by James Axler
“Where’s Baptiste?” Kane asked as he hurried across the wide corridor, bringing the Copperhead to bear on Domi’s attackers.
As if in answer, the stairwell doors burst open again and Brigid Baptiste came running through them, a wide-bottomed glass flask clutched under her arm. Her TP-9 pistol was held in her free hand, blasting a steady stream of fire behind her.
At the far end of the tunnel, shrill voices could be heard rising in alarm, and Kane turned to see what was happening. There, from the direction of the rollback doors, Ullikummis’s group of hooded servants in their fustian robes were sprinting toward them, followed slowly by the great stone giant himself. Ullikummis strode with firm steps as his people ran ahead of him like dwarves.
This was it, Kane realized. Do or die.
Chapter 12
Kane stared at the container Brigid held beneath her arm. Made from clear glass, it was about the height of a family-size soft-drink bottle, with a wide bottom and straight sides tapering to a spout. The mouth was sealed with a red rubber cork. The vessel looked empty at first glance, but Kane noticed the line of distortion near the top and realized a clear liquid was swishing about within: hydrochloric acid.
“That it?” Kane asked, gesturing at the bottle.
Brigid spun back, facing the stairwell door as three more hooded figures charged through toward her. As they ran at her she unloaded a clip of bullets at them, spraying the figures and the door behind them with 9 mm slugs. Bringing his Copperhead to bear, Kane added his own blaster fire to her attack, a rapid expulsion of bullets ripping into the interlopers. Behind Kane, Grant was busy assisting Domi with the two who had preceded Brigid from the stairs, the fierce boom of his own Copperhead echoing in the confined space of the tunnel.
Breathless, Brigid turned to Kane as the robed figures crashed to the floor amid the hail of bullets. “We were ambushed, Kane,” she explained. “Found four containers in the lab, but we had to use two on the attackers. Damned effective against them, too, but…” She stopped, repulsed by the memory of the damage she and Domi had been forced to inflict.
“And the third?” Kane asked, glancing across to Domi as she picked herself up from the floor to join him. Behind her, Grant drove the heel of his boot into the hooded head of one of the initial attackers, driving his jaw into the floor with finality, the Copperhead subgun booming in the struggling figure’s face.
“Shattered,” Brigid explained.
Kane gulped. “You okay? Is Domi…?”
“I got out the way,” Brigid said, and Kane got the impression she would rather leave the comment at that.
One of the hooded figures Brigid had just felled was struggling up off the tunnel floor, pulling himself slowly erect in the manner of a wounded insect, all flailing movement with no logic. Kane saw that the man’s face looked old and was bleached white where acid had been thrown at him, his skin puckered and wounded. Brigid and Domi had been busy whittling these people down, he realized with a rising sense of disgust.
Kane drew his Copperhead up and, taking a pace forward, blasted the hooded man in the head repeatedly until he finally stopped moving. “Point-blank ’em,” he muttered to himself as he turned to face the next assault.
“Kane,” Grant called from just a half dozen paces down the corridor.
Kane looked, already knowing what he would see. The party of a dozen hooded intruders was almost upon the Cerberus group now, with the towering form of Ullikummis bringing up the rear. The hooded ones were reaching for the cloth pouches they wore at their waists, loading up their deceptively simple slingshots and readying them as they ran.
“Baptiste,” Kane instructed, “I need you to wound Ullikummis if we’re to take him out. Once he falls…” Kane shrugged, leaving his sentence hanging, as if afraid that speaking the words aloud might jinx his plan.
At Kane’s side, Brigid fiddled with the rubber stopper on the glass container. To her credit, Kane could sense no reservation from her body language; she was primed and determined.
“What happened up there, Baptiste?” he asked quietly.
“We had to leave someone behind,” Brigid replied, not looking at him.
Nodding, Kane turned to his left, where Domi and Grant waited with their blasters poised. “Head shots only, people,” he advised. “There’s still a chance we can turn all this around.”
