Angel Of Doom

Chapter 5 (#ulink_3719802a-4a32-55c0-9b73-c4104cb16b97)

Perched on the nose of the parked Manta, his Sin Eater retracted into its forearm holster, Edwards knew he’d be waiting a while for someone to show up for Charun’s fallen hammer. Even at this distance, thirty yards from where it’d cratered the rocky hillock, its emanations whispered promises of ancient evil up and down his spine.

He checked his wrist chron, a display built into the forearm of the sleek, body-conforming shadow suit, actually. Brigid had contacted him again, alerting him that they would be on his position in about two hours. The big Magistrate passed the first hour and a quarter thinking about the brief, brutal aerial chase and battle he’d undergone. At supersonic speeds, even a few seconds of movement translated into miles of ground to cover, especially since there were a couple of ranges of mountains between him and New Olympus.

Even with the mighty strides and leaps of the Gear Skeletons, it was unlikely that there would be an arrival within the next thirty minutes.

Edwards started to inform himself not to take aerial combat so far away from friends who could come to his aid, but his common sense kicked in. The whole purpose of air support was to distance aerial combatants from troops on the ground. Getting the horrific Charun as far from his compatriots was the best thing to do. He couldn’t have anticipated the presence of a powerful artifact in need of recovery.

For a moment he saw that he had two shadows on the ground, looking past the wrist chron. Edwards squinted, then looked back up into the sky. Up there, somehow, had appeared a second brilliant sun, blazing white and hot. He scrambled to his feet, standing on the front of the Manta. The machine pistol snapped down into his fist, ready to go into action, but the strange, glowing disc was not moving. He put on his shadow suit’s faceplate and hoped for the visor to screen and filter out the blinding light as well as analyze the object in the sky.

The range was ten miles and it was advancing quickly.

He activated his Commtact microphone. “Guys, wherever you are…”

Nothing. No response, not even static. He turned his gaze back to the sky. For all the polarization of the lenses, necessary for use on walks outside the Manitus Moon Base, he could not make out a detail in regard to the blazing comet looming ever and ever closer to him. But in the space of fifteen seconds it had closed to nine miles. He couldn’t get details about the shape of the object, only its range, and there was no guarantee that it was right.

Edwards turned to open the cockpit, but the command signal to remotely open the canopy was jammed. He was in a complete blackout. He ground his teeth behind the faceplate and looked back at the hammer. “You wouldn’t be alone, would you?”

The hammer didn’t speak, but it didn’t have to. There was a new malice hanging in the air; a smug sense of superiority that proved annoying in humans but was infuriating when it came from a supposedly inanimate object.

Edwards tried to open the manual hatch, a backup in case of the failure of the remote access. The only problem with that was that now the hatch was shut; immobilized by a force so strong that even using his foot-long fighting knife he couldn’t budge it open. He bent the blade by sixty degrees and gave up for fear of losing an important survival tool or causing himself injury should the blade shatter. In frustration, he gave the cockpit a hammering blow in an effort to somehow override the Manta’s security systems.

“Come on, open,” he growled.

The Mantas, however, were machines meant to withstand the stresses of supersonic flight and re-entry flights from the moon. As strong as Edwards was, he was nothing compared to the force of air pressure striking the atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound. And with the Manta sealed tight by the interference put out by Charun or one of his partners, it was far too late to grab a few grens from his war bag.

All he had were his Sin Eater and his Copperhead. It was formidable firepower when dealing with bandits or mindless mutants, but the mind behind the ever-approaching torch was encased in a body that had survived a crash with a Manta. Though his gun’s bullets moved at the same speed as a Manta in full acceleration, neither of them possessed the raw mass of the orbital transport. He might as well be throwing kernels of rice at the opposition.

Edwards grimaced in his impotence. He could stay and provide a brief, valiant, but ultimately doomed resistance, or at least try to do something useful. Thinking ahead, he knew he had to opt for the latter choice.

Edwards sighed, looking at the hammer in disgust, then ran, bounding off the Manta. Sticking around would be suicide, or worse, get him captured and used against the others. Running away was not going to be his course of action, though.

