by J M Hemmings
Joao, armed with his gold-plated, diamond-studded Desert Eagle pistols, brought up the rear with two of his men, both of whom were walking backwards to maintain complete vigilance and cover.
On another floor, using her ninjutsu expertise to dart with swift silence through the shadows, and moving only when the red lights dimmed in their rhythmic ebb and flow of luminescence, was Kimiko. Her katana, forged by the great seventeenth-century master swordsmith Fujiwara Kanenaga, rested loose in her scabbard, while in her hands her bow – a modern composite, rather than a traditional bow – was ready to fire, with an armour-piercing arrow notched to the string and a dozen more in the quiver. She knew she would have to hurt William badly to subdue him, for he would not willingly capitulate. A few well-placed arrows through his joints would do the trick, she thought, but if those failed, she would have to use the katana, and she knew exactly where to cut in order to inflict crippling but non-lethal injuries.
Despite Kimiko’s mastery of meditation, which allowed her to separate her body from her consciousness and to detach herself from the twin quagmires of emotion and attachment, her brain was awash with turmoil and guilt, and this ate continually at her, chewing at her innards with the voracious hunger of a churning mass of maggots. What she was doing went against everything she believed in, everything she stood for, everything that she had fought for over the course of a long life dedicated to justice and righteousness – yet she felt as if, at this point in time, there could be no other path to take but this one. What the Rebels stood for had finally been revealed to her as an illusion, a hopeless dream grounded in idealistic fantasy. The world of mortals stood leaning over the edge of a great abyss, feeling the irresistible suck and relentless pull of vertigo, and tethered to this population of lemmings, which was on the cusp of plunging with suicidal abandon over the cliff, was a spiderweb network of millions of cords, tied to each and every other lifeform on the planet. When humanity toppled into the abyss they would drag everything else along with them, and this tragedy in the making had to be averted.
Her Rebel friends – former friends, now – had remained obstinate in their belief in the essential goodness of humanity, clinging like petulant children to the fictitious delusion of good ultimately triumphing over evil, of humankind rising above the age-old dogmas, tribalism, self-interest, greed, addictions and superstitions that had kept it chained thus far, believing in the innate certainty that, left to their own devices, people would always choose the greater good over individual selfishness, if only a few bad apples could be weeded out.
Kimiko, however, understood this to be folly, bald and complete. Over the past few decades a terrible sense of frustration and resentment had built with a mounting pressure within her, like a head of superheated steam in a reinforced tank. And one by one the rivets that had held the integrity of the chamber tight had begun to pop out, weakening the structure to the point of catastrophe. With each successive failure of the Rebel leadership to address the problems in the mortal world that were spiralling ever faster out of control, yet more cracks had begun to appear in Kimiko’s resolve and her commitment to the age-old cause. Furthermore, the more doggedly William, Zakaria and the rest of them had clung to the teachings of the old Council masters, the more Kimiko had begun to question the veracity of these teachings and their relevance to the twenty-first century, with its global population of almost eight billion humans and their seventy billion enslaved animals, the trillions of fish hauled from the oceans every year, and their voracious annihilation of the natural world in their lust for minerals and treasures, all of which was leading to a looming cataclysm of globally apocalyptic proportions.
The solutions needed to avert a disaster the likes of which had never before been seen in the history of humankind were harsh and uncompromising, and beyond what soft-hearted people like William and Lightning Bird were willing to contemplate.
This was a betrayal, oh yes, this was shoving jagged blades right into the backs of everyone she had loved and cared most about for so many lifetimes, but she had reached the point where an epiphany had come to her – an epiphany that stated that personal happiness, old connections and loyalties could no longer tip the balance in favour of inaction. No, she had to put these relationships aside and instead act for the benefit of billions of living souls and the future of all life. This was the only way.
With tears burning her eyes Kimiko gritted her teeth, forcing all sentiment, guilt and softness from her heart, and she gripped the bowstock tightly with her left hand as she edged forward.
On another floor, at the front of the group of soldiers, Hrothgar held up his hand to signal a halt. A distinct electrical tingling was buzzing through his nervous system; other beastwalkers were close, very close, and they had most certainly discerned his presence as well.
