Shadows of Olympus (Universe in Flames Book 6)

by Christian Kallias

  It’s the Earth year 2175 and these fanatics are still as disillusioned as they were when they started their campaign of terror at the dawn of the twenty-first century. You’d think they’d learn. You’d think they’d understand that we won’t let them terrorize us with their fear tactics. I sure won’t.

  The first thing I notice is that there is nowhere enough heat from the explosion of the missiles. And the fact that I can see the flames and not feel them is a dead giveaway. They’ve been stopped by a shield. Like I was almost certain they would be. I see Ahmed with his arms extended in front of him. He’s extended his personal shielding to cover not only himself but most of the roof, making sure his escape vehicle is protected as well. I am in awe of the level of technology this scum has managed to equip his body with. This is not going to be an easy fight.

  “You’re right there; you need to reload or let him leave,” says TAINHA.

  “Let him leave? Be serious, will you?”

  “Cole, your power levels are at nineteen percent. In expanding his shields the way he did Ahmed consumed twenty-three percent of his own power reserves, but that’s still an unfair fight.”

  As much as I hate to admit it, she has a point. I look around and find a power conduit panel.

  “You’re not seriously considering what I think you’re about to do?” she says with a trembling voice. “You could fry yourself and most of my systems at the same time.”

  “Desperate measures,” I say as I use my super-strength augment to rip the power conduit panel and plunge my hands through the 50,000-volt conduits.

  “Please, Cole, don—” but her voice cuts off the moment I make contact.

  To say this was the scariest and most painful experience I have ever felt would be an understatement. And for a millisecond, I think she might have been right. I lose access to some of my systems on the spot. I can plug into 10,000-volt power streams easily, but 50,000 thousand is a good margin over what my recharging circuitry is meant to handle. I don’t give a rat’s ass. I can’t afford to have Ahmed escape me one more time, not again.

  Automatic security features kick in and I get ejected from conduit and crash onto the floor. When I open my eyes I see smoke rising from my body. I hear her but she’s garbled.

  “In the name . . . bzzz . . . were you think—bzzz . . . crazy feck!” This is followed by some strong static that quickly dies back into silence.

  She sounded pissed, and I can understand that. But I have a terrorist to kill. I need to cut the head of the snake, the head of one of the last Jihadist groups in existence. Allah’s Angels Freedom Army.

  Angels, my ass!

  My power level gauge is at one hundred percent but I get dozens of overload error messages that I choose to ignore. When I rise back to my feet I can see lightning bolts still sizzling upon what’s left of my armor and black, torn bodysuit.

  The commotion has attracted unwanted attention but that was unavoidable. I hear Ahmed shout something in Arabic. As always TAINHA translates all of this on-the-fly for me: “Kill the infidel!”

  Not in a million years, I think to myself.

  TAINHA is silent now. I think I must have fried her communication circuits. I can’t run diagnostics now, not with three soldiers running towards me, unleashing blaster fire with less than accurate precision. But then I realize something. Even though I’m not in bullet-time anymore, I must have activated a bunch of nanites with the electric shock, ’cause I can see the blaster fire approaching and I dodge the shot, jumping and whirling in the air like an Olympic athlete. When I land from my last stunt I activate super-speed. I punch through the air like a supersonic bullet and soon I’m upon my first foe. I grab his blaster rifle and turn the muzzle towards his head. Before he understands what the hell just happened, the sky is filled with blood, bones and brain parts. I lose no time and run towards the other two soldiers, activate my repulsors still in thruster mode, and fly over them. I backflip in the air on my way down, increasing my velocity even more. When I feel I’m near them, I slash both my arms on my sides, activating my forearms’ blades implants and cut both heads clean off.

  When I land with one knee on the ground, I can hear their bodies and heads impact with the ground. One of the heads rolls in front of me, a look of utter terror on the bloodied face.

  I rise up and kick the head towards Ahmed like a soccer ball; thanks to my super strength it flies there very fast. He deflects it with one of his arms.

