by James Axler
During his flyover and hover, his augmented vision had swept for a mile in every direction, and though the men and women of Cerberus had been lauded for their physical prowess, there was no way they could have run as far and as fast as this.
That meant that they were present but had rendered themselves all but invisible and undetectable thanks to the optic camouflage technologies of their shadow suits. Without heat signatures and sealed airtight…they might as well have been phantoms.
Kane and his allies wanted to dictate the terms of their next encounter, which was something Charun could not allow.
The battle he’d forced Grant and Kane into had spilled back onto him and, without his armor, without his weapons, the frail flesh containing the power of his birthright was easily felled. With a body such as Grant’s, he’d be unstoppable and closer to his original height and build.
Of course, Vanth had promised that with the incredible intellect of Brigid Baptiste, he wouldn’t have to worry about shadows, mere substitute bodies. Their home world was almost open, and Charun’s hordes would bring his slumbering form across, uniting him with the flesh that he was meant for.
“Humans! I grow tired of your games! Bring me the woman Baptiste, and we shall be gone from your lives evermore!”
Charun glanced around. “No taker?”
Charun drove the handle of his hammer into the soil and then stepped away from it. “What do you want?”
“You wish a fair battle?” he called as he peeled off the headpiece of his armor. “You, seven against one?”
He began pulling out of the near-fabric-like top of his smart-metal body armor. “You wish to prove yourself against a god?”
Nothing. No one moved. He was alone and apparently addressing a field full of mouse and bird corpses, stripping himself down. His head still hurt from catching the hundreds of pounds of force Kane had developed when he was hurled violently by Grant. That impact, and the back of his head crashing against a solid stone wall, had rendered Charun insensate and helpless. All he could do was watch as Kane, Grant and Brigid had fled the arsenal to rush to the rescue of their allies trapped in the storage chamber.
“We had all seven of you under our roof. We could have snuffed you out! But that is not our way. That was not our need!” Charun bellowed.
Within moments figures were at the tree line, but Charun knew that it was merely the automatons from his own arsenal. They stood there, scanning around, utilizing camera mounts of their own to sweep for signs of the humans.
Charun initiated a telepathic contact with his Stygian pilots. Have you made any contact?
Negative, sire. We saw none. We heard none. None struck at us.
“This is maddening!” Charun frowned.
“Where could you stupid little humans have gone?” Charun asked, hoping his mockery would inspire them into stupidity.
He spent fifteen minutes, walking around, finding only empty tear-gas gren hulls and other spent casings, but there were no footprints, no spoor and no infrared imagery. There wasn’t even an active Commtact that he could use his own smart-metal armor to home in on as he pulled it back over his chest and arms.
Husband…return home. Leave the humans to wander around, confused and lost.
Vanth had a compelling point, and according to her, it would be only days, not months, until the resurgence of their portal. To crawl into Vanth’s supple, loving arms and to taste even the withered shadow of her true flesh, would be the sweetest of release, a recharge for his next encounter with the men and women of Cerberus.
His leathery wings unfurled, stretched to almost translucent tautness. They appeared as living flesh, but they were more akin to the polymers that made up the suits of his human opponents, including the ability to either carry or insulate against the electric charges necessary to produce a gravity-defying ionic field.
Charun extended his hand and the war hammer rose from the ground, cartwheeling to his grasp.
With but a thought, he was airborne, spearing into the dimming sky.
His Stygian warriors, manning the Gear Skeletons, would continue their hunt through the night. Nothing could interrupt their telepathic contact with him, and with Brigid Baptiste’s interphaser under their control in the pyramid, the Cerberus explorers were trapped and isolated.
Let the humans stew—let them fret and worry. Their ending would come, as had those of millions before who stood in the path of Charun.
