Angel of Doom (12 page)

The last thing that Kane and the Cerberus staff wanted was a nuclear meltdown in the Mediterranean, causing loss of life throughout New Olympus and its environs. They had too many friends and there were also too many potential allies out there for them to risk a failure of those reactors.

“We're still going to have to walk a ways,” Sinclair mentioned. “According to Lakesh, there had been a parallax point on the Italian peninsula until three months or so ago.”

Kane frowned at the idea they had been literally so busy over the past months that the disappearance of a major parallax crossroads was something listed as far down on the priorities of the Cerberus explorers. Only the mention of a danger in the Etruscan countryside sparked the memory of that mystery in Lakesh's mind. “Three months.”

“The point is turned off?” Smaragda asked. “How is that possible?”

Kane tapped in the coordinates to the interphaser. “Vanth and Charun have to be behind that development.”

Smaragda's eyes narrowed. “So, they haven't been
awake for long. The stories that we received go back at least six months. What were they doing the first two or three?”

“Waking up. They've been asleep for a while,” Grant said. “Brigid said that the worship of Charun and Vanth ended around three thousand years ago. They only woke up recently.”

“Gathering people to power the device that has hijacked the parallax point,” Sela added. “Because there's no way that you can do something like cut off access to a wormhole without an assload of power.”

Kane frowned. “Gathering up the energy to shut down the parallax point using brains. Human and otherwise, given your account of the birds.”

“Zombified humans is one thing. But the songbirds were downright creepy,” Smaragda responded.

“Brigid did say that Vanth wanted her brain and soul to add to opening a door,” Domi added. “The points are already doors for us. Maybe they want to change where the door opens.”

“To unleash the hordes as a plague,” Grant repeated from Brigid's debriefing.

“If I didn't know any better, I'd think that when she hypnotized us, she planted seeds of answers for the questions we're asking right now,” Sinclair mused, her arms folded.

Edwards chuckled. “Like none of us have learned anything from our adventures?”

“Yeah. We picked Edwards for the Cerberus teams for more than just the muscles he's wearing on his arms,” Grant added. “There's some working muscle between his ears.”

“All of our ears, yes,” Sinclair answered. “But we're thinking about parallax points as doorways that can be
hijacked. And the whole ‘dragon roads' thing as a circuit board that can be rewired.”

Kane stood, looking down at the interphaser. “What's wrong with that? I mean, it's not as if Lakesh hasn't explained that in simple terms for us foot soldiers enough times. Nor Brigid.”

The air around the group began to hum, laser beams spraying out in a pattern around them. The interphaser created a matrix of energy surrounding them, plasma vortices taking on the appearance of mist and fog, lit and glowing under the ray beams shimmering from the pyramidal device's top. The five people were transformed from solid matter into cohesive streams of atoms that could be slurped through the wormhole. All of this energy was poured out at Cerberus Redoubt, from the long-running nuclear reactors that were the only power source at their beck and call that could open such a wormhole.

The interphaser simply found those crossroads of magnetic lines crisscrossing the surface of the world, and in finding the nexus, beamed those massive energies through the thinning of reality, literally opening a door between universes, folding the space on the other end. To an observer, the effect was sprays of misty Technicolor energy flying outward in sheets, and then five humans clad in skintight black leather materializing, rather than the interphaser reconstructing the bodies of the travelers in their journey across hundreds and hundreds of miles and across two dimensions.

The process was painless, if disorienting for first-timers or those entering an improperly programmed mat-trans. Kane was familiar with “jump dreams” and more than once these very same disconnects from reality actually gave him glimpses into other lives, other incarnations.

The interphaser, however, had cleared up much of that interference that resulted in a nauseating landing or that
wave of delirium making the jumpers sensitive to odd psychic vibrations. In a way, it felt less like a dangerous leap into the unknown than it had before, where every redoubt was still an unknown, potentially inhabited by coldhearts or other menaces.

The world phased back into view around the Cerberus adventurers and Smaragda, becoming more and more visible through the “bubble” of laser-lit smoke around them. Within moments they were at a small clearing in a forest, one adorned with stones arranged in a form of henge.

