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“We’re going to have to be very slow and patient,” Grant mused.
“Careful, yeah,” Kane agreed. “Even a silenced Copperhead would draw attention. It’s going to have to be knives and garrotes.”
Grant nodded. Neither Magistrate enjoyed murdering unaware opponents, but such ruthless tactics were going to be a necessity. If just one of the men standing guard over the prisoners suspected that someone was attempting a rescue, the Panthers would open fire, killing the group rather than giving up their treasured human cargo. “My bow, too.”
Kane turned, regarding the big man. “You brought that?”
“A collapsible version,” Grant replied.
Grant’s lover, Shizuka, the leader of the samurai force known as the Tigers of Heaven, had been teaching Grant to use the bow and the sword. It was a shadow of a skill that Grant had retained from when his tesseract—a physical “time shadow”—had been hurled back to the time of ancient Sumeria. Back then, Grant’s tesseract had been mostly amnesiac and just enough “off time” to have superior reflexes and durability, as well as his natural strength. His captor, a son of Enlil named Humbaba, had named Grant Enkidu, the man-bull, because of that physical power. In that era, Malesh, a rogue Annunaki, had been first Grant’s target, then his lover and co-warrior in a rebellion against Humbaba’s rule of the region.
Malesh was the inspiration for the mythic hero Gilgamesh, and she taught Enkidu the use of the bow as a replacement for Grant’s firearms knowledge. When Kane, Brigid, Domi and Shizuka had managed to arrive in the time stream where Grant’s tesseract had been deposited, the shadow had developed enough that its spirit gained reality in a spare body of the Annunaki court, returning Grant to his mortal form. All seven warriors had engaged the leonine, eleven-foot-tall Humbaba in direct conflict, finally killing the scion of Enlil after throwing everything at him, including flights of arrows, magazines of bullets and the slashing of deadly blades.
Grant had left his tesseract Enkidu back in antiquity, husband to a warrior goddess, and he’d returned home with the love of his life, Shizuka. Grant found great comfort with her.
“Bow’s pure silent, as opposed to a silenced gun,” Grant said. “And it packs a lot of power, especially with my strength and its construction.”
Kane didn’t doubt that. “Let’s get back to the others.”
The two Cerberus Magistrates slithered back through the forest. They moved slowly, cautiously, from where they’d closed on the slavers’ position. The two men took care to watch out for any sign that someone had come across their trail, and they felt secure once they didn’t pick up any. It helped that the two of them utilized the multiband optics in their shadow suits to look for spoor or tracks. Someone might have been good enough to evade high-tech optics capable of focusing on single broken stalks and twigs and disruptions in the dirt, or the talents of a skilled tracker, but when both combined, there was little sneaking up on them.
Then it would take an hour for the assembled travelers to make up a plan on how to assault the slave caravan.
The plan was simple: kill quietly or the failure would be measured in helpless prisoners executed.
Thurpa’s approach to the prisoners on the chain was at a midpoint on the line. There was only one member of the Cerberus group who could handle opponents at range with utter silence, and that was Grant. However, if there was one thing that the Nagah outcast knew he was capable of, it was a silent kill, by virtue of his half-cobra nature and the gifts that Enki had endowed every Nagah with—transformed or native born.
His fangs were folded against the roof of his mouth, and his legs were bent beneath him as he stood at the edge of the clearing, thigh muscles tightly coiled. He was to wait until one of the guards was close enough for him to strike, and Thurpa knew that his calculations had to be exact. One misstep, a few inches short or even a simple stumble could result in an armed killer turning his automatic weapon against Thurpa, his allies or the very people they were there to rescue.
Thurpa hadn’t cared much for the Panthers of Mashona when he and Durga first encountered them alongside the Millennium Consortium. They were brutish men, the type of beings who exemplified Durga’s description of mankind as nothing more than a pack of barbaric apes. It was their disregard for their enemies and victims that reinforced Thurpa’s initial prejudices. He’d seen what the Panthers had done to their captives already.
