Reality Echo

by James Axler

  Grant nodded, understanding her. “Thrush, you’re outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded.”

  Thrush-Kane threw back his head in raucous laughter. “Come out from behind the corner, you pretentious ape! You think I’m so stupid that I couldn’t notice you and Baptiste skulking there?”

  Grant stepped around the corner, but instead of getting into a face-off, he leveled his Sin-Eater at Thrush-Kane and opened fire. A 6-round burst ripped out of the machine pistol, heavy-core 9 mm slugs chopping into the impostor’s chest. Divots of skin and muscle exploded beneath the fake’s T-shirt, spattering it with more blood, but Thrush-Kane’s only reaction was to stagger back a couple of steps. The false man’s shoulders jerked in a spasm of repressed laughter as he looked down at his gore-smeared shirt.

  Grant tilted his head, then took aim at Thrush-Kane’s forehead. The doppelganger jerked forward in a blur of motion that caught the ex-Magistrate off guard. His rounds missed the impostor’s head, and the powerful construct slammed a palm strike into Grant’s own broad chest. His 250-pound frame was lifted off his feet and he sailed several feet down the hall.

  Brigid triggered the Copperhead submachine gun at contact distance from Thrush-Kane. A blazing fire of 4.85 mm rifle rounds chopped viciously, carving up the false man’s centerline before the last cartridges in the magazine discharged into the cyborg’s bloody face. The submachine gun ran empty after its 40-round payload, and for a moment, Brigid thought she’d actually inflicted harm on the infiltrator.

  Thrush-Kane lurched, turning back toward Brigid, half of his face hanging off a shimmering pink skull in tatters. “Baptiste, Baptiste, Baptiste.”

  “Oh, this is going to suck,” Brigid growled as she swung the rifle hard at him. Thrush-Kane blocked the stroke with his forearm, and Brigid grunted as the impact of the Copperhead’s frame sent vibrations rattling up her slender but well-muscled arms.

  Thrush-Kane straightened his arm, fingers wrapping around the receiver of the gun. With a squeeze, he compressed the metal box containing the firing mechanism of the Copperhead into a crumpled mess of mangled steel. Brigid let go of the rifle before the cyborg could toss the weapon aside. “Yes, this is going to suck. You killed the flesh shell wrapping around my skeleton with your antics.”

  Grant rose to his feet, glaring at Thrush-Kane from down the hall. “But you still manage to talk and talk. Whatever happened to the good old days when you put a bullet into an asshole and they shut up and died?”

  “Welcome to a whole new world, Grant,” Thrush-Kane responded. “My skeleton may not look like the other Thrush androids or cyborg constructs, but it’s every bit as effective and powerful.”

  Grant growled and charged at the bullet-riddled impostor. Thrush-Kane braced himself for the charge, fully aware of the incredible strength of the largest of the Cerberus prime team. What the infiltrator hadn’t been anticipating was that all of that physical power was guided by a savvy mind and years of experience. Knowing that he was going up against a superior foe, Grant didn’t tackle the Thrush cyborg head-on, but crashed into his adversary across its thighs and knees. Thrown off balance by the impact, Thrush-Kane howled in surprise as he slammed face-first into the floor, leaving behind a smear of blood and chunks of torn face.

  Grant shoulder rolled to a stop and crouched on one knee, looking at his foe. Thrush-Kane raised himself off the ground and glanced at the ex-Magistrate.

  “Our files don’t do you justice, Grant. You are strong, yes, but no stronger than any other man your size,” Thrush-Kane said. “But it’s how you use that body that makes you truly dangerous.”

  “You disregard my brains, and it turns out it’s the strongest muscle in my body,” Grant responded. “All that robot hydraulic power you’ve got in your skeleton might give you the strength to bend steel with your bare hands, but you don’t have a tenth of the talent necessary to make it really dangerous.”

  Thrush-Kane chuckled and sank his fingers into the floor, prying out a concrete chunk. “I just haven’t been thinking big enough.”

  Grant’s shoulders sagged as the cyborg wrenched a fifty-pound slab of stone over his head as if it were a pillow. With a surge, he hurled the concrete block toward Grant, forcing the ex-Magistrate to dive out of the way. The stone dented the wall behind him, the collision raising a cloud of powdered concrete.

