by James Axler
“So, you figured that the olitiau are imports,” she said, getting a nod of agreement from Shuka.
“Or weren’t manufactured on the spot,” Kane added.
“Manufactured?” Lomon inquired.
“We’ve dealt with more than a few foes who’ve utilized biological engineering, or even stored specimens, to create foot soldiers,” Grant explained. “These could have been whipped up in some lab.”
“Shades of Frankenstein,” Nathan murmured. “Custom-built monsters.”
“How would you know what the olitiau are?” Shuka asked. “I only remember because my grandfather told me the stories of old, and he traveled far.”
Brigid turned her attention back to Shuka. “I have an eidetic memory and remember reading about them. It was in the writings of Ivan T. Sanderson, the man who first encountered the creatures. He coined the term cryptozoology and went on to seek out both real and legendary creatures.”
Shuka nodded. “Makes sense. What exactly are they? Winged apes? Dinosaurs?”
Grant shook his head. “No. Definitely not dinosaurs. Pterosaurs and pteranodons are not technically dinosaurs. And the jaws of those things are just a little too blunt even for pteranodons, which have teeth.” Grant looked to Shuka and shrugged. “My girlfriend lives close to an island inhabited by dinosaurs.”
Lomon raised an eyebrow at that, as Grant unzipped a large war bag and removed a massive weapon with a large telescope mounted on top. A small canvas satchel hung off of the side of the brutal-looking firearm. Grant opened a hatch, made sure that the belt of ammunition coming from the canvas sack was centered on the feed tray, then closed it. He gestured toward the piece. “A light machine gun.”
Grant nodded. “I didn’t think that a Copperhead had enough punch to deal with these things. I can use this as a rifle, and firing short bursts, I can engage a target flying as far away as nine hundred meters. Up close, this will punch through even the musculature of one of those monsters.”
“I’m trying to decide whether we wait these things out or confront them,” Kane mused aloud. “Baptiste...is there a parallax point outside, near enough?”
“Either a parallax point, or I could drop in with a Manta,” Grant suggested. “We hop back to Cerberus....”
“One of these days, we’re going to have to put gun pods onto a Manta,” Kane murmured. “Hang on. The creatures are moving away. Why didn’t you radio for closer reinforcements?”
Lomon spoke up again. “We had a platoon of armed men guarding this facility. Those creatures came down and wiped out trained fighters. We barely managed to withdraw to the upper levels of this facility, and it was my call.”
“You didn’t want to risk the lives of anyone else,” Kane said.
Lomon nodded.
Kane clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man. Can’t have been an easy choice.”
“We’re tucked into a vault,” Lomon said. He worked through the monitor settings, showing new camera views. The winged horrors did seem to be leaving, but his brow furrowed with concern. “Are they really retreating?”
“They probably expended too many calories trying to break in,” Grant suggested. He pointed to the camera views of blood smears, ominously absent of corpses. “Four fresh bodies isn’t going to make up for the energy exerted on breaking those doors. Typical predator behavior.”
“They seemed a lot smarter than run-of-the-mill predators,” Nathan mused. “But...it could have been that they were chasing me. Relentlessly.”
“The area beyond the vault door is clear, though,” Kane said. “I’m going to take a step outside.”
“What about me?” Grant asked.
“Stay back and be ready to open the door if they come after me,” Kane answered.
“Do you want the machine gun?” Grant pressed, but didn’t hold it out. He simply watched Kane shake his head.
“I’ll need mobility,” Kane responded. “You can run around with that thing as if it was a rifle. I can’t.”
“Be careful,” Grant told him.
Kane gave his friend a one percent salute, a touch to the bridge of his nose—shorthand for the deep, brotherly and complex loyalty that the two men held for each other when they faced overwhelming odds. “Is there a closer place to watch the monitors?”
“We’ll take you there,” Jonas said. “I want to come with you.”