* * *
KANE SCANNED HIS back trail, the growing shadows of evening being taken into account and adapted by his optic camouflage on his shadow suit. The arrival of Charun himself had been something of a surprise, especially as he hadn’t expected the demigod to be hands-on in his hunt for the humans. The trio of Stygian “snot-pilots” in the Gear Skeletons seemed perfectly capable of crushing them on their own, especially since they didn’t have the kind of fighting power that Charun had inadvertently bestowed upon Grant with his hammer. Moving with every bit of stealth and grace he had, he was a phantom.
He saw Domi motion, letting him know of her arrival at their rendezvous. They’d only traveled four hundred yards in the time it took for Charun and his bounding automatons to arrive, but it was still room enough for the seven members of the expedition to disappear into nooks and crannies of the ground, the foliage and the roots of the forest. Kane wasn’t a big fan of hiding, but in the face of opposition that could crush a human skull with the same facility that a man could crush a grape, discretion was the better part of valor.
Right now he and the rest of the team were homing in on him, following the sound of clicks he made with his tongue. It was one thing to use something high-tech, like an infrared emitter that would show up on the optics of the robots, but the noises he made were in imitation of insect chirps. Unlike Domi, the others were visible to him, but only because he knew exactly what to look for in terms of signs of motion among his camouflaged friends.
Finally the small party was reassembled, and all hundreds of yards from the towering automatons skulking through the forest for their trails.
“I can’t wait to pick up a rocket launcher and deal with those blobs,” Grant grumbled.
“Me, either,” Edwards agreed. “But how is that going to happen with the three of those things looking for us?”
“Brigid, just what was in that interphaser housing that you brought?” Kane asked.
The archivist smiled. “Oh, that little thing? I was considering different options when I had it brought in. The first thought was a fail-safe…a compact but powerful explosive device.”
“That’s what I thought when I handled it,” Kane said. “But it was still too light to be even a suitcase-size nuclear warhead, and there’s no way that anything else could have been packed in there with enough power to dissuade Charun and Vanth. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that you’d brought a regular interphaser in with the housing.”
Brigid frowned. “And what would the purpose of that be?”
Kane smirked. “You brought in a working, full-powered interphaser so that the cavalry could be called in. At the same time, the extra mass has something to do with a jammer. A frequency jammer to do to Charun and Vanth what they’ve done to our Commtacts.”
“I triggered the countdown for the broadcast of that frequency the moment I found you two,” Brigid answered. “In five more minutes, the song of Vanth is going to disappear from the airwaves and a million people are going to awaken.”
“That could get messy,” Grant said.
“It could, if there weren’t three Spartans ready to protect them from the Stygians, and Charun’s armored minions were already occupied with us,” Brigid said.
“That sounds like a great plan,” Smaragda offered, but there was doubt dripping from that statement. “But the pilots of those armors are inside the cells hundreds of feet below the arsenal, if that’s where they put your interphaser.”
“That is exactly where they would have put the interphaser,” Brigi
d corrected. “They think it to be a dangerous weapon, and the arsenal has been constructed so as to minimize potential damage to the rest of the pyramid in the instance of an explosion.”
“But not in the instance of three Olympians being brought in through a parallax point,” Smaragda concluded. “So…”
“Blowing up the very humans we’re coming to rescue is highly counterproductive and against our ethics,” Brigid added.
Kane nodded. “I was wondering what would even the odds. But how about us?”
“Activate your Commtacts now,” Brigid said. “We should be in communication with our ride.”
“Our ride?” Edwards asked. “The only ship we have access to is a Manta back in Greece…”
“Left with the incomparable mechanic Fast,” Brigid added.
The crack of a sonic boom as the aforementioned ship entered the atmosphere punctuated Baptiste’s statement.
“Mantas can carry one, two people at the most,” Sela Sinclair noted.
“Inside its sealed cockpit? Yes, it’s at best a crowded two-seater,” Kane said. “But we’re in full-body environmental suits. Suits that allow its wearers to walk on the surface of the moon with only an oxygen attachment.”
