Cradle Of Destiny
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Those precautions included a foot-long fighting knife worn in a cross-draw scabbard that hung off the belt of her cargo shorts, and the small but powerful Detonics .45-caliber automatic in a holster on her opposite hip. Backing it up was a steel-tube-framed crossbow that hung, folded on a sling, from her shoulder. Raised in the Outlands, Domi didn’t need much more than a knife to sustain herself, but the crossbow was good for hunting and the little handgun had evened the odds in countless battles.
More equalization came in the form of Edwards, a tall and broad-shouldered former Magistrate who had been recruited to the Cerberus cause with the fall of the nine baronies. The blunt-headed man stood at the other end of the small expedition. Edwards was a beast of a man, nearly as tall as Grant, but stocky and bulky, not long limbed and well proportioned by the man who often served as her surrogate father.
Edwards, like all Magistrates, had been given only one name by the hybrid barons, who once ruled the baronies before their evolution into overlords. Their singular appellations combined with the grim, black carapace-like armor to separate them from the rest of the barons’ subjects, all the better for brainwashing them and transforming them into the dreaded judges and juries who ruled as the ultimate enforcers. Domi and Edwards had tangled once when they were assigning the leadership of the Cerberus Away Team they shared. Edwards had been a difficult opponent, but Domi had put him in his place. Like most of the Magistrates, he was an alpha male, someone who felt that his brawn made him the most appropriate leader. But like all good wolves, Edwards had conceded when he was shown that he could be physically bested by the slender little albino wraith.
Since then, he and Domi were amicable allies and trusted teammates.
Edwards glanced over one thick, bulky shoulder, then shrugged his head back toward the two women who dug in the dirt around a small ring of stones with worn but barely readable inscriptions carved into them. Domi smirked. She knew that Brigid Baptiste was someone who could lose herself in scientific investigation easily, in the most unusual of climes. Though the sun beat down relentlessly on their uncovered heads, the environmental adaptations of the shadow suits kept their body temperatures low thanks to cooling systems woven into their high-tech fabric. Even sweating under a tied-off bandanna, Brigid was unwavering in her attention to the ancient scratches in the rock.
Brigid was a foot taller than Domi, and where the feral girl was cast in pale porcelain, the archivist was an explosion of color. Brigid was adorned with hair that looked like red silk interspersed with golden threads, sun-beaten skin that managed to tan despite her ginger tresses and emerald eyes that glimmered like precious gems. Right now she hid her orbs behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that allowed her to better inspect the stones around the small, nearly unnoticeable circle of rocks where the interphaser had deposited them.
The interphaser ferried the Cerberus explorers along a web of energy trails that connected at parallax points. So powerful were the currents rolling through these threads that when they intersected, humans felt the urge to build monuments to the power that coursed in the very ground. The Cerberus personnel had mapped many of the parallax points, both around the world and beyond, and built a device that exploited these naturally occurring focal points as a means of transferring people and goods.
Bored beyond the end of his usual impatience, Edwards resorted to sarcasm. “So, what are we looking for again? Humma Humma and the Cedar Chest and the city of Airy Do?”
“Humbaba and the Cedar Forest, and the city state of Eridu,” Brigid corrected. “Though I suspect that you, like Kane and Grant, have a better memory and comprehension than what you’re displaying.”
“Let me get this straight. We have an eight-foot stone monster running around, and you’re taking time out of dealing with this crisis to look for trees in the middle of a desert?” Edwards asked.
“Ullikummis is old,” Domi told Edwards. “Myth is old, and might have some truth. Maybe we can find weakness for Stoneface by looking in his old stomping grounds.”
“That freak was here?” Edwards asked.
Domi noted that the big ex-Mag was rubbing his forehead, brows furrowed in the unmistakable sign of a splitting headache. After Ullikummis’s first appearance, Edwards had been taking more aspirin of late, and his Commtact was no longer able to transmit; hence the bulky transmitter unit he wore on his hip.
