Angel of Doom

by James Axler

  Absently, Charun gave the torch blade a twirl, admiring its balance. It was nothing compared to his hammer, and yet, with it, Vanth had showed the ability to carve mountains…such as this one. The detonations of her arrows showed the sturdiness of the granite halls she’d carved through the interior of this mountain. Even after thousands of years of hibernation, this homestead stood mighty against the elements. Certainly, it had been buried under soil and rock, and entrances had to have been reconstructed by the mightiest of their Fomorian forces, but the Stygian pyramid was indeed still powerful.

  How could he have been blamed for thinking that the interphaser was some form of bomb, especially since he’d been reading that in Brigid Baptiste’s thoughts all the while he thought he had them all under his influence? Had the bomb in the housing gone off, all they would have lost would have been anything not constructed of secondary orichalcum, a mighty alloy that few powers on this planet could dent.

  And yet there was that failure to completely infiltrate and connive inside the mind of the human woman. She had managed to delude Charun and Vanth all the while making it seem as if she were their perfect puppet, even leading both of the Cerberus teams into ambush situations, trapping them firmly. The plan had been to leave them seemingly unaware of how easily they had gotten through the front door, only to be ensnared in a web spun by one of their own.

  But she’d known.

  She’d put the blocks in place to make it only seem as if they’d walked into the trap. Once there was a proper command given, the meek lambs to slaughter showed just what kind of lions they were, flattening Charun and stunning Vanth. They had lost a dozen Stygian humanoids then.

  He felt the sudden input, the shock and ache of three of his Fomori shock troops at the ramp entrance to the pyramid. All of them had died. That meant the Cerberus warriors were invading from below, making their way directly toward the throngs of mammals assembled for the purpose of housing an army of a million Stygian demons. The apes and their livestock would be transformed into the shock troops of a conquering interdimensional army, but all of that was under assault now. The kind of energy necessary to make that wormhole opening was gone.

  Their brains were freed. The whispers and murmurs of all of those minds threatened to wash Charun’s own thoughts away. Too many of them were present. The breakdown of the tethers on the sentients and even the droning thoughts of food were becoming a rising tide that menaced his individuality.

  “Vanth, my bride, I apologize for the mistake I’ve made,” Charun said.

  She was quiet now, her hands folded to her face. Maybe he had gone too far this time with his rebuke. After all, the two of them thought they had everything under control. Any failure on her part was weighted against him, as well.

  He knelt beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. “My bride…”

  “The humans,” Vanth whispered. “Angry. Confused. Do you not feel them? Hear them?”

  “Take your torch,” Charun ordered. Her eyes were bloodshot and full of tears. This was far more than Charun’s slaps, the pain, swelling and bleeding he’d inflicted upon her. This was psychic trauma. “My bride, your torch will shield your mind.”

  Vanth lashed out, her nails raking his war mask, the smart metal parting under sharpened claws of the slightly greater, far less flexible hardness. Through the rip, Charun felt the thoughts of their captives, no longer enthralled, no longer dominated by the task forced into their minds by the song of Vanth. He pressed his own war mask shut and the smart metal stitched itself closed, sealing against the external pressure of hundreds of thousands of consciousnesses.

  “Diabolical humans,” Charun growled. He pulled Vanth to her feet, pressing her mask closed. “Ignore them, shield yourself!”

  “So many…so angry,” Vanth repeated again and again. “Too much…”

  “Shield yourself!” Charun roared, pressing the edges of her ripped headpiece together in a vain effort to isolate her from the collective humanity in the pit beneath.

  “They…” Vanth began.

  She turned away from Charun, looking back from where he’d entered.

  There was Kane, standing between him and the war hammer, shotgun in hand. Grant and Brigid were behind him. Though they were clad head to toe in their shadow suits, their faces were visible through the faceplates on their hoods, and each of them regarded the pair of demigods with grim resolve.

  Charun pushed Vanth aside, wielding her torch. “There is no hope for you, mortals.”

  “If that’s so, why are you so eager to fight?” Kane asked.

