The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  And they were completely exposed out on this high platform.

  “There!” Jack called, spotting two snipers on the peak of a huge step pyramid in the middle of the cavern.

  A pair of black-clad Japanese snipers.

  “They’ve got people in here . . .” Astro said in disbelief.

  “Return fire!” Jack called, ignoring Rapier and loosing a burst from his MP7 at the snipers. “We can all kill each other later, but right now we’ve got to get off these bridges! Go! Go! Get to that tower up ahead!”

  A five-story-tall tower rose out of the lava lake about a hundred yards ahead of them, between them and the snipers’ pyramid. It appeared to be built entirely of stone in the ornate style of a Japanese palace. And so far as Jack could see, it was the only source of cover from the Japanese snipers on the pyramid.

  Another CIEF trooper snapped backward, his head spraying blood. As he spun with the impact, Jack saw that the man had been trying to raise a long-barreled Barrett sniper rifle. Then Jack saw the other dead trooper at Zoe’s feet . . . and noticed the long rifle on his back.

  “They’re taking out our snipers!” he yelled. “Zoe! Get that gun before it falls!”

  As bullets impacted all around them, Zoe dived to the ground and snatched the dead man’s Barrett just before it fell over the edge.

  “Cover fire!” Jack called to the remaining CIEF men. But they all balked, confused at following the orders of their enemy.

  All except Astro.

  He obeyed immediately and joined Jack in firing up at the Japanese snipers.

  Now covered, Zoe knelt, taking careful aim through the Barrett’s telescopic sight, and . . .

  Bam—!

  She fired, and one of the Japanese snipers on top of the pyramid was thrown backward in a puff of red.

  “Gotcha.”

  Wolf was yelling at his men: “Stephens! Whitfield! Do as he says! Get a laser on that sniper position! Rapier! RPG!”

  “Lily!” Jack turned. “Which bridge do we take from here!”

  Now he saw the object she was holding: Zoe’s Canon digital camera.

  It was the same digital camera Zoe had used to take photos at the First Vertex and which she’d later used in Africa to solve the circular maze of the Neetha.

  Lily was looking closely at a certain photo, and after analyzing it, called, “The right-hand one, then the middle one, then the left-hand one! “

  “Right, middle, left—okay!” Jack called, leading the way, racing out onto the right-hand aqueduct bridge.

  Like the descending staircases earlier, each aqueduct bridge featured guttered edges and downward-sloping steps, only they were not as steep.

  The first step of each aqueduct bridge, however, concealed within it a knee-high vent that opened onto the guttered bridge itself; a vent, Jack figured, that spewed forth molten magma like the big one at the top of the descending staircases had.

  He was right.

  As soon as he’d taken a few steps down the right-hand aqueduct bridge—at some point stepping on a concealed trigger stone—blazing-hot lava vomited out from the step vents on the other two bridges.

  Running down the high railless bridge, he looked out at the sets of bridges and stairways ahead of him—always in groups of three, always parallel—and suddenly it all became clear to him.

  This place is one big series of booby-trapped bridges and staircases. You get three choices every time, but only one choice is safe. The other two get flooded with lava when you’re a few steps down them.

  The name of this Vertex suddenly took on real meaning: the Fire Maze.

  Following Lily’s directions, the combined force hustled along the aqueduct bridges, with Zoe exchanging fire with the remaining Japanese sniper atop the pyramid.

  Each time they raced down one bridge, the other two bridges would flood with fast-flowing knee-deep lava.

  Without Lily’s predictions, there was no way they could have negotiated the booby-trapped bridges. How she was doing it—or more precisely, which photo on the camera she was using—Jack didn’t care, so long as she kept choosing correctly.

  As they ran across the high narrow bridges under heavy fire, he was also glad that he and Zoe had Warblers. The CIEF men didn’t, and two more of them got hit and fell to their deaths.

  At the end of the last aqueduct bridge, the combined group came to three more parallel descending staircases.

  “The right-hand one!” Lily called.

