by James Axler
Brigid sprang back up to her feet, targeting the two figures as they charged her. The first reeled back at the hail of bullets, but the second reached near enough to throw his weapon, launching it across the space between them like a spear.
Brigid saw the metal shaft glint with the red radiance of the furnace as it sailed toward her, and she sidestepped just in time to avoid its impact. Then she was moving again, sprinting toward the remaining Gene-ager, ejecting the empty clip of the TP-9 as she ran.
A moment later she was on top of the false man, and she brought her knee up in a swift jab at his groin. The Gene-ager took the strike without reacting, reaching for Brigid as she tried to pull away. His arm snagged her right shoulder, pulling down to prevent her using the semiautomatic pistol. Brigid didn’t care—the weapon was empty right now, which meant it was little more than deadweight until she could reload it. Instead, she brought her left arm around, flattening the palm like a knife and using its side to strike a blow to the slave’s throat. The Gene-ager’s eyes bugged as he felt the blow, and his grip on Brigid slackened for a fraction of a second.
That fraction was enough. Brigid pulled her right arm free from her assailant’s grip and spun away in a graceful pirouette.
The Gene-ager recovered from the blow to his neck, rubbing at his throat with annoyance. Then Brigid dropped low, snagging her left leg behind his and flipping him onto his back. The Gene-ager toppled back, kicking out as he slipped over the side of the catwalk. In a second, he was tumbling down into the artificial lake of water that waited beneath the door in the wall, colliding with it in a great splash. Brigid watched for a moment as the replica man flailed in the water, struggling to keep himself afloat. There was no time to wait to finish him off. She had to keep moving.
Brigid was not a killing machine, but she could kill if she needed to. More importantly, these semi-men were some kind of clones; she was sure of that much, and while she didn’t have the full story yet, she trusted her instincts enough to dispatch them without it weighing on her conscience. Whatever Wertham was doing, she had a nasty feeling that bumping off a few artificially grown men would pale into insignificance by comparison.
* * *
THE ROYAL PALACE came into view through the lightracer’s windshield like a behemoth rising from the sea. The structure took up a whole city block, and with the lights of the city out it looked all the more ominous as if it waited for them to enter and challenge it.
Kane muttered a curse as King Jack pulled the lightracer to a stop, the braking mechanism just as noiseless as the engine had been at full speed. “You’ve really got to warn us when you’re going to do that,” he told the king as he swallowed the bile that had appeared in his throat.
“Sorry, fellas,” King Jack said amiably. “I clean forgot the two of you didn’t have a velocity belt between you.”
Kane didn’t know what a velocity belt was, but he guessed it was some kind of gravity dampener, similar to the one used in the Mantas to prevent a pilot blacking out while traveling at very high speed.
The front of the lightracer peeled away like a waterfall, and Jack clambered from his seat and out onto the street. Kane followed with Grant pulling himself free of the space he had been wedged in during their rapid trek across town. Grant stood for a moment, bent over with his hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath.
“You boys up to this?” Jack asked, looking from Grant to Kane.
Kane nodded as he reloaded his Sin Eater, tossing the dead clip into the driver’s seat of the spear-shaped vehicle. “Yeah, let’s get you seated back on the throne.”
Behind Kane, Grant reloaded his own Sin Eater, as well as his Copperhead, and together the three men hurried up the grand steps that led into the palace.
* * *
THE TITAN CAME awake at Wertham’s command, the designer’s mental faculties charging his masterpiece.
The Titan waited deep in the cavernous recesses of the Doom Furnace, where it had clung for seven centuries in the timeless void of the quantum rift, poised like a nesting bat. It looked like a man, or a mockery of a man, dressed in armor plate that shone despite all its years of neglect. Nothing rusted in the nonspace of the quantum rift, nothing aged, not really. Only people became older, and the residents of Authentiville had even found a way to get beyond that.
