Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (4 page)

The venomous look in Kahn’s eyes was enough to make Motaro think the better of his reluctance.

“Centaurans are known for their hunting prowess,” he said hesitantly. “As your general, I will hunt down every single human soul and spare no one.”

“Motaro can’t be trusted,” Sheeva said. Motaro having stepped forward, she did not want her loyalty to look weak by comparison. “Long ago I proved myself as the personal protector of Queen Sindel. Your orders are mine to follow.”

“Was it not under Sheeva’s watchful eye that the Queen killed herself?” Motaro said, his words dripping with sarcasm.

Kahn looked between them, stroking his beard, clearly enjoying the conflict.

At last he said, “No. You are both too impetuous for such important work. Sindel will be my new general.” He grinned meaningfully at Sheeva and Motaro. “Unless you have another point of view?”

Their eyes turned to the inert body of the Extermination General, but they remained silent.

His
point of view being one that neither of them was at all anxious to share.

Entering the velosphere with Rayden, Sonya was surprised to notice there were neither controls nor seats – and that feeling only intensified when the immortal began fastening leather straps around her wrists.

“You will be moving so fast... it will be as though you are not moving at all,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow. “That’s comforting.”

Rayden turned so they were standing back-to-back and strapped himself in. On the platform outside the sphere, Liu was trying not to seem worried – with only partial success.

He inched closer to the contraption and grabbed hold of its frame. “What if Kitana and I don’t make it to Mount Gaia on time?”

“We will wait,” Rayden said. “Without Kitana, we cannot close the Portal.”

“Are you sure there’s no other way?” Kitana asked from where she stood beside Liu.

“If there is, only the Elder Gods will know,” Rayden said. He looked at Sonya, impatient to get underway. “Roll to your left!”

She shifted her weight, adding it to Rayden’s, and with virtually no further effort the velosphere rolled off its pedestal. Sonya realized the globe was spinning rapidly although they were not, and assumed they were being stabilized by some sort of concealed gyroscopic mechanism.

His concerns unallayed, Liu was still holding onto the vehicle as it teetered on the lip of the funnel track.

“Wait!” he said. “What if
you
are not at Mount Gaia, Rayden?”

“Follow your instincts, but trust no one. For you will be the target of all Kahn’s fighters,” Rayden said above the noisy swell of the wind. “Remember there are no rules this time.” He tiled his head toward Sonya again. “Once more, to the left!”

A moment later the velosphere dropped down into the track. Their clothes flapping around them in a tremendous wash of wind, Liu and Kitana stepped back and watched it rocket away into the darkness of a tunnel.

“They are faster than I remember,” Kitana said, half to herself. She turned to Liu. “I’m glad I am not alone.”

Liu took her hand in his and gave her a smile that he hoped look reassuring.

Then, together in silence, they started toward their own velosphere.

Their backs pressed against each other, Liu and Kitana grasped their handles as the velosphere abruptly stopped gimbaling in the windstream.

“What’s going on?” Liu said. “Where are we?”

Kitana was peering out at an oncoming wall of tunnel vents. Above each opening was an iridescent hieroglyph.

“The interchange!” she said urgently, scanning the ancient symbols. “Roll to your right! Hard!”

Liu did as she’d told him and the velosphere changed trajectory, angling right and down and then popping into a lower tunnel vent, veering into its entrance so sharply it clipped the wall and shed a trail of rock fragments.

The jolt caused one of Kitana’s handles to break, hurling her into Liu’s arms.

“Liu!” she said, clinging to him for balance.

Keeping one hand securely strapped, he tore his other arm free and wrapped it around her, pulling her against him.

Her sudden closeness made Liu flush and sent wildcat tingles up and down his body.

“Hold on,” he said.

And she did, tightly, as they were swept along by the dark subterranean wind.

Boooosh!

The velosphere carrying Sonya and Rayden shot from the mouth of a tunnel, soared over a bubbling river of magma, then zipped into another tunnel opening and spun off in a new direction.