  Grant touched the hammer’s handle, closing his fist around it. He gave the mighty weapon a tug and Charun watched as it wobbled.

  Brigid Baptiste’s smile was blasphemous against the Etruscan deity. “Having trouble concentrating?”

  “‘Concentrating’?” Vanth repeated.

  “What are you doing?” Charun asked, holding the flaming spire of the torch between him and the humans. He tugged on Vanth’s shoulder, trying to get her behind him.

  “Scrambling your particular brand of telepathy,” Brigid answered.

  “‘…of telepathy,’” Vanth repeated. Charun felt her nails stab through his leggings, pricking into his thighs.

  “Or you could say your frequency,” Brigid corrected herself. “The same one you’ve been using on your prisoners.”

  “‘…your prisoners.’” Vanth mouthed the words as her claws sliced into the skin and muscle of Charun’s left leg. He backhanded her hard. She barely budged.

  “No way to treat a lady, Char,” Grant said. He upended the hammer, giving it a twirl. He twisted the handle and suddenly the four-piece unit broke apart, a smaller hammer going to Kane’s hand.

  “We could do this with our shotguns,” Kane mocked. The smart metal of the hammer seemed to mold to the image of what a warrior like Kane would wield: a plain Celtic-style battle-ax, complete with swooping beard, adding cutting length and depth to the blade. For Grant, his weapon retained its hammer styling, except there was a blunt, flattened end and a spiked point at the back. “But you were so keen on Grant handling the hammer that…”

  Charun concentrated with all of his might and suddenly the two humans were spun toward each other, their weapons also spinning toward each other. This was his weapon and no mere ape would—

  Charun staggered, his concentration broken by the detonation of a 12-gauge gren against his war mask. Only the power of his armor kept him from harm, but as he staggered backward he could see Brigid Baptiste riding out the recoil on her shotgun.

  “Yeah, getting poetic with your own weapons was stupid,” Grant growled. He opened fire and Charun’s ribs received a hammering blow that sent the titan reeling once more. With a flourish, he swung the torch and a wave of heat and light smashed against the trio of Cerberus warriors, bowling them over.

  Vanth’s torch hadn’t quite put out the kind of power he wanted. Charun was too distracted, too stunned, by the onslaught to focus all of his energy into commanding the weapon. As well, it was attuned to Vanth, and her face was slack and beset upon by waking nightmares.

  “To me,” Charun growled, and the four sections of his hammer flew from where they had been dropped, reaching his hand.

  More hammering explosions peppered Charun’s broad chest, even as he wrestled his chosen artifact into its original form. “Run, Vanth!”

  “…anth…anth…Vanth,” the female demigod murmured, crawling forward on her hands and knees.

  Charun sneered as he finally assembled the hammer.

  The roar of machine guns filled the air, but Charun felt none of that. At first he attributed the lack of sensation to the puny nature of human weaponry, but a spray of blood splashed on the floor at his feet. He looked down and saw his bride, riddled with bullets, her blank eyes glazing over.

  “Vanth?” Charun asked.

  Spartan 50 lurched into Charun’s view and the angry Etruscan deity brought the war hammer up. The detonation of an explosive
spearhead shook the entire corridor, but Charun had shielded himself and his mate. Her armor was still split, torn open, and the human form she wore was riddled with bullets beneath. The frail old woman, despite being pumped with the strength of a god, had been unable to deal with the onslaught of blazing bullets punching into her.

  Charun looked up from the lifeless form at his feet, regarding Spartan 50 as his hammer’s shield burst bullets in midair against its shimmering plasma screen.

  “She died at your hands?” Charun asked.

  “It’s about time she went down,” Spartan 50 challenged. “You next.”

  Charun let the hammer lay and leaped at the Gear Skeleton. His fingers tore into the Sandcat armor around the robot’s cockpit. He roared at the top of his lungs, the same kind of nail enhancements that had drawn his blood making short work of the steel plating meant to protect the amputee pilot of the Olympian battle suit. Metal peeled and parted under his onslaught, even as the hammer’s plasma field melted the barrels of the shoulder-mounted machine guns.