The Titan wore armor the color of the sunset and a helmet that towered high over its head like a hood. As Wertham sent the command to engage, lights came to life across its towering crown, and its eyes glowed a deep, fiendish red that lit the cave around the furnace as brightly as the furnace itself. Each arm on the mighty battle suit was ninety feet in length, each leg a hundred feet. Its fingers were large enough that a man could stand on just one of them, and a single clenched fish was enough to crush a modest-sized building.
The expression on the face was fixed in a grimace, with down-turned mouth and scowling eyes.
Wertham could feel through the suit, sense the world coming alive around him as the Titan—or more properly, the Target Invasion, Total Annihilation and Negation suit—powered up after seven centuries of waiting. The Titan itself knew nothing of this stretch of time—it could have been built just a week ago or a million years ago, it didn’t matter. All it knew was the mind that sat within its shell, and that was all it would ever know.
At a single command, the Titan began to move, mighty limbs shuddering as it rose from its seven-hundred-year nest in the shadows. The eyes surveyed the cavern by the furnace, watching emotionlessly as Gene-ager slaves scrambled out of its path. High above, the fleet was amassing, ready to go to war.
Through the eyes of the colossus, Wertham saw the rainbow swirl of the quantum pocket where lightning played, ever at a distance from the golden city that had hid there for a millennium. The Titan suit could feel; every inch of its armor body, every ounce of its armored flesh felt in a way that defied description. Wertham needed the drugs just to enter this trance, to give himself enough senses—nine in all—to function within the artificial body. Only he could do this, only he could control it.
With a single command, the Titan disengaged from the floor and began to rise, levitating on the field of birth energy that had waited all these centuries to be engaged.
* * *
BRIGID WAS AT the outside door of the laboratory when she heard the rumbling beneath her. She stepped away from the door and walked to the lip of the rocklike walkway, peering over the edge. What she saw made her heart race.
There, rising on a tide of energies, was a gigantic man dressed in red armor. She ducked back as he came crashing through the walkway, shattering it. Brigid cried out as the walkway snapped in two, the floor dropping away from her as she ran back to the doorway of the hanging laboratory. She reached out, grabbing the door handle with her free hand, hanging on for dear life as the walkway crumbled away beneath her feet.
Within moments, all that was left of it was a semicircle around the door, jutting out just nine inches from the wall. Using the door handle for support, Brigid stood there on tiptoe as the armored figure hurtled past like a launching rocket, a fantastic cushion of energy trailing and propelling it from deep inside the structures of the Doom Furnace.
Brigid watched, hanging from the door, as the figure ascended. Its proportions were almost more than she could contemplate. It towered at least two hundred feet in length, head to toe, perhaps more. It was hard to tell because it was moving so fast. Brigid watched as the Titan rushed up into the sky, joining the rest of the fleet that had gathered there.
“What the heck have we gotten ourselves into?” she muttered as she dragged the door open and pulled herself from view.
A moment later, Brigid was inside the corridor leading to Wertham’s laboratory, the reloaded TP-9 held ready in her hand.
* * *
WERTHAM EXPERIENCED THE sense of being born as the Titan s
uit ascended into the sky above the Doom Furnace. Through the eyes of the armor, he looked left and right, admiring the invasion fleet he would lead to planet Earth.
With a single mental command, he began to drift, floating on the cosmic tides, fluttering away from the golden city of Authentiville like a feather on the breeze. A million tons of smart metal—the same substance that had been discovered on the skin of the Annunaki sky disks, which could expand and contract as required—dropped from the impossible city into the rainbow swirl of the quantum night, plummeting into the opening maw of a parallax point.
Target: Earth.
Chapter 30
Serra do Norte, Brazil
“What the hell is that?” Edwards barked, drawing everyone’s attention.
The investigation team had moved from the area where the alien lifeboat had been buried, trekking closer to the spot that Roy Cataman had identified with the parallax point in the sky. It was unspoiled forest here, green and lush with the call-and-response birdsong playing through the air from the middle distance. Cataman, Mariah and Sinclair turned at Edwards’s surprised shout.