‘Combat positions,’ he hissed in a harsh whisper.
The vanguard of the gunmen mobilised, arranging themselves into a defensive formation, with three men lying on the floor and two kneeling at the flanks, their firearms all aimed at the top of the flight of stairs up which the Rebels would shortly be coming, ready to unleash a murderous hail of lead at the first sight of a head cresting the top of the steps. Death would come swiftly and brutally to the invaders.
As Hrothgar, Joao and their men prepared for their ambush, another set of beastwalkers was also experiencing the telltale tingling in their nerves; Zakaria, Ranomi and Njinga tensed their muscles and prepared to commence their own attack, one that would take Hrothgar and his troops by complete surprise, because it was about to come from directly above them.
Zakaria’s Plan B had involved ascending a few floors via climbing up the inside of the elevator shaft, and then getting into the ceiling above the main corridor of this floor to wait for Hrothgar, who would almost certainly be heading this way to lay his own trap for the Rebels. Adriana had been left perched on a ledge inside the elevator shaft, out of danger from the battle that was about to erupt, and also, conveniently, unable to escape or move.
Hrothgar and his men had laid their ambush for the Rebels, who they expected to ascend the stairs around the next corner; unbeknownst to them, however, they were already there, a mere ten feet above their heads, all holding their breath so that Hrothgar and Joao, with their animal-enhanced hearing, would not even detect the sound of them breathing. It was only a matter of time, however, before the game would be given away; in the intense silence that had now fallen, Hrothgar or Joao would soon hear the sound of the Rebels’ heartbeats or detect the scent of their presence in the air.
The attack had to be launched immediately. Njinga, Zakaria and Ranomi, each of whom was gripping a hand grenade, were perched on thin steel rails that were only barely able to support their weight; especially that of Zakaria, clad as he was in his armour. He was at the front, positioned directly above the first line of troops, facing Njinga and Ranomi so that they could see him and thereby synchronise their movements with precision. Ranomi was in the middle, right above Hrothgar, while Njinga was at the rear, above Joao and his two sweepers.
In the inky darkness of the cramped ceiling, through which the Rebels could see with their night-vision goggles, Zakaria gave a subtle nod and yanked the pin out of his grenade, as did Njinga and Ranomi. With their hearts pounding with such freneticism in their chests that they felt as if they were on an amphetamine high, each of them counted down silently, the booming, rhythmic thudding of their hearts deafening inside their hot ears. The grenades had to be tossed only two seconds before detonation; if they were thrown too soon they would give away the Rebels’ position and allow the troops below to react, and, of course, if they held onto the grenades too long, they would blow themselves up.
It was for this reason that they had practiced counting with a metronome, over and over, until their internal timekeeping was as solid as any Swiss watch. In one move, all three of them kicked out the ceiling squares directly under them and dropped the hand grenades.
Hrothgar, Joao and the troops only had a second
to shout in surprise and try to dive out of the way as the deadly steel balls bounced at their feet. Two seconds later, those fist-sized harbingers of violent death ripped a titanic explosion through the corridor, sending a shock wave tearing along the walls, floor and ceiling, and blasting white-hot shears of shrapnel out in all directions.
The instant the grenades exploded Ranomi transformed. Morphing in a split-second from a forty-kilogram woman into a six-hundred-kilogram Sumatran rhinoceros, her eighteen-fold increase in weight tore the thin steel out of its wall attachments, and the entire ceiling around her collapsed downward.
She landed directly on top of one of Joao’s sweepers, crushing and killing him. Joao dived for cover and only just avoided being trampled, but his second sweeper, riddled with smoking shrapnel from the grenade, was neither as fast nor as lucky as his commander. In a burst of speed, Ranomi charged and thundered over him, trampling him under a flurry of sledgehammer hooves.
Njinga and Zakaria dropped out of the ceiling too, landing in the centre of the smoke-thick chaos and confusion. Three of the front-line troops had been killed outright by the blast, while the others had been badly wounded. Hrothgar, thanks both to his preternatural reflexes and a bulletproof vest, had only been mildly injured by the grenades, but his assassin had taken a terrible beating from the explosion and had been flung across the corridor, his body pierced all over with jagged shrapnel.
