“We’re here!” One of the team called from behind. They’d taken a different path back to the bay, which meant ripping open more doors, but they’d made it. The hack was planted, which meant Fang might’ve been able to fire open the doors for them, but they’d lost contact and speculation was that it was too soon to conceal such activity. Doing so would most definitely have tipped the Kel to the fact that the humans were in their systems.
And so Zac ripped them away.
Once again he swung aside the Earth chain-gun, punched and grabbed a hand into the last door between them and the docking bay, jammed in the other and pulled it back with a surge. It was like each effort made him stronger. He really had no idea how strong he’d become but right then it seemed incredible. Pete shouted him on and this door gave way faster than any yet.
He grabbed up the gun—it was almost out of ammo—and stepped immediately into a firestorm.
“Here they come!” he yelled, even as he lit the up the first Kel in sight. There were at least three squads in that first glimpse, ranged around the giant hold, waiting with guns raised and opening fire. Suddenly the massive hangar bay sang with their electric pops, burning the air with an acrid tang. Zac charged one group as he sprayed another, laying down withering fire with the mighty Earth gun, trusting in the humans behind him to aim true and keep to cover.
They were terribly outnumbered.
He’d protected them this far but the scenario before them was beyond even him. The area was far too open and there were far too many Kel, and he felt the sting of their electric guns as he sprayed a dozen more dead with the last of the ammo in the chain gun, tossed it aside and laid into the nearest squad by hand, hammering bodies aside, sending them flying with a flurry of fists, on to the next even as he saw two more squads emerge from cover and lay down a stream of deadly beams …
ZZZ-POP! one of the SAS guys was hit. The first casualty, remarkably, and in the midst of his shock at that loss Zac found himself amazed with the results of the Kel rifle against a relatively unarmored human body. Impact was a dramatic fry/pop with an abbreviated yell of agony, the whole center of the man vaporized, chunks steaming into the air as pieces fell away. The team around him brought their fire to the new threat, the air now thoroughly singed with static discharges, bringing down several of the Kel.
It wasn’t enough.
Zac shouted his team toward the lander, even as another SAS guy was hit and went away.
There was no way he could save them all.
He hit the next group of Kel in a hail of quick death, too many for the humans to contend with, and found his glance sweeping over Willet with each move he made, checking to see that his friend still lived, that he still carried the oh-so-vulnerable Satori and that she, too, was alive. Her pale skin in that setting was like a cry for help, naked human weakness, and Zac wanted so badly for those two, Willet and Satori—of all of them; he never wanted to choose but of all of them—he wanted so badly for them to make it through this. Of them all Willet and Satori had to survive.
Willet moved as quickly as he could toward their objective, the team covering and firing a flurry of return shots, shouting and signaling.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Freedom, so close yet so far.
Then, as Zac swept his vision across his team, a banshee of whirling death as he surged from target to target, everyone else further from the lander and fighting for their lives, even as he killed Kel after Kel with a berserker rage, he saw Steve just as he was hit. Steve, Zac recognized him, gone in that same instant; hit by two shots at once, body steamed into the air.
At this rate they’d never make it.
Pete, standing beside Steve, looked enraged at the loss of his friend. Charged with fresh determination the crazy, likeable American—Zac liked them all, so much—opened up with unmatched fury, firing at an incredible rate. Each shot a kill. It was like he suddenly couldn’t miss. Pete had always been a crack shot; now he was god-like. He was berserking, just like Zac. And where Zac’s weapons were his fists Pete’s was his gun, and he fired as fast as he could pull the trigger and each shot hit, each shot rid them of one more enemy, and maybe there was hope after all. Zac stepped up his rampage, if that was possible, flying around the room and vowing to save the rest.
CHAPTER 33: FULL CIRCLE
Jess stood beneath an awning, out of the rain in plain sight, people with umbrellas or wearing ponchos passing back and forth before her, some hurrying in the drizzle with no cover, very few out at that time of night, even there in the heart of the city. She wore her own dark poncho, hood drawn forward, face in shadow, nothing to give her away unless you looked close. Armored calves and boots showed beneath, looking to be an odd sort of body armor, but only with scrutiny. At her back the hilt of the sword stuck up a little, pushing a small rise into the poncho over her shoulder. Otherwise she was just like the rest of them.
Nothing, of course, could’ve been further from the truth.
After the events in the Bok penthouse her mind had been left so raw … she no longer felt human at all. Once the sustaining adrenaline ebbed she was left with the reality of what she’d done. She went into the confrontation fully amped, ready, anticipating what she was capable of, anticipating, more or less, how it would play out, but the results had so spectacularly exceeded any expectation, and by such a gruesome margin …
Mechanically she fingered the angel choker just above the collar of the armor, feeling the little wings, etched in fine detail. Desperate. Centering herself with it; the one fragment of normalcy she had left. She understood what Zac saw in its symbolism. After tonight, though … after tonight she knew for certain she was no angel. Not a classic one, at least. Not a cherub, not a golden-locked, halo-sporting vision of peace in white dress and sandals. Not a dove.
