by James Axler
“Because he shot you in the eye,” Bres said. “He found what could be your weak spot.”
Balor frowned. “Or he could deprive you of a toy that you’d grown fond of, no?”
Bres’s eyes flashed with anger. “You will respect your father, you sniveling little brat. I made you—I can unmake you!”
Balor’s twisted mouth turned down into a frown. “You can try.”
Bres clenched his fists. “Keep directing our forces against the humans!”
Balor nodded. “But from someplace where it matters.”
With a swat, Balor knocked Bres violently against a tree. It was a casual exertion of strength, with enough power to pulverize Bres’s spinal column into fine powder. Agony speared through the immortal being as he twisted on the ground.
His eyes fell upon the silvery saucer above. “Enlil…”
With a rustle of thoughts, the words of the Annunaki overlord resounded in Bres’s mind. “You called me here to witness the destruction of my enemies. All I see is rebellion within your ranks, and the humans turning your freakish foot soldiers into corpses.”
“Master, I have also given you warning, about the Thrush Continuum,” Bres gasped.
“Yes. Yes, you told me that,” Enlil replied. “I’ve been listening to their radio communications, and it appears that they have a means of dealing with the android’s infiltrator. And yet, you seemed to promise me that you would crush Thrush himself, not a constructed minion. Even then, you haven’t done much to slow him.”
“I damaged his robotic brain,” Bres pleaded. “It was how I sabotaged him. If not for me…”
“If not for you, the ruse of his disguise would actually have lasted more than a few hours,” Enlil returned. “Instead, you managed to bungle everything. You bungled Thrush’s operation. You couldn’t capture a wounded and nearly naked Kane. Yes, I’ve been watching ever since you first contacted me.”
Bres swallowed. His spine was rebuilding itself, but it seemed slower. “Master? My gift…”
“Yes. You wanted the opportunity to feel again,” Enlil answered.
As the shattered bones of his vertebrae stitched back together, Bres became aware of the prickling of pine needles against his cheek, the chill of night air, the shifting of chunks of spinal column and cord grating against each other. Bres broke out into a sweat as muscles spasmed and nerves tore. He had been battered and crushed so many times, but he had never experienced the sensations of the rebuilding process before. His guts were on fire, and tears poured down his cheeks as he bit ragged holes in his lips. The brief caresses of agony that had penetrated the numbness of his being were simple kisses, moments of sensation in a sea of nothingness. The pain stayed with Bres this time; it didn’t go away as swollen and overstressed tissues contracted again, torn sheets of muscle tugging violently back together.
Being rebuilt hurt far more than he ever conceived it would. Now he understood the soul-piercing howls his “children” had emitted when he molded them into the mighty Fomorians.
“Oh, it will still be fun to see you as an immortal, reconstituting yourself from every injury,” Enlil said. “I gave you a gift, the power to ignore every bit of pain in your life. The true gift wasn’t that you healed, but you didn’t feel it when you were hurt.”
Bres whimpered. “My god…”
“Remember that honorific, my son. Don’t be such a complete and utter failure the next time we meet,” Enlil told the Fomorian king.
The scout ship shimmered for a moment, then rocketed straight up into the night sky.
Cerberus
BRIGID BAPTISTE wasn’t surprised when Thrush-Kane sat up suddenly on the table. The compact motors built into the bones of the cyborg were powerful enough to shatter the steel chains binding him to the table. But utilizing the photocell technology built into the skin of the shadow suit she wore, she made certain that when Thrush-Kane woke up, she’d surprise him.
The infiltrator had snapped the chain wrapped around the main trunk of his torso and biceps, but that was about all he managed to get broken before Brigid grabbed Philboyd by the arm and shoved him out of the central transformer station for the redoubt. The other staff members had abandoned the rolling gurney at the door of the electrical junction. Philboyd and the rest slammed shut the armored doors, sealing her in with a superstrong cyborg with murder in its heart.
“Baptiste? Are you trying to hide from me?” Thrush asked. The android had dropped any pretense of duplicating Kane’s voice, and even the sloughed section of face that remained on the reinforced skull of the infiltrator sagged and deformed under its own weight. No one would ever mistake this being for human.