Edwards raced to find a good spot wherein he could hide his bulk. At least the shadow suit’s fiber optics were still in working condition, picking up the surrounding dirt and scrub brush to disguise him among them. It wasn’t invisibility, but it was still great camouflage. The suit’s fibers were also radar-absorbent, so that meant he might not be picked up by any form of detection.

The environmental seals in place with his faceplate also prevented his scent from escaping the skintight garment. With all of these precautions, however, Edwards was still worried. This wasn’t his first go-around with entities of superhuman weaponry or ability. One of the previous had strung him around like a marionette, turning him from an individual fighting for the future of the planet to a foot soldier trying to conquer it.

There was a bowel-chilling sense of dread as the blazing sun died down. Two winged figures hung in the air at least a hundred feet above the hammer. Edwards almost flinched as the faceplate optics zoomed in on them, almost as if they could hear the electronics focusing. He held his breath in an effort to further lower his profile. With his body mass draped over the Copperhead and Sin Eater, there were no metal objects to reflect radar pulses or show up magnetically, he hoped.

His thoughts were racing, so if either of these two were telepaths, they would hear him as if he were screaming at the top of his lungs. His fists clenched and he fought to control himself, to deaden his frantic mind. All the while, he hoped that the faceplate was still recording the image of these two entities.

Though they were winged, neither set of appendages on either appeared to move, not Charun and his leathery, demonic adornment, or the other’s feathered limbs. The other was far from being Charun’s equal in ugliness. Instead of a scaled, lipless crack with curved tusks sweeping up from his jaw, her mouth was lush with lips like flower petals or succulent as orange wedges and the color of wine. Instead of a scraggly black mane, thinning and pierced with yellowed horns, her brow was smooth, with auburn tresses cascading in looping curls that spiraled down past her shoulders.

Charun’s skin was blue-gray, holding the pallor of a near-mummified corpse, despite the vital and bulging muscles beneath that ashen, crinkled hide. Hers was deep and richly tanned, vibrant and glowing from within; a decidedly Mediterranean bronze gained by long hours taking in the sun. She, like he, was topless, her full, pendulous breasts jostling as they were framed by an X of leather straps that seemed to connect her to either the eerily motionless wings or the quiver across her shoulder.

Both of them were the same height, nearing eight feet from toe-tip to the top of their heads.

In one hand she held a great, hornlike torch that had faded to merely the brightness of ordinary flame now. In the other she held a bow. But even with his greatest magnification on the shadow suit optics, he could not see the string on the ancient-seeming weapon. Instead, where the bowstring would have been notched, on each arm of the bow there was a bejeweled block of golden metal that shimmered with the same brassy sheen of a Gear Skeleton. There was a hand-molded grip in the center, with a stubby projection making it seem like some form of pistol around which a bow had been built.

Edwards couldn’t help but think that this device might be more than gaudy, ornamental, ancient weaponry and more a piece of alien technology. The resemblance of segments to secondary orichalcum, the same Annunaki alloy in the Olympian war suits, was all the evidence he needed to make the assumption.

Speaking of the devil, the woman extended her arm with the torch. With a flash of brilliant flame, the ground suddenly came alive with several pillars of sprouting light. Edwards’s stomach twisted as either his eyes adjusted to the brilliance or the shapes of the pillars solidified into human forms. There were two Gear Skeletons, and from Brigid’s briefing, Edwards could recognize the Spartans as having the same ID numbers as those reported missing.

There were about twelve soldiers with the two battle robots, and the Cerberus Away Team member let out a low hiss of his retained breath, inhaling to replace the stale air. The armored warriors were clad in the familiar mix of modern Magistrate polycarbonate and classical Greek leather armor.

The faceplates were open on their helmets, though, and through the empty space, Edwards made out the white-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of the Olympian soldiers. They moved with normal agility and walked apace, but there was literally nothing but pinholes in the middle of their eyes.

Edwards’s molars ground together until they locked in place. Not good. Not at all, he thought.

