Authors: James Axler
Reaching the fence, she parted some grass and saw
that there were at least forty sheep penned into the area, but they simply stood in place. They'd eaten, but not with the same mindless industry that a usual flock would have. The animals were just taking in enough to sustain their lives, not grazing down to the nub and then moving on to another section. By the growth, Domi was able to put it at three or four months, putting the conquest of this small farm town right in the area of the first expansion of Charun and Vanth after their awakening. This was just as the CATs surmised upon their transit.
Approach on the road was too risky. The ovine brain wasn't one of the sharpest in the world, but certainly if the sheep were caught in a form of mental thrall, there was every likelihood they could serve as eyes and ears for the two Etruscan demigods. Domi slowly allowed the grass to bend itself back into position, in no hurry to let her presence be betrayed by the rustle of blades.
There was no wind, especially none at her back, so her scent wouldn't waft toward the sheep. With practiced stealth and grace, she returned to the rest of her team.
“Sheep. Just like the birds,” Domi noted softly, keeping her voice low. “Numb.”
“Why mind control sheep or birds?” Edwards murmured.
“The power needs to punch a hole to the other dimension,” Sela Sinclair offered. “They want to open a door back to their home world, and doing that takes a lot of energy.”
“So they're tapping free will? Souls?” Smaragda asked. “However that goes, it'd be a hell of a boon, technologically.”
“If you don't mind robbing someone of their individuality,” Sinclair countered.
“Maybe for prisoners,” Edwards mentioned.
“Maybe we get out of here,” Domi grumbled, her ruby
eyes narrowed to slits as she looked back toward the farm. “We skirt the town.”
“And we shut the hell up,” Smaragda added, gauging Domi's impatience.
The albino girl nodded. “Not so many words.”
With that, Domi and her team backtracked, then gave the farm town a wide berth.
It would add an hour to their trek, but when it came to butting heads with alien menaces, there was little to be gained by rushing blindly into battle.
* * *
W
ITH NIGHT
'
S ARRIVAL
, cloaking the world in darkness only illuminated by stars and a slim crescent of moon, CAT Beta had been able to move with a little more speed. In the inky shadows, they had the advantage of superior night vision, including Domi's ruby-red gaze, which made her sensitive to even the faintest of glows. She'd long since inured herself to daylight, but except on overcast days, she kept a pair of sunglasses ready to keep from being “snow blinded” by the burning sun.
It was after the arrival of dusk where she came most alive; a nocturnal predator entering her environment. The others were utilizing night-vision optics, and with the world cast in green via light amplification, the four of them were in far less need of keeping to foliage and such.
Sure, they meant to stay in the shadows, something that they could discern even in the night-vision optics. Domi eschewed that, as she was used to a lifetime of night hunting that she had honed to perfection. This was training and skill that she continued using, even with technology that couldn't honestly improve upon the senses she utilized. She could understand using IR and UV vision, as well as telescopic optics, but for night work, with plenty of natural starlight for her to see by, she didn't use the hood.
The four people kept their profile low, thanks to the camouflage aspects of the shadow suit's high-tech polymers. Though Domi didn't have her faceplate down on her hood, she did have it tucked up over her bone-white hair, so as to minimize the shocking contrast of it against the countryside. The same had gone during the day, as well. Her bare feet, though cast of the same alabaster as the rest of her albino skin, had been darkened and dirtied by years of trudging, so that she didn't have to worry about them sticking out like sore toes.
Domi heard the flutter of wings in the distance, then froze, the others coming to a halt behind her and crouching low.
“Bird?” Edwards murmured, speaking in a low tone.
“Lots,” Domi returned. “Too dark to see us. Maybe.”
Edwards and Sinclair immediately picked up on Domi's heightened agitation. Her language skills suffered in fight-or-flight situations, but that was all right with her two partners. When it came to fighting for survival, Domi's lack of elocution was balanced by downright eloquence when it came to the arts of violence. However, as they were closing in on the location of the missing parallax point, any bit of action would only draw down the attention of the godlings and who knew how many of their mindless slaves.