It had been that negative impression, and the consortium’s equal disregard for the militia’s cruelty, that had primed Thurpa to become so disgusted with “mammals” that he’d used a grenade against a small family of meerkats who had made too much noise. The last thing Thurpa had wanted to do was seem weak in front of the hairy-knuckled, thick-browed thugs who took the defeated and helpless and used them as glory holes, men or women, if they weren’t already pressed into hard labor.
Thurpa hadn’t wanted to think what would happen to him if they saw him as a pushover. He had little interest in becoming a rape rag. If there was one thing that Durga didn’t appear to tolerate among those fighting for the purity of the Nagah race, it was that the cobra men didn’t engage in that kind of sexual violence, against their own or against others.
That was before Thurpa had met humans with a conscience. People who protected their injured, who cared for others despite differences. That was before Brigid Baptiste had related Durga’s sexual cruelty toward Hannah, his princess, and the evidence of what he had done to other women who hadn’t been his perfect little toys.
You’ve been following a rapist, a kin-murderer, a despot, damn you, Thurpa told himself. That only strengthened the young man’s resolve to take the gunman guarding these prisoners out quickly and certainly.
The Panthers are so strong, so cocksure against the helpless, Thurpa thought. You haven’t faced a son of Enki, though. We were born with fangs to ensure that you do not poison the other beloved of our Father.
The Panther gunman drew closer. Kane and Grant had timed out the patrols of these men perfectly. Everyone seemed to be stepping into position as the two men had predicted. Even so, there was no guarantee that his timing would be right, and Thurpa’s heartbeat increased.
Just in case he had to take out more than one opponent silently, Thurpa also had his knife in hand. He had venom and long fangs, but a broken fang or an empty venom sac would make it impossible for him to bite two opponents. He wondered at the ability of Brigid Baptiste and Nathan Longa when it came to close-quarters murder, but he didn’t want to think about it too much.
Thinking about how hard it could be for others to take down a murderer with a swift, ruthless strike made him think about how cruel his act would be.
Brigid Baptiste was not a murderer, nor was she a trained assassin, but she hung around with some of the best masters of sharpened steel in the world. She knew how to use the knife in its sheath as more than a tool or utensil. Kane, Domi and Shizuka had taken turns at teaching her the art of the fighting knife, not any intensive set of exercises, but they’d shown her moves, explained to her the discipline and made her go through every step.
They hadn’t gone easy on Brigid simply because she had a photographic memory; they’d expected her to copy their maneuvers. They had her go at it with blunt, rounded cornered blades for intense sparring matches. Muscle memory was different from the data that came in through her eyes and ears, and they worked her in the gym until her arms and sides ached, her flame-gold hair was matted to her scalp and her breaths came in long, ragged gasps.
In the end, no, Brigid was not going to take on another knife fighter as a master duelist, but she would be able to show a good accounting of herself if she was separated from her pistol.
That if had come enough times in Brigid’s adventures around the globe for her to know that losing her firearm would be a when. Any distaste for an assassin’s strike had been washed away with Kane’s depiction of how the caravan of prisoners had been treated. Naked and manacled about the neck and ankles, as she could see now, thanks to the light amplification optics in her shadow suit, the captives were in miserable physical condition. They were gaunt, exhausted, with blood dripping down their torsos.
To a child, they were naked and ragged, and each had to sleep staring straight up into the night sky because the metal yokes about their necks would cut or tear skin if they moved their heads one inch. Brigid’s heart ached for the poor victims of the militia members, and she was able to make out the insignias on the patches of the soldiers.
They were the Panthers of Mashona, the same group who’d laid siege to the Victoria Falls power station, who’d allied themselves with the mad Nagah prince, Durga, and the Millennium Consortium. They were known killers, murderers, raiders who had no concern for human life except for what they could get out of them.