The fluid nature of their movements indicated that the blank-eyed soldiers were in perfect health and ability, but the unblinking, slack nature of their features warned of something darker, deadlier, at work than hammers capable of smashing Mantas from the sky or torches that burned with the brightness of a sun. These were thralls, lost completely to the control of an outside entity.

And yet, for the soulless, zombified expressions, they were spread out, searching carefully for any sign of Edwards, their guns at arms. The two Gear Skeletons walked over and seized the Manta, picking it up as if it were a toy, further testimony to the kind of raw power of ancient Annunaki robotics. The mecha began walking to the west, carrying the aircraft in their powerful arms.

“The pilot might not have gone far.” The woman spoke, lowering closer.

Again, the motionless nature of those wings, despite their classic angelic or demonic shape, dug into Edwards’s nerves. It only took him a few moments to realize that the appendages wouldn’t be natural, but artificial constructs designed to match a human’s view of a winged deity. He’d been around with Cerberus long enough to know when technology was the explanation of something occurring in mythology, be it the hammer of a god or something as simple as flight.

The wings were silent and motionless on the backs of Charun and his beautiful partner, which took away one possibility that they were some manner of jet pack or rocket belt. Indeed, the eerie quiet pretty much narrowed things down to some manner of antigravity system. As to why their flying devices were so similar to wings…well, even the Manta had wings. It just made flight and maneuvering easier. He couldn’t see flaps or ailerons, but given their biological appearance, they could have been supple, enabling them to steer.

This also explained the lack of pain or reaction to injury when Edwards had put a .50-caliber round through Charun’s wing. He saw the scorched hole, flesh split and tattered at the edges of the “wound.” His optics couldn’t detect any mechanics sandwiched between layers of leathery skin, but nor could he see blood vessels or other signs that the wing was alive.

As if on silent, telepathic cue, Charun looked down at his injury, the limb bending around so he could look at it more closely. That tusked maw turned up at the corners in a smile.

The woman looked across and met his smile with her own. Almost playfully, Charun brought the bullet hole up to eye level and peered at his partner through the aperture, which elicited a laugh from the angelic female.

It looked like a true friendship between the two entities, reminiscent of what he had seen between Kane and Brigid, the ability to communicate entire ideas in just a few gestures, because the audio pickups on his suit’s hood were not conveying anything more than breathing between the two. The only words she had spoken seemed to be toward the slave stock searching the Manta’s landing area.

That spoke to either telepathy between the flying pair or an intimate friendship that often did not require a single word. Edwards, at this point, was desperately hoping it wasn’t telepathy. Such doomie powers would make all of the camouflage and hiding a moot, useless point. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if the zombified Olympian troops had any more special senses as he lay, still as a rock, his suit’s camouflage system making him look like inert stone and soil piled as a short berm.

A soldier walked to within inches of Edwards’s motionless form, even looked right down at him, then continued on. The big brute of a man made a convincing pile of rocks, but that did not give him the freedom to breathe a sigh of relief. Instead he kept frozen, muscles tense to the point of aching. His breathing ran shallow and he only allowed himself to blink when his eyes were dried and burning.

It seemed like hours before the soldiers moved on and Charun and his “bride” rose further into the sky. She waved her torch, almost dismissively, and suddenly streaks of the same light that deposited the Olympian zombies on the ground flashed up, sucked into the tongue. Charun alighted on the ground just long enough to lift the massive hammer.

Edwards didn’t move his head, didn’t do more than sweep his eyes to the periphery of his vision at either angle. He waited, remaining still despite the growing ache and fatigue in his shoulders and neck.

He didn’t know how long it was, but finally the heavy tread of Gear Skeleton feet resounded again. Edwards almost didn’t want to relax.

“Edwards!” a voice shouted. When he turned his head toward the sound of that call, he could feel tendons popping at the base of his skull, making it feel as if hot, wet gore splashed down on his neck. He winced and gasped.

“Here,” he croaked.

A slender but muscular figure raced to his side. It was Kane.

He helped Edwards to his feet.

Looking around, he could see one of the suits, complete with a quiver of javelins and brassy, steel-wool curls flowing down over her shoulders. That had to have been the new Artem15.

“We’ve been trying to contact you for an hour,” Kane said.