  Thrush-Kane’s act of tearing up the floor had peeled the flesh from his fingers, and Grant could see the pink-white artificial bone, semitranslucent in the orange glow of the emergency lights. The ends of the fingers were pointed like claws, and Grant had no doubt that if they lashed out, they’d rend his flesh as if they were the talons of a raptor.

  Brigid reentered the conflict, blazing away at the cyborg with her .45. “Grant! Fall back and get some more help!”

  Thrush-Kane flinched as 230-grain slugs sparked off the naked part of his skull. “Foolish little bitch. What makes you think you can damage this skeleton?”

  “Kane wouldn’t give up, so neither do we,” Brigid growled in defiance. “Grant…”

  Thrush-Kane looked back toward the ex-Magistrate, who had gotten back to his feet. “Keep wasting ammunition, Baptiste. I have to pull your annoying friend’s arms and legs off his torso.”

  “Bring it,” Grant taunted.

  Thrush-Kane took one step, then another, starting to close the distance between himself and the brawny Grant. “It’ll be a shame. You actually are a worthy opponent for an—”

  A thunderclap resounded in the hallway, cutting off the cyborg’s lamentation. Brigid thought her brains were going to leak out of her ears from the force of overpressure ripping through the hall. However, she saw that the cyborg was knocked off his feet, writhing on the floor.

  Edwards stepped out of the gloom, holding his Barrett rifle. “Everyone okay?”

  “Next time, slowpoke, you provide the distraction for the superstrong cyborg,” Grant complained.

  “Oh, I saw you. You were having the most fun you could with your pants on,” Edwards replied.

  Domi and Sinclair had their Copperheads trained on the fallen cyborg as his limbs twisted and flailed uncontrollably.

  “Sorry we were late. We had more trouble with the locked-down doors than we thought we would,” Domi told Brigid. “Is he supposed to still move after a hit in the head from a Fifty?”

  Brigid looked down at the cyborg. His arms and legs still writhed, but they had no strength to them, and coordination was reminiscent of a newborn in a crib. Half of Kane’s face looked up at her, lips attempting to mouth words with only a portion of their length remaining. It was a pathetic-looking example of a being that had seemed so cocky and full of confidence earlier. A crushed stump of jacketed lead was lodged in naked skull, cracks emanating from its center.

  “It doesn’t look as if the brain was destroyed,” Brigid admitted. “Though the impact of that bullet certainly produced massive trauma.”

  “Thank God for head wounds,” Sinclair said, flicking the safety of her Copperhead as Thrush-Kane’s movements stilled. “Looks like a Terminator.”

  “Well, he’s not going to be back,” Grant said. “I don’t care if any of the scientists want to break this thing down to examine its guts, we’re stuffing it into a mattrans and dumping it at the bottom of the ocean, provided we have a parallax point that sits there.”

  “Even if it’s at the surface, it’ll probably just sink,” Domi answered. She watched the downed cyborg warily, her ruby-red eyes taking on a darker, angrier glint in the emergency lighting of the base.

  “That’s all good, but the infiltrator shut down the computer system. We can’t just dump him somewhere until we get the redoubt back online,” Brigid said.

  Grant loomed over the fallen Thrush construct. “Edwards, hand me your rifle, then go find something that can restrain this son of a bitch. Chains, steel cable, something.”

  “Got you,” Edwards answered, tossing the Barrett to Grant.

  “You’re not going to move from
this spot until you’re sure he can’t move under his own power,” Sinclair said. “Good idea. The moment the heroes let their guard down, these crazies always sit up and commence to slaughter all over again.”

  Grant smirked as he aimed the Barrett at the downed cyborg’s damaged skull. “You got that damn straight. Funny how life imitates art, if you can call old slasher vids art.”

  “One thing that confuses me,” Brigid said as she reloaded her .45 pistol and kept it in hand, staring down at the inert foe, as if expecting it to explode back to life. “He hacked into the computer system, and yet did nothing to restore power to the doors in his path. He just peeled the blast panels aside.”