  “Ahmed!” I scream. “You’re next.”

  He laughs out loud as the remaining two guards flee the scene. They clearly don’t feel like measuring up with me. He shoots them in the back with his own repulsor weapons. They are incinerated on the spot as he mutters something in Arabic that I don’t quite catch with all the commotion. As the F-235 soars nearby and breaks left for another pass, the turrets on Ahmed’s heavy transports spring to life, acquire the jet fighter and quickly dispatch it with powerful volleys of plasma fire, cutting through its wing and sending it to crash and explode into another skyscraper nearby. The explosion incinerates at least four floors. Casualties will be high, but these council feckers shouldn’t have tried to take things into their hands. They either trust in my abilities to complete my mission or face the consequences of their dumb-ass, chicken-shit posture.

  I brush the thought away. I still have someone to kill.

  I rush towards Ahmed who’s already in a defensive posture. I grab my nano-blade and try to activate it but nothing happens. I fried the damn thing a minute earlier with my reckless flash recharge. While it was to be expected, I arrive upon him in the middle of a slashing move without my blade being deployed. Ahmed is taken by surprise but was already ducking to dodge my attack. As he quickly realizes what has happened, and before I can regain my balance, he grabs my arm and smashes me into the ground. Chunks of concrete are dislodged and fly in the air as I feel a tremendous amount of pain travel down my spine.

  As he stumps his foot towards my face in an attempt to crush me right there, I spin on the ground just in the nick of time, use both my hands in super speed and super strength and catapult myself upwards towards him, both feet aimed at his face. He is unprepared for that move and I hit him squarely in the jaw, throwing him back a good ten feet. Somehow he manages to stay upright. A little blood drips from the corner of his mouth, but he still smiles back at me.

  He wipes the blood with the palm of his hand while I grab a piece of dislodged concrete from the ground and throw it full force at his face. He then uppercuts the projectile and turns it into dust, but he doesn’t realize I’m already upon him by the time the dust cloud clears out. I throw a powerful jab at his lower left ribs, and his armor takes the brunt of the attack, but I know from his facial expression that this blow, enhanced with my super-strength augment pushed to its maximum, has hurt him. In fact, I hear the satisfying sound of his ribs getting broken.

  I push my advantage forward; I grab him by his hair and introduce his head to my knee, making sure the blow is as powerful as it can be. Seeing a couple of broken teeth and blood fly through the air as a result is extremely satisfying. I don’t know if it’s because he almost incinerated hundreds of thousands of innocent lives today with the nuke I managed to diffuse, or if it’s something else, something deeper within myself that I don’t want to acknowledge. One thing is for sure: I feel a thirst for this man’s blood. Not only do I want to kill him, but I take pleasure with every blow I land.

  I push my thoughts to the side as I continue pounding on him more. I decide to work with his body now, inflicting as much internal damage as I can muster while I have the upper hand. He tries to dodge and block my blows but he is always a step behind. I time them in such a way that each new blow hits before he has time to recover from the previous one. That’s when I start to see fear in his eyes. He knows he is in trouble.

  Good!

  But then in the middle of my next combo, his speed increases. He probably overclocked his augments in order to keep up with me. And keep
up he does as pretty soon none of my blows manage to hit him anymore. He expertly dodges, blocks and counters my attacks. I go for a low, sweeping round kick, hoping the sudden change of tactic will throw him off. Big mistake. He jumps out of the way with ease and I can feel him atop my now defenseless position. I don’t know what I feel first, flying through the air or the intense throbbing pain in my cheek as a result of his powerful kick. I almost lose consciousness.

  I realize in mid-air that I probably fried so many of TAINHA’s systems that I will probably be on my own for the rest of this fight. Part of me dreads the thought and part of me enjoys the fact that I have to win this on my own. I also know full well this could be my ego speaking, and that could be fatal if I underestimate my opponent. Speaking of underestimating my opponent, it is clear that Ahmed isn’t doing so with me. I can see him run towards me, raising his palm to incinerate me with his repulsor weapons as I crash onto the ground on my already wounded shoulder. The pain is excruciating; more than it should be, in fact. I probably damaged the nanites assigned to lower feedback from my pain receptors as well.

