Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (5 page)

“Dammit! I can’t get you free, Jax!”

“Okay, stand back,” he said. “Let’s see what I’m made of...”

She stepped away from the table and watched the strength-amplifying sleeves ripple and flex almost like natural skin, their microthin circuitry interactive with Jax’s own muscles and creating tremendous ergonomic gain.

A moment later, the restraints burst apart before her unbelieving eyes.

Jax sat up and grinned, striking a hammy Charles Atlas pose. “Wish I had these in high school.”

Sonya didn’t smile back. Instead, her mind flashed on what had happened to the sergeant down the hall.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Jax slid off the examining table and they ran for the door, but halted suddenly when they heard the sound of an explosion out in the corridor. Sonya motioned for Jax to hang back and peered around the entry wall.

She instantly cursed herself for leaving Jax’s file on the nurse’s station.

That same manila folder in hand, the cyborg was striding toward her along the hallway, trailed by a substantial contingent of Exterminators. As it advanced, dozens of round, golfball-sized seeker bomblets dropped from its abdominal launch cavity, rolled across the smooth linoleum floor to the doors on either side, and detonated on contact, their plastique charges blowing in the doors with powerful, concentrated explosions. With each penetration, several of the Outworld warriors went rushing through the doorway in tight search formation.

Sonya ducked her head back inside the lab.

“Look for another way out!” she said, her eyes ranging around the room. “That thing–”

“Death is the only exit,” a synthetic voice said behind her.

Her stomach tensing, Sonya whirled and saw the cyborg and a cluster of Outworlders surge into the doorway.

“Major Jackson Briggs and Sonya Blade,” it said, its hellfire eyes glowing. “Shao Kahn will be pleased.”

“What the hell is
that
?” Jax blurted.

“I am an LK-4D4 Cyber-ninja prototype,” the robotic stalker said. “Codename Cyrax.”

Sonya was sure she wasn’t imagining its boastful tone, and for a moment wondered if that arrogance had been deliberately programmed into it. She took a deep breath, willing away her fear. She had noticed a glass supply cabinet over to her right. Noticed a chain inside the cabinet. It wouldn’t be much of a weapon against the inhuman horror in the doorway – but it beat what she was holding right now – nothing.

In one fluid motion, she backspringed over to the cabinet and smashed the glass panel with a precise snapping kick. Then she snatched the chain off a shelf, wrapped one end around her forearm, and assumed a catlike defensive stance.

The Outworlders converged around her in a closing circle. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Cyrax advancing toward Jax, knocking over the furniture and electronic equipment between them with easy sweeps of its arms.

His eyes wide as saucers, Jax watched it tear a heavy steel counter off the bolts fastening it to the floor, then hurl it aside as though it were weightless.

“Excuse me for askin’, bro,” he said, “but do I take it this ain’t something we can talk about?”

Jax got out of the way barely in the nick of time.

His question had no sooner left his mouth than Cyrax leaped at him with a flawless two-footed kick that sent him flipping over the operating table in retreat, astonished by the cyborg’s speed and agility. Springing to his feet, Jax backed against the wall, shot a glance over each shoulder, and decided there was no room to run – not fast enough anyway.

Meaning he’d have to take the direct approach.

Jax lunged at his attacker, but was knocked out of the air by a rapid-fire sequence of martial arts moves as Cyrax landed an axe kick, a front kick, and a palm strike to his chest. The cyborg followed with more punches and kicks, scoring repeated hits to Jax’s body and face. Jax tried to counterstrike, but his blows were ineffective, his unfamiliarity with the arm enhancers throwing off his aim and timing. A windmilling mallet blow intended for Cyrax’s shoulder went wild, crunching the operating table in half with a sound like a car wreck. His next punch also strayed dangerously from its target, ramming a hole in the wall... and worse than that, getting his hand stuck
inside
the hole.

As he struggled extricate himself, Sonya was making good use of her close-quarters fight training at the other end of the lab, using athletic backspring kicks and split kicks to cut through the small group of Outworld warriors. Out of the corner of her right eye she saw Jax trying to pry his fist free of the wall, saw Cyrax raise his hand for a slicing, palm-edge blow to Jax’s throat, and without concern for herself flipped between them to block the attack.

