred right beside him. Mira was shooting at the thing.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t look away from her target, but shouted her answer through clenched teeth as the Desert Eagle rocked in her grip, spitting lead at the monstrosity’s eyes. “Everything I can!”
The bullets seemed to have no effect on the creature, vanishing into the black orbs like rocks thrown into the ocean, but as Mira paused to reload, a thundering voice resonated inside their heads. “Still here, Mira?”
“You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily?” she shouted back, and resumed firing.
Tarrant gave an apathetic grunt then pivoted his tremendous bulk so that his eyes were no longer exposed. Six tentacle-like protrusions unfurled from the crown of his trunk. Each ended in an over-sized, but in every other way perfectly recognizable, human hand. Electricity arced between the fingertips as the arms fanned out, then leapt out in a blinding discharge against the sheer wall of the cavern. The sound of lightning, ionizing the atmosphere, was as loud as a jet engine.
“What the hell is he doing?” shouted DiLorenzo, shading his eyes.
“He’s tunneling! Trying to get out!” She stared at the gun in her hand, her mind racing to form a strategy for fighting the
towering creature. Tarrant, or whatever he had become, was still a living thing and as such could be killed. Marquand Atlas, wielding a piece of the Trinity in the Panamanian tomb, had gone down from a single bullet wound. Yet, even when her former benefactor had walked on two legs, a round from the Desert Eagle had barely tickled him. She would need something a lot bigger if she was going to take him down.
She holstered the pistol and reached for her backpack. Her fingers found the grenade launcher she had used against the guardians, but she kept digging until her hand closed around a larger cylindrical object. “This will do,” she murmured, too softly for even her own ears to hear.
DiLorenzo did not recognize the weapon until she folded down the handgrips and pulled out a second tube telescoped within the first. It was something he had seen only in movies, a single-use missile launcher. Mira raised the device to her shoulder and took aim. Before pulling the trigger, she glanced over at him. “Better get down.”
Startled out of his dumbfounded paralysis, he dropped to the floor and covered his head in the very instant that she pulled the trigger. The dry chemical propellant in the rocket motor ignited with an explosion that was itself like a bomb going off. DiLorenzo felt the percussive slap in the pit of his stomach, and for a moment thought that the warhead had detonated. He raised his head in time to see the projectile streaking toward the Tarrant-thing, trailing a finger of white smoke and a wave of blistering heat. Before he could cover-up a second time, the missile completed its journey.
To his surprise, the warhead did not erupt on impact. Instead, the arrow-shaped rocket pierced the skin of the colossus and kept going. DiLorenzo’s dismay was short-lived, however. A second detonation, mostly felt rather than seen, shook the cavern as the high-explosive payload was triggered a millisecond after contact.