  “Maybe hacking the power back in order would just take too much time,” Sinclair offered. “Yanking doors open is quicker.”

  “But where the hell was he going?” Brigid asked, frustrated with the lack of logical motivation for Thrush’s chosen path through Cerberus. “You’d think for all his braying about how he wanted to take out Enlil, he would do something like head to the hangar and steal a Manta or a Deathbird and fly off to hunt down Enlil.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t done looking in the computer for Enlil?” Domi asked.

  Brigid felt a wave of nausea pass through her as she looked down at the shredded corpse on the floor. “He could wirelessly connect to our mainframe. He was an artificial intelligence. And that means he could inject himself into our computer systems, leaving his body behind…”

  Edwards returned with an armload of chains. “Wait, you guys are saying I popped the cyborg in the head with a Fifty, and all I did was give him an excuse to evacuate his body?”

  Grant grimaced. “Edwards, help me tie this thing up solidly. Brigid, Domi, get to the command center and see what the situation is with the mainframe. Sela, head to the cafeteria and bring back Philboyd and whoever the hell else knows about computer programming. We’re going to need our best brains on this.”

  The lights came on throughout the redoubt, but that didn’t stop the Cerberus Away Team members from setting about their tasks with grim, desperate urgency.

  Colonel Thrush had just gone from disguised cyborg juggernaut to a ghost in the machine. And this ghost had a known history of brutal, deadly murder.

  THRUSH-KANE HAD to give credit to the feral albino woman and the soldier jocks of Cerberus. They had enough imagination to realize that the still weapon before them was a time bomb waiting to go off. He had shut down his skeleton’s control apparatus in order to conserve the resources of his plasma matrix, realizing that he had to work quickly if he was going to have a chance to launch an assault on Enlil. And he hadn’t completely uploaded his consciousness into the mainframe as they had assumed, but he still was operating within the cyberspace landscape of the powerful system.

  He had accessed dozens of hard drives within the base, pulling information off them with skill. Thrush-Kane needed to gather whatever data was relevant to the hunt for Enlil and the surviving Annunaki. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill the wayward Thrush entity. Enlil had usurped the pandimensional android’s identity, using the body and mind for his own purposes while Enlil’s true form remained as a mummified corpse, kept on ghoulish display in the Manitius lunar base. The irony of usurped identity was not lost on the infiltrator as it realized that he had not only taken over Kane’s place, but had also taken command of the redoubt that was his hated pawn’s home.

  The mammals who meddled in Thrush’s affairs were only a secondary source of irritation, however. The true goal of this penetration was to locate Enlil and do his best to unleash vengeance.

  Thankfully, Lakesh and Bry had done much to restore the satellite network of surveillance that hung in orbit around the devastated Earth. With those powerful eyes in the sky peering down on a nuke-blasted world, the humans of Cerberus had a means of searching the globe for anomalies that were indicative of threats like the Annunaki and other menaces. Thrush-Kane ran over the records of the base and discovered a few instances of Annunaki drop-ship sightings, faint streaks of light as the high-tech, silvery disks slashed through the atmosphere at high speed. While Bry and other computer operators were working on code to bring such stratospheric, ultrasonic disturbances to the humans’ attention, Thrush-Kane had no such limitations in regards to worldwide surveillance. Now that he had plugged into the mainframe, he was able to see the whole of the Earth’s toposphere all at once.

  It was good to have a brain that had exponentially more perceptive ability than even a group of humans. With millions of square miles of the Earth’s surface visible at once, and a reference for what the passage of an Annunaki ship looked like, Thrush-Kane was able to scour the globe with ease. Minutiae that would have been missed by the human eye or a wandering attention span didn’t escape the notice of the powerful plasma matrix brain as it piggybacked the Cerberus mainframe.

  The Earth spun beneath his eyes, and in a manner of minutes, he picked up a streak of silver slash in the blue sky, heading toward the Poconos.

  Thrush-Kane would have doubled over with laughter if he was still using his body. All this effort to scour the planet, and Enlil had a scout ship hurtling toward Bres and the Fomorians in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

  “Ah, Kane, it looks as if we won’t need to use you as our backup plan for revenge on the Dragon King,” Thrush-Kane said. “The bastard is coming right to you.”