Cyrax’s response to her intervention was lightning-quick. Ejected from a concealed wrist-pod, the cyborg’s energy net fired through the air and unfurled over her head, but she eluded his trap by jumping up and grabbing hold of an exposed ceiling pipe, then swinging like a pendulum to deliver a smashing kick to the top of Cyrax’s head. Driven by her own momentum, Sonya leaped onto a lab counter, then jumped off and skillfully executed a handstand onto Cyrax’s shoulders. That move flowing seamlessly into a midair turn, she swung downward, and executed a front kick into the cyborg’s back that sent him flying across the room.

“Get rid of those stupid toys, Jax!” she shouted, landing beside him. The taste of adrenaline was like an aluminum strip across the back of her tongue. “You’re gonna get us killed.”

Jax frowned and pulled his arm backward with a grunt of effort, finally tearing it free of the wall in a shower of plaster and lathing.

The cyborg, meanwhile, had gathered itself up off the floor and was coming at them again. Having dropped her chain in combat with the Outworlders, Sonya looked around anxiously for a weapon, her gaze sliding along the counters and cabinets, roving over all four corners of the room...

Suddenly she noticed a gluey chemical spill on the floor of the lab, noticed the incendiary phosphorescent glow being generated as the contents of two shattered flasks intermingled, noticed a flaming Bunsen burner on a counter just to the left of the puddle, and decided to take a desperate chance. Her heart bucking, nervous sweat beading on her forehead, she reached for the Bunsen burner, then waited for Cyrax to get closer, closer, closer. At the last possible second she scooped up a handful of the chemical mixture, turned the Bunsen burner onto it, and silently prayed it would ignite.

In this case her prayers were answered. With a combustive flash and oxygen-devouring
floomp!
the sticky glop burst into flame, clinging to Cyrax like tar, enveloping the cyborg in a fiery cocoon. A moment later it reeled backward to the floor, shedding brilliant orange firedrops and blobs of steel-blue smoke.

Jax stared down at the charred, shoring-out monstrosity, his mouth agape, his nostrils twitching from the acrid odor of fused metal, synthetic skin, and wiring.

“I’ve never seen anything like this... it’s a goddamn robot,” he said.

Her hand clapped over her mouth, Sonya knelt over the cyborg’s smoking remains, examining a strange tattoo in its body: some sort of mythological-looking creature, half bird and half lizard.

“Check this out,” she said, pointing to the mark. “Wonder why it’s not scorched from...”

Whatever else she was going to say was forgotten as the tattoo inexplicably came to life, lashing out at Sonya, then biting its own tail and consuming itself.

“Son of a bitch!” Jax said, and with dawning horror realized he had just witnessed the initiation of a self-destruct sequence.

The crystalline red optics behind Cyrax’s face mask had suddenly begun to blink. Then, its internal machinery whirring and clicking, small hydraulic levers unlocked on the cyber-ninja’s arms and legs as they detached from its torso, shooting out into different parts of the room. Clearly cybernetic bombs, these limbs had rotating metal rings that turned and twisted, revealing banks of LEDs. They flashed green for several seconds and then went red, blinking rapidly.

Then a harsh simulated voice issued from the cyborg’s unmoving lips: “Three minutes and counting...”

Jax and Sonya glanced edgily around the room. The cyber-bombs were now embedded in the walls around them.

“I think we better go now,” Jax said.

The two of them dashed out of the room without another word, pelting through outer corridors until they reached the ventilation duct through which Sonya had entered the complex. They scrambled into it, clawing their way upward, and had come to within a few feet from the surface when the sides of the shaft began to heave and shudder with violent rocking tremors. Urgency pressing at them, they pulled themselves out of the vent opening and ran as if hell were at their heels, plunging behind a boulder for cover. Then there was a terrific roar as the cyber-bombs detonated all at once, blasting thousands of tons of concrete and structural steel to rubble, consuming the facility in a huge toadstool of flame.

The very ground bulging beneath them, the sky ruptured with thermal flashes, Sonya and Jax huddled together in the raging heart of the destruction, hoping they wouldn’t be claimed as well.

The velosphere careened out of a dark-walled switchback, whirling wildly as it came to a stop at a dead end in the track. Seconds later, Liu and Kitana stepped out of the globe to find themselves in yet another enormous chamber beneath the earth.