“No. Not anymore,” Brigid said, tapping the wrist control for her shadow suit and disabling the camouflage feature.
“Only because your gun harness hadn’t turned invisible with you,” Thrush said. He shrugged again, another link of steel chain falling away, another loop clinking to the floor. “Of course, I’m pretty certain that we’ve established that I am immune to any small-arms fire you could hope to bring against me.”
Brigid smiled as Thrush hopped off the table, his bindings clattering to the floor in a musical rain of metal clanging against metal. “Yes, I was wondering what I’d do about that.”
Thrush’s eyes scanned the room. Though he had no forehead, no brow to wrinkle in confusion, Brigid knew what had happened.
“This particular area of the redoubt is not equipped for wireless computer access,” Brigid explained. “You won’t be able to hack into the Cerberus mainframe from here.”
Thrush laughed, a mechanical bark coming from an electronic voice box situated on the artificial bone structure of his neck. “Those doors don’t look strong enough to deter me, Baptiste. And there is no way on Earth that you could force me into the transformers to overload my plasma matrix brain.”
Brigid shrugged, circling the rag-fleshed skeletal android. No longer was he a cyborg, a mix of living and mechanical. He was an articulated robot, wearing rotting flesh that dripped and sagged.
“You really should do the smart thing and stay out of my way, Baptiste. You’d be a worthy addition to the Thrush Continuum. I’m sure the prime unit would be glad to have you,” Thrush said.
“Thanks, but I like it here,” Brigid answered. She pulled off her faceplate and peeled the hood off her head. Thrush’s eyes once again swiveled, looking around the room in a form of robotic paranoia that would have been comical.
“What are you doing?” Thrush asked.
“Killing time until any chance of you gaining access to nuclear missiles is completely gone,” Brigid replied. “Of course, if you want, I could shoot at you, but that’s not really my favorite solution to a problem.”
Thrush chuckled. “It’d also be a waste of ammunition.”
Brigid screwed up her face, as if she had somehow forgotten the android skeleton’s invulnerability. Thrush took a step back. “What are you doing? Don’t lie to me!”
Brigid withdrew a pistol from her shoulder holster. It was a compact device that only nominally resembled a conventional handgun, with a long, slender pipe for a barrel and two smaller tubes running parallel to it. Thrush looked closer at it.
“A gauss pistol from Manitius,” Thrush muttered. “I knew you weren’t stupid. Maybe a magnetically accelerated pellet could punch through my head, given the right material.”
“Oh, I’ve got the right ammunition in this,” Brigid said. “It’s an easy choice—slain by me, or you can deactivate yourself by overloading your brain.”
“Or option three, I tear your arms off, beat you to death with them, and then I kick open those flimsy doors and use your severed limbs to kill as many of your friends as I can,” Thrush answered.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Brigid responded.
Thrush lurched as if to disarm the archivist, but froze in place. His limbs had seized up, and he was an easy target. “The Kane personality—”
Brigid nodded. “
I thought that maybe if we deactivated you, we could somehow salvage him.”
Kane’s voice issued from the speaker box. “It’s not going to happen. I can barely control Thrush as it is. He’s gone insane with rage.”
“Damn it,” Brigid cursed.
“Baptiste, let me die as a free man,” E-Kane replied. “I know you don’t like listening to his suggestions, but show me some respect.”
“I respect Kane,” Brigid told the construct.
“Then let me free,” the rotting doppelganger said. He lowered his head, closing one eye as the other had no lid.
Brigid raised the gauss pistol, making sure to aim at the flat portion of the skull. She didn’t relish the idea of a ricochet bouncing off the curved bone at hypersonic speeds. “May your soul soar freely, anam-chara.”
“Thank you,” E-Kane whispered.
Brigid pulled the trigger, and the plasma matrix brain exploded out of the base of the android’s skull in a mist of lime-green froth.
Taking a deep breath, trying not to let the tears come, she pushed the gauss pistol back into her belt. The skeleton folded and dropped to the floor, the semiliquid brain that controlled it churned up and shattered by the force of a piece of titanium accelerated to five times the speed of sound.