Domi looked down, then smiled. “We can hang from the outside, on harnesses.”
Edwards chuckled. “You are almost diabolical, Brigid.”
“Almost?” Brigid asked, raising an eyebrow. “Which of you guys want to fly it? It’s being brought in via remote control.”
Kane and Edwards both pointed to Grant immediately.
“He’s the best pilot we have,” Kane added.
“Good,” Grant said. “The weapons systems?”
“Hephaestus was told not to alter them,” Brigid answered. She tapped her forearm. “You’ll have the remote piloting controls on your shadow suit forearm display.”
Grant looked down. “This looks awfully familiar…”
“Naturally. We needed you to be familiar with the operation of the Manta,” Brigid explained.
Grant nodded. “Hang on…I’m going to give us a few more minutes before the armors harass us.”
Brigid nodded. “That was anticipated.”
* * *
AS SOON AS Grant was plugged in to the Manta’s remote-control network, suddenly he was surrounded in his hood by all the displays and control layouts necessary. As he moved his hands, he realized that he was inside of a virtual cockpit, and he immediately took control of the joystick and the throttle. Even the newly mounted weapon systems were part of the computer-generated command module on the Manta. Suddenly, the Cerberus pilot was where he’d been hours ago.
And the Manta switched to hover mode, guns deploying as he flicked controls.
At the edge of the clearing the three robots of Charun and Vanth stood, looking up at the newcomer and infiltrator. They each had some form of heavy machine gun in their hands, carried as if they were gigantic rifles. Before they could do anything, though, Grant activated the Browning machine guns on his Manta, spraying the lead ship with a wave of half-inch-wide, armor-piercing slugs. While the bullets didn’t penetrate or damage the secondary orichalcum frame, the steel plates that protected the cockpit of Grant’s first target suddenly became a sieve.
Hot lead burned into the pilot of the alien-controlled robot and its semifluid body structure did not make it immune to impacts capable of liquefying armor plate. The control couch beneath the amorphous pilot was also chewed awry, the internal systems of the Stygian armor bursting apart in a wave of destruction.
Gutted by heavy-caliber fire, the robot toppled backward. The others reacted to the sudden rain of fire and doom, scrambling to evade the hovering Manta.
Grant didn’t intend to let his element of surprise get away from him for a moment, however. He hit the throttle and tore off, swooping low enough above the Gear Skeletons that they were bowled over by the Manta’s thrusters.
Sent out of control by the sudden rush, Grant swung his ship upward, armed the unaimed artillery rocket pods on the ship, then looped back toward the ground. Missiles—77 mm—ripped from the pods, and struck either directly or in close proximity to Charun’s robot minions. Hi-exes erupted with such violence, Grant could feel the tremors through the soles of his boots. He couldn’t see what was happening to the twin robots he’d hammered with artillery rockets as he swooped the Manta up and away to keep the ship from crashing.
At least not right away. Within a moment he was able to get a rear camera view of the ground, and the dust-penetrating infrared lenses saw that while the nearly invulnerable frames of the robots were still extant, everything else that had been bolted on or was sitting in the cockpit had been forcibly removed by the pressures released on detonation.
Grant swung the Manta back toward the section of wood they were placed in. Along the way, he swept the skies in the direction of Charun’s pyramid. The winged demigod was over there, but he was torn between the sudden mayhem under his roof and the violence occurring against his soldiers.
Grant brought the ship down and landed it in a clearing just large enough for the Manta. Security straps ran all along the top of the sleek ship, as well as new cowlings that could shield the riders outside from high winds.
“I was wondering why it looked and maneuvered a little different,” Grant mused as he climbed up to the cockpit. “Space for six.”
“And the pilot,” Brigid said. “There are also replacements for the less-lethal ammunition in the compartment with you.”
Grant reached in, pulling out two war bags. He took a peek in. “Real shotgun and 40 mm shells. Not the less-lethal.”