“How do we get to the Hopi Mesa from here?” Liu said.

She gestured toward an arched stone bridge crossing a small, silently flowing subterranean stream. Several rock outcroppings jutted from the water under the far side of the bridge.

“We must cross that overpass,” she said.

He nodded and they started forward. All around them calcite deposits draped the stone walls in elaborate formations. High overhead, pink-eyed albino bats squealed and churned among the conical stalactites hanging from the cavern’s ceiling.

At the foot of the bridge Kitana paused and faced Liu for a long moment.

“Liu, if anything happens to me...”

“I’m not going to lose you, Kitana,” he interrupted.

Touched by his valor, Kitana smiled softly, and was about to say something in answer when she heard the loud, hurried pounding of feet. Startled, they looked across the bridge to see a large Extermination Squad surge from a passage on the opposite side, blocking the exit out of the cavern.

Within seconds the Outworld warriors had poured across the bridge and surrounded them.

Acting on instinct, Liu and Kitana assumed combat stances. The fighting was savage. A whirl of motion, Liu slammed his foes with a blurry combination of twisting side kicks, reverse wheel kicks and leg sweeps. But for every warrior that went down, another took his place. Kitana also found herself badly outnumbered. She blocked, ducked, and kicked with amazing skill, whipping razor-edged metal fans from her boots as she was attacked by a warrior armed with a
chigiriki
war staff. Moving with the grace of a dancer, slashing blurry figure-eight patterns in the air, Kitana rotated the fans around her body to hold him off, then did an evasive backward somersault onto a stone overhang. But two more Outworlders were waiting for her there – and both bore high-tech plasma lances.

Suddenly an ice pole shot down from the cavern’s roof and struck the fiercest of her opponents, knocking him off the ledge. Kitana glanced upward, her eyes widening with shock and recognition. Sliding down the pole was Sub-Zero, a blue-clad ninja she recognized from the Mortal Kombat tournament. An elemental with the power of cold, and loyal warrior of the Outworld wizard Shang Tsung, she had believed him dead, killed before her very eyes by Liu Kang.

Silent as an arctic night, Sub-Zero landed on the overhang and broke apart his ice pole with a series of sharp, focused kicks, hurling the spear-like sections at the Outworlders. They froze solid as they were struck.

Below the overhang, Liu watched Sub-Zero with a mixture of astonishment, confusion, and relief, barely able to credit his eyes. It was beyond him how Sub-Zero’s resurrection was possible, but he had no doubt at all that his appearance had turned the tide of battle. No doubt at all that the Outworlders were suddenly
afraid
.

Fighting with renewed confidence, he quickly overcame his opponents and leaped onto the rock shelf to join Kitana.

“Go, there will be others,” Sub-Zero said to them.

Liu eyed him warily. “I killed you in the Mortal Kombat tournament.”

“You killed my older brother,” Sub-Zero replied.

Liu was confused. “And still you help us?”

“No, I helped
her
.” Sub-Zero cocked his head toward Kitana. “Kahn believes she’s the key to stopping his plot.”

“You’ve been following us,” Kitana said. “Why?”

Sub-Zero was looking past her toward the bridge.

“You don’t have time to ask questions, Princess,” he said. “We–”

He looked around in dismay, his mouth abruptly snapping shut. Without warning, the earth had begun to rumble with seismic tremors. They spread and intensified with sickening rapidity, almost jolting Liu and his companions off their feet. Jagged cracks appeared in the cave walls. Large chunks of stone shook free of the ceiling and came spilling onto the overhang in a deadly hail. Before Liu’s horrified eyes, a long section of the bridge crumbled away and splashed into the spring. Then a crevice split the churning waters and a massive Outworld statue pushed up from below, surrounded by a pool of flaming lava.

Liu reeled as another spasm tore through the earth, steadying himself within a hair of the overhang’s dropoff. He backed toward the wall, breathing hard, the sound of his heartbeat swelling in his ears until it seemed louder than the tremors around him. Whether the quake had been caused by vibrations from the underground combat, the continued, violent merging of worlds, or both, he was certain of one thing – the chamber was about to come down around their heads.

“How do we get to Nightwolf now?” he said, staring at the partially collapsed bridge.