  Tearing his foe’s shielding free, he looked at the amputee within. Strong arms, nubs of legs cut off at mid-thigh, a beard. He wore a simple coverall and there was little about this baby-like humanoid, this mewling ape, that distinguished him as the kind of warrior to slay a goddess.

  Even then, Spartan 50 pulled a handgun from a holster on his chest, aiming it at Charun’s face.

  “You expect me to beg?” the pilot asked.

  Bullets rang off of the facial armor of the demigod as he sank his fingers into the Olympian’s chest, shattering ribs and lacerating heart and lungs. With a mighty wrench, Charun tore the organs from his bride’s murderer, letting gore splash all over him.

  “You maniac!” came a shout from behind.

  It was Kane, and the man opened up with his Sin Eater. The hammer swatted bullets from the air, but the warrior from Cerberus emptied his whole magazine in an effort to draw blood from Charun.

  “Maniac? Maniac?”

  Charun wrenched the corpse of the pilot from its couch and hurled it as a missile at Kane, bowling the man over. “My wife is dead at the hands of your misbegotten species, and you dare insult me?”

  “Don’t use the shotguns,” Charun heard Brigid say. “His hammer is detonating any projectiles sent toward him.”

  Charun looked down at the waist of the mobile battle suit and found one of the warheads in its quiver. “Yes. If you will not blow yourself up, then I shall do the job for you!”

  Grant plucked something from his belt and rolled it low, rebounding it off the wall so it went past the demigod in his resplendent armor.

  “What are—?”

  The corridor became a ball of light and thunder.

  * * *

  THE EXPLOSION OF several spear grens, cooked off by Grant’s own hand-rolled gren, bought Brigid and him enough time to drag Kane from beneath the corpse of the murdered Olympian. Standing at ground zero of so much devastation would have totally obliterated any other creature, but the thing stood there, blinded and deafened by the multiple blasts.

  Kane grimaced as he kicked to his feet while being dragged along by his friends, and then he clapped both of them to let him know he was about to move on his own.

  “So, we’re back to shooting this bastard?” Grant asked.

  The ground shook beneath their feet. Charun had gotten his hammer back in hand and he’d tapped the floor. At several feet thick, the stone slabs that made up the structure between the levels of the pyramid were great at transmitting the kind of vibrations that rattled the three of them.

  “Well, he dealt with that amount of explosives without concern,” Brigid said. “I don’t think even the armor-piercing shells we have can do anything against him.”

  “He’s pissed,” Kane added. “We’re dealing with only one of them now, but he’s gone full berserk.”

  Grant paused as they got to the foyer. “Brigid…”

  “I disarmed it via radio,” she said.

  Grant surged up the ladder, snatching the explosive mine from where she’d placed it. He opened the hatch and got out onto the top of the pyramid. There, a few yards down from the peak, the Manta was parked.

  “Can the two of you buy me a few moments?” Grant asked.

  Brigid nodded as Kane joined them.

  “Distract him?”

  “Slow him down,” Grant said. “I’ll be in the Manta.”

  Kane gave a one percent salute to show that he was willing to follow his friend’s lead. He took Grant’s war bag.

  “Any idea what he’s up to?” Kane asked.

  Brigid nodded. “I’d rather not say anything, though. He might be listening.”

  “Through several feet of solid stone?” Kane asked.

  “I could hear you on the far side of the moon, you sniveling monkeys!”

  Charun’s rage and volume were unmistakable. Kane reached into the war bag, looking down into the hatch. The demigod strode into the open, wielding his hammer, glaring up the ladder.

  “You wish to slow me?” Charun asked. He spread his arms. “Do your worst!”

  Kane decided to oblige the ancient alien, dropping a couple of live grens down the hole. Brigid was on the lid, slamming it shut to contain the explosion.

  Kane’s teeth shook at the rumble, which seemed unusually strong for a couple of gren blasts.

  “Shouldn’t the countersignal be interfering with whatever doomie powers Charun has?” Kane asked.