She took a deep, shuddering breath.
More like a dark angel of fury.
She stepped into the light rain and started walking, listening as the first drops hit the poncho and turned to shimmering streams, running along the sides of the hood in stereo.
After Hansel, the Bok major domo, showed her the hidden way out of the penthouse she gathered the poncho and other items where she’d left them and moved on to Phase Two. There was no need to engage the resistance network for help. Going into this she’d planned for the possibility that she might need them to reach some far corner of the globe, once she found the location of what she sought, but though she’d planned for it, some part of her, at the same time, expected their help might not be needed. As it turned out that hunch had been right. She needed no help. Not from here. For Lorenzo had chosen to locate his World Throne right near the thing he treasured most.
She turned at the next street, onto a smaller venue.
From that intense moment with him she had an imprint of where to go. During the instant of revelation it was as if she sensed what Lorenzo saw. Felt the way to what he protected, though no specifics were transferred. It wasn’t as if she read his mind, or even extracted turn-by-turn directions or even an address. Rather, it was as if she saw. She saw what Lorenzo saw, and only because, in that moment of stark terror, he looked. He turned his eyes to the thing she wanted and which he fearfully hid, and when he did … she looked with him.
And it was close.
She was almost there. Up ahead was where she needed to go. She could see hints of the pictures from Lorenzo’s mind, like echoes. She checked and crossed the street, over to the deeper shadows on the other side, into an alley and on to the end. To a fire escape, down to a basement door on the left side. At the bottom she popped the door and passed through to a musty, unused room. Little light passed through the window up at street level, but it was enough to see by. Dust was thick in the air, the smell of it strong. She wondered how recently Lorenzo had been there.
And she was certain only Lorenzo ever had. He would not have shared this with any of the others. And in fact she wondered how long ago anyone had been in there, anyone from the previous gen
eration of Bok. This was an old area of town, and it was possible it predated even the founding of Hong Kong. She knew the Bok had a history of building new structures over old, concealing what they held, and they may well have built around this ancient place as Hong Kong encroached.
She found the next door, knew exactly where it was from the image burned in her mind; went directly to it without hesitation, opened it and started down a set of dark stairs. At last the gloom was too much and she pulled her little LED light and brought the stairwell under harsh blue-white light.
It wouldn’t matter how much Lorenzo had looked over the contents of what lay hidden here. Not only did he not understand Kel, these records were far too personal to decipher even if he did. Jess remembered it now. These were records left by her, as Aesha, a thousand years ago. Made part of the things the Bok were instructed to protect, she leaving her traitorous protégé with the final command that this, above all else, held the most potential for their future.
Foreseeing they would hoard it in their betrayal.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and another door, went through to a room with seemingly no other exits, feeling like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, pressing deeper into the unknown, alone, only her own wits, her own strength to carry her, found the trap door waiting in the far corner, uncovered it and went down yet another set of stairs, these carved stone and ancient, all the way to the bottom.
Her destination.
There it was. An iron portal, green with a patina of age, riveted around the edges and bolted securely.
Not unlike the one from her dreams.
She went to it; debated trying to force it but chose instead to pull the small plasma torch, the one Nani gave her. With the flip of a switch it was on, a short white flame leaping from the tip. The intensity of its heat filled the air immediately around it.
She touched it to the iron with a spark. It burned and popped easily through the bolt, red-hot slag dripping away like molten icing.
She started cutting.
**
Impossible. Heath couldn’t believe they were actually on the lander and clear of the dreadnought.
“We being followed?” Pete wanted to know. He’d stripped off his helmet, as had a few of them, though half still had them on, stunned and holding on for dear life as Willet manned the controls of the lander, racing them away from the dreadnought.
“Yes.” He was intense. Fang had managed to re-establish contact, run an override through the dreadnought docking systems and fire open the airlock door, long enough for them to escape and get on the way. Pursuit was not far behind.
“They’re gonna shoot us down.”
“We’ll never know it if they do.”
Behind them the dreadnought dwindled as they burned into the atmosphere in a death plunge toward the Earth far below.
“We’ll make it.” It was Satori. They all looked to her, slumped against the far wall of the cockpit. Naked, signs of torture and mistreatment … there was yet a certain, cocksure attitude about her that seeped through that veneer of suffering. Satori was a commander, according to Willet, and Heath could see that clearly.
She was a warrior.
“At this point we can’t not make it.” She regarded them with her one good eye, relating an unavoidable truth. “We missed our chance to fail.” Despite the fact that her other eye was cauterized and, basically, a hole in her head, she managed to look fully composed.
“She’s probably right,” Willet admitted, not sparing even an instant to look away as he piloted them on their mad dash to the ground. “We’ve been through too much shit like this. I’m sure you guys have too. When it’s the worst, that’s when you pull through.” Then: “Hell, at this point I’m starting to think I’ll probably die in my sleep. Something very boring.”