Grant closed one eye as he sighted down the length of the Copperhead and snapped off his first three shots, pumping the trigger of the lengthy subgun. Despite its size, the weapon looked like a toy in Grant’s huge hands. An accomplished marksman, he hit his targets, the first shot smacking dead center between the eyes of the lead attacker. The bullet struck but seemed to be deflected off his flesh, pinging away into the high rafters of the tunnel. Grant’s following shots were already dispatched, and while the third did a similar ricochet, as if striking solid metal, the second drilled into the lead runner’s left eye, turning it into an explosion of liquid that burst over his cheek as he fell.
Kane, Brigid and Domi performed similar bloodwork, unleashing a stream of gunfire at their onrushing attackers as the lights above flickered and dimmed. Several of the hooded figures fell under the onslaught, toppling over themselves as their robes billowed about them.
In response, the hooded strangers loosed a volley of gravel, the stone chunks whizzing through the air and striking the surfaces all around the Cerberus teammates with bursts of sparks, sharp flecks cutting into the shadow suits three of them wore. Domi howled in agony as she took the brunt of the stone assault on her bare skin.
From the corner of his eye, Kane saw her fall to the floor, clutching at a bloody gash on her arm. Besides the hard stone, the diminutive albino woman had been hit with multiple grains of sand, each striking her with such speed that it had sliced through her skin. Now her white form was streaked with thin lines of blood, a hundred grazed cuts peppering her body like cracks on glass as she rolled on the floor, crying in agony.
Two more of the attackers fell under the Cerberus team’s assault, and then the first wave was upon them.
To one side of the tunnel, Grant snapped out with his left fist, driving it into the face of the closest attacker even as the hooded stranger tossed another stone from his slingshot, spinning the weapon in his hand to generate the momentum needed to launch the stone. Like a point-blank bullet, the hunk of rock struck Grant just below the rib cage, knocking the wind out of him even as his punch connected.
Kane saw his partner knocked from his feet by the blow, toppling backward with a growl of agony. But there was no time to help. Two of the hooded freaks were whipping around their own slingshots, launching a cluster of tiny stones at Kane and Brigid as he turned his Copperhead on them. The bullets raced at the two soldiers of Ullikummis, striking the onrushing stones and—incredibly—being deflected from their path in a blur of sparks.
Then the first of the men was upon Kane, and the ex-Magistrate brought his arm up to deflect a savage blow aimed at his head. An instant later he dropped to the floor, his left leg sweeping out before him in a frantic attempt to knock his attacker off balance. The hooded figure tumbled to the ground and Kane whipped his Copperhead up at the man’s face.
“I am stone,” the man stated, his voice strangely emotionless.
“Well, I’m hacked off,” Kane replied, snapping a quick burst of gunfire directly into his fallen foe’s visage. The man’s head snapped backward, sinking into the folds of the hood. But to Kane’s astonishment, there was no blood.
Didn’t matter. The man was out of action and that’s all that counted just now, Kane realized as he whipped the subgun around to cover himself. For some reason he couldn’t begin to fathom, he hadn’t really paid much thought to the lack of blood from their foes until this moment. Seeing them so close up, hearing the man speak fearlessly in the face of sure death, Kane concluded there was something almost mystical in the whole situation. He had seen mystical before now; the Cerberus operation had seemed mired in combating f
oes with almost supernatural abilities since it was first established. Often these mystical abilities had proved to be nothing more than elaborate tricks, the employment of superior technology to disguise the true nature of the abilities on show. Kane dismissed the puzzle for the moment, turning his attention to the next of his attackers as two more rushed at him, firing heavy rocks—three inches in diameter—at his head. Whatever they really were, whatever was really going on, was something to ponder at another juncture. Right now, they were in the middle of a war zone, and Kane and his teammates were the only hope Cerberus had left. He leaped aside as the twin rocks whizzed past, striking the floor beyond him with a flurry of sparks.
A few feet away from Kane, Brigid was using her own weapon—the matte-black compact semiautomatic she favored—to fend off another of their foes as she searched for her opportunity. The hooded figure—this one a woman with long blonde hair beneath the rough weave of her cowl—used her slingshot to launch a handful of sharp stones at high velocity. The stones cut through the air toward Brigid’s porcelain face as she ran forward.
