Authors: James Axler
“Don't make me hurt you, bro. Say something. Let me know that naked bitch hasn't got you as her puppet!” Grant demanded.
Kane gathered himself up, glaring silently back at him. He pointed to his throat, but still stood in a defensive martial arts posture.
Grant kept his distance, circling. He'd see white, slender figures in the corners of his eyes, but they faded the instant he tried to focus on them. They couldn't have been an active threat, not with Grant distracted like this.
The only reason they wouldn't be interferingâ¦
They're not interfering because you're on their side.
Grant paused. Kane wasn't taking the offensive, and he wasn't looking for his firearm, either.
There were huge gaps in the logic of his battle with his friend, and that went double as he looked and noticed that the Sin Eater was still retracted, flat along Kane's forearm. He'd never unleashed it, and thus hadn't lost it when Grant tackled him.
Anger surged through the big man as he realized he'd just been duped, having fallen into an illusion cast by Charun.
Of course, he still felt the impulse to battle against Kane. This was something that had slithered under Grant's conscious defenses, which was doubly disturbing. Hadn't Brigid Baptiste implanted posthypnotic suggestions into the Cerberus expedition to protect them from this?
“Damned aliens,” Grant snarled. He lunged forward and wrapped both hands around Kane's throat, lifting his friend up. It was an aggressive move, one that hadn't inspired an ounce of resistance from the voice at the back of his mind, shouting for him to put Kane down like the rabid dog he'd become.
Grant only hoped the collar of Kane's suit was absorbing the bulk of the force, as it had earlier with his initial punch.
“Kick that bastard in the head,” Grant hissed to his friend.
Kane's eyes flared with recognition and agreement.
With a mighty surge, Grant whirled, hurling Kane toward the fallen Charun. Twisting in midair, Kane brought both feet up so that he could connect with the Etruscan giant. Soles stiffened to the hardness of steel plates and Charun found himself crashing against the wall with 200 pounds of fighting-mad Cerberus warrior kicking out. Kane's momentum was increased by the power of Grant's throw, and the two men had actually floored Charun.
The strange pressure inside Grant's skull disappeared in an instant.
“Anam-chara!”
Kane rasped, finally able to speak.
Even more static dissipated from Grant's mind and he looked around to see the slender, pale creatures he'd barely been able to acknowledge under the ministrations of mind control. Of course, the moment they saw that he had been released from domination under Charun's spell, they immediately struck a retreat. They had showed up to enjoy the carnage that would have occurred when the two friends engaged in a bloody brawl, and foolishly did so without weapons at hand. Now, having underestimated Grant and Kane, they realized that discretion would keep them alive much longer than standing in front of two armed and trained warriors.
Brigid Baptiste swung around the nose of the Manta, her TP-9 in both hands and leveled toward the fleeing Stygians, making them run even more quickly away.
“We need to go now,” she said. She must have realized the change in demeanor of the two former combatants. “Vanth is behind me⦔
“This way,” Kane croaked. “It sounds like Beta's in the middle of a firefight.”
Grant let his Sin Eater launch into his grasp. “How rude. We invite them to all of our gun battles. Let's register some complaints!”
Kane grinned. “It's so much better having you on my side than against me.”
As one, Brigid, Kane and Grant rushed down the corridor toward their besieged allies.
So far, the Stygians outside the door to CAT Beta's hideout had wasted a lot of their ammunition, and had only succeeded in leaving ragged gaps in the door's panels. Domi turned and made certain that her allies were all in full hoods.
“Gas them,” Domi said. She'd gotten a glance through the holes torn in the door and could tell that while they wore appropriated Olympian armor, they had forgone the helmets.
It was an uncertain strategy since there was no guarantee their body chemistry and biology were close enough to human to be adversely affected by clouds of pepper gas. However, if their sense of smell and touch, if they had similarly sensitive mucus membranes to humans, Domi could attest to the conclusion that tear gas would send them scurrying away.