**
Voltan had to be baiting Cee. That was the only explanation. Otherwise it made no sense to allow the blatant rampage aboard her flagship. Eldron, no fan of the queen himself and certainly having no objection to whatever Voltan had in mind, nevertheless strongly questioned the Praetor’s decisions of the last hour. Once becoming aware of the human feint Voltan had carefully guided his officers and, in turn, their juniors, continuing to keep Cee out of the loop, letting her do whatever it was she was doing down there on Earth, oblivious to all this, the supreme commander issuing just enough instruction to allow the human’s to see their amazingly bold move through.
They would never have done it without his interference. Eldron wondered how the humans ever imagined they could. Why did they even try? Their attempt to rescue the human prisoner wasn’t just bold, it was insane.
And they were getting away with it.
**
Heath hung on for dear life. Of course in the Kel lander you could hardly tell you were moving, but the terrifying sensation was no different than a white-knuckle dangle over a cliff, hoping to God you lived through the next few seconds.
Everyone was crowded into the cockpit or at the door, tension thick in the air, nothing to do but watch and wait. The surface of the Pacific filled the screen, side to side, making it look like impact would happen any second. All land on any horizon was now gone at that altitude, water and nothing else curving away in all directions, wave caps against that uniform backdrop providing no reference points whatsoever. Their jagged white edges could’ve been small and close just as easily as they could’ve been monster, deep-ocean rolls, still many, many miles away. Pursuit was right behind and Heath had stopped looking at those screens. In truth they’d probably only been drilling down into the atmosphere for a few minutes but it felt like hours. He was pretty sure his heart had stopped beating.
“Now’s our chance to lose them,” Willet leaned against the console and put out a hand. “Brace yourselves.”
Heath found an edge and held on.
Suddenly the water looked like what it was: Right there right now and they were about to hit it going ungodly fast.
FWOOOOM! they punched through the surface, a surge pulsing the hull and causing a few to tumble. But it wasn’t the dramatic slap Heath expected. The view out the forward screen went dark, then cleared, showing the effects of the super-cavitation boiling around the leading edges, framed in deeper and deeper shades of blue until, soon enough, the screen was dark again.
Way, way beneath the ocean, far from the light of the sun.
Heath steadied himself and allowed a glance at the tracking screens. The pursuing Kel were there but lagging. The hull of the lander shuddered, hard; deep, throbbing pulses that passed through in titanic waves of stressed composites as Willet pushed it, one then another, then a respite as they seemed to catch a cavity of ultrasonic hydraulics, then another, worse, and Heath figured their next threat was going to be shredding themselves to pieces or being crushed like a can.
“Can we take that?”
“Almost there,” Satori answered. “We’ll break the wall for good in a second. That’s what he’s going for.”
“Sounds like you’ve done this before.”
“We have.”
Heath looked at her. One blue eye in that calm face, framed by unnaturally red hair, looking back with unreasonable certainty.
He put his attention back on the dark forward screen, not knowing why he looked there, concentrating as if he could see, staring out a window with absolutely nothing in view. The others were looking too.
Then the rumble ended with an abbreviated sort of boom, rocking the cabin like breaking the sound barrier, and they were in clear, smooth water. Ripping along with gentle little shakes now and again but otherwise quiet. Blitzing miles below the surface of the Pacific.
Willet checked and confirmed readings on the console. The tracking blips of the pursuing Kel fell further behind.
“Shit.” Pete’s voice drew Heath’s attention to the hold. Pete was kneeling back there next to Zac, shaking him. “Buddy. Hey. You okay?” His hand was on Zac’s shoulder. Zac sat against the wall, seemingly frozen in place, eyes open
and staring straight ahead. Heath hurried to him; knelt and made eye contact.
Blank.
Pete gave Heath a worried look.
Heath shook him. “Zac? You okay?”
“He looked kind of funny for a second,” said Pete, “then he went all mannequin like, stiff, then he wobbled, managed to sit and plopped right here. Just sat there and stuck.”
Heath checked Zac for a pulse. There was no focus to his gaze. Normally sharp, piercing eyes, now dull and vacant in the green glow of the lights of the Kel hold.
“Is he …” Pete couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s supposed to feel like. I got nothing.”
Pete put his hand on Zac’s chest. “I can’t feel his heart.”
Heath moved in closer, checking other vitals, wondering what was normal for their super-hero friend. Did he have a heartbeat? Did he even have a heart? Heath had no idea.
This was scaring him. Did Zac just die? Right here, just like that? How? Why?
But even as he was checking … Zac blinked.
Pete leaned in close, “Dude!” directly in Zac’s face, peering desperately into his eyes and searching for signs of awareness.
“Dude,” Pete exhaled with unsteady relief. “What just happened? Can you hear me?”
Zac took a deep breath and was alive again. “I hear you.” He was composed. Completely normal, it seemed, despite the fact that he’d just been frozen in place; locked up or dead, or who knew.
“Jesus, you freaked me out,” Pete blinked himself back to center. Heath, too, breathed easier.
Zac came more alert. Shook his head and the rest of his body responded, revitalized; little signs, adjusting arms and legs, sliding around in position.
No longer a stiff mannequin. The moment was past.
“I’m fine,” he said, but he stayed sitting. Like he was still a little disoriented.
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 41
