Angel of Doom (32 page)

Grant showed his worth, the way in which he was able to handle the mighty hammer, learning the true symbiotic nature of the intelligent metals that made up the weapon. Where Kane had struggled with the artifact, Grant knew that a Zen approach, a bonding with the hammer, was the means by which one took control of the deadly piece of alien weaponry and focused its power with deadly efficiency.

The body that Charun currently was burdened with was starting to lose its cohesion, while Grant's would give the demigod years more to survive in this world while the
million brains at the bottom of the pyramid engaged in forcing open the aperture between universes, the route to home and to his beloved minions.

Back home was the true form that could contain the power of Charun's soul. The poor fool who had been present when his seed was planted. Not the beautiful, dark woman Nathalie, the one who actually sowed him, but rather the local guide, an Italian farmer well on in his years, who'd told her of the hidden pyramid.

Charun recalled having been tempted to make the woman his bride, to implant her with the genetic information to create a brand-new Vanth, but his hand was stopped by a subconscious command, a force from beyond him. The name Hurbon was associated with the hesitation, one that told Charun there were more important things for Nathalie to do than serve as a temporary shell.

Instead, simmering inside the skin of the now-erased farmer, Charun had returned to the man's home and found the local's wife. She had been as withered as Charun's “human suit,” sixty years making her skin hang in wrinkled drapes on her skeleton. All it took was a kiss, a penetration of energy, and the seed that had been one became two.

The rest of the sons of Styx who inhabited the pyramid were composed of a chicken-coop full of birds. The genetic data, and the feast of the Stygians upon every other living creature in the barns of the farm, turned the small poultry into the reedy but powerfully built warriors who could be grown even larger and more powerful.

Once Charun had brought his family back together, there was only the task of amassing those necessary.

At first it was a town or two disappearing. Over the past several months the disappearances became epidemic; convoys vanishing, even expeditions from the coast arriving
to wonder why the center of the peninsula became a black hole from where thousands were never seen again. Several hundred thousand human brains, and even all of the larger mammals that Charun hadn't crafted into the meat suit for their recently fallen cyclops, or the small creatures molded into the Abyssal blob, were now gathered in the city-size prison beneath the pyramid.

“This is disrupting us, love.” Vanth spoke across the miles with her mind touching his. “We were so close to the final equation and now…”

“Continue your focus, my bride,” Charun admonished. “The humans will surrender or they shall be crushed.”

“Crushed,” Vanth repeated.

Charun knew that tone of mind, her disdain stinging him like an open-handed slap. “Bride, mind thy words.”

“They have cast down others of our ilk before,” Vanth warned. “Just because you have girded your loins and brought yourself to them at the peak of your armor and weaponry does not mean that you will fare better.”

“Already, you think that I have not learned my lesson,” Charun growled as he hovered above the clearing where he and Vanth had last felt the presence of the Abyssal. He scanned around, his armor augmenting his already formidable senses, and yet found nothing on the ground. It was mere minutes after the savage battle and there was no sign of human life.

He alit, his draconian wings folding back against his shoulder blades. There were signs and elements of the battle, shell casings and the bisected corpses of sparrows and voles. He bent and lifted one halved creature.

He cursed the luck that they had come equipped to deal harmlessly with groups of mind-controlled people, and the very gases they intended to slow and dispel throngs of thralls had also proved to counteract the atomic matrices
that turned millions of tiny creatures into an unstoppable whole. He crushed the half squirrel, its delicate bones snapping and its meat liquefying in his powerful grasp. He wiped his palm against the ground and stood tall, looking around.

During his flyover and hover, his augmented vision had swept for a mile in every direction, and though the men and women of Cerberus had been lauded for their physical prowess, there was no way they could have run as far and as fast as this.

That meant that they were present but had rendered themselves all but invisible and undetectable thanks to the optic camouflage technologies of their shadow suits. Without heat signatures and sealed airtight…they might as well have been phantoms.