  At the same time, the CIEF man named Whitfield called out, “Sniper position is lased!” He was aiming a handheld laser unit up at the summit of the step pyramid.

  “Got it!” Rapier answered, hefting a lightweight Predator rocket launcher onto his shoulder and firing it.

  The RPG shoomed into the air, trailing a finger of smoke. It banked at wicked speed around the tower in between their position on the staircase and the sniper on the step pyramid, before it thundered into the sniper’s nest and detonated in a billowing explosion, blasting the Japanese soldier to kingdom come.

  Safe now from sniper fire, the group rushed down the stairs and stepped over onto the base of the tower—where the first thing Wolf’s people did was turn their guns on Jack, Zoe, and Lily.

  “STAND DOWN!” Wolf called, stepping forward. “They’re not here to threaten us. On this occasion, we actually have the same goal they do: finding the Third Pillar and laying it.”

  His men slowly lowered their weapons.

  The two sides gazed at each other, standing awkwardly apart.

  Wolf appraised Lily closely. “The famous Miss Lily. We haven’t met in person till now, but we did speak on the phone once, when you were in Africa. How did you know which bridges were safe?”

  “Lucky guesses,” Lily said curtly.

  “Indeed.” Wolf smiled ruefully, seeing the situation for what it was: he needed Lily and the knowledge she possessed to successfully navigate the maze system. “Dare I proposed a truce—a temporary one, naturally—at least while we find ourselves in this maze together. Since our goals are identical and our enemy is the same.”

  Lily frowned, unconvinced.

  Wolf said, “If I kill you, I effectively kill myself. And I’m not into mutually assured destruction.”

  “All right . . .” Lily said.

  Wolf glanced at Jack.

  “A very temporary truce,” Jack said evenly. “Kiddo, a word.”

  He took Lily aside, huddling with her and Zoe.

  “Care to let us in on the secret?” he said.

  She held up the digital camera and clicked on one particular photo. It was the shot Zoe had taken of the golden plaque inside the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, the plaque that listed the names of all six Vertices:

  Without saying a word, Lily subtly pointed at the bottom edge of the plaque’s frame. It depicted an odd series of lines that were clustered in parallel groups of three, and through which a single line safely threaded its way.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Zoe breathed.

  “Clever girl,” Jack said.

  Lily said, “When I saw the parallel stairways and bridges from the entrance to this place, all in groups of three, I knew I’d seen a pattern like it before. This pattern.”

  Lily abruptly clicked off the photo. Wolf was approaching.

  “You can keep your secrets, little one,” he said. “But we can’t afford to linger. The clock is ticking and we have a Pillar to lay. Lead the way.”

  And so, flanked by their armed rivals, Jack, Lily, and Zoe made their way through the deadly network of bridges and walkways that guarded the Third Vertex of the Machine.

  At every step, they were presented with a triple choice of parallel paths, a choice which Lily made correctly.

  Through the tower, over the step pyramid, even down through a set of sunken trenches buried below the waterline of the lake.

  Whenever they came close to the surface of the lava lake, they had to cover their eyes with goggles or antiflash glasses and wrap wet cloths
or bandanas over their mouths—the simmering heat of the lava was enough to cause their skin to peel. If they stayed too close to it for too long, it would sear their skin, essentially cooking them in their own bodies.

  “Why doesn’t this lava solidify and crust over?” Zoe asked, wiping sweat off her brow as she walked.

  “We must be near a volcanic rift,” Jack said. “The heat from below is keeping the lava in a semiliquid state.”

  “Why doesn’t the lava eat away at these bridges?” Lily said. “I thought lava ate through everything.”

  “That’s the ultimate mystery in all this,” Jack said. “Whoever built this place, built the Machine. We’re talking about a superancient civilization, one that was advanced enough to see the Dark Sun coming and create the Machine to repel it. These bridges and towers and whatever ‘stone’ material they’re made of, were built by that civilization, too, and they were clearly able to make them lavaproof.”

  Lily was silent for a moment.

  “And yet that civilization was still wiped out,” she said as they walked. “By something.”

