Reality Echo

by James Axler

  And then there was his “baleful” eye. It glowed a sickly radioactive green, and was the size of a fist. When Balor looked at his reflection on the surfaces of puddles, the emerald shimmer seemed alien to him—he never saw it, never felt it, even when he opened up the depths of the baleful eye’s true power. It was just like a normal eye. He even possessed normal depth of field, just as when he had two eyes. The glow, however, was something he’d never noticed in normal everyday life. The power of the orb in his skull was on multiple levels, and when Bres had given it to him, the godling claimed that it had belonged to Bres’s own father, kept safe for thousands of years.

  He remembered when he was reborn as Balor. He was just a young boy, his voice still high, not having dropped with the onset of adolescence due to hormonal imbalance. Bres had dug the eye out, and there, surrounded by dozens of murdered Appalachians, those who had tormented Balor before his defection to the side of the Fomorians, he unveiled the eye.

  The front half looked normal, a regular eye, but the back was a bowl of metal and electronics with a cord of pink polymer that resembled an engorged, wormlike optic nerve. Balor only remembered the fire and the pain of transformation; he didn’t want the calming caress that would have numbed his nerves. The agony he was twisted through as bodies were fed onto him, adding layers of biomass to his frame, was the cleansing process that helped him sever his link to when he was a human.

  Now, he was truly the son of Bres, Balor the Second, mighty beyond all, stitched together from a dozen carcasses and a strange, ancient device that gave Balor powers beyond all normality.

  It was one of these powers that picked up the presence of warm footprints in the ground, pools of heat where hands had touched the ground or crates. Bres had explained the process as thermal imaging, but to Balor, it was his rainbow sight, capable of peering through foliage or tracking a person by his passage. Balor’s flat, ragged nose twitched in irritation, and he loped toward Bres, who stood, watching over the witch.

  “Kane was here. He took supplies and left,” Balor explained.

  “He left?” Bres asked.

  “He moved in when I wasn’t watching. That’s the only way he could have snuck past,” Balor grumbled.

  Bres cursed under his breath. “I’ll get in touch with the hunting party via radio.”

  “I want to snatch him up,” Balor begged. “Let me go after him.”

  “No, son,” Bres whispered softly. “There will come a time when you may face this human, but now is not it.”

  “He cannot harm me, and I will be gentle,” Balor pleaded.

  “I said no,” Bres growled, the angry authority in his voice snapping on Balor like the crack of a whip.

  Balor lowered his head at his father’s command.

  “You have brothers to free from imprisonment in the side of the mountain,” Bres cooed, stroking the huge lantern jaw of his titanic offspring. “We cannot afford the loss of my army.”

  “Yes, sir,” Balor whispered, thoroughly admonished.

  With that, he sprung back toward the cliffs and applied his might to tearing away slabs of rock and clots of soil with renewed ferocity, shovellike fingernails clawing through material as if it were soft sand, not compacted earth and stone. Shoulder muscles shifted like icebergs crashing in an arctic ocean, each movement precise, yet bearing the power of a bulldozer. He had been tempted to use the full fire of the baleful eye, but the lambent radiation would only cut holes in the dirt, and perhaps penetrate into a tunnel and sicken his brother Fomorians. Even they could not stand in the harsh emerald glow of his dread stare. No, this was a matter of brutish strength alone.

  Such was his task until his father deemed it the appropriate time for him to set out in search of the man Kane, descendant of Cuchulainn.

  When they met, it would be the meeting of the sons of the gods. Balor’s twisted lips turned up in a grim smile. The battle would be glorious, a challenge that Balor had sought all of his existence.

  WITH THE AID of his walking stick, and shielded from the elements by his impromptu canvas outfit, Kane was able to ascend the mountainside much more quickly than before. The leverage of his cane helped him use all of his strength, not just his legs, to haul himself up the steep slope. Behind him, there were four of the Fomorian hunters, put on his trail because they noticed that he’d stolen by them. Kane wondered if perhaps one of the Fomorians had a form of enhanced senses to have detected his passing.

  The hunters were skilled, Kane had to admit. He had done much of his traveling by walking toe-heel, minimizing his stride and footprints. Still, when it came to ascending loose soil and the detritus of the forest floor, he couldn’t help but make some mess. That they could follow his spoor in the darkness of night was a credit to their skill.

  Perhaps they wanted him alive, because not one of them had unslung his rifle, but Kane wasn’t going to gamble too much on that presumption. Bres wanted Kane for something, and given the stories of cannibalism among the Fomorians, it was likely that whatever means Bres had to gain information would not be pleasant for Kane.

  It was time to make things a little more difficult for the Fomorians, so Kane stopped climbing and scurried laterally on the mountainside. Traveling on a more level incline allowed him to make the most of his escape and evasion skills. His tread grew lighter, and very little was disturbed as he passed. It was about a three-hundred-stride detour, and Kane paused to crouch behind the cover of some boulders. Hunger and thirst rumbled in his gut again, and Kane pulled out a clump of grass to chew on the roots. Moisture exploded in his mouth and refreshed him. He made certain not to leave any sign that he’d paused among the rocks, scanning by touch for any fallen blades that would have been visibly out of place here.