Kane and his allies wanted to dictate the terms of their next encounter, which was something Charun could not allow.

The battle he'd forced Grant and Kane into had spilled back onto him and, without his armor, without his weapons, the frail flesh containing the power of his birthright was easily felled. With a body such as Grant's, he'd be unstoppable and closer to his original height and build.

Of course, Vanth had promised that with the incredible intellect of Brigid Baptiste, he wouldn't have to worry about shadows, mere substitute bodies. Their home world was almost open, and Charun's hordes would bring his slumbering form across, uniting him with the flesh that he was meant for.

“Humans! I grow tired of your games! Bring me the woman Baptiste, and we shall be gone from your lives evermore!”

Charun glanced around. “No taker?”

Charun drove the handle of his hammer into the soil and then stepped away from it. “What do you want?”

“You wish a fair battle?” he called as he peeled off the headpiece of his armor. “You, seven against one?”

He began pulling out of the near-fabric-like top of his smart-metal body armor. “You wish to prove yourself against a god?”

Nothing. No one moved. He was alone and apparently addressing a field full of mouse and bird corpses, stripping himself down. His head still hurt from catching the hundreds of pounds of force Kane had developed when he was hurled violently by Grant. That impact, and the back of his head crashing against a solid stone wall, had rendered Charun insensate and helpless. All he could do was watch as Kane, Grant and Brigid had fled the arsenal to rush to the rescue of their allies trapped in the storage chamber.

“We had all seven of you under our roof. We could have snuffed you out! But that is not our way. That was not our need!” Charun bellowed.

Within moments figures were at the tree line, but Charun knew that it was merely the automatons from his own arsenal. They stood there, scanning around, utilizing camera mounts of their own to sweep for signs of the humans.

Charun initiated a telepathic contact with his Stygian pilots. Have you made any contact?

Negative, sire. We saw none. We heard none. None struck at us.

“This is maddening!” Charun frowned.

“Where could you stupid little humans have gone?” Charun asked, hoping his mockery would inspire them into stupidity.

He spent fifteen minutes, walking around, finding only empty tear-gas gren hulls and other spent casings, but there were no footprints, no spoor and no infrared imagery.
There wasn't even an active Commtact that he could use his own smart-metal armor to home in on as he pulled it back over his chest and arms.

Husband…return home. Leave the humans to wander around, confused and lost.

Vanth had a compelling point, and according to her, it would be only days, not months, until the resurgence of their portal. To crawl into Vanth's supple, loving arms and to taste even the withered shadow of her true flesh, would be the sweetest of release, a recharge for his next encounter with the men and women of Cerberus.

His leathery wings unfurled, stretched to almost translucent tautness. They appeared as living flesh, but they were more akin to the polymers that made up the suits of his human opponents, including the ability to either carry or insulate against the electric charges necessary to produce a gravity-defying ionic field.

Charun extended his hand and the war hammer rose from the ground, cartwheeling to his grasp.

With but a thought, he was airborne, spearing into the dimming sky.

His Stygian warriors, manning the Gear Skeletons, would continue their hunt through the night. Nothing could interrupt their telepathic contact with him, and with Brigid Baptiste's interphaser under their control in the pyramid, the Cerberus explorers were trapped and isolated.

Let the humans stew—let them fret and worry. Their ending would come, as had those of millions before who stood in the path of Charun.

* * *

K
ANE SCANNED HIS
back trail, the growing shadows of evening being taken into account and adapted by his optic camouflage on his shadow suit. The arrival of Charun himself had been something of a surprise, especially as
he hadn't expected the demigod to be hands-on in his hunt for the humans. The trio of Stygian “snot-pilots” in the Gear Skeletons seemed perfectly capable of crushing them on their own, especially since they didn't have the kind of fighting power that Charun had inadvertently bestowed upon Grant with his hammer. Moving with every bit of stealth and grace he had, he was a phantom.