The warriors immediately scanned the surrounding tree line, though part of Kane missed the presence of Brigid to explain to them what this circlet of standing rocks signified. It was already evident to Kane and Grant that the stones meant that ancient peoples knew of the presence of a parallax point in this location. Those with sensitivity to extrasensory phenomena knew to associate these places with a means of contacting the gods.

There was scarcely an interphaser landing point that hadn't showed some form of marker that it had once been a spot of worship. While there was no real confirmation that the Annunaki threshold jewels operated on the same parallax point principle, this would have been a likely landing point for the overlords themselves as they'd visited the Earth.

Kane remembered that he had his shadow suit hood recording vid, and Brigid
was
looking over the scene here. Their landing point was not far; only about seventy-five miles from where the major nexus had been before it became a black hole on Lakesh's observations.

Domi was crouched, her hood down. Though the girl was not averse to technology, there were some things that only her feral instincts could pick up on. Smells and behaviors of local wildlife were as much in the cues she
could pick up on instantly as Kane's own point man's instinct.

Her ruby-red eyes locked in one direction. “Heavy steps.”

“Beta, disperse. Myrto, go with them. We'll stay, observe and initiate contact if possible,” Kane ordered.

There was no disagreement among the three CAT Beta members and their Olympian companion as they gathered their effects and disappeared into the tree line.

“At least we've got backup out there this time,” Grant murmured, shouldering his war bag. “I'm not picking up anything on the Commtact.”

“Me, either,” Kane returned. “That means something else might be up.”

“Charun and Vanth might have figured that if they couldn't brainwash Edwards, or get Brigid with their little virus, we might be immune to their subtle ways,” Grant offered.

Kane nodded in agreement. “So they sent Gear Skeletons.”

“Capture or kill?” Grant proposed. “That's what we have to figure out.”

Kane and his friend went to the tree line, looking for a good hiding spot. “We've got the same dilemma here, partner.”

Grant's lips pursed in thought. “We've brought the materials needed to incapacitate the Olympian troops without much harm, but the Spartan pilots…we would have to donate armor to them.”

Kane chuckled. “A cloud in every silver lining. Don't ever change, buddy.”

The large Magistrate had a shotgun out. Loaded with less-lethal loads, mainly neoprene slugs that would punch with enough force to stun and bruise, but against the Sandcat panels enveloping the Spartan pilots it might as well
have been a handful of marshmallows to be hurled at the giants. There was one saving grace, though, but they didn't know if it would work.

Under the pump on Grant's and Kane's less-lethals were Taser units. Each of these little electric guns fired twin prongs via compressed air at a target. On humans, the barbs would stick in clothing or stab shallowly in skin, and the fine wires attached to the tines would ferry forward a powerful pulse of voltage, capable of freezing a person's muscles and nervous system, effectively paralyzing them.

The theory, as devised by Sela Sinclair and Brigid Baptiste, was that maybe, if the electrical current somehow connected to the Spartan war bots, their pilots would be affected. The pilots commanded the powerful robotic suits through a cybernetic node installed at the base of their spines, so that the mighty Gear Skeletons could actually conduct the electrical shock of the Tasers.

“If it's one or two, we'll be fine. If it's all three, we're going to have to get creative while one of us reloads,” Grant noted.

“Or if we miss,” Kane offered.

Grant narrowed his eyes.

“This is a new system for us,” Kane added. “So we won't be as good and accurate with it as we are with our usual arms.”

“If I can hit targets with a bow and arrow, I might be able to compensate with Taser tongs,” Grant grumbled.

“Hush, I can hear the stomps of a Spartan closing,” Kane returned.

Kane knew he didn't have to say anything. Grant might have been famous for his gruff, grumbling nature, but when it came time for serious work, there were few people quieter than he.

The two men slithered deeper into the cover of the
tree line, eyes open, ears peeled for the approach of the robot or robots.