  Swallowing the last of the juices from a second serving of roots, Kane put the pulp under a flat piece of stone to hide it. In daylight, it might have been noticeable if the Fomorians had wandered this far, but right now, he had the impression of frustration emanating from the hunting party. He kept low behind the boulder, unmoving, his canvas hood and parka helping him to blend in with the shadows around him. As he watched, he saw a lone Fomorian pacing. The creature had withdrawn his rifle, hard eyes scanning for signs of his prey.

  Kane held his ground, remaining silent, his breathing slowed until it was inaudible to the one-armed hunter sweeping the mountainside. While killing one of the creatures might have given him the opportunity to steal more supplies and even the odds, the group of hunters were operating in coordination. One move, a flurry of violence, would produce enough noise to alert the other three who were on the stalk, keeping their eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary. Rather than risk a confrontation and putting himself in the sights of a trio of the strong, determined mutants, Kane opted to remain stealthy, using his own senses to keep track of the threats hunting for him.

  The one-armed Fomorian held his AK-47 like a handgun. The thickness of his forearm and the bulge of his biceps informed Kane that no amount of recoil would throw off the creature’s aim, and his binocular vision meant that his marksmanship would be unimpeded by any mutations. A sharp whistle cut the air and the Fomorian halted.

  Kane didn’t move, remaining still as the stones he hid among, only his eyes sweeping for the origin of the piercing signal. Due to the echoing properties of the trees on the mountain slope, Kane wasn’t able to triangulate the origin of the whistle. It was possible that his enemy had surrounded him, but to turn his head to look further would only betray his position.

  If the hunters were certain that they knew where he was, the whistle would have been followed by more verbal means of communication. Kane returned his gaze to the Fomorian that he could see without moving, and saw that the hunter was in the middle of stuffing the barrel of his AK through his belt. The hunter’s face was twisted in obvious reluctance to give up the chase; perhaps he smelled something, or his acute ears had picked up Kane’s heartbeat. Whatever, the Fomorian had sensed that he wasn’t far from his p
rey.

  The Fomorians were to regroup, Kane interpreted as the mutant turned and headed back toward his brethren. As soon as the creature was out of sight, Kane rose slowly. He glanced at the source of the shrieking whistle from before, and while it was an upper-level outcrop, it was empty for now.

  Was this really a game of cat and mouse? How much did the hunters know? What kind of special senses or assistance would these creatures have had?

  Three good questions, but Kane would concentrate on these later on. Right now, he padded off silently, moving another hundred yards before he stopped against the trunk of a pine tree with an exposed tangle of roots that offered cover. Tucked in the soil beneath the tree’s trunk, Kane watched his back trail. He’d used his walking stick to disturb some ground he’d passed through, well within his line of sight, more as a test for how good his stalkers had been. The line of the staff prints had been a turnoff about twenty-five yards from his current hiding position, and Kane had climbed fifty feet before tucking the stick under his armpit and skittering with a minimum of disturbance back toward this hiding spot.

  If they possessed superior senses of smell or a means of reading his body heat from his footsteps, then the feint wouldn’t have worked due to the backtrack. Two Fomorians grunted softly as they spotted Kane’s false trail. The sharp whistle broke the night silence once more, and the other two arrived, not in a rush and maintaining noise discipline. If Kane hadn’t been versed in how Sky Dog’s tribespeople were able to imitate local birds around the Bitterroot Mountain Range where the Cerberus redoubt was based, he could have been fooled into thinking that it was some form of local screech owl.

  Kane scanned the area from his peripheral vision to make certain that the four in the open weren’t a distraction to keep him occupied while other hunters sneaked up behind him. No, he was in the clear for now. The four mutants started slowly up the mountainside, watching the trail that Kane had started. They hadn’t seen his other movements inscribed in the dirt, and when they reached the top of the fifty-foot climb, they looked all around.

  The leader of the group grunted in frustration, then waved for the others to spread out. They did so, watching the slope. They had counted on him moving laterally once more, which meant that their senses weren’t superhumanly keen.

  That was a relief to Kane, who slithered out of the shadows and started back down the hill. He now knew that his enemy had only one or two members of their group who had preternatural senses, but he was also aware that his foes were strong and clever. Their sense of discipline in small-unit tactics and skill at tracking made them formidable opponents. The addition of automatic weapons was only a minor advantage to their already impressive list of abilities. Kane needed to get his own advantages, and that meant a few things had to be done.

  The primary course of action was determining how to liberate Epona from Bres’s clutches. Stealth was going to be his best course, as he didn’t relish fighting a creature who made the average Fomorian look spindly and puny. Right now, Kane needed her ancient Tuatha powers to complement his own skills, but if immediate rescue proved to be too difficult, then Kane would fall back to a second option, which was reaching the top of the mountain.