Domi and the others could hardly blame the big man. Ullikummis had made Edwards one of his pawns by planting one of his seeds in his head. That kind of intrusion by a small pellet of intelligent stone must have been only slightly more comfortable than Domi’s own major headache after the mad god Maccan pumped unholy amounts of sonic energy straight into her skull. Domi had been on wobbly knees for a while after that, so she could empathize with her fellow CAT member. Such a violation would have been enough cause for a few weeks of rest and recreation, but Cerberus couldn’t spare the manpower.
At least Edwards retained his mobility and reflexes. Domi needed time to get back onto her feet after her brief coma.
“That freak,” Maria Falk spoke up. “Or one much like him, if Brigid’s reading is right.”
Falk was an older woman, her brown hair showing glimmers of silvering gray here and there. Domi loved the lunar scientist’s smile. She found more than a little kinship in the way that Falk always perked up but quietly chose to observe without drawing attention to herself. They shared a curiosity, but Domi felt for Falk. If the geologist was a house cat with just a little too much inquisitiveness, she wouldn’t be as adept at fighting her way out of trouble as the wildcat albino.
Falk was used to studying rocks, but she had complained before they made the interphaser jump. She wasn’t an archaeologist, but Brigid wanted a set of eyes that knew about terrain and natural earth formations. Tomb raiders were in short supply among the redoubt’s newly expanded staff.
Edwards tilted his head. “Okay, now I really am playing dumb. One like him?”
“Humbaba, or Humwawa, was appointed by Enlil himself as the guardian of the Cedar Forest. He was a giant with the face of a lion in some sources, and in others, his features resemble coiled entrails of men and beasts,” Brigid said.
“Maybe he’s a sloppy eater, or saving leftovers for later.” Edwards chuckled nervously.
Brigid raised an eyebrow at the thought. “That is a possibility.”
Edwards rested his face in his palm. “Great. A man-eating giant kitty cat.”
“He couldn’t be that big,” Domi said. “If he can wear the guts of his meal as a face mask.”
“Well, the legends said that Ullikummis was a giant who was so large his shoulders scraped the skies,” Brigid said. “The real one was nowhere that huge.”
“Small favors,” Edwards grumbled. “Humbaba’s alive, or dead?”
“Allegedly, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slew the beast,” Brigid answered.
“Who and what?” Edwards asked.
“King Gilgamesh, one of the original human heroes of mythology. His ally was a bull-man, sent by the gods to slay Gilgamesh—Enkidu,” Brigid said.
Edwards looked a little unfocused for a moment. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Which? Gilgamesh is a rather—”
“The other one,” Edwards cut Brigid off.
Brigid stepped closer to the large man. “Perhaps it’s a residual memory?”
“From when Ugly Commish took me over?” Edwards asked.
Brigid nodded.
Edwards closed his eyes, as if looking inside of himself for answers. “I don’t know why I’d remember anything.”
With that, he opened a small pill bottle and downed a couple of pills without benefit of a splash of water from his canteen. “Not everyone can remember everything like you, Brigid.”
Brigid smirked at the subtle jab, then turned back to see Falk dig a little more furiously at the ground. The geologist’s spade hacked at rocklike sand that disintegrated as the steel of Falk’s tool smashed into it. Nervousness set in on the older woman’s features. “What’s wrong?”
Falk tugged on a length of stretchy fabric. Brigid knelt next to the woman, tugging it from deep, hard-packed sand. As soon as she touched the leatherlike material, Brigid knew what it was. She had never worn it, but Kane and Grant had donned the long, armored dusters, one sleeve outsized to accommodate the folding Sin Eater blaster. Domi recognized the jacket sleeve, as well, and her stomach twisted. Edwards had not brought his duster.
“This is a Magistrate jacket,” she pronounced. “How long has it been here?”
“Given the density of the sand, it’s hard to say,” Falk hedged.
“That’s a lie,” Brigid answered. “How long has this been trapped here?”
Falk looked at Brigid, swallowing before she dared to answer.
“It’s been here for nearly five thousand years,” Falk answered.
Brigid looked down at the uniform embedded in the stone. “We need to dig deeper. See what else is in there.”
“I haven’t found any skeletal remains,” Falk replied.
“They might not have been buried here with the clothing,” Brigid answered.
Domi could tell from the stress and urgency in her friend’s voice that one of the Cerberus people was going to be lost in the depths of time.
The question was, who would go missing?