Brigid examined the line of prisoners. Women, men, those in their early teens, none of them seeming as if they were good for forced labor, especially after the march that had turned their necks and backs raw with the weight and abrasion of their slave collars. These people were going to be shells of human beings if they had to go much farther.
Her thoughts went back to the killer who had all but drained the last drop of blood from Nathan Longa’s father. The murderer would have made use of biomass, draining either blood or other moisture and plasma within the human anatomy. Sure, the prisoners spilled some blood, but they still retained more than enough to feed—
Feed what? Brigid asked herself, but she fought off the urge to visualize the horror or horrors that awaited them. She had her knife pulled from its sheath, the keen edge held in an ice pick grip, and the Panther guard ambled closer on his prescribed patrol route along the chained line of prisoners.
Concentrate on the horror before you, Brigid told herself. We’ll deal with an entity or entities who’d devour two dozen human beings when we get to it.
She locked her green eyes on the gunman, who showed no concern for the suffering of other human beings. Slipping a knife between his ribs or into his kidney wouldn’t be a pleasure, but it’d be one step closer to the safe emancipation of twenty-four human beings.
Brigid promised herself not to take visceral satisfaction in gutting the bastard.
Grant assembled the recurved bow he’d brought with him. He screwed the two arms into the central riser, the grip that an archer held, complete with an arrow rest where the shaft would stay during the draw. The riser was made of rigid, high-density carbon fiber around an aluminum core. The arms themselves were composed of sandwiched layers of carbon fiber and wood, making the limbs of the bow denser, harder to flex, and thus building up greater potential energy when the string was drawn back.
Grant also had the yugake glove that Shizuka had made for him. Grant was a student of kyudo, the samurai art of archery, and the yugake was specifically designed for the kind of hold an adherent of the style used, one in which the other fingers trapped the drawn string against the thumb. The yugake had ridges on the thumb designed for securing the drawstring, especially under the pressure of an eighty-eight-pound draw weight. That translated, with the 750-grain broad-head arrows he had, into 58.5 foot-pounds of energy when the recurved snapped straight and hurled the shaft at 188 feet per second.
The kinetic energy downrange might not have seemed like much in comparison to a bullet that moved much faster, but the dynamics of an arrow, especially with razor-sharp leading edges, translated into better aerodynamic passage through flesh and a larger wound cavity. And the fact that the wound channel was filled with the shaft of the arrow added to the disruption of physical function.
With this bow, Grant had dealt with a rogue deinonychus on Thunder Isle, a wounded creature weighing in at 250 pounds of lean muscle and reptilian hide. Grant first had assumed that he’d missed his shot, as there was no arrow jutting from the rib cage of the time-trawled predator, but the animal dropped to the ground immediately. Grant’s arrow had punched through the deinonychus’s rib cage, breaking one rib and turning both lungs into slurries of destroyed brachial tissue, and burst out the other side, embedding into a tree just behind it.
The impact had had such force that Grant had broken the shaft retrieving the arrow, and its hunting tip jammed into the cedar trunk. That kind of trauma was more than sufficient to end the life of a desperate, limping, but still deadly, dinosaur with a single shot. Grant knew that few humans would be able to stand against him. He pulled back on the bow, arms raised in the traditional kyudo draw, his shoulder muscles flexed and tensed.
His would be the shot that initiated this conflict with the Panthers of Mashona. Through the light amplification sensors on his shadow suit’s faceplate, he could see the others, perched and ready to begin the butcher’s work for this night. Grant, with the reach of his bow, and his speed and grace, was given the task of taking down two more men subsequent to his first target. Kane had another target, as well, but Thurpa, Brigid and Nathan were limited to only one ambush apiece.
Kane was a veteran of a dozen blade battles, and he had both the swiftness and certainty with which to bring down a militia maniac in a minimum of effort and time, freeing him for a second opponent. Even so, Grant braced himself to fire a fourth arrow in this dark plan.