“I’ve got protective clothing,” Kane responded. “This isn’t a T-shirt. It’s a shadow suit. Might not be much, but it absorbs impacts and is resistant to cutting. You’re not armored for outside.”
Brigid rummaged through her pack. “Take this with you.”
Kane looked down and saw that she’d withdrawn a small square object that hung from a neck lanyard. It was a digital camera, part of the equipment that the Cerberus explorers had started using on their journeys out into the dangerous world of postapocalyptic Earth.
“This will give us a closer look at the things, and a much clearer view than the security cameras. It’s already running, so you don’t have to fiddle with it,” Brigid told him.
Kane looped it over his neck, and a small electroadhesive patch on the back of the camera sealed it to his chest. The lanyard was simply extra support, and Kane, given the adventures he’d been on, knew that wasn’t an unnecessary precaution.
“Thanks, Baptiste,” he said.
At the vault doors, Kane stood for a moment. His long, lean limbs were loose, and his every instinct was attuned, from his five normal senses to his point-man’s instinct—a nearly preternatural awareness of danger and ambush. Something felt wrong about the big doors, the new quiet with their arrival at the Victoria Falls facility. Even so, he had his gear, and he had Grant as backup, standing ready to manipulate the huge, heavy redoubt doors.
“Baptiste?” Kane asked over the Commtact, the jawbone-mounted communicator plate.
“The lobby is clear,” she responded.
With that, Grant and Kane unhooked one of the doors and slid it open. It felt as light as a feather, but that was an illusion provided by the hinges. Both men had seen similar doors at Cerberus redoubt, and these were heavy, designed to hermetically seal the underground installations and withstand attacks of weapons at large as a small nuclear warhead.
Once the door was open just enough for Kane to walk through, he darted into the lobby, Grant swiftly hurling his strength into sealing the bank-vault-sized doors. There was a deep, metallic thump, the rumble of heavy locking bars fitting into their nesting spots.
Kane glanced over his shoulder and saw that the surface was dotted with bloody prints where fists had hammered at it. Whether the blood came from the olitiau’s split knuckles or palms, or were bloody leftovers of the Zambians they had slain, was difficult to discern. Either way, there were small dents in the surface. The things were strong, perhaps as strong as an Annunaki itself.
Which, in Kane’s experience, was more than sufficient.
“Are you reading me?” he asked over the Commtact.
Grant and Brigid spoke in unison. “Loud and clear.”
“Great,” Kane responded. They were on the opposite side of heavy, armored doors, meant to keep out the horrors of a nukecaust. Getting to him if he was overwhelmed would be a bad idea. Kane had a plan for superior enemy odds—a series of grenades hooked to his belt. As strong as these creatures might be, they were mortal enough. During the walk to the vault doors, he’d been informed that the creatures would fall to concentrated rifle fire.
So they’re only as dangerous as an enraged dinosaur, he thought. Kane and his allies had survived that kind of opposition before.
It was not the best of circumstances, and he’d taken plenty of beatings from those kinds of foes. This still felt like a risk, Kane had to admit.
He didn’t like the staff. It was proof that some
of the dreams he had during mat-trans jumps were more than just delusions, the overactive workings of a mind besieged by transdimensional space. Out here, he was free and out of claustrophobic confinement with an alien thing that murmured into his subconscious. With the actions of beings such as Balam, Kakusa, Ullikummis and other psychics touching his mind, he was growing sensitive, aware of the odd mental radiations around him when they were in use.
The staff had that kind of “feel.”
Better to go toe to toe with monstrous creatures that he could touch, rather than be mentally manhandled by an artifact that was nothing more than a hunk of metal.
“Back on the clock,” he whispered to himself.
The doorway above had been peeled open, the reinforced concrete frame smashed and cratered as steel folded and finally yielded to their attack. The door itself was down here in what the other men had called “the ready room.” Eyeballing the bent wreckage, he figured the thing must have weighed four hundred pounds, and the olitiau or the kongamato or whatever they really were they had used only their bare fists to destroy it.