  That’s when I decide it’s time to throw him a curveball before he can try to turn me into charred meat. I can hear his weapon humming when I spring into action. Fortunately my automatic targeting systems are still operational. Without them, pulling what’s coming next could be tricky at best. I throw two of my guided shuriken. Their edges are a nanometer thin, and made of the same material as my nano-blade. Each lodges right in the center of his repulsor weapons that were turning red hot, ready to incinerate me. Instead of firing deadly plasma at me I see sparks bursting out of them.

  Try incinerating anything now, asshole!

  I jump back to my feet and while Ahmed is looking at the damage and removing my shuriken from his weapons, I send him flying with a powerful reverse roundhouse kick. I have no doubt he is equipped with nanites that will mend the damage I have inflicted on his tech. But it will take time, and I fully intend to end his life before that time has come. I grab my last sonic grenade and throw it at him before his body hits the ground from my latest blow. I close my eyes and cover my ears, doubting that my augments will negate the effect of the grenade at such close range after everything I put my augmented body through earlier.

  It detonates an inch under his body and he is catapulted into the air, spinning wildly. He is at least thirty-five feet in the air when I activate my dagger-claws implant. Four long and highly sharpened blades spring to life from my right hand.

  Time to finish this.

  I quickly crouch, divert all power to my super-strength leg implants and launch myself into the air after him.

  Ahmed is still spinning when I reach him. He flings an approximate kick at me, trying to send me back down, but I see it coming a mile away. I grab his extended leg and use it as an athlete would a support beam. I jump upwards and summersault over him. When I’m done spinning I thrust with claws deep in his back, the claw blades traveling through his flesh, bones and armor. The pleasure I get from this is intense.

  “That’s got to hurt,” I say, grinning ear to ear.

  We’re now plunging back towards the roof of the building. My claws are still dug into Ahmed. His time has come. I feel the urge to prolong his suffering, but many of my augments are sending me superimposed visual warnings, so much so that I need to de-activate my neuronal HUD. It’s too distracting, like an over-decorated, madly blinking Christmas tree. I crouch on top of his back to prepare for landing and retract my claws just before impact. The blades are coated with his bright crimson blood. I use his body as a skate board as we skid on the ground for another ten feet, leaving a trail of his blood in our wake.

  That should do it. Now I can finally finish him off.

  I step off him as I magnetically unlock my secondary blaster rifle off my back armor plating and check its charge and functions. He painfully rolls on his back, half of his face disfigured from the skidding on hard and coarse concrete. That makes this fight, this execution, all the more satisfying. But then he starts laughing through the pain as blood bubbles from his mouth.

  “What is so funny, asshole?”

  “You are . . . you think you’ve won.”

  “Need a mirror to see what you look like now? I have stopped your plan and I have beaten you. Laugh all you want, but these are your last moments on this Earth, so please, be my guest and enjoy them, all twenty seconds of it,” I say as I aim my blaster rifle nozzle at the middle of his head.

  I charge the weapon to max settings. It takes a few seconds of humming. It’s a little slower than usual, probably because of the power overload.

  “Any last words?”

  Ahmed tries to speak but instead he coughs a large amount of blood. Eventually, he manages to mutter, “You think you are doing good but you couldn’t be . . . more wrong.”

  I shake my head from side to side as he continues.

  “The megacorporations are using . . .” he coughs some more blood. “You . . . They probably told you that you are preventing my attacks by . . . ugh . . . traveling back in time. But you aren’t. Somewhere . . . sometime . . . I have blown that building and that city into a hellish inferno and you weren’t there to stop it.”

