Shadow Born

Kane grunted as he was hurled against the back of the pickup’s cab. Luckily the non-Newtonian polymers of his shadow suit prevented anything more injurious than a bruise from forming on his ribs. Even so, the sudden braking action by Grant had knocked everyone in the bed off balance.

He peered down the hood and saw that there was a quick-flowing river of magma twenty-five feet ahead of them. The heat registered on Kane’s faceplate, both the temperature of the running lava and the ambient temperature of the air. If it hadn’t been for the environmental seals on the suits, they’d be drenched with sweat, rather than the moisture being wicked away to keep their bodies from overheating.

Kane still felt the tingling as he was perspiring. The shadow suits could keep them from sun and heatstroke under normal conditions, but the air was suddenly blistering this close to such a large flow of lava.

“Where now?” Grant asked Brigid.

The woman was turning her head up and down, as if she were looking over a projected map. Kane only wondered if it were a computer projection on the inside of her suit’s faceplate, or if it were simply a construct of her photographic memory. Knowing the efficiency of Brigid’s mind, it was more likely she was doing this from her imagination, which was often more concise than most computer reproductions. She’d been able to navigate to an exact location in a nearly featureless desert using the most low-key of landmarks and star positioning.

“Hang right and go 400 yards, and fast. The ground’s going to be cracking under the pressure of this lava flow,” she ordered Grant.

Like the well-oiled machine that the two people had made themselves into, Grant swerved and hit the gas, changing into a higher gear to get more speed.

Once more, sonic beacon bursts flashed in the sky above them. The Kongamato were still about, but they were keeping their distance. Something was up, and Kane swept the terrain about them. The tremors that shook the ground had their own sound signatures, and the substrate beneath the pickup was pulsing and throbbing.

Seismic activity was visible in the same manner that the sonar bursts showed up on their faceplate displays.

“That’s why they gained altitude!” Kane spoke up. “They heard the beginnings of a quake or something.”

Brigid looked through the windshield and frowned. “Bry, what can you see?”

“Things aren’t looking good,” Donald Bry answered from the Cerberus redoubt, where he had access to satellite imagery.

“Earthquake?” Kane heard Brigid ask. He kept his eyes flitting between the Kongamato above the clouds and the heaving ground beneath them.

“Something is acting on the stretch you’re crossing,” Bry explained. “That’s not a natural seismic plain.”

“I believe I’ve noticed,” Brigid said. “What had been a simple barrier between us and the final destination of Durga is expanding, turning into a moat.”

“Moat?” Kane asked.

“Something’s working on the already cracked substrata here and is isolating the tomb,” Brigid said. “The pattern is too regular to be random. The bedrock must already have been scored for such a contingency.”

“How big a ring?” Grant asked.

“We’re looking at a ten-mile inner perimeter,” Brigid said. “The caldera itself is twenty miles at its widest.”

“We’re atop a volcano now?” Kane inquired, an edge of nervousness seeping into the question.

“An artificial one. Yes,” Bry answered. “My God, the Annunaki have some incredible capabilities...”

“Of course they’d put the tomb in the middle of a caldera,” Brigid mused. “They’d need something utterly inhospitable and something that could assuredly destroy whatever was imprisoned.”

“And anyone fool enough to come after it,” Grant agreed. “How bad will it be if the volcano erupts while we’re in here?”

“We’ll survive here in Cerberus,” Bry said. “And you won’t feel any pain.”

That made Kane’s skin tingle. “How bad will the destruction be? How far will it reach?”

“It’ll cause another skydark,” Bry said. “The planet will be thrown into a new ice age. Actual destruction from the pyroclastic clouds will scour the entire continent you’re on.”

Grant swerved and drove, Brigid continuing to point out where he had to move. The zigs and zags came sharper, swifter. The whole ground beneath them was becoming fluid, if not melted by the incendiary temperatures of the lava, then by the enormous seismic pressures being put on the ground.

“What’s our plan now?” Kane asked. “Because things are changing so fast...”