Kane had the Copperhead grasped in both hands, taking cautious steps, avoiding a footfall that would betray his presence. He climbed the stairs, scanning the doorway, gauging every step of advance, looking for any of the creatures outside.
“Kane, the cameras out in the courtyard are out of commission,” Brigid said. “They just went down.”
Kane paused. He hadn’t heard any sounds, but then, if the olitiau were intelligent, they’d know enough to smother the device with their wings, or just sever video cables with their claws. Either way, someone knew he was coming.
Any element of surprise he had on his side was an illusion.
There was movement in the doorway and Kane froze, then dropped low as he spotted a hulking shadow. He hadn’t ducked below the stairs before being seen, and the figure jerked to cover as well.
First contact was going to be hard. Hard as bullets.
Chapter 5
Kane snapped the Copperhead to his shoulder, peering through the low-powered scope of the submachine gun, seeking out the shadowy figure that lurched back from the door, even as Brigid Baptiste, in contact with him through their Commtact, announced that more cameras had blinked off line.
“Kane...we’re blind out there!” Her voice was taut with urgency.
Kane advanced toward the door, eyes flitting left and right, ears peeled, listening for any breath, a scrape of a claw, the flap of a leathery, deadly wing. He spoke low, only loud enough for the surgically implanted transreceiver of the Commtact to translate vibrations into crystal-clear words. “You are. I’m not.”
Suddenly, the signal transmitted through the small cybernetic device released a squeal of feedback, and Kane jolted as if he’d been struck in the face with a hammer. With a tap of the plate, he killed the sound, but his ears were left ringing, and his head was swimming from the sonic shock. The feedback blast was strong, and more than enough to stop him cold and make him shut his eyes, if only for a moment.
When they opened, he saw the flickering motion of a braided length of leather snagging the Copperhead in his hands. A powerful tug pulled the already staggered Kane off balance, and he released the gun in order to grab the stairway rail with one hand. His other hand instantly filled with his Sin Eater as the holster shot the weapon into his palm.
The whip cracked again, a shock wave burst of pressure released from the clacker at the end of the weapon, missing Kane’s face by inches. But the sonic boom forced him to blink again, blinding him for another moment. A hand grasped his gun arm and raised it to the ceiling. Kane was about to swing a fist up into the man’s ribs when his eyes opened.
He recognized Fargo North immediately, and paused for an instant.
“Hold on, Kane,” the man said.
Kane ignored the plea and fired off a short knuckle punch that struck his adversary just above the floating rib. Air exploded from North’s mouth and nose, and he flopped unceremoniously on the floor at the top of the steps. Kane swung his Sin Eater toward the man, someone he had first met as a millennialist operative attempting to break into the city of Garuda, the home of the Nagah. While the man was a classic double dealer, without the sabotage bombs that North had planted, Kane would have fallen before the vastly upgraded Prince Durga.
As such, while Fargo North had helped the Nagah, and gained them a chance at a new ally, he had also earned intense scorn.
Kane sneered at the fallen archaeologist, then flexed his forearm, retracting the Sin Eater back into its folded position. He then reached down, grabbing two big handfuls of North’s battered leather jacket, and hauled him to his feet. Expending a little more frustration at the two-timing adventurer, he bounced North up against the concrete wall, pinning him there with a forearm across the throat.
Kane glanced toward the door. “Did you see anything outside?”
“You mean the flock of creatures with three-yard wingspans?” North asked. “Yes. That’s why I approached slowly.”
Kane turned and glared into his eyes. “You’re the one who turned off the cameras. You’ve got a skull full of those nanomachines.”
“Technically, they’re all throughout my nervous system at this point,” North replied. “But I—”
Kane took a deep breath, then flexed his fist, driving the man’s head harder into the wall. “You messed with the Commtacts.”
