She found Artemis on the ground, next to her felled snake. “Found the part that matters,” Artemis said, holding out another chunk of brain, before biting down on it. “Tastes like chicken.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” Britomartis joined her friend by her side, wiping both knives off against her face, painting herself with its blood as a Native American might. She wasn’t sure Xena would approve, who Britomartis had modeled herself after, down to the immodest black leather outfit and skirt that pulled up short to expose the full length of her legs. Her crisscrossed boomerangs were mounted on her back, the one departure from Xena’s classical attire she allowed herself.
Artemis’s outfit was even scantier; her short white tunic exposing all of her back, but matching the white whittled-down elephant tusks that formed her bow, save for the hand grip that was a special wood, allowing her to grasp the bow, and allowing the bow to flex. Her sandals laced up to just beneath her knees. Her four albino, genetically enhanced whippets she seldom went anywhere without were doing their part to cull the hordes of snakes even now, able to match their speed ably, and with the sense to jump up behind their skulls and drive their enlarged canines into the snakes’ jugulars, leaving them to bleed out as they raced on to the next snakes.
Despite the opposing-colored outfits, both huntresses had matching, piercing, blue eyes and satiny smooth skin; though Artemis’s was stretched over more chiseled facial features, while Britomartis’s face came with the high cheek bones and softer curves.
The two ladies hitched a ride with the two snakes coming up behind them, determined to put an end to the wizard—still largely oblivious to these two. The huntress’s attachment points were their knives. And they used those blades to climb to the top of the snakes where they then used them to hold on until they could catch up with the wizard.
“Let’s hope the wizard has something else up his sleeve to keep him alive long enough for us all to get there,” Britomartis said.
“You fret too much.”
“Perhaps. But I find I live longer that way, anticipating everything that can go wrong.”
Artemis grunted. That was how she responded to most of Britomartis’s comments.
They reached the wizard in time to find the rest of the snakes dead, handled by the dogs. Artemis and Britomartis put an end to their snakes, no longer needing the rides, with their knives angled just so into the sensitive regions of their brains.
What was the wizard standing about for? Surely, he wasn’t waiting to thank them. Theirs was a thankless job by definition.
“You got eyes on this thing yet?” Britomartis asked.
“What thing?” Artemis ran through the EMF spectrum with her genetically modified eyes adjusting to degrees of darkness that were impenetrable to normal humans—assuming any of those could be found anymore. “Shiiiit!”
There was a line of huntresses blocking the wizard’s path. Artemis and Britomartis moved to flank him. “I’m confused,” the wizard said. “Are they trying to protect me, too?”
“Not likely,” Britomartis said.
“Check their eyes,” Artemis coached, projecting her whisper.
The huntress’s eyes in the opposition party were an opaque white. These were the huntresses who hunted blind, preferring it that way so they could sharpen their other senses—including their sixth sense. There were six of them standing side by side. No one had ever seen even two of them together before. Huntresses were loners as a lot, but these were so rarely seen, they were outright legends. All martial arts trained. Presumably by the same master.
“What do the eyes mean?” the wizard asked.
“It means you so much as move, they’ll know,” Britomartis explained. “Their blindness is actually an asset, at least in our business.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question of whose side they’re on.”
“Soren’s,” Artemis explained.
“We can smell the Frankenstein’s monster’s stink on them, and he’s the only one smart enough to get inside their heads,” Britomartis explained.
“But the Frankenstein’s monsters all have their own smell,” the wizard said.
The two women to either side of him shook their heads. “There is one smell they all share in common; death,” Artemis said. “And it smells different on them than anything we hunt.”
“But I have it on good authority, Soren’s been neutralized.” The wizard shifted into a martial arts stance, all the same, not trusting his own denials.
“Neutralized isn’t the right word, I’d say,” Britomartis said.
“More like empowered,” Artemis chimed in. “Get us out of here now—if you can.”