Grant cleared his thoughts, entering the samurai state of zanshin, relaxed alertness, his thoughts in a smothered calmness. He was focused on nothing but aware of all around him. It was part of the art of kyudo and as much a mental state as a series of physical movements. He was mentally standing on the razor’s edge, uncommitted to any single action, to leave himself ready for anything.
The guards were in position, Grant stretched the drawstring back, packing the two-ounce arrow with kinetic energy. The stiff, reinforced limbs struggled to return to their natural state, fighting against Grant’s manipulation of them. He opened his thumb, and the string was freed to slip over the ridges on his glove. Now, at close to 190 feet per second, Grant’s first arrow sliced silently through the night.
The arrow struck the Panther caravan guard at the knot of muscle and bone where his neck met his shoulders. Razor-sharp steel cracked the man’s spinal column, splitting a vertebrae before the broad head slashed through the trunk of nerves that connected his body to his brain. The arrow would have gone farther, but vertebral bones were designed as thick armor to protect the spinal cord, and the shaft had already expended much of its energy shattering one half of the ring of bone.
It didn’t matter. The instantly quadriplegic man turned rag-doll limp and spilled to the ground, struck so hard and quickly he didn’t even have a lungful of air to cry out before he was facedown in the dirt. Grant pivoted, drew another arrow from his quiver, nocked it and turned toward his next opponent. In the shadows beyond, he spotted four people emerge from their hiding spots along the tree line and lunge toward four other guards. In a heartbeat, Grant pulled back, aimed and fired his second arrow of the night.
Grant’s shot met its target in the breastbone, broad head cleaving through rubbery cartilage and squelching off ribs before it shredded two ugly holes in the Mashonan’s aorta. The Panther militiaman’s only sound was a grunt of expelled breath as the impact of fifty foot-pounds of energy slammed into his chest. This arrow wasn’t stopped by the heavy bone of the man’s spinal column, and it burst out from under his left shoulder blade and continued on into the shadows.
Had the arrow stopped, the two yawning wounds in the man’s main pipeline of lifeblood would have been somewhat staunched, except where the four blades of the arrowhead had widened the wound beyond the diameter of the shaft. With the fletching gone through the blood vessel, causing more tissue disruption of already sliced tissue, the man’s chest instantly filled with high-pressure blood gushing through an entrance and exit wound. That arterial pressure pushed hard on the man’s lungs, making him unable to inhale as he knelt, eyes bulging from his horrific internal wounds.
Kane, whom Grant recognized from his location and his build, dropped the Panther he’d ambushed, and dashed with all the speed and power of the wolf he was often described as, overtaking the next of the Mashona slave masters, leaping at the last moment. Kane clamped his hand over the man’s face, and all his weight pushed the man backward to the ground. There was the ugly grind of steel on bone as Kane thrust nine inches of blade through the gunman’s sternum, slicing his heart in half.
Grant turned toward the last of his targets, drawing and nocking even as he was aware of Kane’s victory. The third of the militiamen had heard the rustle of silent, brutal combat, and he’d pulled his rifle from where it hung on its sling, swinging it into position. Grant took this into consideration for where he aimed, and he let fly.
Grant hit the would-be killer on the bridge of his nose. The arrow punched through the relatively fragile bones around the nasal cavity. That target was specific; Grant’s Magistrate training had kicked in and reminded him that an enemy with his finger on the trigger would be unstoppable with anything but a “fatal triangle” hit. The triangle formed by the eyes and the nose were not only the weakest part of the human skull, but they were also directly in front of the huge cluster of nerves and brain functions that narrowed down into the spinal cord.
The broad-head arrow destroyed that, and the third gunman was shut off instantly. His finger would never reach the trigger of his rifle; no shot would blast into the night, bringing down the rest of the slave caravan, rifles blazing. He could see Thurpa attending to a prisoner lying on the ground and Kane watching them.
“Mission accom—”
The crackle of a rifle discharging into the night sky cut Grant short.
