Cradle Of Destiny

“Bry, tell me you’ve cracked the security cameras,” Kane said into his Commtact.

“I have, but the millennialists are staying out of sight,” Bry answered. “These guys aren’t stupid…oh, my God… Grant!”

Sinclair could see Kane stiffen at the alarm in Bry’s voice. Then the Cerberus warrior exploded into motion, and she had to push herself to keep up with Kane.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA MOVED like shadowy wraiths among the corridors of the Operation Chronos laboratories. They had barely ducked out of sight when a group of millennialist gunmen hurried to the hall where they’d entered the base. They avoided notice, and as soon as they were out of earshot, Shizuka got on the radio to her Tigers of Heaven allies. The samurai would deal with the millennialists, bringing them down swiftly and silently.

The two people had the option of going right at the commander who had taken control of the installation, but the fear for the safety of the hostages, if there were any, kept them moving with silence and speed. They had to verify any captives the millennialists had taken and insure their safety. Grant thought of the difference between the consortium and Cerberus. The consortium would sacrifice their hired guns, cutting and running or blasting the facility to oblivion in a scorched-earth campaign. Grant, however, couldn’t write off an ally. These were friends, and if there was one thing that the ex-Magistrate had developed, it was loyalty to the people of New Edo, enough that he’d risk his life for them as readily as he did for his family at the Cerberus redoubt.

Grant frowned, deepening the angle of his gunslinger’s mustache as he mentally reviewed the map of the Operation Chronos labs. When he spoke to Shizuka, it was softer than a whisper. “Two places where they could be holding people.”

Shizuka nodded. “Specimen storage and the temporal dilator itself.”

“They save ammo by tossing the hostages…where?”

“When,” Shizuka corrected. “Prehuman times. The nuclear winter after skydark. Lots of eras would be fatal to modern humans.”

Grant sneered. “It’s scary that we can imagine the actions of sociopaths.”

“We’ve encountered enough to expect the worst,” Shizuka answered.

“I’ll scout specimen storage,” Grant said. “Call me and wait if you see anyone.”

Shizuka nodded and disappeared. Grant didn’t worry about her. If the Japanese woman didn’t want to be noticed, she wouldn’t be. And he had stressed that they were only doing a reconnaissance, not taking action. That didn’t mean either of them would sit still if a hostage was threatened with death, but the two of them were in contact with each other. One call for help, and the other would be with them in a heartbeat.

Grant slunk down the hall to specimen storage, where the scientists who ran Operation Chronos had deposited time-trawled people and animals, like the raptors that they had just encountered, and even larger creatures like the carnotaurus they had met on one of their first visits to Thunder Isle. The trawl could easily accommodate the one-ton, fifteen-foot-long predator with the unusual, almost demonic horns adorning its broad, powerful skull. Temporal disorientation made it easier for the Chronos whitecoats to control even the strongest of beasts.

The population of prehistoric animals on the island indicated that the scientists were prolific in their efforts. The breadth of specimen containment’s cells was another clue, a dozen cages of various sizes. On quiet feet, Grant looked into the darkened prison, listening for signs of habitation.

The hostage takers might have cast the area into shadows, but there was no way that they could muffle the nervous shifting and breathing of captives. Grant tossed a pocketed pebble into the hallway to make certain, but no reaction left him with the impression that this place had been cordoned off and abandoned. He turned away to rendezvous with Shizuka and spotted a half-dozen consortium soldiers moving with purpose toward the Chronos trawl.

“Shizuka, you’ve got company on your six,” Grant warned over the radio.

“Busy,” came the hissed reply.

From the grunts transmitted over her hands-free microphone, Grant knew that he was going to have to hustle. From stealth to explosive acceleration, the big man charged down the hall, his long strides ending in loud thumps on the tile floor of the laboratory, each footfall loud enough to be a gunshot. If things were going to hell, Grant wanted to draw attention away from Shizuka.

“Hey!” shouted one of the group of soldiers who’d passed only moments before, hearing the ex-Magistrate run.

As Grant rounded the corner, he saw that three of the millennialists were in midturn, the front half of the group continuing on its path. Three Calico submachine guns would still have the potential of causing Grant injury through his armored coat, so there was no pause on the brawny titan’s part. Leg muscles surged, and he sprinted forward like a human bull, his arms swept out like the horns of a steer. Instead of making himself a smaller target, Grant gambled on causing as much disruption as possible. His wide, sweeping limbs struck each of the three gunmen, bowling them over.

