скачать книгу бесплатно
At the very least Grant and Edwards had been able to hear the majority of the warning coming from New Olympus. Grant would have felt a lot more confident had not the Heads Up Display on the pilot’s helmet been equally invalidated by the interference pulse. Still, there was a dome of glass, and Grant was an expert pilot, so at least he wouldn’t find himself crashing. Just to make certain, he pulled on his shadow suit hood. One thing the faceplate allowed for, in addition to being a self-contained environment, was advanced optics and sensors.
Grant glanced back and could see, in the distance, the outline of Edwards’s ship. They couldn’t talk by radio, but maybe they could communicate with hand gestures, especially with the telescopic zoom available in the eyepieces.
He throttled down only a fraction, steering to parallel Edwards, when he caught a flicker of darkness from the corner of his eye.
So much for being able to use sign language with Edwards before the UFO arrived.
Grant turned his head, swinging the Manta into an S-turn that would allow him to survey a maximum of sky around him. The cockpit glass of the high-velocity ship allowed him a fairly good panorama of the Mediterranean airspace. Edwards was visible, as well. He was keeping his distance and was focused on something Grant couldn’t see at this moment.
“Deaf and mute, and half blind,” the big, former Magistrate grumbled to himself. “I might as well be a sitting duck…”
With that thought, however, Grant noticed Edwards suddenly accelerate his Manta, as if to engage ramming speed against his fellow pilot. There was only a brief instant of confusion until he realized that whatever had drawn Grant’s attention as the UFO was now flying on his tail, sticking to his blind spot.
That turned out to be a much better form of nonverbal communication that instantly clicked in Grant’s mind. Within a moment he throttled up to near escape-velocity speed, tearing away from his pursuit utilizing the scram jet engines built into the moon-base-built wonder craft. He only maintained escape velocity for a few seconds, but that was more than sufficient to have created a few miles of space between the Manta and his pursuit.
With a deft spin, Grant was able to see the UFO as it raced to catch up. He could see a pair of powerful wings, but what hung beneath them was no mere bird, not even a pteranodon.
He employed his optic enhancements and zoomed in, focusing on a man.
No, to call it a man would have been a misnomer. With electronic readouts on the transparent shadow suit’s faceplate, Grant could see that the entity had a wingspan of thirty feet, its skin tone blued like that of a pallid corpse. Around its bare, brawny arms, he saw what at first appeared to be coiled serpents, but recognition immediately kicked in. He bore some version of the serpentine ASP blasters worn by the Nephilim drones who served beneath Enlil and the other Annunaki overlords. They glinted like metal in the sun, but those weapons seemed puny in comparison to the winged humanoid’s handheld device. It was a gigantic hammer, gripped in sinewy, powerful hands.
Grant looked at the face of his foe, one twisted in grim rage, tusks protruding and curving out over his mustached upper lip, a black beard of writhing worms crawling up the sides of his face before they lengthened into serpents like a male version of the Greek monster Medusa. His nose plunged down over his peeled-back lips like the hook of a vulture’s beak and its eyes were shadows beneath bulging, clifflike brow ridges.
Grant’s shock at the hurtling creature knocked him from taking a mental inventory of the beast’s appearance, and he flipped the circuits to activate the weapons recently added to the Manta. As he did, there was a whine of protest from the systems, informing him that whatever had negated radio communications had likewise disabled the weaponry controls.
“Isn’t that just great?” Grant growled, throttling up the engines and hurtling toward the flying humanoid. Though he was certain the hammer was far more than just a brutish weapon meant for crushing skulls, he was gambling on a Mach 2 impact stunning the flying opponent. The creature was not thematically different from the gigantic Kongamato from Africa, and he always wondered how one of those muscular horrors would have dealt with being run over by a supersonic Manta.
The tusked mouth turned into a semblance of a smile through the telescopic magnification on Grant’s faceplate and immediately he started to regret playing chicken with a flying demon.
He didn’t have long to doubt his course, though, as a moment later the Manta jolted violently. Even strapped into the pilot’s couch, Grant’s head and arms flailed wildly in the cockpit. Alarms and lights jerked to life around the cabin, the violence of impact making the horizon cartwheel in the cracked windshield of the supersonic craft.