  He attempts to smile. From the amount of blood he has lost, I figure finishing him off by blowing his head to bits is probably just for my own satisfaction than real necessity. I decide I’m gonna enjoy that moment nonetheless. It’s been years since this asshole had first escaped me. Sure I always managed my primary target to prevent his plans for mass destruction on our planet. But could he be right? Could I travel to another timeline when I jump back after preventing his actions? Not only am I not versed in time travel physics, but the whole thing gives me a headache, even when TAINHA tries to explain it in the simplest of terms. All I know is I get a mission objective, and I always deliver. That’s my job and, since my wife passed away, it’s actually been my whole life. Today is no different, except this time he won’t escape and I won’t have to stop his next attack. Another zealot with thirst for martyrdom and fame will take his place, of that I have no doubt. But the life of Ahmed Al’Hasi ends here and now.

  I spit on him. “You will say anything to plant doubts in my head. Your kind of an expert at brainwashing others, but I’m not your usual weak-willed suggestible mind.”

  “One day . . . you’ll understand.”

  “But that day is not today. Time to say goodbye, I’m afraid.”

  The blaster is at full charge; at this distance and supercharged level, the blaster will incinerate his head and probably most of his upper torso. I relish the thought of depressing the trigger.

  “Cole?” he says in between coughing more blood.

  “We’re done talking.”

  “Goodbye. Till next time, that is,” he says.

  I hear a buzz of static inside my head. Could it be TAINHA?

  “There won’t be a next time ass—”

  Before I can finish my sentence, something hits my throat at extreme velocity. I can feel it traveling through my neck from side to side, and I can’t speak anymore. I try, but I feel a viscous liquid in my throat and a taste of lead.

  Was I just hit?

  Ahmed smiles from ear to ear and I re-aim the gun and depress the trigger but I’m too late. He kicks it out of my hands the moment the blaster shoots. It creates a crater in the concrete a couple of feet away from his face.

  I put my hands on my neck and feel both the entry and exit wound. I turn in the direction of where the shot came from. I use my vision augment to zoom, for a mile, then two, then five. That’s when I see him. A sniper is lying down on concrete atop another skyscraper, the sun reflecting into his visor. I try to activate emergency healing nanites but they don’t respond. I get an error message instead. I deep fried them, no doubt. TAINHA was right. I’m insane, and it looks like I’m also about to die. The thought sends my brain into a weird mixture of terror and satisfaction. On the one hand I can’t fathom how pissed I am at fail
ing to kill Ahmed, even though I have managed to stop him incinerating New Geneva. I was a few seconds away from removing this scourge from this world. And then, another sensation superimposes itself on my mind: that the fight is over, that it is the end, and that I will rejoin my wife in the afterlife, if there is such a thing.

  He rises to his feet painfully, his nanites already mending his wounds, but I can’t say the same about my own body. I shouldn’t have used bullet-time earlier. That’s what I get for not listening to my instincts. It should have been kept in reserve for this, like I planned it. I would have heard the smart bullet that hit me if I had. I only realize I have fallen to my knees when I look back at Ahmed who is now looking down on me.

  “As always it’s been a pleasure, my friend.”

  I want to scream back at him, to tell him I’m not his friend and that I’m gonna rip his heart out and shove it down his throat, but instead I feel bubbles of blood expanding and bursting from the holes in my neck.

  “I’m afraid your last words will have to be silent ones. Farewell, Agent Cole Seeker.”

  He lowers his face and puts two fingers on his temple, then waves them away as if to say goodbye.

  He turns away and starts walking towards his ship, the loading ramp of his craft lowering automatically upon his approach.

  The amount of rage boiling inside me is beyond anything I have experienced. Our fight has been so quick I could have taken him with my twenty percent or so reserve with fully functioning augments. I would be healing from this wound right now if I had. But it’s too late. I can’t change the past, not if I die on this roof anyway. The irony is not lost on me though. I’m a time traveler agent whose sole purpose is to try to change the past to make a better future. I try to engage the emergency recall. I never had to use it and I never wanted to . . . It would mean acknowledging I have failed my mission. But I can’t seem to access this augment either. Not that it would do me any good; the response team in charge to evac and time travel me back in time would probably not make it before I draw my last breath, which is now very near; I can feel it.