He turned and saw that Brigid and Nathan were both atop a militiaman. Though Nathan’s target was no longer struggling, he’d still managed to fire his gun.
Yards away, the caravan quickly stirred at the burst of gunfire.
“Kane...”
“The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them,” Kane answered over the Commtact. “Get loud and get bloody!”
Chapter 4
Kane wrenched his knife from the heart of the second Panther gunman, then took a step back, looking toward Grant, who was using that weird samurai archery to dispatch yet another of the Mashonan thugs with a single shot. Kane saw the muzzle-flash and heard a Panther’s rifle. Bullets sliced into the night sky to where they wouldn’t hit anyone until they fell back to earth. Nathan had his arms wrapped around the legs of a guard, and Brigid Baptiste was on the gunman’s chest. She had her knife deep in the goon’s face, having ended his existence.
The cacophony that the rifle produced was damage enough.
Fortunately, all eight of the gunmen assigned to the prisoners were down, snuffed out before they could shoot at any of the chained victims. That meant anyone armed and willing to harm the helpless prisoners would be coming from the caravan camp themselves.
“Kane...” Grant spoke over the Commtact.
Kane spoke up; the need for stealth was gone with the echo of gunshots in the night. “The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them. Get loud and get bloody!”
With that order, Kane reached down to his belt and unhooked a fragmentation grenade. He plucked the pin from it and hurled it toward the enemy camp as guards roused from relaxation to alertness. Some of them were fast, rushing halfway up the trail between their quarters and the prisoner area. It was these men who ran right into the flying gren, hurled by Kane with all the speed and accuracy he could muster.
The miniature bomb struck the lead militiaman in the center of his chest. The impact knocked the wind from the gunman and caused him to stop cold. One of his fellows plowed through him, tripping them both and throwing them to the ground bracketing the high explosive, just in time for them to catch a wave of extreme overpressure and flying metal shrapnel.
The surge of force slammed into the downed pair and the three men with them. The blast wave burst blood vessels in their bodies, killing them swiftly. It was a quick, merciful end for the men who’d been marching unarmed, naked prisoners across miles of the wilderness of Africa.
The exploding grenade slammed the door on that approach from the column of militiamen. They now knew that someone was covering that route, and very few people were ever armed with only one grenade. At the very least, that would mean more hand bombs or firearms covering the trail between the two locations. And these militiamen weren’t stupid. The group that Kane could see beyond the explosion skidded to a sudden halt as they realized that if they cut through the bottleneck, they’d be cut down.
As if to punctuate Kane’s unspoken point, Grant loosed an arrow, sending the high-velocity missile into one of the groups who’d stopped. The arrow sliced through a rifleman in the center of the group. The fletching disappeared into his chest before the rest of his body got the message that it had been perforated through center of mass. The man dropped an instant later, blood bursting from his lips, much to the shock of his fellow soldiers.
Because Kane and Grant were wearing the night-black shadow suits, they were invisible to their opposition, and neither had used a weapon that gave a muzzle-flash. Grenades and arrows were good at keeping their users relatively unseen in darkness.
Kane knew, though, that the Panthers hadn’t become such a feared enemy without learning common tricks such as flanking maneuvers. They would come at their former prisoners and the rescue party from another angle, and when that happened, Kane intended to meet them with every ounce of violence he could muster.
Nathan Longa decided to leave Nehushtan balanced against a tree trunk. He didn’t want to inadvertently unleash a bolt of power, and he wasn’t certain how stealthy he could be with the ancient staff. Sure, the artifact had granted him superior speed and strength in the past, but he didn’t want to produce more of a spectacle than necessary. If things came to a worst-case situation, he was only a few feet away from the propped-up staff and the battle rifle he’d shed for stealth.