After a long, dizzyingly high-speed ride, they reached a chamber much like the one in which they had entered the sphere – the most notable difference being that they had been carried halfway around the world.

Though it was a short hike to the surface, Sonya found herself getting increasingly winded as they made their ascent... which struck her as more than a little odd, since the incline wasn’t especially steep, and it had seemed reasonable to expect that the uppermost stretch of the passage would be filled with air from above. The temperature also seemed to rise with each step she took, and by the time they reached the end of their climb she was covered with perspiration.

Pausing beside Rayden in the mouth of the cave, Sonya was no longer merely breathing hard but actually gasping – one look at the shimmering horizon told her why.

As far as she could see, the terrain was a primordial, steaming hell, devoid of life, criss-crossed with rivers of molten rock and blanketed by a haze of volcanic ash and smoke. In the distance, a series of low metal buildings sent up darts of reflected sunlight.

“You will take the same track back, and turn where I showed you,” Rayden said.

“I’ll figure it out,” Sonya said, clapping her hand over her mouth. The sulfurous stench in the air was overwhelming. “Is it like this everywhere?”

“With each hour that the merger grows closer, more of Earth will die.”

Sonya stood without response, squinting across the blasted flatlands. Then she started toward the faraway steel structures – knowing they housed the military complex where she would find Jax, scarcely able to believe that just days ago they had been surrounded by lush green fields of grass.

“Sonya!”

She spared a glance back at Rayden.

“I’m very sorry about Johnny,” he said. “But it wasn’t your fault. You need to remember that.”

She nodded silently, turned, and resumed walking.

The square metal plate was hot from the unremitting sunlight, and Sonya felt her palm sizzle painfully as she brushed a film of sand off it, then began prying it open. It lifted easily, black tar spurting up around its sides, revealing a thick grating underneath. She flung aside the plate and went to work on the grating, hooking her fingers through the bars and heaving upward with all her strength.

Within seconds it came loose, and Sonya was peering down into the entrance to a ventilation duct – one that was darker than any of the underground tunnels Rayden had led her through earlier.

As far as she’d been able to tell from a quick inspection of the area, it was the only way into the otherwise perfectly sealed compound.

She squatted on her haunches, catching her breath. To her immediate right, the windowless military dome gleamed radiantly in the super-heated air, its familiar appearance only emphasizing the transformation that had occurred everywhere else she looked. All around her lava moved across the terrain in burning, runny tributaries. Here and there she could see jets of steam erupting hundreds of feet in the air, spitting off glowy particles of ash and dust.

Sonya’s lips tightened into a resolute line. She couldn’t afford to stay out in the open much longer. Not unless she wanted to be spotted. And besides, it couldn’t be any worse inside the base than where she was right now.

Right,
an inner voice said.
Sure thing, girl.

Without further hesitation, she slid down into the narrow shaft.

The earsplitting blare of Klaxons greeted Sonya as she slid down the shaft to the facility’s basement level, then dropped quietly from the ceiling to the floor, going into a smooth tuck-and-roll to break her fall.

Springing up from a crouch, she scanned her surroundings with cautious eyes. The alarms were at full volume down here, and though they’d been installed for the purpose of alerting security personnel, that wasn’t her concern right now. In fact, she would have found the sight of American soldiers more than welcome, given the evidence of a lethal struggle everywhere around her.

Fires burned in a nearby hallway and filled it with a spew of choking gray smoke. Doors hung off their hinges. The walls were scorched and gouged from explosions. Charred, battered steel desks lay toppled on their sides, the contents of their drawers scattered across the floor in random heaps. Whatever its source, the wave of violence that had rolled through the facility had left very little untouched.

Sonya moved down the deserted hallway on the balls of her feet, looking left and right, her trained senses keyed for any sign of enemy forces. The siren whooped with steady shrillness. She slipped around a corner, turned another, then cut into a third corridor. Now she could hear hurried footsteps and the crump of small explosions. Close, very close.