Brigid concentrated on the fact that the thing that had spoken to her was not real, but she couldn’t buy it. Somehow, though, she managed to keep a lid on her emotions.
She wasn’t proud of herself, but she kept her composure as she unlocked the transformer station doors.
The Appalachians
LAKESH’S VOICE RANG OUT in Kane’s ears. “The nuclear threat has been disarmed. Thrush is no longer a problem.”
“Did my friend’s plan work?” Kane asked.
“Your counterpart…yes,” Lakesh replied. “Brigid destroyed the android’s brain.”
A rustle of thoughts, and Epona was in his mind. “He will be mourned.”
Kane fought to concentrate on reloading his shotgun. Two dozen Fomorians had already fallen in battle since Edwards lit up the night with high explosives, but the feeding of shells was a simple enough matter that he couldn’t resist a moment of philosophical contemplation. “Does that make sense? He was a soulless construct.”
“No. He had a soul. I could feel it from your memories of your brief conversation with you,” Epona answered. “If he could love enough to sacrifice himself for others, then he had a soul.”
Kane reeled at the implication. He wanted to say more, but the Fomorians scattered as a bounding form crashed into the side of the mountain. Balor had arrived, no longer held back as a director. Muscles shifted on his muscular chest, shoulders the size of boulders flexing as he stretched out his arms, bellowing a challenge.
“Hound of Cuchulainn! My weakling father no longer holds me on his leash! It is time!” Balor bellowed.
“He sounds like a kid,” Grant muttered.
“Sounds fused out,” Domi added over the Commtact. “Do we hit him?”
Kane slung the shotgun over his shoulder. “I’ve got this.”
“You sure, man?” Edwards asked. “Because I’ve got twelve rounds of high explosive ready to blow up in his face.”
“Let Kane do his thing,” Sinclair interjected.
“What time is it?” Kane called out in challenge. The sickly green eye turned to regard the shadow-suited warrior who rose to the challenge.
“It is time to set history right,” Balor said.
“I think you’d want to talk to Lugh, not Cuchulainn,” Kane mentioned. “But what the hell. I’m getting tired of blasting second-stringers.”
Balor’s lips twisted in a perversion of a smile. “I’m not too particular. Either way, like Lugh, you’re a beacon of hope for these pedantic little apes infesting this planet. Bres felt you were his sole obstacle to everything he wanted, to the point where he was more afraid of confronting you than doing what needed to be done. I am not a sniveling coward like my father.”
“You need to learn to respect your elders, even if they are heartless, genocidal maniacs,” Kane offered. “So, am I going to fight you bare-handed?”
Balor shook his head. “No. Lugh had a sword when he battled my grandfather. You can have those puny popguns.”
“Thank you,” Kane replied, circling the muscular titan. “So what happens if I kill your ugly ass?”
“The slaughter continues as before,” Balor said. “I just want my crack at the legend. I want to see if you live up to the hype.”
Kane unslung his shotgun. There was a round already in the chamber, and the magazine tube was fully loaded. The fat chunks of lead had proved their worth this night, tearing through Fomorian bodies like bricks through tissue paper, but Kane wasn’t dealing with a half ton of monstrosity that moved with unnerving speed. “How about a compromise. I put you down, and anyone who walks away from this fight, I let live.”
Kane looked around. Through the trees he could see dozens of Fomorians, wielding assault rifles, watching in uncertain concern. None of them cheered at the prospect of the duel between the legendary figures before them. They’d seen too many of their own felled by the might of the man in black.
“What say you, my brothers?” Balor asked.
“Crush him!” one managed to snarl defiantly.
“They don’t think I’ll lose,” Balor said.
Kane shrugged. “They’ve been wrong about me before.”
Balor raised both fists and slammed them down into the slope. Kane could feel the mountain shake beneath his feet, and he tightened his grip on the shotgun handle. A few rough voices grumbled now, excitement starting to spread through the Fomorians.
“When you are ready,” Balor taunted.