Smaragda fired her under-barrel gren launcher on her rifle. The 40 mm shell punched through a weakened, bullet-eaten section of door, and when the round struck the far wall, it popped loudly. Hissing smoke gushed into the corridor and they were almost instantly rewarded with the sound of rasping coughs and gasps.
Sinclair and Edwards, who had switched to his shotgun on the command to gas them, fired their 12-gauge variants of tear gas shells, adding to the billowing, eye-burning mists that replaced the roar of autofire with the sounds of spitting, retching and wheezing.
“There's a reason why we wear helmets on the battlefield,” Smaragda stated. She thumbed another shell into the breech of her launcher.
“What?” Domi asked bluntly, pointing to the round she loaded.
Smaragda looked down. “Flash-bang.”
“Boom,” Domi said with a grin. No longer needing their suits to be in camouflage mode, the team let the second skins return to their shadowy black, hoods turned translucent for the ease of recognition and communication. The black faceplates were good for stealth and intimidation, but a conversation lacking facial expressions was unnecessarily troublesome, especially for Domi, who tended to lose most of her vocabulary in times of stress and conflict.
Smaragda grinned in reply and fired the launcher.
The hoods protected the hearing of those inside the storage room, audio pickups filtering out the massive pressure wave, but for the Stygians trying to root them out, it was unadulterated pain. The stun gren shook loose splinters and remnants of door that had been hanging on by threads, and Domi could see one of the pallid aliens clutching the sides of his head. Though the creatures had no apparent external ears, that didn't mean they didn't have eardrums that could be ruptured.
The blast wave also did a number on their vision, as black, thick tears flowed from their almond eyes and slit nostrils. Domi recalled Brigid's explanation of the effect of dangerously loud flash-bang grens; that the sound was accompanied by levels of pressure that burst small blood vessels in vital areas such as the sinuses and eye lining in some cases. With their sinus membranes already under great stress due to the tear gas, the Stygians were undoubtedly going through hell as the already filled chambers of their skull were exacerbated and flushed with blood.
Gunfire rattled in the corridor, which caught Domi's attention. It didn't take more than an instant to recognize it was the gunfire from her friends' pistols, not the appropriated Olympian rifles. Slender, haggard figures lurched through the choking tear gas in an effort to flee the arrival of CAT Alpha.
A black-gloved hand reached in front of the door and gave a rap on a solid bit of remnant.
“Excuse me, is the man of the house around?” Brigid called out.
“And the ladies, too,” Edwards shouted back. “What took you guys so long?”
“Would you believe acts of god?” Brigid asked.
Domi ran to the door, opening it for her friends. “We staying here or moving along?”
“I'd say we're moving,” Kane returned. “Especially if Vanth isn't going to waste time on the scrambled Charun.”
Domi snapped her fingers, waving the rest of her team into the corridor. Sela Sinclair led the way, motioning the direction from which CAT Beta had entered the bowels of the pyramid. Domi paused long enough to see Grant setting up a pair of flat demolitions charges along the walls.
“It slowed her down once before,” Brigid said, starting to run and follow Kane and the others.
Domi nodded. “Good.” She turned toward Grant, calling out, “Hurry up!”
“I'm coming!” Grant growled, punching the controls to activate the wall mines.
Domi caught the reaction of the big man as he looked away from the wall, then spun and raced toward them. Instants later the wall erupted under a thundering crash, a blast much larger than anything the trip-wire mine could have produced. Domi could have sworn, in the moment before the tunnel was shaken by the explosion, that she saw a black arrow slicing through the air.
Whatever the case, Grant skidded on the floor, then scrambled to his feet. “Vanth's here!”
Domi helped Grant get his footing again, and the pair exploded into motion, racing away from the spreading cloud of dust and debris.
Vanth had definitely showed up ready for all-out war, and she wasn't staying her hand, or the quiver of arrows she wore. Those arrows struck with the force of thunderbolts and, right now, the teams were equipped more for dealing nonlethally with mind-controlled minions than with deadly enemies whose archery was as destructive as anti-tank missiles.
“She's making room between us and them. She needs to get Charun back on his feet and into his armor,” Grant explained. “Still, that's a hell of a bow and arrow set.”
