Extinction Series (The Complete Collection)

by James D. Prescott

  Without taking aim, Rajesh held his pistol over the debris pile and fired until his magazine ran empty.

  Jack, Gabby and Grant ducked down behind a mound of bones and watched as three enemies began circling to the right of Mullin’s position.

  “Mullins, do you read me?” Jack shouted into his mic.

  “About time you showed up.”

  “Listen, you’ve got two enemies moving across your flank.”

  “Got ’em,” Mullins said, swinging out and laying down fire on them.

  “Jack,” Grant hollered, holding one of the bones he’d wrenched from the pile. “Do these look like cut marks to you?”

  “Are you for real?” Jack started to say as bullets pinged off the wall above them. Grant stood stunned for a moment until another round knocked the radius bone right out of his outstretched hand. He dropped to the floor, counting his fingers to make sure all were accounted for.

  “I’m not sure we can win this battle,” Gabby said.

  “We could if it was a math-off,” Dag shouted over the din of fire.

  These guys were determined to keep the group from making it past this open chamber. What Mullins didn’t realize was that the outcropping of stone fifteen feet above his position was actually a walkway which led to the other side of the chamber. With his eyes, Jack followed the walkway from right to left, watching how it tapered into a set of stone stairs about thirty feet behind where Mullins and the others were pinned down. That was where Jack saw another tunnel opening, similar to the one they’d travelled through to get here. He also remembered how shortly after entering the bunker system, the path had split and they had decided to keep to the right. If Jack could backtrack and circle around, he might be able to climb up to the catwalk and cross over and behind the enemy before they knew what hit them.

  “Dag, Eugene, lay down some covering fire. I’ve got a plan.”

  A second later they did so and Jack took off running up the narrow hallway. Moments later he passed the room where Anna was waiting.

  “Dr. Greer,” she said, beginning to follow.

  “Not now, Anna.”

  The sound of Jack’s labored breathing echoed inside his helmet as he reached the fork and proceeded down the other way. He then switched his vision to thermal, trying to avoid catching a stray bullet as he raced down the corridor. Up ahead, he spotted Mullins and the others coming under renewed assault. To his right, Gabby and Grant remained behind the bone pile, popping out here and there to fire back at the enemy.

  “Okay,” Jack said, “give me another burst of covering fire.”

  They obliged and Jack sprinted to his left for the stone steps and the narrow ledge. It was a risky move since if they spotted him, he was an easy target. He had nearly reached the top when he heard Grant moan with pain and slump over. Jack froze. Gabby spun and immediately began searching for a wound. A soldier on the far right was inching toward them, leapfrogging from pile to pile.

  “Gabby, leave Grant for now,” he told her. “You got someone coming up on you.”

  His heart pounding, Jack had to decide whether to risk Gabby’s life or his own by firing from his elevated position.

  That was when he saw Anna, entering the open space from the corridor.

  “Anna, I told you to stay put,” he called out over the radio. “Are you crazy?”

  Without saying a word, she reached Grant, closed her metallic hands around his wrists and began dragging him back to safety.

  Just then the soldier nearest them reached the bone pile, peered over and fired. He must not have noticed Gabby directly below him, because he was aiming straight at Grant and Anna. The first round tore through Grant’s wrist, spraying blood on the ground. The next narrowly missed his head and struck Anna in the leg, causing it to explode in a fit of sparks. She fell over, landing with a loud metallic crunch. She reached out with one hand, as if to tell him to stop, and that was when the third shot took it off at the wrist. Hydraulic fluid poured out onto the icy ground, sending up rivulets of steam.

  Rajesh sprang up at once, snatching Dag’s rifle, and filled the soldier with a dozen rounds. His body fell back over the bone pile, dead. Jack continued crawling forward, determined to work his way behind them, when he heard fire directly below him. Rajesh took two bullets to the chest. As Anna watched him fall, her one remaining hand curled into a fist.

  But it wasn’t one of the Israeli soldiers who had shot him. It was Tamura. And she turned on Mullins now, shooting him in the legs and torso.

  With fifty percent of them down, Eugene threw up his rifle and raised his arms in surrender. One by one, five Israeli Special Forces stood up, keying on the few remaining holdouts. Tamura stood too, waving the pistol Mullins must have given her when the firefight broke out.

  “Throw down your weapons,” Tamura ordered them.

  Gabby was the next to stand and drop her weapon, followed by Dag, who rushed to Rajesh’s side. Watching all this, Jack continued along the catwalk, making slow progress. With Jack pressed up against the chamber’s left wall, only someone standing near Grant had a chance of spotting him.

  “Dr. Viswanathan,” Anna called out. “Are you badly hurt?” She began dragging herself over with her remaining limbs.

  “Why did you do this?” Dag asked, cradling Rajesh, who was coughing up blood.

  “You should be asking Jack that question,” Tamura said, looking around. “Speaking of Jack, where did he run off to? Commander Avraham, I heard him say he had a plan right before he disappeared.”

  Avraham moved in. He was chiseled with a dark complexion and a black bushy beard. “All right, round them up. We’ll find the last one sooner or later.”