The wizard used both his hands to speed-paint them a mural, and together the three of them jumped into the world of the painting.
The portal closed behind them before the other six huntresses could jump through. No one sighed relief until that door was closed.
Artemis and Britomartis took notice of where they’d landed; it looked like little more than a painter’s studio—belonging to one who specialized in oil paints.
“One of us has to get word to Victor,” the wizard said, his voice no less urgent than before they stepped through the portal.
“You leave that to us,” Artemis replied.
Britomartis was already scribbling a note. “Can you make us an arrow?” she asked the sorcerer.
The wizard conjured one for her, and she attached her note to the arrow, then she pulled back on her crossbow, which she had returned earlier to the small of her back, after collapsing it down. “You can track Victor?”
The wizard nodded, and used words of power to focus the portal he opened. Before them was a scientific lab. From the bright lights and fancy equipment, it was Artemis’s guess it was somewhere in the heart of the Transhumanist sector. Victor was staring at Soren, suspended in a fluid-filled tank. Victor was pulling at his whiskers as he pondered his friend’s fate.
The arrow landed in the floor behind him, startling the entire team. The portal collapsed about the Chinese wizard and his two protectors.
“How long before the next cluster of creatures finds you?” Britomartis asked.
The wizard thought about it. “They’ve been coming in waves, each one closer together. So, based on my calculations, any second now.”
Artemis groaned. “No rest for the wicked.” Both huntresses surveyed the room for anything they could use to forestall an onslaught of an enemy that would have fewer weaknesses this time than the snakes and the chimera before it.
“Is there some reason you chose this room?” Britomartis shouted, overturning a table in frustration. The room seemed to contain little by way of weapons—the closest thing to one possibly being the handles on the paintbrushes themselves, which could be used to jab, and the small paint cans, which might be lobbed the way one throws a stone. The round wooden table she’d just overturned, was where the artist rested his paints and his palette.
“Yes, this is my studio. All the paintings are portals to other safe houses for me. Each one with access to different tools, depending on whom or what I’m trying to fight off.”
“We’ll let you choose then,” Britomartis said.
“Only choose quickly!” Artemis barked. “Whatever it is that’s coming next, it’s here.” Both women’s hairs were standing up on their arms.
“It’s not a creature this time. It’s the blind huntresses,” Britomartis informed him.
“You sure?”
“No; their stealth is quite good. But it stands to reason,” Artemis replied.
“Follow me,” the wizard said. They did, jumping through the painting right behind him, the canvas large enough that they barely had to duck down to avoid the frame.
“Destroy that entry point now!” Britomartis barked. The wizard didn’t hesitate. Before the portal could seal entirely, they saw the blind huntresses decloaking—they’d been in the room! The entire time? If so, those other safe houses were probably now burnt,
Artemis thought.
“This day just keeps getting better and better,” Britomartis bitched. She still hadn’t relaxed her stance with the knives in either hand, half expecting the blind huntresses to jump through the closed portal anyway.
The wizard was already collecting up what he needed to go another round with his magic. “Please tell me that magic is for use against huntresses,” Artemis, ever the pragmatist, said.
“Yes, it is. Based on what you suggested before we jumped again, I thought it wise.” The wizard looked at them guiltily.
“If you’re worried about how we feel about that,” Artemis said. “We feel just fine.” The girls had a feel for what they could make use of themselves. Not everything here would require a master wizard to wield. Nor any explanation from the wizard how to utilize—not for a huntress.
Britomartis’s eyes were already going to the stick-on metal fingernails and toenails with the dragons etched on their surfaces. Artemis was more drawn to the small bottle marked “eye drops.” The innocuous labeling portended momentous things; why label it so generically if not to conceal its true purpose?
Artemis sighed relief, wondering how much of a reprieve they’d really earned. They were now up against the best of their kind—six of them, and psychically linked to Soren, no less. All of the Frankensteins were worthy opponents. She’d hunted one with Britomartis by her side once; he’d nearly killed them both. And Soren was the smartest of the lot of intellectuals, and the best of them at the fringe science stuff.