Stunned, Grant tried to will his hands back to the joystick nestled between his knees. Unfortunately centrifugal force and a stabbing pain in his back and shoulder kept them dangling at the ends of his ropy arms. All the while, his optics displayed a countdown of the Manta’s altitude as it spiraled toward the Mediterranean Sea below. At this speed, striking incompressible water, it would be like hurling a melon against a stone wall, except the meaty fruit disgorged would be Grant’s internal organs.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_657fcf4b-541c-5605-8ca6-4c0ed718730b)
Edwards was aghast at the sight of the winged monstrosity flying to meet Grant’s Manta at ramming speed. At the same time he grimaced at the inconvenience of having his weaponry disabled by whatever had knocked out the radios. As it was, the flying monster itself was spiraling out of control, seemingly as stunned as the Manta, its pilot locked in a fatal corkscrew heading toward the waiting sea beneath them. However, even as the hammer-wielding flier toppled head over heels through the empty air, Edwards’s Commtact came back online.
“Grant!” It was a chorus of alarmed cries in familiar voices.
Edwards looked between the stunned monstrosity and his fellow Cerberus warrior plummeting toward the ground. With a pit of disgust in his belly, he realized that the newly armed Mantas had very little that could be used to save another aircraft from crashing. The upgrades were meant to swat threats from the sky, to ensure that they crashed.
And if Edwards could not rescue Grant, he’d sure as hell avenge his friend. His thumb flicked up the safety switch on his joystick and he pressed down on the trigger. In a moment a pair of .50-caliber machine guns roared to life beneath the keel of his Manta, streams of lead locking on the falling humanoid. As tracers described the path of fire from Edwards’s guns, the winged creature jolted to alertness. One bullet smashed through the beast-man’s wing, but no pain registered on his target.
Instead the huge hammer was raised in both hands. It lowered its head and the hammer’s bonce began to glow brightly, turning into a blazing sun at the end of its two-meter-long shaft. Edwards watched as the air in front of the hammer and the falling devil sparked to life. Instinctively the former Magistrate realized what those individual flares were as he eased off the trigger. The hammer was incinerating the massive bullets in flight, shielding the stunned opponent.
“So, if you want to play it that way,” Edwards murmured, “let’s try something that won’t burn up.”
Edwards kicked in what passed for afterburners on the Manta, and the crush of acceleration pushed him deeper into the pilot’s couch, the transonic aircraft blistering along at escape velocity. This low, he wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace very long, but it was merely a short burst of speed that roared him past their winged opponent. Unlike Grant, he wasn’t going to ram his enemy, but rather, let the sonic boom in his wake beat at the odd, hammer-wielding being.
And since the interference had stopped and the Manta’s cockpit was now receiving camera images, he was able to spot the effects of the thunderclap of his passage on the creature. It had lost its hammer and, once more, it was working into a spiral. Unfortunately this spiral was slow and winding, lazy and controlled.
Even so, there was no way that Edwards was going to allow it anywhere near its fallen hammer, wherever it would have landed. He swung his Manta around, all the while hoping that somewhere Grant had regained control of his craft.
The winged creature spotted the incoming scram jet and righted itself, putting on its own burst of blinding speed. Within moments it was out of sight, a spray of .50-caliber lead chasing it over the horizon.
“Guys? How’s Grant?” Edwards asked, still distracted by whatever it was they’d encountered.
* * *
IT COULD HAVE been adrenaline surging through Grant’s limbs that gave him the strength to pull his hands back down to the joystick, or it could have been the more automated systems on the Manta kicking into gear, providing just enough of an iota of balance and slowing for him to regain control of himself in the death spiral. Or it could just have been the mental image of him exploding like overripe fruit against the surface of the Mediterranean Sea that found Grant with his fingers wrapped tightly around the controls once more.
Whichever it was, he hit full reverse on the thrusters, jets blasting out bellows of air to slow his twirling descent, even as his other arm seized fast to the stick, bringing the control surfaces back to level.