  The Fomorians were currently running a wild-goose chase, and they might get a clue again and try searching farther afield. The hunters wouldn’t waste their time returning to camp, even if they thought he might try something. Bres and Balor were back there, adding to the numbers of Fomorian tribesmen ready to hunt and fight. Kane could skirt the compound, figure out how to rescue Epona and then either with her in tow, or on his own, head to where the Cerberus explorers had left the communication equipment linking them to the Appalachians. The false Kane wouldn’t have had the time or energy to sabotage the radio, and when Kane got in contact with Cerberus redoubt, he’d be able to warn them of the real danger. His Commtact still wasn’t working, though Kane wasn’t sure whether the problem was with his comm unit or back at the redoubt.

  Slicing through the night like a panther, Kane moved silently, leaving little trace as he closed in on the Fomorian compound. If there was going to be a fight, at least this time he was prepared. Kane figured the amount of time since the avalanche, and he was closing on perhaps an hour and twenty minutes by his reckoning. He wondered about the turnaround time for Cerberus to send teams back to this area in order to help the Appalachians against the now decidedly dire threat of Bres and the Fomorians. Would his partners be paranoid enough to be concerned about his being replaced, and if so, would Thrush’s doppelganger play into that paranoia, slowing them?

  Kane figured for at least an hour and a half of medical tests, perhaps closer to two. He thought about his current course, back toward the Fomorian base, and then turning and heading to the top of the mountain. Add in the necessity to have Grant refit his equipment and head out with CAT Beta while Brigid stayed behind with the false entity…

  It would take Kane an hour and forty minutes to get Epona and return to the mountaintop. He figured that would be about the amount of time it would take for Cerberus to feel as if they had successfully contained a possible impostor and sent Grant and Domi to deal with the ancient race of mutants. Given Grant’s and Edwards’s size and Magistrate training, both men would be loaded for far more than bear, with grenade launchers and heavy antitank rifles in their gear. Ideally, to deal with the Fomorians, Kane would have opted for something like the mobile armor suits utilized in New Olympus, but Lakesh and Brewster Philboyd were working on modifications of the basic gear skeleton layout. As much as the New Olympian pilots were skilled at the use of the high-tech battle armor, they had sacrificed much to be able to utilize the suits. The original cockpits had been designed for smaller than human servitor races, like the Trans-adapts, so a human had to be an amputee to handle the current cockpit layouts.

  Increasing the size of the suits and the control chairs had been one idea, but the accompanying extra mass took up room that the war armor had originally been redesigned for sensor and weapons systems. While there were suggestions of forearm mounts replacing the shoulder weapon pintels, akin to the Magistrates’ Sin Eaters, there was controversy whether the arm mounts reduced the effectiveness of the gear skeletons. Part of the success of the Olympian fighting armor was that they could do chores and act as heavy-lifting equipment. The shoulder guns had been out of the way, letting them be fighters in addition to being superhuman laborers.

  Thus, Philboyd had been studying the designs in order to make smaller versions of the big combat suits.

  Here, on a mountainside, wrapped in canvas, Kane wondered what it would be like to be plugged into such a thing. He had worn other types of uniforms—Magistrate armor, battle dress uniforms, the high-tech shadow suits. He couldn’t imagine donning an articulated exoskeleton.

  Time enough to make such speculations later, he reminded himself sternly.

  Check on Epona, and then try to reach the parallax point before Grant and the others come back to clean up the Fomorians left over from the landslide.

  Kane fitted his stone knife into the notch at the end of his cane. Even on a stealth run, the use of its flesh-piercing point would mean the difference between discovery and evasion.

  It was time to see if he could rescue a witch.

  Chapter 15

  Cerberus

  Daryl Morganstern was in the middle of laughing at Wynan’s joke when Thrush-Kane approached him. Where Morganstern was a bit shorter than Brigid, Wynan was a mere five foot seven with black curly hair contrasting with a pale, rusty brown coloring. For a moment, the infiltration cyborg was reminded of the antithesis of Kane and Grant, with Morganstern’s “Grant” being small, scrawny and big eared. A smile flitted across his lips at the concept that Brigid Baptiste had found her own means of getting together with a different take on her anam-chara, this time opting for a variant who was more brain than brawn. Thrush-Kane didn’t know whether Wynan was the scientist’s first or last name, since he wasn’t called anything else.
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  “Hi, Daryl?” The android made his halting introductory statement, removing as much of the bass, and by extension the menace, from his voice.

  “Oh, uh, Mr. Kane,” Morganstern replied. He hastily reached up and pulled off his glasses, folding them to put them in the pocket of his shirt.

  “Don’t worry about your glasses,” Thrush-Kane said.

  Morganstern looked down at his breast pocket, then chuckled nervously. “Oh, I wasn’t afraid that you’d hit me. I just didn’t need them right now.”

  Wynan raised his hand meekly. “He uses them for magnification purposes. Reading small print, working with tiny devices…”

  Thrush-Kane tilted his head, stooping so as to meet Morganstern eye to eye. “Daryl, this isn’t high school, and I’m not some kind of jock here to push you around.”

  “Forgive me if my nerd senses were left tingling, okay?” Morganstern said.

  Thrush-Kane sighed and rested a calming hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to talk. Man to man, friendly, and here in the middle of the mess hall. I’m not going to haul you off to some secret corridor and punch you bloody.”