He saw Domi motion, letting him know of her arrival at their rendezvous. They'd only traveled four hundred yards in the time it took for Charun and his bounding automatons to arrive, but it was still room enough for the seven members of the expedition to disappear into nooks and crannies of the ground, the foliage and the roots of the forest. Kane wasn't a big fan of hiding, but in the face of opposition that could crush a human skull with the same facility that a man could crush a grape, discretion was the better part of valor.

Right now he and the rest of the team were homing in on him, following the sound of clicks he made with his tongue. It was one thing to use something high-tech, like an infrared emitter that would show up on the optics of the robots, but the noises he made were in imitation of insect chirps. Unlike Domi, the others
were
visible to him, but only because he knew exactly what to look for in terms of signs of motion among his camouflaged friends.

Finally the small party was reassembled, and all hundreds of yards from the towering automatons skulking through the forest for their trails.

“I can't wait to pick up a rocket launcher and deal with those blobs,” Grant grumbled.

“Me, either,” Edwards agreed. “But how is that going to happen with the three of those things looking for us?”

“Brigid, just what was in that interphaser housing that you brought?” Kane asked.

The archivist smiled. “Oh, that little thing? I was considering
different options when I had it brought in. The first thought was a fail-safe…a compact but powerful explosive device.”

“That's what I thought when I handled it,” Kane said. “But it was still too light to be even a suitcase-size nuclear warhead, and there's no way that anything else could have been packed in there with enough power to dissuade Charun and Vanth. If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought that you'd brought a regular interphaser in with the housing.”

Brigid frowned. “And what would the purpose of that be?”

Kane smirked. “You brought in a working, full-powered interphaser so that the cavalry could be called in. At the same time, the extra mass has something to do with a jammer. A frequency jammer to do to Charun and Vanth what they've done to our Commtacts.”

“I triggered the countdown for the broadcast of that frequency the moment I found you two,” Brigid answered. “In five more minutes, the song of Vanth is going to disappear from the airwaves and a million people are going to awaken.”

“That could get messy,” Grant said.

“It could, if there weren't three Spartans ready to protect them from the Stygians, and Charun's armored minions were already occupied with us,” Brigid said.

“That sounds like a great plan,” Smaragda offered, but there was doubt dripping from that statement. “But the pilots of those armors are inside the cells hundreds of feet below the arsenal, if that's where they put your interphaser.”

“That is exactly where they would have put the interphaser,” Brigid corrected. “They think it to be a dangerous weapon, and the arsenal has been constructed so as to minimize potential damage to the rest of the pyramid in the instance of an explosion.”

“But not in the instance of three Olympians being brought in through a parallax point,” Smaragda concluded. “So…”

“Blowing up the very humans we're coming to rescue is highly counterproductive and against our ethics,” Brigid added.

Kane nodded. “I was wondering what would even the odds. But how about us?”

“Activate your Commtacts now,” Brigid said. “We should be in communication with our ride.”

“Our ride?” Edwards asked. “The only ship we have access to is a Manta back in Greece…”

“Left with the incomparable mechanic Fast,” Brigid added.

The crack of a sonic boom as the aforementioned ship entered the atmosphere punctuated Baptiste's statement.

“Mantas can carry one, two people at the most,” Sela Sinclair noted.

“Inside its sealed cockpit? Yes, it's at best a crowded two-seater,” Kane said. “But we're in full-body environmental suits. Suits that allow its wearers to walk on the surface of the moon with only an oxygen attachment.”

Domi looked down, then smiled. “We can hang from the outside, on harnesses.”

Edwards chuckled. “You are almost diabolical, Brigid.”

“Almost?” Brigid asked, raising an eyebrow. “Which of you guys want to fly it? It's being brought in via remote control.”

Kane and Edwards both pointed to Grant immediately.

“He's the best pilot we have,” Kane added.