If Artemis and Britomartis lasted a day, they’d be doing good, wizard or no wizard in tow, huntress-killing magic in hand, or no.
NINETEEN
Victor bent down and picked up the arrow. “That’s a tad dramatic, even by our standards.” He glanced up through the skylights at the constellation Gemini; the arrow hadn’t entered the room that way.
He examined the primitive projectile, spying the note. After detaching the paper, he opened up a palm chakra in his right hand and dumped the arrow into the miniature black hole.
“That arrow is probably landing in the heart of one of my descendants,” Aeros said, “out to avenge us for what this shit has yet to do to us. I heard he thinks many moves ahead on the chessboard.”
“More than you can count, Aeros, and you’d do better than to put ideas in my head,” Victor remarked absently, reading the note.
He scrunched it in his hands and screamed, “Ry-An!” His voice sent a crack up the front face of the hibernation chamber holding Soren. Not because the note was high-pitched, but because when his anger rose to this intensity, his voice became an acoustic weapon.
“Shit!” An squawked, running to the glass and sealing the crack with a swipe of her hand and the nano bleeding out of her fingertip.
“Easy, Victor!” Ry balked.
He just handed the note over to her and pressed the sides of his nose at his forehead, at the pressure points, to calm himself.
Ry read over the note. The others were scrutinizing the message over her shoulder with her. “An, we have to transfer Soren out of that tank now,” Ry said.
“Not until someone explains to me what the hell’s going on,” Victor said, his testy tone well beyond his usual baseline. “We shan’t be empowering the beast further this day.”
An read over the note. Everyone had their mindchips and nanites working at capacity, save perhaps for Aeros, and couldn’t be bothered to send the contents of the message to one another’s mindchips—costing them precious bandwidth.
An stared at the tank with Soren drifting inside, his robe long removed by Surf even before sticking him in there. Soren’s nanites were as active as ever, showing no slowing with their teaming activity over his skin. Aeros had returned to pacing about the tank, taking Soren in from all sides, made forever curious by the active mounds of crab-bots on his person.
“Those who have spent any time inside the tank have reported a strange kind of dreaming,” An explained. “I suppose it’s possible that the diminished conscious activity has actually facilitated the beast’s access to the cabbalistic nanites. Allowing them in turn to activate more of his biological brain without fear of suppressing the beast or awakening the old Soren in the biological body.”
Naomi and Lar were the only ones of their team currently present; Lar had left on his mission-of-mercy assignment directed at easing the suffering in Syracuse, only to return. Sitting high up in the rafters, she asked, “The fluid in that tank…was it based on a NASA formula?”
“Yes,” An said, craning her head to her, startled, curious as to where Naomi was going with this observation.
“Soren based his embryonic solution he uses back at his lab on it,” Naomi explained. “It grants him access to more than just dreams. It allows him to astral travel, to psychically reach out to others, even to travel through time.”
“There’s no way the base NASA formula would grant those kinds of abilities. He must have tweaked the hell out of it,” An said, sounding both horrified and defensive.
“The beast may still have more than he needs,” Victor interjected, “with the cabbalistic nanites to do some of the work of Soren’s formulation for him. That, and grant other abilities Soren never thought of. And if the nanites and the beast can access Soren’s memories, now that his conscious mind can’t put up any kind of defense, I’d say we may very well have opened Pandora’s box.” Victor clapped his hands together. “Well, who wants to die first? Did I mention my zero tolerance policy for failure?”
“Transfer him to the cryogenics tank now,” Ry snapped at An, ignoring Victor. “I’ll take over from here.”
Naomi teleported Soren into the cryogenics tank before anyone could blink. She hadn’t meant to, not consciously. It was more of a spinal cord reaction that had gotten away from her. If she was in better control, she would have known better than to show her hand like that. “Sorry,” she said, “I just didn’t think we had any more time to waste talking.”