Chapter 2
Gongs reverberated throughout the Tigers of Heaven dojo in the heart of New Edo. Though the transplanted Japanese had access to technology such as radios, they were also traditionalists. Alarm Klaxons produced by loudspeakers were not an improvement over the classic padded hammer striking a gigantic dish of bronze. The loud, air-shaking noise drew attention and focused it like few other sounds could.
Instinct pushed Grant and Shizuka to grab their weapons, the big ex-Magistrate sliding the Sin Eater holster over his thick right forearm. Shizuka slid her katana through a single loop of the sash around her waist, slung a quiver of ya arrows over her shoulder, and scooped up her kumi samurai bow. Every member of the Tigers of Heaven was trained in the arts of the samurai, so that even with a wild supply of automatic rifles and handguns, they were still deadly with their “primitive” weaponry. The penetration ability of a ya launched was insufficient to spear through the polycarbonate plates of full Magistrate assault armor, but Shizuka’s aim was quick and accurate enough to slip her deadly arrowheads in the gaps between those panels and through the Kevlar and Nomex underneath.
Still, the exchange of technologies and ideas between New Edo and the Cerberus redoubt had been enough for the Japanese archers to utilize shafts and bows of carbon fiber over a laminated wood core, and stiff nylon supplemented turkey and swan feathers to make the ya fly true. While Grant himself was a man who appreciated powerful firearms like the Sin Eater or his Copperhead, Shizuka had been teaching him kyudo, the samurai’s “way of the bow.” His upper-body strength was more than sufficient to handle a kumi with an eighty-eight-pound draw and keep the bowstring nocked and on target with very little vibration. It was a slow process, however. Grant was familiar with the basics of marksmanship, but it was akin to the early six months of training that he had been given on the dangerous, lightning-fast Sin Eater machine pistol. He could hit a bull’s-eye given a few moments, but he was not adept at utilizing the bow in combat. Shizuka, on the other hand, could nock, draw and launch a ya shaft in the space of a second.
A 20-round, full-auto machine pistol firing armor-crushing 240-grain 9 mm slugs would have to do for now, Grant mused. He paused and looked at his folded Magistrate trench coat. Shizuka had already slithered into the bamboo-and-polymer-plate armor, and Grant was loath to go into action without some protection. He had left behind the shadow suit at Cerberus redoubt, but the protective long coat was sufficient armor, its leatherlike material interwoven with polycarbonate strips and ballistic-resistant cloth, and extremely comfortable. The duster fluttered as he picked it up, whirling it like a cape around his shoulders as he shrugged into the roomy but supple garment.
“You really need to wear that with your shadow suit,” Shizuka spoke up. “You look magnificent with your coattails flapping.”
Grant managed a smile. “I sometimes worry about snagging this thing.”
“Have you ever?” Shizuka asked.
Grant thought about it for a moment as he and the samurai commander prepared to rush to the Tigers of Heaven’s small fleet of motorized launches. “Nope, but I don’t wear this much.”
The two lovers exited Shizuka’s Spartan dwelling and at the railing saw the gong ringer, his brawny arms and shoulders glistening with sweat as he swung the hammer to alert the city. As the gong was centrally placed, everyone could quickly get their bearings by the row of lanterns mounted on the support beam that the great bronzed dish hung from. Grant could see that the lantern indicating trouble on Thunder Isle had been ignited.
“Shit,” Grant muttered.
“We’ll get to the boats,” Shizuka said. She pulled her radio from its place on her sash. Now that the Tigers of Heaven had been alerted, they would be waiting for indications of who should respond and where they should go. “Nagumi, harden the perimeter in case this is a diversion. Ichira, Honda, bring your squads with me to the island. Full force.”
Grant knew that “full force” was not inconsiderable. Twelve samurai warriors with composite armor, high-tech bows and arrows and thousand-folded pure steel blades with nearly monomolecular edges were easily a match for Magistrates with submachine guns, grenades and bulletproof armor.