  Jack was three-quarters of the way across when he felt pressure begin to build in his ears. Then came the humming. Soon the air filled with an electric current as the soldiers on the lower level looked around fearfully.

  “We need to get out of here,” Avraham began to say, but never got the words out before the soldier’s weapons were yanked from their hands and to the ground by an irresistible magnetic force. Jack struggled to move his own rifle, but it wouldn’t budge. Then the flashbulb of light he knew was coming tore at his retinas. The rumbling sound grew louder, followed by a thunderous crash that filled the chamber as the ceiling folded in on itself in a blizzard of ice and destruction. But this was no storm, it was a massive boulder of ancient compacted snow falling in on them. Projectiles of ice and stone rained down on soldiers and scientists alike. Three Israeli Special Forces who were just then crossing the middle of the chamber disappeared in a white haze.

  When the magnetic force finally released, Jack sprang to his feet. Above him, an enormous hole had punched through the ceiling, revealing the outside world—or at least what passed for outside down here. Below, the storage floor was nearly unrecognizable. A new mountain had risen up from the center of the room. Beneath it, a handful of the enemy lay dead, others scattered about dying. Gabby was attempting to help Grant while Anna continued pulling herself toward Rajesh. The others, including Tamura, were nowhere to be seen.

  Crossing to the back of the room, Jack took the stone steps two at a time. He began making his way toward his friends, watchful for any enemies that might have survived. He was circling around the right-hand side of the new mound, calling out people’s names, when he heard Tamura say, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” She stood over Anna, kicking her. Jack leveled his weapon and readied to shoot when something knocked the wind out of him and sent him tumbling to the ground. His rifle slid a few yards away. He rushed to grab it, but he wasn’t quick enough.

  “Nice little disappearing act,” Commander Avraham said, pulling Jack to his feet and tearing off his helmet. He caught sight of Anna, now a multiple amputee. The sight of so many of his friends either dead or seriously wounded tore at him. They had failed. They would never reach the pyramid and everything they had learned about the Mesonyx people would die with them.

  If all of that was true
, then why was Anna winking at him?

  Avraham shoved Jack forward. “We’ll take the robot and kill the rest.” He tapped something on his wrist and a strange-looking animal came galloping toward them.

  It took Jack a moment to realize it was a robotic pack animal. The metallic creature was all torso with four back-jointed legs pumping furiously over the rough terrain. It certainly explained the strange tracks they had found earlier.

  Jack’s gaze soon found Tamura. “You never were a member of the military, were you?”

  “I am so,” she replied coldly. “Just not yours. After we swept in and killed your advance team, my primary role was to stay behind and gather as much intelligence as I could. My other role was to keep any of you from getting too close to the objective.”

  “Is that why you killed the wounded man in the tunnel?” Jack asked. “So he’d stop talking?”

  Avraham turned to her. “That was you who shot Dahan?”

  “Sure,” Jack answered for her. “And he wasn’t the only one. She also killed the other guy you left in the facility, probably so we would trust her.”

  The distant sound of a buzzsaw caught Jack’s attention. No, not a buzzsaw, more like a swarm of bees and they were heading their way. Tamura and Avraham caught the sound too because they each looked around fearfully.

  The noise grew louder until a dozen black objects dropped down through the hole in the ceiling and dove on their position. They broke up into two even groups, one half going for Tamura, the other for Avraham.

  They were the drones Anna had put together in the electronics lab before heading down.

  Tamura swatted at them before raising her pistol to take a shot. One of the drones flew from behind and crashed into the weapon, knocking it from her grasp. The drone tumbled end over end, only to catch itself and zip away before hitting the ground. Another made a sharp turn and jammed its spinning rotors right into her face. Tamura shrieked and clutched at her bleeding eyes.

  Jack sank an ice cleat into the top of Avraham’s boot at the same time that he buried his elbow deep into the commander’s gut, bending him at the waist. He then rolled over, grabbed the man’s fallen rifle and popped up, riddling his body with as many holes as he could.

  Now all the drones were on Tamura. Blinded, she pawed at the ground in a frantic attempt to retrieve her weapon. But Jack was there first, crushing her outstretched fingers with the heel of his boot.

  Tamura squealed in pain, terror plastered over her now pallid and bloody face. He set the barrel to her head and moved his finger over the trigger.

  “Dr. Greer, please do not kill her,” Anna begged.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I venture to guess continuing to exist with what she has done will be far more painful.”

  Jack flipped the gun around and brought it down against her skull, knocking her out instead.

  Gabby came over and rushed past him to Dag and Eugene, who had punched their way out of the packed snow. They had kept their helmets on, which meant they could still breathe under all that snow. Working together, they began searching for the others. It soon became an all-hands affair as, one by one, they managed to pull them free.

  “How’s Grant?” Jack asked Gabby.

  “He’s alive,” she said. “For now.”

  But the same couldn’t be said for Rajesh. The bullets that had struck him in the chest had killed him in a matter of minutes. Captain Mullins was also alive, but barely.