  Jack nodded. “Every empire comes to an end eventually, kiddo. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing we build can ever outlast the relentless march of space and time. Whether it’s a Dark Sun, a rogue asteroid, or a shift in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, this planet is still just a small rock in the vastness of space. And space and time always win eventually.”

  “So if these ancient people were smart enough to survive the coming of the Dark Sun, what killed them?”

  “I don’t know.” Jack turned to face her as he walked. “Hey, I’m finding this Dark Sun thing hard enough.”

  At length, the group came to what appeared to be the centerpiece of the mighty cavern: a huge volcano cone.

  Into the face of this cone had been carved a stupendous multilevel castlelike structure. Flowing freely over its fortifications were several waterfalls of magma.

  Traversing it, however, still meant choosing one of three paths or stairways, and this took a whole hour by itself—but eventually the group arrived at the uppermost level of the massive castle, where a cleft had been cut into the rim of the cone and two soaring stone buttresses formed a gateway leading into it.

  As he arrived at the gateway, Jack beheld the inside of the crater beyond it and caught his breath.

  “Mother of mercy . . .” he said in disbelief.

  THE CRATER

  THE RESTING PLACE OF THE 3RD PILLAR

  JACK LOOKED down on five magnificent spires: four pinnacle-like towers surrounding a taller fifth one.

  The four outer towers were all made of a pale gray igneous rock, and they all bore complex winding channels cut into their flanks. The central tower was made of darker stone and it had sheer polished sides. Its sole defense was an encircling gutter four-fifths of the way up its body. All five buildings rose up out of a foul black lake of bubbling tar.

  Then Jack saw it.

  There, mounted on a pedestal inside a cupola at the lofty summit of the central tower, looking like a cloudy glass brick, was the Third Pillar.

  It was actually quite close to him—so high was the tower, it was almost level with his gateway. But to get to the Pillar, Jack saw, one had to negotiate a series of narrow swooping stone bridges that connected the four outer towers in a counterclockwise sequence before a final stone bridge sprang up at a frightening angle from the fourth tower to the cupola on the central pinnacle.

  It was dizzying just to look at. Jack imagined it would be worse to actually traverse it.

  Beyond the Pillar in the cupola, directly across from his position on the rim of the crater, Jack saw the opposite rim—and beyond that, glimpsed a now-familiar shape.

  The dark outline of an immense inverted bronze pyramid.

  The Third Vertex itself.

  Wolf gazed at the five towers nestled in the crater.

  “The Shogun’s maze-within-the-maze,” he said. “The rest of this place was built by the ancient makers of the Machine, but these towers were built by the Japanese at the time of Genghis Khan.”

  “The smaller maze they built to protect the Third Pillar,” Zoe said.

  “So how does it work?” Rapier asked.

  Jack took in the towers and bridges. “Looks like a time-and-speed trap . . .”

  “Hey,” Lily said from behind him. She was standing near a statue of a dragon at the edge of the gateway platform. She pointed to a Japanese inscription carved into the dragon’s podium. “It says:

  “A simple test,

  Held at the birth and death of Ra each day.

  The brave warrior ascends while the fire liquid descends.

  He who beats the deadly fluid to the summit, will keep the Great Khan’s gift;

  He who beats it back, will keep his life.”

  Jack assessed the twisting channels cut into the flanks of the four surrounding towers. At the top of each tower was a chimneylike opening in which bubbled a level pool of lava. At some trigger, he guessed, the lava overflowed from the chimney opening and made its way down the channels. If you wanted the Pillar, you had to negotiate the maze of zigzagging stairways on the towers’ flanks and get to the cupola—and then you had to get back down again before the descending lava cut off your retreat.

  Jack looked out across the seventy meters of air separating his platform from the central tower.

  “It’s at times like this, I wish I’d brought Horus along,” he said. He’d left her with Sky Monster in the Halicarnassus.

  “Too far for a Maghook to reach,” Zoe said.

