Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (11 page)

“Everybody clear on the plan?” he whispered when they had joined him. They were crouched out of sight behind a crude mining machine.

“Yeah,” Jax said. “We get the guards, you get the girl.”

Without replying, Liu dashed off ahead of the others.

The passage to the containment chamber was right where Jade had indicated it would be... something Liu promised himself he’d mention to Rayden the first chance he got.

He emerged from the tunnel onto a rock shelf, crawled to its ledge, and leaned his head down for a hurried recon. Kitana was in one of the small cages hanging from cables that reached to the chamber’s ceiling, looking helplessly out between the wooden bars.

Liu took a deep breath. Jax and company had already dealt with a great many of the guards out in the yard, stealing up on them, taking them out with quick, silent blows. Now it was his turn.

Okay
, he thought.
First things first. How do I get down to the floor without breaking my neck?

He slid further over the edge of his stony perch. One of the guy wires running up from Kitana’s cage was almost directly in front of him. If he could only reach it, he might be able to climb down...

He inched forward until the upper half of his body was sticking out off the ledge, then extended his hands as far as he could, his fingers trembling from the strain. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t make it, thought he would lose his balance and teeter over into space... but finally, with a surge of relief, he grabbed hold of the cable, getting his right hand, then his left, firmly around it.

Filling his lungs with air again, gripping the cable with all his strength, he pushed himself off the ledge and monkeyed down to the bottom of the chamber.

No sooner had his feet touched the floor than he darted toward Kitana’s cage, craning his head back to look up at it, trying to figure out a way to free her.

Their eyes made contact.

“
Liu!
” she said in a loud whisper, an expression of surprise and relief spreading over her face. “
There’s a crank of the wall! It lowers the cage!
”

He frantically looked around for the crank and was still searching for it when Baraka stepped out of a shadowy recess behind the cage, his lips stretched across his metal teeth in a forbidding smile.

“Hello, little man,” he said, moving further into the light. His eyes gleamed with anticipation above his flowing black warden’s robe. “Nobody escapes my prison.”

There was the deadly
snick-snick-snick
of steel claws springing from sheaths on his knuckles. Then Baraka dove in at Liu.

Liu ducked, narrowly missing a swipe from one of the mutant’s clawblades, responding with a sharp uppercut to the chin that staggered him sideways against an empty cage.

Recovering his balance, Baraka emitted a bestial snarl and lunged back at him, both clawed fists aimed at the center of his chest. But Liu shifted aside an instant before he would have been skewered and, his body a blur of motion, thrust out at Baraka with a crescent kick, knocking him to the floor.

“
Now!
” the warden shouted up at the chamber ceiling. Ropes of bloody spittle flew off his gnashing teeth, “What are you fools waiting for?”

His skin prickling with alarm, Liu shot a glance upward.

High above the chamber floor – higher, even, than the ledge from which Liu had himself descended – two masked nomad guards were hanging upside down from the rafters like enormous bats. Even as he spotted them, they dropped from the ceiling in precipitous nosedives, their calf-blades shearing the air, forearm swords stabbing out at Liu.

Caught between the two attacking warriors, he assumed a tightly-coiled bent-knee stance, jumped into the air, and split-kicked them in their faces... only to find that their helmets absorbed most of the impact, robbing his blows of any noticeable effect.

Inside her cage, Kitana scanned the area for more hidden ambushers and glimpsed another nomad guard swooping down at Liu.

“Liu, there!” she shouted, gesturing urgently between the wooden bars.

As Liu spun around in the direction she was pointing, the nomad clashed its swords together, sparking off an energy beam that zipped downward in a humming red-orange shaft. He leaped out of the way and saw it go skimming harmlessly past him, blowing the ground at his feet to smithereens.

Liu considered scrambling for cover, decided there was nowhere to run that would offer any protection, and rapidly moved into the offensive. He ran toward the diving nomad and flipped high, striking it in midflight, slamming it right out the air.

The guard hit the ground with a loud crash of armor, dropping one of its forearm swords.