  The top of the pyramid shook once more, seething and cracking under a powerful force bursting from within. Kane and Brigid lost their footing, but he recovered, bracing her from falling into a crumbling rift in the peak.

  “Let’s get off the top of this,” Brigid replied.

  Kane didn’t argue; he simply grabbed her by the waist and the two of them bounded across the growing chasm in the hilltop. As they reached the other side, another thunderous boom resounded. This wasn’t the explosives anymore. Someone was literally tearing the top off of the pyramid, and a slide of dirt and pebbles washed the two Cerberus explorers another several yards down the hillside.

  With a last, powerful surge, one section of the peak disappeared and Charun and his hammer erupted through the broken stone. His wing harness lifted him through the hole, and Kane was surprised to see that the wall he’d punched through was easily three feet thick. The hammer sparked with arcs of blue plasma.

  “Humans,” Charun snarled.

  “Maniac,” Kane returned. He brought up his shotgun as the bat-winged horror hovered.

  “Prepare to pay for your trespasses,” Charun warned.

  A moment later something bigger, darker, loomed behind the flying warrior.

  Charun looked back over his shoulder.

  Grant’s Manta hovered, ten yards from the Etruscan titan. He powered up the spotlights for the craft, casting Charun in silhouette for Kane and Brigid. Over the loudspeaker, Grant’s challenge was unmistakable.

  “Pick on someone your own size, asshole.”

  Chapter 26

  Charun hovered in front of Grant. With his armor and war mask, he was easily eight feet in height. His betusked features twisted; a face that was born of ugly hatred echoed in his actions and words over the past several minutes. The beaklike nose of the blue, pallid man-beast was set between eyes that were red and livid with a mixture of suffering and anger. Batlike wings that spread to a span of twenty feet waved and undulated. They didn’t beat, but they didn’t have to as they were more for steering, maneuvering and shielding, the actual impetus of Charun’s flight originating with a field of ionic energy that severed gravity’s grasp upon him.

  In the meantime, Grant was in a stub-winged, sleek, bronze craft that bore more than a passing resemblance to the sea creature from which it took its name. The Manta. The ship had been built for the purposes of Manitius Moon Base, but had quickly grown in utility for the explorers and warriors of Cerberus Redoubt. Not usually equipped with guns and missiles, this time it had
been so armed, as well as recently bedecked with streamlined nacelles in which it could carry passengers outside. Of course, that transport could only be done safely within the confines of a Manitius-designed shadow suit complete with its environmental seal, even under the protective windshield shells.

  Grant tilted the Manta further away from Kane and Brigid, hover jets lifting the ship from the broken peak of the pyramid.

  Charun rose, as well, but he didn’t seek to stay the same distance from the scram jet.

  “You wish to pit your flying skills against mine? In the same thing I broke when first we laid eyes upon each other?” Charun asked. His voice was loud and clear over Grant’s Commtact. Brigid’s ploy of breaking the radio jamming of Charun’s hammer, as well as the mind-clouding song of the deceased Vanth, had cleared the airwaves for such communication.

  Grant nodded, then grimaced, forgetting that his opponent could not see through the cockpit glass. “We battle in the sky. You and me.”

  Charun rolled his head back and laughed, but there was no mirth or warmth in the cacophony leaving his twisted lips. “You expect me to care enough to allow you a fair fight?”

  “I didn’t think you were that much of a coward, Tusks,” Grant taunted.

  “Maniac. Coward. Just for that, after exterminating you and your pathetic friends, I will create a death camp and slaughter millions just in response to your insults,” Charun said. With that, he burst skyward, accelerating far faster than Grant could have imagined, going from zero to supersonic in the space of instants.

  Grant let his pilot couch tilt back and he took off in pursuit of his enemy. Man and machine versus alien and nearly magical technology, and already, Grant was aware that he was behind the curve. G-forces, the results of high-velocity maneuvers and the crush of acceleration, were something Charun apparently could ignore without care. The shadow suit and the pilot’s couch in the Manta provided some compensation for such stresses, but the Etruscan demigod was taunting in the ease with which he defied physics.