  “The birth and death of Ra . . .” Astro said. “Sunrise and sunset. So at sunrise and sunset every day, the tower system becomes accessible?”

  Jack jerked his chin at a series of broad stepping-stones down at lake level giving access to the first tower. There was a wide gap between the stones, a gap that could not be jumped. “I imagine twice a day, at dawn and dusk, a stepping-stone rises up out of the tar, allowing you to get across to the first tower. Then you race the lava coming down the towers.”

  “What time is it now?” Wolf asked.

  “Eleven in the morning,” Rapier said.

  “When’s sunset?”

  “Around 6:00 P.M.”

  “And when is tomorrow’s Titanic Rising?”

  “0005 hours. Five past midnight,” Jack said.

  Wolf took a deep breath and sat down against the wall of the high gateway. “Seven hours till we can make a run for this Pillar. Another six after that before the Pillar has to be set in place. Looks like we’re stuck here for a while.”

  He smiled at Lily.

  “How delightful. It will give us a chance to get to know each other.”

  THE HOURS ticked by.

  The members of the mismatched group slumped around the gateway platform, variously resting against its walls or pacing to stretch their legs.

  Lily slept in Zoe’s lap. Wolf sat across from them, staring at Lily intently—as if he was pondering exactly how she worked.

  At Jack’s insistence, Wolf sent two men ahead to scout the terrain on the far side of the volcano’s crater—to make sure there were no surprises there, especially more Japanese ones, and that laying the Pillar could be done inside the seven hours after sunset.

  The two men crossed the crater and disappeared inside a long tunnel-like structure on the other side, sending back images on a digital video camera. At first, interference from the Warblers affected the signal, so Jack had them switched off.

  The dark tunnel was about fifty yards long and two stories high, roughly the size of a train tunnel. After passing through it without incident, the two scouts emerged on the other side of the crater.

  Here their camera showed the massive inverted pyramid of the Vertex surrounded by another lake of lava and suspended above a great abyss like at the other Vertices. No mazes or labyrinths protected it. Seven hours would be more than enough time to get to it.

  The two scouts returned.

&nbs
p; Astro was standing at the edge of the gateway platform, gazing out over the five towers in the crater, when Jack joined him.

  “It’s been a while, Astro.”

  Astro didn’t reply.

  “What did they tell you about me?” Jack asked.

  Astro was silent for a long moment, then he said, “They said you were planning to kill me as soon as we got out of Egypt.”

  Jack had wondered what had happened to Astro. The young Marine had joined their team during the first meeting in Dubai, at the request of Paul Robertson of the CIA, just before a plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab tower.

  From there, Astro had accompanied Jack through Laozi’s trap system in China, been at a second meeting at Mortimer Island in the Bristol Channel, and then gone with Jack to Abu Simbel—during which time Jack had felt he had become a loyal team member.

  But then after the wild chase on the desert highway involving the Halicarnassus and several dozen Egyptian Army vehicles, Astro, Jack, Pooh Bear, and Stretch had all been captured. At the time, Jack was knocked out and had woken up crucified inside Wolf’s mine in Ethiopia . . .

  . . . where he had seen Astro standing loyally beside Wolf.

  Jack had felt betrayed, and had said so to Pooh Bear. But Pooh Bear had advised him not to rush to judgment on Astro.

  “Do you seriously think I wanted to kill you, after all we’d been through? Does that match up with what you’ve seen me do?” Jack asked.

  Astro said nothing.

  “Do you remember seeing me in that mine?” Jack said.

  Astro frowned, as if trying to recall. “I don’t remember much after Abu Simbel, and certainly not any mine. I woke up at the air base on Diego Garcia, in a hospital bed. They said I’d fallen to the road during an armed pursuit and been airlifted out. I was unconscious for two whole days, they said.”

  “You don’t remember the Ethiopian mine at all?”

  “No.”

  This was unexpected. Pooh Bear’s advice might have been very wise.

  “You didn’t fall to the road,” Jack explained. “We all survived that episode just fine. They must have drugged you just after they pistol-whipped me.”