  The infiltrator scanned through the Cerberus computer system, looking for weaponry that could be accessed from the mainframe. He found nothing in the redoubt itself. Its armory was meant for equipment utilized by humans, not over the AARPA net. Thrush-Kane grimaced in disgust that Lakesh hadn’t bothered to directly hack into an old Air Force silo to keep a nuclear missile or two in reserve. That kind of firepower would have been sufficient to purge Enlil and his reptilian kin from the Earth.

  So what if a little more radiation and fallout was released into the atmosphere? Entire tracts of the world had been wasted by a convulsion of atomic violence, and humanity and other life-forms had returned and recovered from such environmental atrocity.

  A couple more nuclear explosions wouldn’t affect the landscape.

  “Fair enough,” Thrush-Kane grumbled. He looked for external links to other redoubts across the country. Surely one of them would be connected to a nuclear weapons stockpile. There were hundreds of sites to go through, and for a normal man to get involved, it would have taken hours. The plasma matrix, in conjunction with the Cerberus mainframe, found what it needed within a minute.

  It was a silo complex with six Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, each of them carrying seven submunition warheads. Those warheads each carried a 2.5 megaton yield, and could bring annihilation to multiple cities with one launch or carve a crater out of the Earth’s crust with a focused salvo of detonations. Poring through the system, Thrush-Kane discovered that only three of them were in working order, avoiding fuel leaks over the two centuries of inactivity, or their electronics systems remaining intact.

  Twenty-one warheads, capable of unleashing the equivalent of 150,000 tons of TNT, were now at Thrush-Kane’s disposal. He reached out to the ICBMs, already calculating the trajectory that would deposit them right on top of Enlil, Kane and Bres.

  “Fifty megatons per irritant is a sufficient bit of scratching, no?” Thrush-Kane asked himself.

  The ICBMs didn’t respond to him. Thrush-Kane reached out again, but a wall of black ice slid into place between him and the control module.

  “Let me guess…Bry and Lakesh managed to jump-start the mainframe?” Thrush-Kane mused aloud.

  “This has gone far enough.” Kane’s voice cut through the void of cyberspace.

  If Thrush still had a face, it would have been twisted in confusion. “You’re an impersonation protocol. A tool. A puppet at my command.”

  “Kane is never going to be anyone’s puppet,” the memory construct said as it floated in front of the infiltrator. “You want to go after Enlil, wake our body up, snap the chains
binding us and steal a Manta to go after him.”

  Thrush chuckled. “This is easier.”

  “It’s sloppier. It’ll pump thousands of tons of fallout into the atmosphere, and anyone not killed by the initial blast will be poisoned. Pennsylvania will become a dead zone,” Kane warned.

  Thrush grabbed at the Kane construct, attempting to seize the artificial intelligence model. Kane, on the other hand, grabbed at the figurative wrists of the Thrush cyber-entity, holding it at bay.

  “This is insane. We came here to destroy Enlil at any cost!” Thrush demanded.

  Kane shook his head. “You made me too perfectly in his image. I might just be a shadow, but I still know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

  “Damn you!” Thrush cursed, struggling with the digital counterpart of Kane.

  On the edge of cyberspace, just outside of the command console for 150 megatons of nuclear death, two electronic entities battled with all of their power.

  Chapter 20

  The Appalachians

  It had taken considerable effort to wrench the AK-47 from the chest of Cilain, the Fomorian stand-in for Granny Epona. Kane made certain that the barrel was unobstructed and checked his supply of ammunition for the weapon. He had three and a half 30-round magazines, which wouldn’t be much of a deterrent with a few dozen Fomorian hunters similarly armed.

  Epona watched the Cerberus warrior as he made his preparations for the coming combat, her eyes raw from the tears she shed for a lost sister. The hardest part for the granny witch was that Cilain had been lost to her even before Bres whispered sweet promises of eternal youth and limitless power into her ear. Cilain had learned the parlor tricks of the ancient Tuatha de Danaan magicks, but she had ignored the true lessons of responsibility for that power. Her greed had been in place before the seduction by a golden-skinned, perfect-bodied devil.