With that all going on in the space of a few moments, the inertia of Grant’s insides caused a sour ball of bile to roll up into his throat, acidic taste making him grimace in disgust as the Manta’s crash course with oblivion came to an abrupt halt. It wasn’t like crashing into a wall of stone or an ocean from nearly a mile high, but it certainly was an upsetting experience. He couldn’t see through the gloves of his shadow suit, but he could feel how whitened his knuckles were as he clutched the throttle and collective.
Despite the environmental protections provided by the full-body shadow suit, Grant was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering to the point where he wondered if it would burst through his ribs. Adjusting the thrusters in VTOL mode, he steered a course toward the Oracle. He wanted to set down because he could feel a stream of cold air hissing through the cracked windscreen, hear the flap of torn seals and bouncing metal holding the cockpit’s canopy in place.
In the distance Grant heard a sonic boom and wondered if it was the explosion of Edwards’s ship or the detonation of some other weapon. It might have been the distraction of keeping the Manta on course for its emergency landing, but it took a moment to sink in that Edwards and his ship had gone supersonic.
Whatever Grant had collided with had proved to be more than capable of standing up to the incredible withering power of the jerry-rigged .50-caliber machine guns and missiles on their ships. And since Edwards saw with his own eyes what “ramming speed” accomplished, the big, bald brute went with a balance of raw power and ability. The blast of air parting and then clapping back together at Mach speed was the trick he’d opted for.
“Grant, you all right?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his voice showing far more emotion and concern than the stoic Cerberus warrior had displayed in a long time.
“Yeah. I’ve got my Manta limping to a landing near you,” Grant responded. “Any clue as to how much damage I’m suffering? Systems are still on the fritz here and there in the wake of that feedback blast.”
“You can see it for yourself once you land,” Kane replied, his voice growing harder.
Grant curled his lip. It was likely that it was more than just a scratch. He kept the pace even and steady, knowing that imperfections in the hull would make a renewed effort at supersonic transit a very messy method of suicide. The shadow suit provided a modicum of small-arms protection and had kept him from shattering limbs on short falls or minor crashes, but should the cockpit split open and the restraint belts on the pilot’s couch fail, no amount of non-Newtonian fabric would keep him from being crushed as he hit the ground after thousands of feet of free fall.
“Guys?” Edwards spoke over the comm-link. “How’s Grant?”
“Limping along. What happened to the winged bastard who ran me over?” Grant asked back.
“He took off running after I knocked the hammer from his hands,” Edwards replied. “Do we have contact with New Olympus yet?”
“You got a hammer from him?” Brigid interjected.
“Big bad hammer. It just missed opening Grant’s Manta like a can of rations,” Edwards explained.
“That’s a fair assessment,” Grant added. “He was an ugly cuss, with blue-gray skin and snakes for hair…”
“Charun,” Brigid stated.
“So much for a skeletal boatman,” Grant murmured. “What, we have the cross between Thor and some ugly angel?”
“No, Charun was a god of the dead. Edwards, you going to keep watch over where the hammer landed?” Brigid inquired.
“Damn straight. Once I knocked the thing out of his hands, we got our comms back,” Edwards explained. “So keeping the hammer away from him is, in my humble opinion, a great plan.”
“Good,” Brigid said. “Then we can see if we’re dealing with Annunaki technology or—”
“Charun had some metallic snakes wrapped around his arms that immediately reminded me of Enlil’s ASP blasters,” Grant said, cutting her off. “But these were bigger, thicker. Presumably more powerful. And being wound around his arms, he likely still has them.”
“Confirm on that,” Edwards advised. “We’ll need people on the ground to get to the hammer before Charun returns.”
Grant’s mood was not good as he grew closer to the spire where his compatriots had landed with the interphaser. So much for having the advantage of air superiority, he mused.
He grit his teeth. Of course they had air superiority. Edwards’s Manta still was in perfect condition, and as long as the strange, hammer-like device was out of the hands of their enemy, their weapons systems would operate and they could communicate with each other. And from the way that Edwards seemed dead set on protecting the airspace over the fallen weapon, it occurred to the CAT Beta ex-Magistrate that the hammer was special.
Maybe the winged humanoid had access to powerful arm blasters, but there were bigger and more impressive tricks in his lost tool bag.