“Up there,” Edwards told them. “Where the prof says our parallax point is.”
Something glistened in the sky like the morning star.
Edwards was already delving into his backpack for his binocs, a confused scowl darkening his sun-reddened face.
“I see it,” Cataman said. “Shining. What is it?”
Edwards had his binoculars to his eyes now, their strap dangling beneath his chin. Sinclair drew her own pair from her field kit and whipped them up to her eyes.
Through the magnifying lenses, Edwards and Sinclair viewed the glistening point in much more detail. It appeared to be a circular pattern holding position in the sky about a mile above them. The pattern was a luminescent white, and its glow was a little like looking into a lightbulb, burning a brief afterimage on the retina. The circle was broken into sections and it spun continually as it held in place, the outer and inner circles rotating in opposite directions. Around its edge, symbols appeared to be written in the very air itself.
Sinclair whistled, handing her binocs to Cataman. “Looks like I don’t know what,” she said, shaking her head.
Cataman took the binoculars and held them briefly to his eyes before handing them back. Mariah was already busy setting up their computer equipment on a flat expanse of ground, using a blanket to protect the computer base. Cataman leaned down and tapped the screen, commanding it to run an analysis on the phenomenon in the sky. The distance was too great to get much info, he knew, but they had to do something—especially if this was the conclusion to whatever was happening out here.
While Cataman worked the computer, Mariah grabbed the field glasses and turned them to the sky. As she looked, she let out a gasp. “There’s someone up there,” she said.
“Yes,” Edwards confirmed. He continued peering through the binoculars, but even without them the others could see the glowing circles fade from existence and the silhouette of a man plummet out of the sky, feet first.
“You told us not to jump to that parallax point without securing a landing platform,” Sinclair reminded Cataman. “Whoever was up there could have done with your advice, no? That’s one heck of a drop.”
“Over a mile,” Cataman agreed, thumbing through a plethora of screens on his computer terminal as he mentally processed the early data.
Mariah gasped again. “Then...they’ll die,” she said with evident concern.
Levelheaded and practical, Edwards was already engaging his Commtact to report what he could see. It took a moment for his communiqué to patch through to Cerberus, and the reply came through distorted.
“—ay again, Edw—?” Brewster Philboyd’s voice stuttered. “—can’t g—”
“I said we got something here appearing right out of that parallax point,” Edwards repeated, speaking quickly to get the information across.
“Copy that,” came Philboyd’s reply, marred by the hiss of static. “We—ooking at same now.”
Overhead, the figure in the sky was dropping to earth in a straight line, feet first as it fell.
“What if it’s Domi?” Mariah asked. “Or Kane? Or...”
It was impossible to guess the plummeting figure’s identity from this distance, but one thing was clear. This was not a controlled approach—the person was simply falling.
“It’s not Kane,” Sinclair said as she scrutinized the distant figure through the binoculars. “Not unless he’s wearing a suit of armor.”
“Ain’t Domi, neither,” Edwards confirmed, focusing his own binocs on the figure. He could see it now, as could Sinclair. The figure in the sky was masculine and it wore a radical suit of armor. The armor was a deep orange like the setting sun and included a towering headpiece that doubled the height of the man’s head. And there was something else about the figure, too, Edwards realized as it plummeted toward them.
“That ain’t a man,” he said, whipping the binoculars from his face. “It’s too darn big. Everybody clear the area. We need to get out of here, right now.”
That was all the warning they needed. Professionals all, the group grabbed what they could and started to run, with Edwards bringing up the rear, the Beretta back in his hand from the shoulder rig he carried it in.
“What is it, Edwards?” Mariah asked between ragged breaths. “What did you see?”
“We made a mistake,” Edwards told all of them. “Assumed something ’cause of the distance. But that thing’s a whole load bigger than a man. More like a ville tower.”