Despite being stunned from the combined force of the exploding grenades, however, these men were seasoned and battle-hardened veterans, all of whom had been shot and stabbed many times before, so without even thinking of recovery or flight they launched an immediate counterattack.
Njinga had landed close to Hrothgar, and he quickly fired his sawed-off shotgun at point-blank range, giving her two direct hits in rapid succession; one was a blast to her face, which tore the hi-tech helmet – the only thing that stopped her entire skull from being macerated – right off of her head, while the second was a direct hit to her torso. The force from the shotgun blast to her chest punched her off her feet and hurled her against a wall, the impact knocking all the wind out of her lungs and leaving her gasping futilely for breath that just wouldn’t come. She had dropped her AK-47, and even though she had a nine-millimetre pistol holstered on her hip, she was stunned and virtually immobile, and therefore almost helpless as Hrothgar bore down on her through the swirling smoke and wall-jarring gunfire, his battle-axe raised with deadly intent above his head.
Zakaria, meanwhile, unloaded half of his Uzi clip into the face of one of the surviving soldiers of the vanguard, and then dived to the floor under a scything arc of M-16 fire unleashed by the other trooper, emptying the rest of his clip into this opponent the moment he hit the ground. As his lifeless adversary flopped to the floor, Zakaria dropped his empty firearm and scrambled to his feet, moving with swift agility despite the weight of his suit of steel. Now that he was without a firearm, he drew his two-handed sword and prepared for hand-to-hand combat.
At the rear of the action Joao, his arms and legs riddled with shrapnel and his trousers dark and slick with blood, backpedalled toward the exit while firing off his twin Desert Eagles with focused wrath at Ranomi. However, due to a combination of Ranomi’s spurt of speed and her russet-coloured form being only partially visible in the half-light, most of the shots missed, with only a few of the heavy rounds hitting home. One shot, however, passed right over Ranomi’s shoulder and hit one of Joao’s own men. The bullet obliterated his skull, taking off half of his head; death was immediate.
In an instant Ranomi was on Joao, and with a vicious hook of her head she smashed her horns into him, hitting him square in his torso and flinging him to the side with the speed of a stone ejected from a catapult. Despite the debilitating power of the blow, which packed the force of ten boxers’ uppercuts combined, Joao was as tough as soldiers get, with his natural strength and resilience potently enhanced by his beastwalker blood. While airborne he enacted the change that transformed his human form into that of a nine-hundred-kilogram Cape buffalo, and as he slipped into his animal form his instantaneous increase in size and mass destroyed his combat fatigues as well as the wall he hit, with a literal ton of force. For a second he disappeared through the demolished wall in a billowing cloud of masonry dust and tumbling, broken bricks … and then with a brazen bellow he regained his footing and charged out to meet Ranomi head-on.
Even as a Sumatran rhinoceros, Ranomi was greatly outweighed, and she could not hope to match Joao’s furious, testosterone-driven aggression. Still, she knew that she must have done some damage to him; no man, however tough, could have taken a hit like the one she had just delivered without breaking a few ribs at least. And the moment she got confirmation of the damage – an ever so brief glisten of dark blood dripping from Joao’s buffalo nose and mouth in the waxing and waning light – fresh confidence surged through her with the beautiful power of a breaking summer storm. She tensed her muscles, put her head down and exploded into a hurtling charge.
Further down the corridor, Njinga, still semi-paralysed, watched in helpless horror as Hrothgar advanced. Her combat suit was bulletproof, but it had already taken a severe beating, and after being blasted at virtually point-blank range by the twin barrels of Hrothgar’s sawed-off shotgun, the space-age material had started to crack. Two or three blows from the battle-axe, especially swung with Hrothgar’s gargantuan strength, would obliterate both the suit and Njinga’s body inside it.
Njinga stared, almost as if she were an outsider observing a sequence on flickering, colour-washed film, as the hulking Viking brought his axe down at speed. Instinctively she raised a forearm to block the blow, in spite of the fact that she understood that the axe would simply shear through her arm as if it were made of nothing but wet clay.