North blinked, then rasped, “Yes.”
“Why?” Kane asked.
“I’m trying to keep a low profile here,” North returned. “Could you let me go?”
Kane leaned in close. “Let’s see. You sneak around the door of a redoubt under siege. You knock out the cameras that could tell us if we’re being attacked. Then you not only cut me off from my allies, but hit me with feedback and a whip. Why should I let you free?”
“Because I never struck you with my whip,” North said.
Kane grimaced. “Then I would be one of the first you haven’t abused.”
“You’d be surprised,” the man replied.
“Kane?” Grant bellowed from the vault doors.
“I’m here,” Kane grunted in reply. “Turn off the jamming. Now.”
“All you had to do—” North began. Kane applied more pressure to his throat, turning his words to a wet crackle past a constricted windpipe.
“Ask?” Kane growled. “No. Now.”
“The Commtacts are clear now,” Grant and North said in unison, the stereo between Kane’s ears and the cybernetic implant adding an odd, almost ghostly double intonation.
Kane backed off of North. “Watch this asshole.”
Grant stayed where he was, but shouldered the machine gun, lining up North in the scope. “Done.”
Kane took his time checking the perimeter of the Victoria Falls substation. There was little left of either man or beast. He found a few gnawed bones that were too large to crunch and swallow, pelvises and lower vertebrae. The winged horrors must have had jaws like hyenas, able to crush through bone to slurp out the marrow, or just digest the whole thing as bonemeal. That meant they had more than just fangs; they had bone-crushing molars.
What Kane did find was spatters of blood and piles of empty shell casings befitting a battle of life or death. The place smelled of death, gunpowder and coagulation. The monsters that had struck were cruelly efficient, leaving neither their own, nor their victims behind, at least in parts larger than gnawed bones.
The forest beyond the tall fence and its concertina wire was empty. Kane scanned the branches of the canopy just to be certain, but he doubted there were any of the creatures remaining behind. Already birds and small mammals were visible on the boughs. Were there a semihumanoid predator present, it would have been out of sight, hiding. The African jungle had returned to a semblance of normalcy as wil
dlife frittered to and fro, seeking food or shelter.
He glanced toward the station house. There was a second level above the bunker house that led down to the vault doors. It had been constructed of wood and corrugated metal, but that had been smashed with unfettered violence. Mangled panels of sheet metal had been collapsed by hammer blows, and from the spray of blood across them, Kane knew that one of the Zambian guards had fought his last up there.
Kane returned to the door to see Grant still guarding North.
“They’re gone?” Grant asked.
Kane nodded. He turned toward the other man. “Why didn’t you get any attention from them?”
“The kongamato?” North asked. “I don’t know. The boat breakers had moved on, so I made my entrance.”
“Boat breakers?” Grant asked. “These things are aquatic?”
“I’d surmise so,” North responded. “They didn’t retreat into the forest, but into the rapids.”
Kane sized up North, wondering if the man was telling the truth. He recalled that Shuka had mentioned the name North referred to, the kongamato. The one thing Kane didn’t care for was the archaeologist’s arrival so swiftly on the heels of their attack. “Why are you here?”
“The same reason you are, I presume,” North said. “I sensed the awakening of the Nehushtan.”
Kane’s lips drew into a thin, bloodless line. “I swear, if you’re behind those monsters attacking this place...”
“No. I’m not,” North replied. “But an old, mutual adversary is.”
“The Millennium Consortium? Enlil?” Kane pressed.
“Durga is in Africa,” North explained. “As well as the consortium.”
Grant and Kane shared a shocked glance.
“My bombs were more than enough to strip away Durga’s added biomass. He was left a cripple....” North began.
“We know,” Grant interjected. “A while back, we returned to Garuda for a brief stopover. His people are still at work trying to destabilize Hannah’s administration and increase tensions between transformed Nagah and the human population.”