Grant frowned, swinging the wounded Manta closer to the ground, making the decision to land near the puddle of molten secondary orichalcum. There was more flat ground and he didn’t want to damage the wings or harm his friends with too clumsy of a landing. The henge stones would likely add to the damage of his wounded aircraft, making repairs even more difficult.
Soon he was in range so that he didn’t even need the telescopic zoom on his helmet to inform him that three Gear Skeletons, one adorned as a “hero” suit, two others as Spartans, had arrived at the base of the ramp leading to the top of the oracular spire.
The giant exoskeletons spread out, forming a perimeter in which Grant could set the Manta down. Even as they did so, they extended their arms upward to cushion the descent of the craft in case it had suffered more damage and couldn’t extend its landing gear.
Grant kept up his vigilance upon landing. The last thing he needed was to get sloppy, no matter what kind of help he had available to him. Even so, when he felt the powerful robotic hands latch on to the hull of his Manta, Grant was relieved.
Unfortunately the big man realized that such relief was only temporary. This was only his first encounter with a winged monstrosity powerful enough to engage an armed Manta. Another godlike being, different in some ways from their usual Annunaki opponents, but still formidable, still extremely dangerous.
He hoped that Charun was alone, but even as he did so, he realized that things were never that easy.
* * *
EDWARDS DIDN’T HAVE to search too hard for where the hammer went down. It had produced so much energy in its shield against the twin machine guns on his Manta that it left a smoke trail and its landing produced a highly visible scar on the countryside. So far, his systems were continuing uninterrupted, but that didn’t mean the winged enemy wasn’t trying to slip back into Greek airspace after being driven off.
However, he didn’t want to waste any more of the Manta’s endurance than necessary, so he swung the aircraft low over the crater. As he did so, sensors in the Manta’s cockpit measured the width and depth of the dent the hammer had made in the ground. It was only two feet in depth, and little more than two and a half feet wide, but it was a crater carved into solid rock.
Edwards was no expert at mathematics, but he’d seen large bombs go off before and placed the power of the hammer’s impact equal to about twenty-five kilograms of plas-ex. That was merely from falling from a great height, not being thrown.
Now he could see why even a glancing blow had almost crushed Grant’s Manta.
Edwards landed the ship and used the shadow suit on his forearm as a keyboard and monitor to gather the crater’s information and transmit it to the others. If anything, Brigid Baptiste would want to see the physical environmental effects of the artifact. It might be only pure trivia, but it could also give the brilliant archivist some form of scale from which to determine just what they were up against.
Edwards got out of the cockpit and jogged closer to the hammer, letting the optics in his shadow suit faceplate continue to record information about the hammer. As he closed with it, he could see that the handle was fully two meters in length, and it was not made from any material he recognized. It was dull, not resembling the polished brass of secondary orichalcum or any other natural alloy the Cerberus explorers had encountered.
No, that was wrong, Edwards thought. There was a woodlike grain to the handle, but the shadow suit’s analytical optics were not registering it as anything carved from a tree that he’d ever seen. He frowned. He’d seen something made of wood but not wooden before, and he wished he’d had a hint of Brigid Baptiste’s photographic memory at times such as this.
“Brigid,” Edwards called.
“Thank you for the camera footage of the artifact,” she answered. “What are you going to ask about?”
“The handle. It looks like some kind of material I’ve seen before, but I can’t place it. I’m hoping…”
“The Cedar Doors we encountered underground in Iraq,” Brigid responded. “In mythology, they were the gates to an entire Cedar Forest, whose fruit, when eaten, would provide immortality. Unfortunately said eternal existence came in the form of zombie-like reanimation and was not full of cedar trees as we understood them.”
Edwards took a deep breath of relief. “That’s what was bugging me. So, this is fake cedar? Or a petrified tree material?”
“It is possible,” Brigid answered. “But I would prefer a closer look.”
Edwards grunted. “I’ll babysit this thing until we can get a recovery team here.”
“Do not attempt to move it yourself,” Brigid admonished. “Who knows—”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to get zapped by any security systems built into a hammer that can punch a hole in rock like fifty-five pounds’ worth of TNT,” Edwards murmured. “And while I don’t know the kind of heat that could incinerate two ounces of armor-piercing shell, let alone a whole volley…” Edwards trailed off, hoping for her to give him a bone of information.