  The sound of Russian voices echoing from inside the tunnel froze the blood in Jack’s veins. How could it be that after everything they had sacrificed, and struggled to overcome, they would be taken out by a fresh group of enemy soldiers?

  Jack, and the few who could, raised their weapons, prepared to fight. Gunfire echoed down the corridor toward them. Jack tensed, dropping behind cover. A moment later figures moved into the chamber and Jack had to ask himself if he was dreaming.

  “Friendlies,” Admiral Stark shouted. “Do not fire. I repeat, do not fire.”

  He was flanked by a squad of SEAL Team operators. From the other corridor came members of Delta Force.

  Jack collapsed into the mound of ice beneath his feet.

  At last Anna reached Rajesh and continued to stroke his hair with her one remaining hand until they took him away.

  Chapter 53

  Greenland

  With Northern Star back in friendly hands and the enemy forces either dead or captured, the next phase could begin. Namely, putting to rest Rajesh and the others who had fallen and mourning those who had given their lives. Mullins was in intensive care and being prepped for a medevac back to the United States. Grant’s initial prognosis had been the same, but had changed dramatically over the course of a few hours. It seemed his wounds were healing faster than any of the doctors could believe, and something inside of Jack suspected that if Mia was here, she might understand why.

  Tamura, as it turned out, was not Israeli Special Forces, but an agent working on their behalf. Born and bred in America, she had been telling Jack the truth about her family’s imprisonment in the camps during the war. Despite the government’s attempts to reconcile, she had lived with that burning desire for revenge her entire life. Blinded and disfigured, she would be returned to the U.S. where she was expected to be tried as a spy, a crime for which she would certainly face the death penalty.

  As for Anna, she had been reduced to a third-rate pair of treads and a single arm until the necessary parts were flown in, along with the two grad students, Adam and Leah, who were all that remained of her maintenance team. It was sad and downright disheartening that Rajesh would never get a chance to see the rest of Anna’s incredible journey to adulthood and beyond. Jack hoped it would be a long one, but given the present situation, anything longer than a week or two would be nice.

  She had stayed by his icy grave on the surface until her hydraulic fluid had begun to congeal with the cold. That kind of devotion had left the rest of the military personnel on site feeling mystified and somewhat disturbed. But not anyone who knew her. In more ways than one, Rajesh had been a father to her. And whether she knew it or not, Anna was now an orphan.

  Walking the now-bustling corridors of Northern Star, Jack couldn’t help but reflect on the astounding discoveries they had made beneath Greenland’s ice sheet. For reasons they had yet to understand, the once-flourishing Mesonyx civilization had been marked for extinction, a frightening fate now shared by humans today. His mind turned to one of the statues they had found in the temple, the simian creature with the chain around its neck. Genetically, it was a distant cousin and yet after millions of years it had remained but an animal. Evolution, it seemed, didn’t choose favorites. This time around, perhaps by a series of accidents or blind luck, Homo sapiens were the ones to scale the perilous slope and claim a spot at the top of the animal kingdom. But the most important questions remained unanswered. Were we worthy of the honor? And could we succeed in holding on where so many species before had failed?

  •••

  Soon enough, the time came to descend once again. Other teams had swept over the underground city extensively, only to discover that Jack had at least been right about one thing. The storage area did lead up to the pyramid. Centered inside the pyramid’s main chamber sat what appeared to be a twenty-foot-tall ornate marble shrine. Like the Edicule that covered the purported tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, or the Kaaba in Mecca, the beautifully carved rectangular structure radiated with energy. Unlike those other mystical places, however, the power here could actually be measured. The readings off the magnetometer revealed incredibly powerful electromagnetic currents flowing all around the structure.

  All who could be were present when engineers began prying apart the structure, looking for a way to get at whatever was inside. A winch and pulley helped to remove the roof. Then the walls came down. For Jack, seeing a structure that ancient turned to rubble broke his heart. But what they saw inside left them in awe.

  “What i
s that thing?” Dag asked.

  A circular distortion nearly twenty feet across hovered before them. It shimmered in the dim pools of light, rotating in a slow clockwise circle. As they stared into the swirling pattern, it was almost possible to see strangely shaped figures gathered on the other side.

  For a moment, Jack could swear one of those shapes resembled his deceased mother. He rubbed his eyes for what felt like a long time. When he was done, he could hear Mia beside him, calling out her daughter’s name.

  Everyone gathered was in tears, their faces masks of tortured ecstasy.

  A surge of longing and nostalgia closed around him like a tight fist. Jack fought free from its intoxicating grasp. He understood now why the ancient people who had lived here had worshiped this spot. To them it had been a doorway to the afterlife. But then an old saying came racing through the cluttered neural pathways in his mind.

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  A famous science fiction writer had once coined the phrase, and it had never been truer than it was at this very moment. They weren’t witnessing some metaphysical gateway to the spirit world, they were staring into another kind of doorway altogether.

  “It appears to be a portal,” Anna observed.

  Gabby swallowed. “But to where?” she wondered, brushing the salty tears from her eyes.

  “Difficult to say for sure,” Jack replied dreamily, his fingers rubbing against one another in slow, thoughtful circles. “But I can hardly wait to find out.”