It did not.
The axe haft struck steel – steel that stopped the guillotine-like strike in its tracks, mere inches above Njinga’s chest: the blade of Zakaria’s two-handed sword. The parry was followed up by a darting throw; Zakaria picked up and hurled Hrothgar through the drywall to his right, and then jumped through the resulting hole and the cloud of dust into the large, empty conference room beyond. Inside the room Hrothgar had landed with an acrobatic roll and was already on his feet, so there was no time for a pause, no moment for insults or threats; both warriors swung their weapons, which clashed with a ringing clang as two immense opposing forces crashed into each other. The warriors pressed their sword and axe against one another for a few tense seconds, each channelling his ancient aggression into his weapon, each testing the resolve and brute strength of the other. When they found that they were equally matched, they disengaged their weapons and sprang simultaneously back, although Hrothgar was not able to move as fast as he would have liked; Zakaria, as he darted backward, turned his blade with a quick flick and cut upwards. The sharp tip whipped through the meat of Hrothgar’s jutting jaw and scored a deep cut all the way up his cheek, slicing his left eyebrow in half as it travelled in its vicious arc.
Hrothgar grunted with pain but moved with focused alacrity; the moment he sprang back he shifted into a defensive guard, keeping his axe aimed at Zakaria all the while. Zakaria, meanwhile, flipped up the visor of his helm. He was breathing hard, but his single eye was alive with a dangerous light, the storm-fire sparked by both the battle-fuelled adrenalin and the anticipation of this duel with his age-old nemesis. His lips curled into a wicked grin as he observed a trail of blood dribbling down Hrothgar’s face and trickling down his throat, the crimson liquid seeping from the freshly pared flesh.
‘I have waited for a long time for this, slaver,’ he growled. ‘First I will take your head, and then your vile friend’s, wherever that coward is hiding. How does it feel, eh? How does it feel, scum, to face an equal instead of the defenceless mortals you are so used to crushing?’
Hrothgar snarled wordlessly, spitting on the floor as he shifted on the balls of his feet and loosened up the muscles of his upper body in preparation
for the duel.
‘You’re not my equal, crusader,’ he rumbled. ‘You never were and never will be, and like a true fool you still worship an invisible deity, not realising even after all these centuries that we are gods!’
‘We are not mortals, you viper, but neither are we gods, and you will find that out soon enough. Your soul will sleep in hell tonight!’
Zakaria shifted his stance and darted forward in a lunging attack, but Hrothgar danced with the speed and agility of an acrobat, turning Zakaria’s blade aside and attacking with a vicious hack of his axe directed at the knight’s leading arm. Zakaria, however, had been expecting this, and he crouched in the blink of an eye onto one knee, dropping his arm rapidly in the process and whipping the sword blade back and to the side so that it bit deeply into Hrothgar’s exposed right shoulder. Hrothgar roared with pain as the steel opened his flesh, but he swivelled the axe in his hands and swung it backhanded in a horizontal cut aimed at Zakaria’s head.
Instead of rolling to his left to evade the blow, which would have been the natural and instinctive way to dodge the attack, Zakaria instead dived right, flipping his sword to his left hand as he did. He took the weight of his dive on his right forearm while slashing upward with the sword, and while Hrothgar barely managed to dodge the cut, there was no way he could avoid the follow-up, a quick stab which caught him right in his stomach; a perfectly timed thrust that would have run him through had it not been for his bulletproof vest.
Still, the impact sent him staggering back, and all he could do was to aim a vicious but clumsy diagonal slash at Zakaria as he stumbled, both in order to create some distance between himself and the knight and also to ward off a third and possibly fatal blow from his opponent’s blade.
As an experienced warrior and a grandmaster of combat, though, Hrothgar regained his balance in a mere second and adopted an unorthodox guard, with his battle-axe raised high above his head, angled downward. Zakaria switched his own stance as well, and the two fighters began circling each other with the cautiousness – and the barely contained concomitant ferocity – of rival lions, each well aware of the deadly prowess of his opponent, yet burning with vengeful rage in an eagerness to do battle.