“Even that calculation is beyond my current knowledge,” Brigid interjected. “But the melting point of lead is 328 degrees Celsius.”
“That’d be nice if I were shooting a handgun, but the Fifties fire tungsten-cored bullets.”
“Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-two degrees Celsius,” Brigid offered. “Oh, my.”
“Ten times hotter than you thought?” Edwards asked.
“Ten point four-three-three rounded to the nearest hundredth, but, yes,” Brigid said.
Edwards could hear the smile in her voice as he demonstrated at least a semblance of mathematical skill, so that the big brawler showed that he wasn’t a complete drain on the brains of the assembled Cerberus Away Teams. “This is very disconcerting.”
Edwards nodded, even though he knew the head-bob wouldn’t translate over the Commtact. But if he gave voice to his personal fears, he would lose more than a little of his appearance as a tough guy. Even so, he couldn’t disagree with Brigid’s own outwardly calm evaluation. The hammer’s powers were formidable, easily as dangerous as the glove that Maccan utilized in his attack on Cerberus, maybe even worse, since it was a larger item.
Edwards’s curiosity led him nearer to the deadly hammer, examining the crater even more closely. For all the force of its impact, it stood flatly on its head and had not penetrated the bottom of the bowl. This set the hairs on his neck on edge, because that was not how it should have been naturally. He recorded this, and transmitted it to Brigid.
“Edwards, do not approach any closer,” she warned.
“It fired off something like a braking rocket, didn’t it?” Edwards asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “Which means that the artifact, indeed, has some manner of autonomy.”
Edwards took a couple of strides backward, but even as he did so, he recalled the shape of the head. It was not the normal shape for a sledgehammer, nor was it a stylized T shape with Celtic carvings enmeshed on the sides, as the holy symbol for Thor that Edwards had seen before. This was a more crystalline structure, semitransparent, flat-sided but held in place by webbing forged from molten metal. It was a hexagonal prism, with a pair of hexagonal pyramids forming the caps on each end, as if it were a gigantic piece of quartz.
Except this quartz was bloodred and glowed from within as if possessed by a hellish flame at its core. The whole thing had an eerie electricity that made Edwards’s skin crawl, even behind the protection of his shadow suit. As he was fully environmentally enclosed within the high-tech garment, his instincts were on maximum alert simply due to the crackle of energy he felt in the air.
Brigid Baptiste, as usual, had been correct in her assessment. He’d gotten too close to an entity that could protect itself with the same facility it had protected its wielder from the heaviest “small arms” that had ever been developed. Edwards flexed his forearm and the Sin Eater automatically launched into the palm of his hand, ready to spit lead. He didn’t think it would be any more effective than the heavy machine guns he’d fired earlier, but Edwards was not going to go into death without a fight.
The throb of dread in the air lessened the further he backed from the alien weapon.
“Okay. If I don’t mess with you, you won’t mess with me,” Edwards murmured. As he spoke he could feel a tickle in his forehead, right from the spot where the inhuman Ullikummis had inserted the seed of his flesh into his brain. With that action, the ancient stone godling had gained total control of Edwards, turning him from a protector of Cerberus into an oppressive, dangerous marionette. The feeling was still raw inside his skin and spirit.
Whatever the source of the odd reminiscent feeling, it made him angry, reminding him of his violation by another alien mind as well as his failure as a protector of freedom. As much as he fought, he’d still ceded his will to something else, no matter how powerful. That even Brigid had likewise been changed and abused by the same godling didn’t help, as she’d found a way to fight Ullikummis’s control. Edwards hadn’t.
It still didn’t matter that the would-be conqueror was no less than the son of Enlil, nor engineered to even greater abilities than a standard Annunaki overlord. Edwards had fallen, and he still hadn’t felt as if he’d washed that stain from his spirit.
And right now, he felt as if the alien artifact in front of him saw that stain, smelled the stink of failure upon him, and saw an opportunity.
Edwards grit his teeth and settled in, standing guard. The anger spurred by the shame he felt made him wish someone would try to steal the hammer.
He wouldn’t even have minded going into battle against the winged monstrosity when it returned for its property.