A great shadow in human shape seemed to grow from nowhere behind the Cerberus survey team, darkening the foliage and ground like the ink of a tattoo. With every second, the shadow became larger still, until it was impossibly huge, stretching out across a vast acre of land. At the same time, the sound of the hurtling figure grew from an almost subliminal whine to a roar of rushing wind like a hurricane.
Mariah stumbled, and as she did she took a peek back over her shoulder to see the falling man properly for the first time. He was so large he obscured the sky, more like a toppling skyscraper than something human. It appeared to be a gigantic robot, a fixed expression cast on its face, glowing red eyes searing out from beneath a stylized brow.
Mariah gasped as the colossus sank beneath the tree line and out of her line of sight.
“Just keep running,” Edwards instructed, shoving one hand between the geologist’s shoulder blades and forcing her to move faster. “Cerberus, we have a problem!” he added, engaging his Commtact link.
Behind them, the enormous figure slammed through the highest branches of the trees, wrenching wood and leaves away as it plummeted to the ground. Birds cawed and took flight, other animals shrieked and ran, and the nocturnal creatures awoke with hideous yells of fear.
And then, for a single instant, everything seemed to fall utterly silent. Mariah, Edwards, Sinclair and Roy stopped and turned back, watching where the thing had fallen behind the line of trees.
The silence was followed by a noise like thunder, so close, so loud that it shook everyone in the vicinity right down to the core. The Cerberus field team was thrown to the ground by the aftershock, while uprooted trees toppled and fell. A massive flock of birds took flight and great lightning-shaped scars appeared across the earth, ripping holes in the ground with the power of the shock wave. The world armor had landed.
Bitterroot Mountains, Montana
THE SATELLITE IMAGERY was unambiguous. Lakesh stared at the live feed with a sinking feeling in his gut. There, standing in the midst of the forest, was a figure so tall it was almost impossible to picture.
Farrell sat at his desk, working back through the recorded footage of the event. “Damn thing appeared out of thin air,” he confirmed with irritation. “One minute it’s clear skies, nex
t we have the dang Colossus of Rhodes on our doorstep. Relatively.”
The satellite cameras had been poised when the figure had arrived, prompted by Roy Cataman’s assertion that there was a parallax point up there in the sky. On screen now, Lakesh could see the circle of lights wink out as the figure itself materialized.
“Backtrack a little,” Lakesh commanded, patting the top of Farrell’s monitor with his fingers. “Let’s look at the moments before the object appeared.”
Farrell did so, rewinding the footage to just before the colossus began its descent. Lakesh leaned closer, scanning the twin circles of light that seemed to rotate in the air. The overhead camera of the satellite was looking directly at and through them.
“They must be a quarter mile across,” Lakesh stated incredulously. “Freeze-frame and bring us closer.”
Farrell tapped an instruction into the computer and the image froze on screen. Another tap and the circles magnified and recentered. They had lost some detail, but close up it was clear that there was some kind of patterning across the outer ring. Lakesh nodded slowly as realization dawned.
“Sumerian pictograms,” Lakesh said. “Glyphs, icons, whatever you wish to call them.”
Farrell looked up at Lakesh, brows raised in surprise. “Dr. Singh?” he asked.
“Just thinking aloud,” Lakesh said, but he was clearly working something through in his mind. “If that portal is Annunaki controlled then it could mean...” He stopped, unable to finish as he realized the dark implications of what he was suggesting.
“Surely Enlil couldn’t have risen from the dead,” Farrell stated, recalling the most vicious Annunaki overlord who had been an ongoing thorn in the Cerberus operation’s side until the recent God War.
Lakesh fixed him with a grim stare. “The Annunaki have ways of reviving themselves from even a deathlike scenario,” he said bleakly. “If this parallax point leads to a hidden base of theirs, then our colleagues are in even more trouble than we assumed.”