There was also the potential that the Spartans weren't alone. Who knew how long the two mysterious godlings had been ready for an arrival by the Cerberus contingent? There had been hours between the time Edwards was picked up, the debriefing, and then finally the very hectic night in the wake of Brigid's battle against the deadly song of Vanth.

So far, things seemed in the clear. Neither Kane's cunning nor Domi's feral instincts had been tripped by the presence of soldiers camouflaged among the forest surrounding the little clearing. The only signs of an enemy presence were the leaden footsteps of the robot approaching. Enemy ambush was not close enough to be on the agenda, but then, these two Etruscan entities had lived as contemporaries of the Annunaki overlords. Maybe they were other Igigi, or they were an entirely different species, but whatever the case, they didn't survive the intrigues of the dawn of humanity by being easy to predict.

Then again, wits and cunning often did wonders for Kane and his allies in dealing with deadly overlords. One of the problems of being a being with access to armies and nearly magical technology was a tendency to overlook the scrabbling little apes and their resourcefulness with nothing more than twigs and pebbles.

Too often, in Kane's observation, these “gods” forgot that they were mortal, flesh and blood as the rest of the planet. Enlil and his surviving brethren had learned that lesson at the cost of more than a couple of their fellow Annunaki. Brigid mentioned that there were similarities between the hypnotic song of Ereshkigal and that of Vanth. Vanth's version, however, had a much more mathematical base, she'd told him, which made it into an aggressive, human-brain-based piece of malware.

If these bastards can nearly give Baptiste a heart attack, then they definitely are in full Annunaki range of powers, Kane thought. He remembered his own psychic duel with Enlil in India, one that had almost crushed him mentally and physically. Kane never claimed to be any great shakes mentally, and that he survived the telepathic conflict instigated by Enlil seemed merely stubborn resolve and dumb luck rather than anything else. Vanth's attack against Brigid still weighed on Kane's nerves.

There was nothing more that he would like to do than wring Vanth's neck, should she show. Kane and Brigid were
anam-charas
, and harm to one was literally harm to both.

Bide your time.

Going off in a knee-jerk reaction was not the key to victory here. He wasn't even certain that either Charun or Vanth would be showing. As such, he remained patient, his less-lethal shotgun ready for action. The Sin Eater, folded away along his forearm, would be for someone or something worse. Brigid had stated for the entire Cerberus group that they would do their best to rescue and recover their lost soldiers.

The monstrous steps slowed. The walker was on the far side of the clearing, fifteen yards away, and obscured by the tree line. One thing, though, had become apparent. What they had mistaken for the ponderous bulk of a walking Spartan war bot wasn't a thing forged of alien alloys and cobbled Sandcat armor.

Fingers, the size of sausages, swept aside the crown of a tree, branches shattering under incredible pressure. The splintering limbs weren't violently thrashed, merely shrugged aside with a casual brush of an arm as long as Kane himself was tall. The creature that the arm attached to was a thing of horror, its face just as twisted and inhuman as Charun's own.

This was not an automaton, and it was far too large to be an Annunaki or one of their servant Nephilim. This was a gargantuan creature, not unlike another horror that Kane had encountered. It had been in the Appalachian Rift, and his name was Balor of the Baleful Eye, an entity of horror and suffering created by another scion of Enlil, the brutal yet eternally handsome Bres. This thing was not a Fomori, but he could already “hear” Brigid's explanation of how the Celtic Fomorian demons and the Greek Cyclops were likely different cultural observations of the same creatures. And these giants were the creations of horrible technologies that made flesh and bone flow like molasses.

Because of the power it instilled in them, and because of the continuous agonies it ravaged them with, the one-eyed giants were fearless in the face of danger and death. Kane watched as splinters of smashed branch speared into thick, elephantine hide, taking only trickles of blood, eliciting a smirk on the titan's face. Anything that sparked its way from the endless existence of dull ache was a moment of pleasure, a relief from the sameness of eternity. According to Bres, when they'd last battled, the constant state of their bodies was breaking and tearing their deformed figures, and instantly healing. Only the worst of agonies could penetrate such a fog of constant ache.