“You’re a Sponger?” Victor glared at her as if that was the betrayal that had broken the camel’s back. “You can stay among the land of the living for now, though I’ll deal with you later. The rest of you….”
“Shut up, Victor,” Naomi said. “I’ve seen the future. The cryonics tank will barely slow him. Whatever this alien entity that brought this cabbalistic spirit science to earth originally—it was trapped in the ice for the longest time, for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“That cryogenics tank can reach temperatures not found at either of Earth’s poles,” Ry said, speaking up, as cryonics was one of her specialties.
Naomi shook her head slowly. “It won’t help.”
“Just how well can you read the future?” Victor asked, pinching his eyebrows, not sure how much to trust what she was saying.
“I don’t know. This ability has been dormant for quite some time. It takes a crisis to activate long-forgotten abilities. Well enough to know, though, you can’t spare anyone on this team right now.”
Victor groaned, strode to the cryogenics tank, which for all practical purposes, looked the same as the hibernation chamber. Only the ice wasn’t as clear as the solution in the hibernation chamber. “There’s got to be something we can do,” he said, knocking his head against the unbreakable metal-glass.
“I’m working on it,” Aeros said. “I ought to be able to produce a new generation of nanites that can migrate through that frozen solution to his brain and give us access to what’s going on inside there enough to possibly intervene.”
“What are you waiting on?” Victor snapped.
“I’m going to need Ry’s and An’s help.” He turned to his wife. “And they’re going to need what archeological insights you can give them, hon.”
Airy took a deep breath. “A pyramid was found in Antarctica recently, buried beneath the ice, exposed by nextgen satellite scanning technology. It was one of many that have since been discovered and explored in that region. Once the first one was isolated, it ignited a t
reasure hunt no one has seen since…. Well, anyway…. These pyramids predate the ones in Egypt, and they bear some of the cabbalistic patterns Ry captured for me.”
Victor opened a portal back to his penthouse, sucked Ramon through it, who came skidding across the floor of the lab. “You’re going on a fieldtrip, kid.”
“Ah, I’m really not a fieldtrip kind of guy.”
“You, too, Lar. Two eggheads are better than one.”
“Ah, not unless you want me to trigger any or all the death traps in those pyramids,” Lar said. “Captain Klutz, and all that.”
“Do I look like I’m in the mood for argument?”
“Where to?” Ramon, the braver of the two eggheads said.
“Show them,” Victor instructed Airy.
She brought up the images on one of the big screen monitors. There are five pyramids in all that have been unearthed so far, enough to grant subterranean access. Five more remain inaccessible. But perhaps not to Victor.
“No way,” Lar said, shaking his head. “I’m not even wearing thermals.”
“And I’m not the kind of monk that melts snow,” Ramon said, “so that lets me out, too.”
“Compare notes, you two,” Victor said, ignoring them, “and report back anything that can help us tap into the communications between the Beast and the cabbalistic nanites in Soren’s body. We need to understand how they’ve infiltrated both his biological brain and his mindchip.”
He approached Ramon and grabbed both his hands, exposing the palms, burning mandalas into them with his eyes, waited for the sacred geometries to activate. They did, inside of another few seconds—no longer burn marks now, but glowing energy patterns that kept shapeshifting.
“You ought to be able to access any point on the planet with these just by thinking about what you need and where you might be able to find it.” Ramon nodded, for now placated by the unexpected gift from Victor that just took his abilities to a whole new level.
Victor stepped up to Lar next and took his hands, forcing the palms up as well. “Captain Klutz, huh? I can work with that. This will dial up access to your sixth sense for any deadfall you might trigger with that self-sabotaging unconscious of yours. Any self-sabotaging workarounds your unconscious might come up with, it will be no match for the bridge my mandalas will keep open to sixth sense by continuing to reconfigure themselves.”
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