Grant could feel the jaw of one mercenary dislocate as his melon-sized shoulder slammed up against it. His fingers disappeared into the wet mushy holes in an other’s face as he sunk them into eye sockets. The last of the trio’s throat thudded hard against his right forearm, wrapped in the hydraulic forearm holster, and there was a dull pop as the gunman’s larynx collapsed and his neck bones separated. It was a brutal assault, and there was at least one fatality in the attack. It was necessary; if any of the three had managed to get their fingers on the triggers of their machine pistols, the resultant gunfire would have alerted all of the hostaged Chronos facility.

Things were already going downhill, and there were three more hired soldiers to deal with. The crash of Grant against their compatriots was now enough to draw the lead group’s attention. Two stunned men and a corpse fell to the tile floor as they turned. Grant snapped off a hard punch with his left fist, the blow crushing the cheekbones of a millennialist, the impact enough to toss the man insensate to the ground. The second of the gunmen swung his Calico up, but Grant launched the Sin Eater into his grasp by flexing his wrist tendons. A heavyweight 9 mm slug exploded through the stealth module on the machine pistol’s muzzle, making a throaty pop that was matched by the bursting of ribs and lung tissue. The mercenary jerked violently backward as 240 grains of high-density bullet turned his internal organs to froth and shattered his spine.

The last of the consortium thugs managed to aim at the center of Grant’s chest, the Calico only the blink of an eye away from opening up. Grant took another gamble, shoving his torso hard against the submachine gun’s muzzle. The contact range blast against his armored coat muffled the noise that the weapon would have made. The impact of the rounds hurt like a hammer to the ribs, but the gunshots were far quieter than even a silenced pistol. The thrust of Grant’s chest against the barrel had the added bonus of jamming the enemy’s weapon.

The gunman cranked the trigger again in vain as Grant leveled his Sin Eater at his enemy’s face. The Magistrate weapon chugged once, very effectively, exploding the mercenary’s skull in a brutal spray of a stringy, sticky mess. Grant looked at his Sin Eater in dismay. The gun had fired once, but he’d flicked the selector to burst-mode.

This is why we never use the stealth modules on these things, Grant thought bitterly. The suppressor for the Sin Eater was notorious for robbing energy from the weapon’s cycles and trapping gunpowder in the action, keeping casings from ejecting from the breech and jamming them up. It had always been kept concealed in a pocket of Magistrate armor, and only the stickiness of a hostage situation made the silencers a necessity.

Grant retracted the weapon back into its forearm holster and scooped up a Calico. It was going to be noisy, and not quite as intricately balanced as the Sin Eater, but it would have to do.

SHIZUKA HAD the advantage of leverage over Allen, but only momentarily. The millennialist commander had Magistrate training, and as such, he knew many of the same tricks that Grant had used against her. She’d held him at bay for this long, keeping the consortium’s lackey from hitting the control panel for the temporal dilator. On the transmitter plates below them, a dozen bound men and women, bloody and helpless, were on the verge of being disassembled on a molecular scale and squirted through a wormhole to some other point in the cosmos and the history of humanity.

There was no way that she could rescue the captives before the dilator engaged, and she knew that despite her strength and skill, she couldn’t hold off Allen forever. He had easily one hundred pounds on her lithe frame, and he knew enough martial arts to begin to counter her grappling against him. Sweat drenched her forehead, sticking her silky black hair to her face. If she could see herself, her pale skin against the midnight void color of her tresses, and the strain on her features, she would have thought herself a porcelain doll in the process of shattering and cracking.

Only for the speed and skill of her bow did she manage to bring down the three other sentries with Allen. Three corpses sported ya shafts from their upper chests and throats, the deadly potential energy stored in her kumi spearing them through Kevlar body armor and bone to sever major arteries within moments.

One of the three dead consortium mercenaries was folded over the railing next to the wrestling pair. Allen had appointed this particular gunman to work the controls in case a rescue attempt had been made. He had been Shizuka’s first target, her ya piercing his windpipe and spine in one shot. Paralyzed and unable to breathe, all that the millennialist lackey could do was collapse and sputter as he hung half over a steel pipe. No nerve impulses could impel his unplugged limbs to hit the transmit button.

Shizuka had perforated the other two gunmen, but Allen moved with the speed of a panther, his Sin Eater having shattered the top bow of her kumi, rendering the weapon useless. Shizuka discarded the broken tool, the need to save lives overriding her sentiment for the crafted bow. They had met in the middle, and Shizuka hit Allen with a nerve punch and proceeded to restrain him in an armlock.