Then he made a mistake as he lunged at a Mashonan gunman and clamped a hand around his mouth, stifling him swiftly. As he brought the knife around and toward the man’s heart from the front, his blade slammed into the Panther’s rifle. The thrust was a powerful one, meant to pierce his target’s breastbone and spear the heart behind it, but the frame of the gunman’s weapon deflected the force of the blow, disarming both men as they toppled to the ground.
Then came the wrestling match: Nathan pitting his might against the disarmed gunman’s. The militiaman reached for his own knife, but Nathan chopped the edge of his hand hard against his enemy’s inner elbow, striking the cluster of muscles and nerves, which left the guard’s fingers numb and unable to hold on to any tool. Nathan suddenly saw stars, and the center of his face and left eye ached from where the militiaman head-butted him. Nathan lashed out, eliciting a grunt from his foe, finger sinking into wet, ugly tissues. Whatever cry the man would have released was superseded by unintelligible choking as the man’s eyeball burst, paralyzing his throat with terror and agony.
Nathan heard footsteps, a solitary figure racing toward him and the Mashonan soldier, and he expected to catch a back full of lead. When no bullets came, he glanced up and saw the lithe silhouette of Brigid Baptiste rushing to his aid, knife in hand. Nathan’s distraction caused an awful turn of events. The Panther punched Nathan hard in the chest, bowling him back just enough that the thug could crawl toward his rifle.
Nathan threw himself atop the gunman, grabbing his legs, even as Brigid Baptiste came down. The militiaman had a handful of his rifle, and he swung it upward; the stock of the weapon struck Brigid in the ribs. Her shadow suit redistributed the impact, but it slowed her, delaying her knife strike long enough for him to wriggle his finger into the trigger guard.
Nathan tugged the man’s legs hard, jolting the muzzle of the gun away from Brigid’s body. Despite the shadow suit, at this range, with the heavy slugs in the rifle, the Cerberus archivist would have been blown to pieces by a contact gunshot.
Nathan saved the woman’s life, but gunshots ripped into the night sky.
“Dammit,” Nathan swore. He heard the scrape of knife on bone, Brigid ripping her blade free and plunging it down again.
By the third time, Nathan was on all fours, grabbing at her wrist. The militiaman was dead already, but Brigid’s frustration was such that she nearly broke Nathan’s grasp.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan whispered.
Brigid shook her head. “I couldn’t keep his arm pinned. It was my—”
She was cut off by the boom of an explosion in the distance.
Kane was throwing grenades, which meant the enemy camp was up and active.
“I can make up for my fumble,” Nathan muttered.
He turned back to his tree and retrieved the artifact staff and the rifle he’d left behind. Brigid returned to her original hiding place to get her heavier weapons, as well.
Kane’s Commtact reached Nathan’s radio earpiece. “Nate, I’m going to need you at the bottleneck here. We’ve got the enemy force delayed, but you’ll work as the bar. You’ve got your grens, right?”
“Yes,” Nathan answered. “It’s because I screwed up?”
“No prisoners died. You kept the guard from harming them. You succeeded,” Kane countered. “I need a big, powerful rifle. Thurpa, you back up Nathan.”
Nathan nodded; then he noticed Thurpa jogging alongside him, holding his mouth. The captive Africans were already conversing among themselves as they reached the path between the two encampments.
“What’s wrong with your mouth?” Nathan asked.
“I pulled a muscle,” Thurpa returned. “The guy twisted once I bit him, and that flexed my fangs the way that they shouldn’t have.”
“Oh,” Nathan replied.
“This shit is not going as easily as we thought,” Thurpa muttered. “I ended up talking to one girl who seemed awake, but she was scared out of her wits.”
“She didn’t scream,” Nathan noted.
“No. I put my hand over her mouth, but gently. I told her we were rescuing them, but right now we need them to stay down and out of our way,” Thurpa responded.
The two men set up at bracketing sides of the path entering the prisoners’ clearing.
“Stuck on defense again,” Thurpa murmured.
“We do what we can, Thur,” Nathan answered.