Though CAT Beta was made of formidable warriors, armed with powerful weapons, there still were limits to both firepower and skill in the face of superior numbers. Standing and fighting would be tantamount to suicide.
Their option was silence and a fighting retreat if necessary.
That retreat would get harder, though, the farther they penetrated into the realm of Charun and Vanth. There would be a larger perimeter to fight through, more lines of thralls at their backs to block their escape.
Together, though, the four of them knew that even if it came to blasting through the opposition, they were still limited by several things. They knew that their opposition was composed of innocents enthralled by the pair of winged demigods. And they had a limited supply of ammunition, even if they didn't care about causing lethal harm to the mental slaves.
As of now, Edwards and Sinclair were scanning the skies with their IR optics, picking up the heat signatures of several small birds in flight. They swept the air above them, staying as still as possible. There was a dull dread hanging in the night, if only for the fact that they knew their enemy had its own air force, the very birds of this area.
If there were raptors in the area, then there was also a likelihood that Vanth wouldn't even need to send actual troops to bring them down. A bird of prey hitting with its claws at over 50 miles an hour, up to 120 in some instances, was more than sufficient to slice through shadow suit and flesh easily.
“I'm watching for patterns among the birds.” Sinclair spoke softly, only truly audible thanks to the Commtact's jawbone microphone pickups and inner ear stimulation. “They're not acting as observers. If one bird passes, it doesn't come back this way, not even making a wide berth.”
“You're going by twentieth-century unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance tactics, right?” Edwards asked. “You had likeâ¦what? One or two up at a time?”
Sinclair nodded. Domi could hear her hiss of disgust as Sinclair realized that with all of the night flying, one bird wouldn't need to circle them to keep track. Not with waves of sets of eyes that could be in the air. Even so, the flights overhead didn't seem to be particularly concentrated. The whole thing reminded Domi of the sweep of
that line on the circular radar screen, illuminating targets with each pass.
As long as they continued their slow crawl, as long as their shadow suits matched the ground beneath them, and as long as they only really moved quickly in the lulls between the mind-controlled eyes in the sky, they wouldn't be found.
As if that hopeful thought summoned down the wrath of Charun and Vanth, Domi spotted a flicker in the distance, the glow of multiple torches illuminating the movements of a patrolling group. Domi kept the team still. CAT Beta and Smaragda used the telescopic aspects of their shadow suit hoods to zoom in on those distant lights.
Three hundred yards away, they saw a group of ten people. They were locals, dressed in simple, handmade clothing, but each of them had either a brutal farm implement or a firearm. They were searching; a party of mixed men and women thralls.
Edwards spoke up first this time.
“They're actively searching for us,” he subvocalized through the Commtact. “Their eyes are at least more animated now.”
“Maybe Charun figured out that you were camouflaged near the Manta's landing site,” Sinclair offered.
“It's weird. They're just below looking human,” Smaragda mentioned, her voice also a low whisper. “Like⦔
“Robots. Zombies,” Domi muttered. She was put on edge by all of this, as well.
If there were people and birds out in the night searching, then there could have been other hunters. Domi swept the closer terrain. They were in waist-high grass, which meant there could be all sorts of smaller mammals present, but if there was one thing the feral girl was good at, it was spotting those little morsels that would keep her alive and surviving for another day, be it in a forest or a
desert. Her instincts looked for mice, voles, rabbits and, with some relief, she came up with nothing. That didn't mean the tiniest of animals was ignored by the demigods, but it did tell the wild woman that those miniature mammals weren't being used as spies and seekers right here.
It was a small measure of relief.
“Do we wait for them to pass?” Edwards asked.
“No. But we stay slow and steady,” Domi returned. “Birds, Sela?”
“None,” Sinclair returned.
“Move,” Domi ordered.