At first, it had been brute muscle against biomechanically balanced strength, but Allen was not an idiot. Even as Grant’s voice came over her radio, Shizuka knew that Allen was struggling to twist his way out of her grasp. He was an eighth of a ton of honed, sculpted sinew and might. Though the physics of leverage were on Shizuka’s side, he was working his way to loosen her balance and apply gravity’s pull on him to escape what would have been an unbreakable grapple.

Shizuka could feel the veins stand out on her neck, her locked talons of fingers bursting at the knuckles. Blood from her partially uprooted fingernails was mixing with that which seeped from Allen’s torn skin. He was growing more slippery, though he was taking a toll on his own muscles as the iron-claw technique refused to yield to Allen’s struggle against it. The man’s fingers stretched, yearning to tap the transmit button.

“Gonna break soon, bitch,” Allen growled.

“Break this, fucker!” a stentorian roar split the air.

Both combatants froze at Grant’s challenge, giving the Cerberus warrior the pause he required to hurl himself through the air like a human missile. Shizuka, Allen, Grant and the dead mercenary all sailed through the air, landing in a tangle of arms and legs on the floor only a few feet below them.

“Get the hostages,” Grant ordered. His instruction to Shizuka was long enough for Allen to recover his wits and punch the big man across the jaw.

Shizuka knew better than to remain where she’d be a concern for Grant. She drew her tanto knife and raced forward, slashing through ropes with the precision of a surgeon. She tried to block out the sound of hammer impacts on meat and bone, but the rapid thuds and crunches were too quick and furious to ignore. All she could do was ensure the lives of the surviving Thunder Isle staff, hemp slicing apart against the finely honed edge of her forged steel.

“Shizuka!” Grant bellowed, a desperate warning that anchored her attention.

The console that Grant and Allen had been warring over was a spray of sparks, peppering them with burning embers of white-hot wiring and circuit board fragments. Shizuka glanced down to the alloy floor plates she and the last of the hostages were atop. The horns atop the central pylon glowed, and Shizuka saw fountains of odd light vomiting from their tips like volcanic kaleidoscopes.

“Move now!” Grant yelled, punctuating his cry by plunging Allen’s head into the gaping wreckage of the command console. The millennialist began a macabre dance as high voltage ripped through his nervous system.

Shizuka had shoved the last of the freed captives off the alloy floor plate when something gripped her. It wasn’t physical; it felt more like she was immersed in water, tiny pricklings running along the surface of her skin. The world outside of the odd glow and sensation fit her mind, but the people were rippling. Instead of moving, their limbs seemed to flow like quicksilver. She wanted to move, to speak, when she saw her hand above the surface of the event she was in.

Shizuka had experienced the mat-trans before, so she had a frame of reference for her body’s responses, but right now, the hand sticking out of the field seemed unseemly and alien. Fingers melted together, turning into a webbed fan or a smooth, featureless ball. It seemed like an eternity of watching her digits mutate crazily before she realized that she wasn’t watching her hand destroying and remolding itself but was instead experiencing her hand’s movement from an angle only available across a dimensional fold.

A strong arm gripped her hand. Shizuka wanted to cry out to the person coming to her rescue, but she saw the thick trunk of Grant’s thigh and lower leg press against the temporal dilator’s platform. If she could have made a sound—her lungs felt as if they were immovable despite the fact that she hadn’t needed a breath in what felt like hours—she doubted he could have heard her.

Shizuka grimaced as she was stretched across the event plane of the time field. When her head went through, it was as if she was being born again, parts of her brain exploding to life and normal status even as the rest of her mind reeled at its now disjointed nature. As soon as Shizuka’s head was in “real” time, she sucked in a ragged breath, trying to speak even though her larynx was seeming miles away.

Grant was half-submerged into the shimmering temporal disruption. His face was a grim mask as he struggled to push her to safety. She wanted to speak to him, but as she regained the ability to speak, his head subsided to the other side.

“Grant!” Shizuka cried.

Other hands grasped her free arm. She turned to see Kane and Sinclair hauling with all their might as Grant’s wall of muscle seethed from the other side of the time barrier. “Hold on to him!”

“We’re trying!” Kane snapped back. The muscles on his wolf-lean arms were swollen with effort. She noticed that Kane and Sinclair had anchored themselves by heavy electrical cable to the wall of the chamber. Grant had secured himself, as well, but the only thing left on this side of the malfunctioning platform was the cable and Grant’s right foot.