Scooping up the sword, Liu plunged into battle against the original pair of guards. One of them flew straight at him, slicing out with its own blade, but Liu sidestepped and quickly kicked the sword from its hand, breaking it in half with the concentrated force of his strike. As the other nomad swept in for its assault, Liu leaped at it with his legs outstretched and his knees close together, landing a kick that spun it wildly off at an angle, hurtling toward a collision with the chamber wall.

Liu wasn’t foolish enough to think that would give him any room for a breather. There was still Baraka, and the nomad he’d disarmed a moment ago.

He looked around, saw them coming at him from different sides – Baraka to his left, the guard to the right – and braced for their attack.

Baraka charged first, but something about the way he moved, a slight hesitation in his stride, made Liu realize that the mutant was only distracting him. He pivoted toward the nomad just as the creature rushed forward and, using the two halves of the energy sword for leverage, rammed them into the wall, swung around them, and delivered a smashing kick to the guard’s face.

There was an audible
snap!
as the nomad’s neck vertebrae broke apart. Then it folded to the floor in a twitching heap.

One to go
, Liu thought, stealing a quick glance up at Kitana to see if she was okay.

His eyes opened wide. The nomad he’d sent flying across the room had recovered, and was now climbing up the side of Kitana’s cage, clinging to it like some huge, armored beetle.

“
Kill her!
” Baraka shouted at the guard, and then sprang at Liu with his clawblades extended, his robe flapping back from his body.

“I don’t think so,” Liu said.

Readying himself for certain pain, Liu deflected Baraka’s jabbing blades with his bare hands, feeling their razor edges bite into his palms and fingers. Then he launched himself toward the wall with a series of handsprings, yanked out the energy-blade fragments he’d shoved into it, and began to scale the wall toward the cage, the notches cut by the blades service as improvised handholds.

Blood streamed from the cuts in his hands, sliming his knuckles, running down his arms to his shirtsleeve. Liu ignored the wounds scrambled upward, his eyes locked on Kitana. She’d been holding off the nomad with a cyclonic barrage of spin kicks, but it had hung onto the cage, and was now prying apart the bars in an attempt to get inside.

Summoning all his strength, Liu pushed back from the wall with both hands and feet, leap-frogging onto the roof of the cage. For a long moment he did nothing but try to steady himself on his legs. Then he reached down, grabbed the nomad by its epauletted shoulders, and hauled it up onto the top of the cage with him.

They went at each other with an exchange of kicks and blows that were so fast they seemed to blur together, battling from one side of the cage to the next, their movement causing it to sway precariously at the end of its guy line.

Shifting and ducking in an evasive pattern, trying to pace himself, Liu glanced down to get a fix on Baraka, spotted his grotesque upturned face below him... and suddenly registered that he hadn’t seen something else that he most definitely should have.

Hadn’t seen Kitana inside the cage.

She’s gone!
his mind screamed.
Gone!

He felt a soaring, heartstopping panic that momentarily wiped out all rational thought, and opened him up to a blow from the nomad that rocked him back toward the edge of the cage roof.

As Liu struggled for balance, the nomad stepped in front of him, then pulled it arms in against its sides with a jerk, ejecting two small, arrow-shaped knife blades from its elbows. They fired out at Liu, barely missing him, then returned to their launch pods like boomerangs.

Still teetering at the edge of the room, trying to distribute his weight so the cage would stop rocking, Liu knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid another direct shot from those things... and judging by the smile on its face, the nomad knew it, too. It was toying with him like a cat having some fun with a mouse that wasn’t long for the world.

“
Finish him! Finish them both!
” Baraka was screaming below him.

Liu felt his heart jolt with hope and excitement. What was that the warden had said?

Both?

The nomad raised its arms, preparing to release the blades again...

Just at that moment, Kitana flipped onto the cage roof behind it, slamming it in the back with a two-footed flying kick. The nomad stumbled off its feet, its elbow knives firing off and straying from their intended target. One of them took a whistling course past Liu’s shoulder. The other sprang out and grazed the guy line, partially severing it, throwing the cage into a crazy, dizzying tilt. Then they both swung back toward the nomad, stabbing him in the chest as he swayed helplessly off balance. He fell screaming to the ground.