Brigid sprang as the stones rushed at her, kicking out as she leaped into the air. The missiles drummed a tattoo against her leg and booted foot as she leaped, cutting into the sturdy material of the shadow suit, their sharp edges tearing slivers of black thread and pale skin from the underside of her leg. An instant later, Brigid’s outstretched foot slammed into the blonde woman’s breastbone, knocking her down with a gasp of expelled air. Brigid landed in a run, her weight flattening the woman even as she sprang forward and hurried onward toward the looming figure of Ullikummis. The red-haired former archivist ducked beneath another volley of flying stones as she weaved past his lackeys on her run toward the Annunaki prince himself.
Another battery of stones flew in Brigid’s direction, and she brought her right arm up in front of her face, letting the ones she couldn’t dodge drum against the protective weave of the shadow suit with brutal finality. Then her TP-9 whipped around again, picking off targets as she hurried on down the chasmlike corridor that ran the length of the Cerberus redoubt. Just a little way ahead, Ullikummis formed a dark shape beneath the arching roof, his magmalike eyes burning in eerie determination.
Meanwhile, Kane found himself amid a whole group of the stone throwers, dodging and weaving as they moved to surround him, cleaving the air with stones of differing sizes. Head down, Kane charged at the closest of his foes, slamming into the guy with all the force he could muster. A rain of stones slapped against his back, leaving his jacket in shreds as they sliced through the material.
The hooded figure that Kane had charged fell backward as he absorbed the force of the ex-Mag’s blow. Kane blasted off a burst of fire from his Copperhead, but there was no time to follow through. Another hooded form was moving toward him, her movements masked by the flowing robe she wore.
Beside him, Kane saw Grant go down amid three more of their foes, a curtain of tattered robes sweeping across his partner like the black wings of a crow.
With a growl born of sheer frustration, Kane drove the muzzle of his Copperhead into the gut of the woman before him. Her hood fell back as he squeezed the trigger, and Kane felt his blood turn cold as he saw her face properly for the first time. It was Helen.
Helen Foster was a member of Cerberus’s engineering division, an attractive woman with medium length, dark hair. Kane had spent almost three days sharing a Manta craft’s cramped cockpit with her as they performed repairs on Cerberus’s Vela-class satellite. He had developed a friendly rapport with the woman, and his friends had teased him that he and Helen had a little something going on. That had been just three months ago.
The sound of the Copperhead’s blasts became muffled as the subgun drilled a relentless stream of bullets into the woman’s gut, forcing her to bend double like a hinge over the extended muzzle of the weapon.
Kane felt her body shudder as his bullets drilled into it. “Helen?” he spit, releasing the trigger and grabbing her as she sagged in place.
The engineer stared into his eyes with only the slightest hint of recognition, and she bared her teeth in a snarl. “I am stone,” she growled, a foaming streak of saliva oozing over her clenched teeth.
Kane stepped back, stymied by this sudden turn of events. From behind him, another hooded figure reached around and grabbed Kane by his throat.
He struggled in his new assailant’s grip, trying to dislodge him. Before his eyes, Helen Foster brushed at the foamy smear at her mouth, then reached for the hood of her robe and pulled it back in place, hiding her features in its dark shadow once more. As she did so, Kane spied what appeared to be a scuff of dirt on her forehead, like a little blister. His heart sank as the woman stumbled backward, weaving in place before sinking to the ground, wounded but somehow clinging to life.
From either side of the fallen Cerberus engineer, two more robed figures approached Kane, reloading their slingshots with stones. He watched as they began to twirl their weapons, whipping them around in arcs until they picked up the momentum required to launch the bullet-like missiles. And then the stones left the slingshots, cutting the air at incredible speed. Kane timed everything in his head, keeping track of the variables with practiced surety.
With a powerful twist of his shoulders, he jerked the man trying to strangle him just as the stones were launched, tossing him over his back and straight into the path of the hurtling objects. They drummed against the man as he flew through the air, slicing gaping trails through his robes as he crashed to the ground.