She edged along the wall, peered around another bend, and glimpsed an Extermination Patrol continuing their sweep of the base, throwing over shelves, kicking open doors, firing plasma bursts from their otherworldly weapons into the rooms beyond. Her heart racing, she waited until the group had disappeared down a T-junction and moved further into the hallway.

The sound of a mechanical voice coming from one of the rooms stopped her in her tracks. Hugging the wall again, she approached it and peered warily through the entrance.

A breath hissed out between her teeth. Inside the room, some sort of bizarre robotic ninja was hovering over a man in U.S. combat fatigues – a man who had been caught in a pulsing green energy net, the line of which was being held in the ninja’s hand. Clearly the product of state-of-the-art cybernetic wizardry, the robot’s slitted, inhuman eyes gave off the distinctive ruby red glow of optical sensors. Wearing a hooded red
gi
, it looked as if it were designed to be the perfect martial arts warrior. Emotionless, tireless, without the limitations of flesh and blood.

“I seek Major Jackson Briggs,” it said, tightening the net with a hard jerk.

Sonya watched with growing dismay. So the monstrosity was after Jax. It damn well figured, didn’t it?

The soldier produced a ragged groan of pain, but his expression remained defiant. “I am Sergeant Joseph C. Taylor of the United States Army,” he said. “My serial number is three, two, two–”

“You now cease to exist,” the cyborg said flatly, yanking the net again.

Then, as the net began to brighten and hum before her eyes, Sonya realized that the cyborg’s repeated jerks weren’t merely tightening it, but somehow
activating
it. Whatever advanced nanotechnology had been applied to its creation went to work then, its fibers tearing through the soldier’s clothes, heading straight for his flesh, buzzing louder and louder over the sound of his agonized screams...

Sonya suppressed a rise of nausea and raced down the hall. There was nothing else she could do for the sergeant. But if she hurried and found Jax before the cyborg did, maybe she could spare him from enduring a similar fate.

She sprinted from door to door, slamming open one after another, shouting Jax’s name. At an abandoned nurse’s station she rifled through the scattered paperwork, searching for documents that might reveal his whereabouts within the facility. Nothing. She flipped through a register book and tossed it aside. Still nothing. She rummaged through a stack of papers in a desk drawer, scooping them out by the handful. Zip, zilch, nada. Then something caught her eye. Over to her left. A file cabinet with alphabetized tabs on the drawers. She sprang over to it, pulled open the drawer for the letters A-G, flipped through the manila folders it contained... and found one labeled “Briggs, Jackson.” Inside was an admission form with the room number he’d been assigned.

Room 34, Sublevel 1.

“Bingo,” she murmured, and went flying down the corridor.

There were two engraved metal plates on the door to Room 34. One said
BIOTECH LAB
. The other had a circle with a diagonal line going through it over the words
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. Sonya pushed on through.

Jax, a tall, muscular African-American with skin the color of strong Ethiopian coffee, lay unconscious on a chrome operating table under muted fluorescent tubes. He was bare-chested above the waistband of his green uniform pants, revealing lightweight cybernetic sheaths around his arms from wrist to shoulder. Banks of sophisticated computer consoles lined the walls, their flat-screen displays flashing through preprogrammed numeric sequences.

Sonya moved quickly into the room and began working at his constraints.

He stirred, and opened a bleary eye.

“Sonya,” he said groggily, moistening his lips. “Would... would you believe I was just dreamin’ about you?”

“I’m not sure I want to hear about it,” she said, and nodded toward his metal-encased arms. “What the hell have you done to yourself this time?”

“Cybernetic strength enhancers,” Jax said, his eyes slowly clearing. “Takes what you got and quadruples the muscle capacity.”

Sonya frowned. “You’ve got a real confidence problem, you know that?”

He let that ride. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“The whole facility’s been trashed by an Extermination Squad. They’ll be here any second.”

“Extermination Squad?”

“All you need to know is they’re trying to kill me. And you.”

“Me? What the hell’ve I done? And where have you been, anyway?”

This time it was Sonya’s turn to ignore his comment. His questions could wait, the important thing now was to get on the move. Yet no matter how hard she strained against his metal bonds, they weren’t budging.