Kane raised the shotgun and fired a blast into the titan’s chest. Skin ruptured and muscle rippled under the mighty impact, and Balor grunted. An arm the length of a log whipped around, and Kane threw himself to the ground to avoid being struck. The monstrous fist of Balor would be more than sufficient to crush him. Luckily, when Kane went to the dirt, he did so in a forward roll, his sleek and agile form tumbling so quickly, he avoided Balor’s other wrecking-ball fist as it crashed to the ground behind him.
Speed was going to be Kane’s best ally, but he still triggered the semiautomatic shotgun once more. As the weapon cycled a new round into the chamber under recoil, Balor howled as Kane’s slug hit him square in the groin.
“Bastard!” Balor screeched.
“With that face, you’re not going to be using those anyway!” Kane returned, pivoting the barrel up and blasting away. His shot went high. He’d been hoping to catch Balor in his baleful eye, but instead of catching the cybernetic orb, the fat bullet carved a crease into the titan’s forehead. With a frustrated howl, Balor lashed out again. This time, massive knuckles grazed Kane’s rib cage. Had he been an instant slower, the full force of the unstoppable fist would have hurled him hundreds of feet through the forest. As it was, the impact hurled Kane onto his back.
Balor sneered and stomped toward the fallen man. Kane triggered two quick shots out of the slug gun, heavy bolts of jacketed lead stabbing into Balor’s sternum. Fetid breath escaped the monstrosity’s lungs, and one hand rose to cup the bloody wounds in his belly.
Balor’s other hand darted out and grabbed the barrel and tubular magazine of the shotgun. Fingers as fat as Kane’s forearm squeezed and crumpled metal as if it was cardboard. With a shrug, Balor hurled the mangled lump of weaponry into the woods. Kane tucked his knees to his chest and speared both feet into the Fomorian’s wounded belly. The impact elicited a groaning creak from Balor’s lips, and gave Kane enough time to roll out of the way before a massive foot smashed the ground where he’d lain a moment ago.
“Get over here,” Balor snarled, a massive paw reaching out and wrapping around Kane’s leg.
With a flex of his forearm, Kane launched the Sin Eater into his grasp and the machine pistol bellowed authoritatively. A volley of 240-grain slugs punched through
Balor’s forearm, tearing through muscle and ricocheting off bone. The massive hand released Kane’s thigh, and he toppled to the ground. Kane felt as if his hip had been dislocated, but he had no time for self-diagnosis. Smearing the blood off of his forearm, Balor glared angrily at the fallen human.
The sickly green eye suddenly blazed, and it took every ounce of Kane’s strength to leap out of the path of the burning beam. As if the pain of Kane’s left leg hadn’t been enough, now his right calf felt as if it had been left out in the sun too long. His skin had dried out and cracked from the sudden, oppressive heat from Balor’s eye, and Kane knew that if it hadn’t been for the radiation-dampening properties of the shadow suit’s environmental controls, his leg would have been seared off by the Fomorian’s dread gaze.
“Baleful Eye monkey!” Balor howled. “I’m gonna cook you good!”
Kane triggered his Sin Eater again, bullets chewing through a slab of chest muscle and forcing the titan to flinch. This time, instead of using the deadly radiation blast of his eye, Balor backhanded Kane.
Kane was thrown against a tree trunk, where he slumped, struggling to regain his breath. As soon as he inhaled, Kane was delighted to realize that his ribs hadn’t been shattered, but his brains had been scrambled by the sudden acceleration and stop.
“Fuck this noise, Kane. Let me put some fifty into this monster,” Grant growled over the Commtact.
“He’s mine,” Kane rasped.
Fingers wrapped around Kane’s shoulders and he was lifted into the air.
“Trying to be noble, Kane? I’d take the advice of your friend and let them come into this. The more, the merrier,” Balor taunted.
Kane speared his elbow right in the Fomorian’s fist-sized eye. The lens cracked under the brutal surprise attack, and Balor dropped Kane, clutching the orb.
“You son of a bitch!” Balor screamed.
Kane landed on his feet, but the sudden jolt to his injured hip lanced a spear of pain into his side. He was red-faced under the shadow suit hood and faceplate, but he was glad that no one could see the agony written across his features. He managed to summon enough strength to rise to his feet again.