“Damn right,” Domi agreed as they charged along.
Grant and Domi finally caught up with the others and saw Kane and Edwards hard at work cranking up the wrought-iron gate from the inside. Now that the Etruscan godlings knew of the presence of the CAT teams, there was little to be lost by using the official controls on the door. Working together, the two men used a lever and a set of chains and pulleys to lift the several-ton iron gate.
Brigid pulled the last of her paper-thin explosive charges and placed it along the chain.
“What's that going to do?” Grant asked.
“It'll slow down Vanth and Charun,” Brigid said. “I'll detonate it by remote control.”
“Did you see that arrow? Or did you forget about the hammer strike?” Grant countered.
“In close quarters, it'll put them at a disadvantage,” Brigid told him. “Trust me, I'm thinking ahead on this one.”
“Come on,” Kane growled. “The longer we dither here⦔
“And the prisoners?” Smaragda asked. “We're trapping my friends down there?”
Brigid gave Smaragda a shove past the gate. “We're not forgetting our promise to you and New Olympus. Trust us.”
Domi and Grant ducked beneath the lowering gate, Brigid scurrying through immediately after. She tapped a control on her forearm and the sound of her munition detonating was instantly followed by the clattering of unraveling chains.
From there, it was a hard run back to the surface.
* * *
S
MARAGDA SAT IN
the forest, her arms crossed, elbows resting on her knees. She felt good to get out of the shadow suit hood, feeling the wind on her face and through her prematurely whitened hair. Though she was physically free from the constraints of the environmentally sealed suit, the world was dark and heavy around her.
The good news was that it wasn't her fellow Olympian troopers who were accompanying the robotic armor suits. They were not wandering around as mental slaves.
Instead they were corralled, like cattle, their minds hijacked for the purpose of punching a hole through to an alien universe. According to Brigid Baptiste, the flame-haired scientific genius of this expedition, their idle existences would be only a temporary condition, as once the dimensional warp was opened, there would be a need for bodies for the invaders.
“Charun and Vanth are likely Igigi,” Brigid explained. “The nonelevated castes of Annunaki society. However, either by design or accident, their original identities were usurped and overwritten by transdimensional duplicates.”
“If they can overwrite the Annunaki, then what chance do humans have?” Smaragda asked. “You're saying that my friends will cease to exist, and in their place, in their
skins
, fiends will appear and become a part of an army of conquest.”
Brigid looked at her, lips sealed tight. Smaragda could see the thoughts churning behind the woman's eyes, and she immediately felt regret at claiming there was no hope. If there was a human being alive with the brilliance to rescue both her brother soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Italian peninsula dwellers, it was Brigid Baptiste.
“I'm sorry,” Smaragda said quickly. “What would you need me to do?”
“Right now, we're going to let the enemy come to us,” she said. “Vanth and Charun have been embarrassed, and they are angry. They will come looking for us.”
“But we can tell that they haven't started with the search parties,” Grant added. “According to Lakesh, who has three satellites looking down on their pyramid, there has been no movement from either of the entrances we've encountered. There are other openings, but no activity there, either.”
“You found other openings,” Edwards asked. “Air ducts?”
“Definitely,” Grant confirmed. “Otherwise, things would become unbreathable down there.”
“Given the human and livestock cells, it's not the healthiest atmosphere down in the pit,” Domi said. Her nose crinkled at the memory of the smell. “But that was one thing Vanth didn't lie about. They've been taken care of.”
“They want all the shells they can get,” Kane muttered.
“Not to mention their squirmy little pale freaks,” Sela Sinclair added. She glanced over to Domi. “Sorry, Domi.”
Domi waved off the mention of the pallid nature of the alien humanoids. “How are we going to handle the two of them and their allies when they
do
come hunting for our heads?”
“It will depend on who they send after us,” Brigid explained. “We're lucky to have Edwards as our pack muleâ¦and you already have sufficient less-lethal firepower to deal with thralls sent in place of the standard troops.”