Kane brushed at his shoulder, where one of the stones had nipped his shadow suit. The thrown man’s figure had blocked the majority of the assault, but the attackers were reloading, and Kane saw no obvious shield for the next barrage. Instead, he ran at the three of them, Helen’s fallen form included, holding down the trigger of the Copperhead to unleash a continuous stream of fire.
A LITTLE WAY AHEAD down the corridor, Brigid Baptiste was the first to meet with the hulking stone-clad Annunaki called Ullikummis. Eight feet tall, he loomed before her like some primitive statue, an impressive presence in the wide, rock-walled tunnel.
“Submit,” he ordered, his voice as brutal as a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil.
Swiftly, Brigid fingered the rubber stopper of the glass flask she held, pulling it loose and tossing the contents—and then the jar—in the monster’s face. Automatically, Ullikummis lifted his arms, turning his head as the colorless hydrochloric acid splashed him.
For a moment—the impossible. Ullikummis, stone prince and furious sire of the Annunaki gods, stopped in his tracks, a shrill curse of pain emanating from his flamelike mouth.
In over three millennia, the sound of Ullikummis in pain had never been heard. The scream seemed to rock the mountainous redoubt, its noise piercing through Brigid’s body and making her bones vibrate beneath her skin.
Then the wide-bottomed glass container shattered as it struck the monster’s towering form, its shards twinkling as they soared away beneath the flickering overhead lights. A plume of thick smoke erupted from Ullikummis’s face and the top third of his rocklike body. The pluming smoke was accompanied by a loud fizzing sound, like bacon sizzling on a griddle.
Then the stone overlord staggered back, wiping at his face as the acid ate away at his rocky hide, that thick stream of white smoke pluming from his face and arms like some kind of living fog.
Brigid did not hesitate. Her TP-9 pistol was in her hand, pumping bullet after bullet into the stone god’s face as he staggered before her. “Go back to the hell you came from, you evil son of a snake,” she growled as the TP-9 spit bullets at her stumbling adversary.
FURTHER ALONG THE TUNNEL, behind Brigid and Kane, Grant tossed one of his attackers aside, throwing the man into the nearest wall with bone-breaking finality. The other two were still gripping him, one pulling at his left arm while the other had her arms around his waist, trying to yank him down from behind.
Grant skipped backward, slam
ming into the wall there, forcing the woman behind him to loosen her grip. The other one was tossed aside when Grant flipped his left arm out, and tumbled across the floor before the huge ex-Magistrate. After taking a step forward, Grant fell back again, slamming against the wall a second time, forcing the hooded woman to take the brunt of the assault. With a third maneuver, she finally let go, sagging to the floor.
“Third time’s the charm,” Grant muttered as he turned his attention to the last of his assailants.
The hooded man grabbed for him, pulling him forward by his right forearm. Trying to hold Grant was like trying to hold down an angry grizzly bear. The ex-Mag raised his right arm, the robed figure still clutching on to it, and shook. The figure there clung on, teeth bared in determination.
“Suit yourself, then,” Grant growled, and squeezed down on the trigger of the Copperhead he still held.
A stream of bullets blasted from the nose of the weapon, slamming into the figure that gripped him until the man was forced to let go. Grant watched as he flew through the air, his robes fluttering about him as bullets drilled into his chest and face. When his foe crashed to the ground, Grant leaped away, hurrying to assist Kane and Brigid in their assault on Ullikummis. Grant owed that stone monstrosity, and right here, right now, he intended to deliver.
Kane was just finishing off the last of his own combatants, flipping the robed figure to the floor with a leg sweep. The would-be attacker slammed against the hard flooring, his head striking with a loud crack.
Kane stepped away, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep himself moving, all agitation and adrenaline. Helen Foster, his strangely affected Cerberus colleague, remained slumped against one wall, the hood of her robe bunched around her face.
Grant caught up with Kane, silently gesturing down the corridor to where Brigid was battling with the terrifying figure of Ullikummis. Kane brushed his finger to his nose, that superstitious acknowledgment of the long odds once again. It felt somehow more appropriate now than it ever had before; Helen had been turned somehow, and that probably meant others had been, too. And now they faced a monster they’d struggled to overcome twice before.