Liu started toward Kitana. The cable frayed some more, its wire strands pulling apart from the strain of the weight they were supporting, and the cage slipped almost a foot closer to the ground. Kitana staggered, almost fell over the side, but somehow was able to retain her footing.

The rope came apart a little more...

And a little more...

Realizing it was certain to break at any moment, Liu jumped straight up, grabbed its upper half with one hand, and hooked his other one around Kitana’s waist. His sudden movement hastened along the inevitable, completely snapping the cable just below the point where he’d caught hold of it.

His scream tearing up from the chamber floor, Baraka tried to scramble out from under the falling cage. But it plummeted to the chamber floor before he could get clear, smashing down on top of him, crushing him underneath it.

Holding Kitana tightly against his body, Liu swung onto the relative safety of a nearby ledge, and then looked down at the shattered remains of the cage. Thick tentacles of blood were spreading around it, creeping slowly over the rough stone floor.

“Baraka died in service to his lord and master, Shao Kahn,” Kitana muttered. “I couldn’t have imagined a more fitting end for him.”

Liu nodded grimly, both arms embracing her now.

“I told you I wouldn’t lose you,” he said, and pulled her closer.

She tilted her face up at him, her smile full of promise.

“I was beginning to wonder,” she said.

Liu hesitated only a moment, then leaned down to kiss her... but before he could, they heard a loud, shrill warning horn from the prison yard.

“We’d better get out of here,” he said, and nodded toward the crawlspace through which he’d rich the chamber. “Our time will come later.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “And when it does, I assure you it will be worth the wait.”

Kahn stood beside Shinnock in his war room, looking out a large, pentagonal window at the corrupt grandeur of his kingdom.

He gestured past a cluster of jutting spires in the near distance. “Behold the seeds of destruction flowering before us!”

This almost seemed a signal for the violent paroxysm that shook the earth a moment afterward. Behind the spires of the city, the Great Pyramid of Giza thrust suddenly into view, its monumental form rising hundreds of feet into the air from a molten chasm, chunks of limestone tumbling from its sides as it breached the realms.

“One more night,” Kahn said, turning from the window. “Nothing can stop us now!”

“Nothing except your supreme idiocy.” Shinnock glared disparagingly at his son. “How could you believe that the ruination of the Elders’ city – their
temple
– would not put our plan in jeopardy?”

“It was necessary, Father,” Kahn said. “To convince the mortals that their only escape was through the Portal Rayden created.”

“Had Sindel captured Rayden and his mortals in your trap, she would be here now, gloating at your feet.”

Kahn gave him a shrewd look. “I swear to you, Father, on my soul, all our millennia of planning will soon be rewarded. You will be proud, and legends will be spun of our–”

Both men looked sharply around as the massive double doors of the chamber burst open, and one of the nomad guards from the Shokan prison staggered in. Though they could not have known it, this was the nomad who had fought Liu atop Kitana’s cage. Blood gushed from the creature’s breastplate where it had been pierced by its own elbow swords.

“The princess...escaped,” it sputtered. “Rayden lives!”

Kahn’s eyes glowed red as coins in a blazing furnace. His features convulsed with rage, knotting and twisting until there was nothing remotely human about them. Then he lunged at the wounded nomad, striking out with a ferocious blow that slammed the guard back into a display of battle armaments. The trophies fell from their stands and wall mounts in a clattery welter.

“Enough,” Shinnock said from behind Kahn. “Leave him be.”

“Father, this worthless mutant was supposed to–”

Shinnock waved his hand in the air to silence him.

“Know this,” he said, cold menace in his voice. “You pledged me your soul in the event of failure... and in return, I now promise you that it is a pledge I will never forget. Do you understand?”

Kahn looked into Shinnock’s threatening glare and felt something akin to dread slither through his bowels.