“I’m plotting our course, but it doesn’t look good,” Brigid returned.

Grant jolted the pickup to a halt, but the rear fishtailed until they were facing a surging slab of stone being lifted up by seismic forces beneath it. It was becoming a perfect ramp. “Brigid...is it good?”

The woman glanced to him, a moment’s hesitation, but the answer was on her lips in a heartbeat. “Safe landing beyond. Get to eighty-five miles an hour!”

Grant clutched the wheel, using it as leverage to stand on the gas, shifting up through gears as the motor revved higher and higher. Kane wondered if Grant could get the speed that Brigid suggested in the brief strip of ground before they hit it. The ramplike slab was still teetering, its slope increasing steadily thanks to the swell of forces beneath the surface. At that speed and angle, Kane couldn’t imagine how far they’d fly and what they would hit if Brigid were wrong.

He grit his teeth, praying that the rising altitude of the ramp somehow figured into Brigid’s mental calculations. If not...

Then the time for worry ended; the truck was airborne. Tons of metal ramped off the slab of shifting stone, and they were rendered, temporarily, weightless.

Kane’s tight grip on the side of the truck had his knuckles feeling as if they were about to burst. Kane never enjoyed when a ground vehicle decided to take wing, and he liked the situation even less now that they were soaring over an ever-widening crack of lava. The heat from below was a blast furnace, and under his insulating shadow suit, his skin prickled from the heat that seeped through the environmental seals. Sweat droplets stung his eyes immediately, and he was already swimming inside the skintight uniform.

Then the pickup truck rocked. It couldn’t have been because of a pothole because they were sixty feet in the air, according to the sudden flash of altimeter readings popped up in the shadow suit’s faceplate display. The closest ground was too far away anyhow, as the flare of heat and light from the lava was still gleaming, illuminating the smoke that their vehicle sliced through. If they actually struck a spurt of lava, the superheated rock would be more like a knife slashing through the undercarriage of the pickup.

And when that happened, it was likely that any fuel in the system would instantly ignite from the proximity of the lava’s heat. The deaths of the six people in the pickup truck would be relatively painless as the gasoline vaporized.

A rock, hurled by an explosive release of steam?

Then Kane noticed the motion of a wing on one side of the truck.

His eyes widened even further as he heard what Brigid said next.

“Good...they did catch us! Just as I’d hoped!”

The Cerberus expedition was now held in the talons of the Kongamato mutants, and they were rising farther and farther above the volcanic plain below.

One slip, and even their shadow suits wouldn’t protect them from the impact with the ground.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_1904aede-64c6-5b17-afab-69326881b2a9)

Hours before Brigid Baptiste even contemplated the course across the surging lava field, Neekra opened her eyes for the first time.

Neekra felt drunk, unsteady and the very effort of lifting her own eyelids required consummate concentration and will. Her body felt as if it were only half alive. Then she realized the utter silence, the complete darkness of a world she had been in touch with for two thousand years, was a smothering curtain over her. She fought to part her lips, but they were sticky against each other, the very act of breathing draining strength from what little spark of life she retained within herself.

The “dark” world, that horrible void of silence and nothingness, only seemed to make the small sliver of her senses that still worked seem so much brighter. She could make out the dull vibrations, seemingly gibberish at first, but then she began to associate each grunt and spit with language. And it was not the high tongue of the Annunaki. The sun was just rising in what she presumed was the east, and though the vulgar splash of all colors would seem bright to human eyes, Neekra wept for those frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum no longer open to her.

“Why are you crying?” came the guttural tongue of humans and other apes. She swiveled her eyes and gazed upon Durga, who crouched beside her.

“What...did...you do?” she managed to croak out in that mutt language. “Why...”

Durga tilted his head. She thought of him as human despite the cobra hood, a sheet of scaled muscle from the sides of his head to his shoulders, and despite the snake scales that armored his fit, trim body. He was one of “Uncle” Enki’s silly spawn, the Nagah, long surpassed in favor of the hairless apes from which Enki spawned the cobra men.