“I said replacements, did I not?” Brigid asked.
Grant grinned. “What happened to getting tired about us talking about enough firepower?”
Brigid strapped herself onto the hull. “That goes out the window when you go in my brain and make me a puppet. You can hand me my Copperhead and gren launcher when we get to the pyramid.”
Grant closed the cockpit, advancing through the pre-liftoff checklist with a broad smile.
This time, the gods were going to be the ones to feel a few thunderbolts.
Chapter 24
The wave of disorientation passed for Diana Pantopoulos and she was suddenly in a whole new area wherein old human weapons and artifacts were on display. Between her and two of her personal squadron mates was the interphaser that released them into the pyramid of Charun and Vanth. In the base of the device was a powerful transmitter that, by all accounts, should be drowning out the strange signal that had seized and controlled the hundreds of thousands of people on the Etruscan peninsula.
The three of them arrived without wheelchairs, but that was really a matter of convenience when they were around people who were taller than they were. Diana moved along on all fours, her strong arms and the stumps of her amputated legs giving her as much mobility as a young, swift monkey. Sure enough, Diana was glad to see the Spartan units up against the wall, their Sandcat armor plate chests open. So secure were the demigods that they hadn’t left guards.
Why would they? They assumed that their seizure of this pyramid had cut it off from outside interference. Brigid Baptiste and the science team at Cerberus Redoubt had been doing a lot of number crunching, mind-bending dimensional physics that allowed them to pierce the bubble of power severing the parallax point from the rest of the planet.
“This is going to suck if they emptied the guns and the rest of the gear,” one of Diana’s squadron mates pointed out.
“We’ll still have the Skeletons’ limbs,” Diana said. She snatched a handhold on the calf of one of the suits, and her well-muscled arms lifted her up. Climbing was easy, thanks to the fact that each of the amputee pilots present was a victim of lower-body trauma rather than upper-body stress. Every amputee was given hours and hours of rehabilitation training to render them able to move around, wheels or not.
Diana and her two partners, however, had been chosen for the fact that they had,
pound-for-pound, the best upper-body strength and agility of any of the New Olympian pilots.
All that time in the gym with the weight machines made Diana feel a hell of a lot better, especially as now she was back on the front lines with her fellow warriors. She swung herself into the cockpit of the Spartan with grace and ease. The interface was still intact and she plugged it into her cyber nodule.
Once connected to the mobile armor suit, she was immediately back in business. The hands of the suit closed her cockpit for her as she checked all the displays. “Charged Energy Modules at full strength, guns are loaded.”
“Same here,” called her allies. Even through the closed shells of their control nodes, they heard the cries of alarm.
Artem15 took her first steps in a long time, crossing the arsenal and stooping to see a group of slender, pallid creatures racing down the hall. Each of them bore a rifle and opened fire on her as she appeared in the doorway. Bullets pinged impotently against the armored skin of her suit, and for a moment Artem15 thought that these poor, deluded beings could be spared. Then she realized that these aliens had taken more than twenty of her soldiers captive but also had thousands more under mind control, and they were rushing to the armory in an effort to prevent any rescue attempt.
The shoulder-mounted machine guns swiveled to life at her mental command, and she rested on the knuckles of her massive hands, allowing the weapons plenty of room to fire on the aliens. The twin light weapons followed the focus of her vision, at least in relation to the view screen in front of her face, and in the next moment both of them erupted, spitting thunder and fire.
The two Stygians at the front of the formation were still cutting loose with their rifles when slashing streams of 7.62 mm bullets ripped them in two. One of the M-240s had a rate of fire of 950 rounds per minute. With two guns cutting loose simultaneously, the wall of death hacking into the pallid aliens was an obscene display of force. It took only a few seconds to turn half a dozen armed troopers to six mangled, shredded corpses lying in pools of gore and burst tissue. The slain creatures were ignored for now as Artem15 and her allies headed out into the corridor.