And she took the lead, her petite form crawling out, slender arms and legs carrying her along in a crawl that would approximate a fast walk as long as she wasn't among tall grasses that would sway with her passage. It was an achingly slow process, pausing every time Sinclair hissed and indicated something was in the air over them.
By the time that they reached the road where the search party patrolled, the thralls were out of sight, the glow of their torches having disappeared around the bend of trees. Even so, Domi flicked on her infrared vision and was able to capture the heat sources of those burning brands even through intervening foliage. She returned to her normal, natural vision, and waved the others onto the road with her. Their shadow suits shifted, blending into the dirt road, taking on tones of brown and rust to match the well-trampled earth that made up the path.
“There's a canopy of trees,” Sinclair noted. “Sweeping for heat sources.”
Domi nodded. They didn't dare move until they were certain that nothing was waiting on a tree limb or in a knot hole, serving as a living security camera for the Etruscan godlings.
Once that was cleared up, they continued moving, picking up their pace. Sinclair remained on infrared, counting
on the heat given off by Domi's bare feet to mark a safe walking path, all the while keeping her head on a swivel. Tension, living and moving in the shadows or the breaths between moments without birds in the sky.
This was nothing new to Domi. This was where she was born, skulking in the shadows against authority and predation that would slam down upon her and end her existence. It was tense, it was tough, but there was one thing that would make this worth all the anxiety, all the stealth.
Freedom for those currently hounding them, freedom from Vanth and Charun's domination of their lives.
This deadly game of hide-and-seek had only one acceptable outcome for Domi and her friends, and that was the fall of the winged conquerors.
Brigid Baptiste tested her weight on her foot once more. It had been an entire day since the others had left for Italy via interphaser. She'd been bedridden, eating aspirin and trying to relax her strained system thanks to a psychic battle against the song of Vanth. EKGs immediately after showed that her heart had irregular rhythms, rendering her in less than optimal condition to penetrate into enemy territory.
The aspirin pills were meant to bring her heartbeat back into normal parameters. They must have worked, since it was the morning after her friends had left and her EKGs over the past eight hours had proved normal. The acetaminophen had also worked wonders on her tender sprained ankle, as she was able to walk securely on it.
Of course, even if she wanted to take the interphaser, Kane and the rest of the Cerberus teams had thirty-six hours' worth of a head start on her. No, what she needed to do was to wait. Kane and Grant had done plenty of work making certain she was checked out on the Mantas, and she could fly them adequately enough. She wouldn't be an air combat ace, but she could land a Manta in a clearing, and keep control of it as it skimmed ten miles above the Earth at supersonic speed.
Her role was rapid response, so being “stuck” back here minding the store was a necessary evil. So far, the only thing reported from the field was Kane and Grant's encounter
with the cyclops. The others had gone into radio silence, which made Brigid feel a little more edgy than normal. She was not a sit-back-and-wait kind of woman. She was an explorer, an adventurer. Her hunger for new knowledge, as well as her obligation to assist the helpless, demanded that she be up and around.
Diana had informed Brigid that she was free to keep herself in condition, mentally and physically, making use of the Olympian library as well as physical rehabilitation.
After ice baths and hot wraps, Brigid's ankle was feeling as strong as ever. She could put her full weight on it, and her ligaments had returned to full limberness. While there were medical facilities and a gymnasium back at the Cerberus Redoubt, New Olympus had far more cause and need to engage in physical rehabilitation. There were those who were catastrophically injured, to the point where amputations were needed to prevent suffering from gangrene. Then there were others with less dramatic wounds, so that Olympian doctors became a well-oiled machine when it came to pulled and sprained limbs, as well as broken bones.
Brigid continued flexing her ankle, pivoting on it to make sure she hadn't merely numbed it.
“You keep working that ankle at that rate, you'll ruin it again.” Diana spoke up. “Then again, what would I know? I lost my feet years ago.”
Brigid sat, laying a towel around her neck. She'd worked up a good sweat, hoping that her body's exertions would distract her. There was no such luck, and she was starting to grow sick of the walls around her. “Thanks for the use of the facilities.”