Grant and Shizuka took their places aboard the Gamera-maru, the same vessel that the two of them and their samurai allies had been on when they’d prevented an assault by the barons on New Edo when the island colony was first discovered by the Cerberus explorers. It was unofficially the flagship of the New Edo fleet, and as such, it had been upgraded with new motors on the aft. While the engines had been designed for twentieth-century inflatable rafts called Zodiacs, they had easily been adapted to the rattan-hulled craft. The increase in speed from traditional outboard motors had been dramatic, enabling a quicker response to a crisis on Thunder Isle.
Grant perched on the bow of the Gamera-maru as the twin Mercedes engines pumped out hundreds of horsepower, producing rooster tails of white, frothy spray, writing the massive energy impulse in twelve-foot-high jets as the craft accelerated from its berth. Two other craft, each laden with a quartet of Samurai, as well as their crews, had started only moments apart, but that was sufficient for Grant and Shizuka to achieve a twenty-foot lead on the other boats.
The two archers assigned to the Gamera-maru strung their bows, the composite nature of their laminated-wood-and-carbon-fiber cores building enormous potential energy. The mist of seawater coming over the rail of the speeding sea craft wouldn’t affect either the resin-lacquered bows or the inelastic cord, which couldn’t be warped by absorption. A bowstring that stretched under any conditions lost efficiency in transferring the potential energy of the bow to the arrow. Pig tendons and horsehair were two of the materials that the Tigers of Heaven had used, and even late twentieth-century polymers provided by Cerberus hadn’t improved on the archers’ capabilities.
The boat archers used larger bows than Shizuka wore, as they were not expected to wade in close. The Japanese warriors had called them “two-man bows,” as they were the height of one man riding on the shoulders of his friend—about eight feet tall, given the average diminutive stature of the Asians.
“Grant,” Kane’s voice crackled over his Commtact from a thousand miles away. “Bry told me you were on the way to Thunder Isle. Don’t go ashore.”
“Too late. We’re on our way to a four-gong emergency,” Grant answered. “Why?”
“Baptiste just called me to say she found one of our off-duty Mag coats buried under around five thousand years of sand in some sort of tomb,” Kane told him. “Thunder Isle’s one place we know of that has an operating time-travel machine….”
“Mag coats?” Grant asked. He looked at the armor-laced duster, its tails flapping from his hips. “I’m wearing mine right now.”
“Damn it, Grant,” Kane growled. “Baptiste thinks one of us—”
“Well, if she found the damn duster buried for a few thousand years, then we’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole,” Grant answered, cutting him off. “Nothing’s going to change that. Did she find any bones sticking out of the sleeves?”
“No, but she only found a piece of it sticking out,” Kane replied. “That doesn’t mean our carcass isn’t nearby.”
“Let me know if she finds any bones. Otherwise, what’s happened has happened,” Grant said. “We’ll be jumping at shadows every time we get called here.”
“Grant…” Kane’s voice was laced with frustration, but Grant knew that there were people in danger; otherwise the alert wouldn’t have sounded on New Edo.
“Kane, we can discuss this all you want later, right now, people who are our friends may be dying,” Grant grumbled. “Or am I worth more than them?”
Grant knew that Kane’s answer would be a hard choice. The two former Magistrates were closer than brothers, bound by blood, sweat and tears, but Kane was driven by the same selfless urge to protect innocents that had made them the finest enforcement team in Cobaltville.
“You don’t have permission to die,” Kane said. “If you do, I’ll drag you back to life and beat you to death again.”
“It’ll take a lot to get me out of your life. If I don’t see you for five thousand years, you’d better behave. Remember, the more you complain, the longer you live, and five millennia ain’t going to be shit off the bitching I’ve done,” Grant answered.
There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the Commtact. “I’ll hold you to that.”
Grant managed a smirk, seeing the shore of Thunder Isle. “Grant out.”
THOUGH HER HEADBAND was meant to keep the sweat and her flowing red-gold hair out of Brigid Baptiste’s eyes, she still needed to mop her eyes as she paused. Her hands had been callused from her years of adventure, but the effort of prying apart the sunbaked sandstone with a foot-long utility knife was raising new blisters on her fingers. The pebbling on the Micarta Fiberglas handle had worn a red patch between the base and knuckle of her index finger.
So far, she’d gotten the sleeve out to the shoulder, and from the tailored length of what she’d freed, there was no doubt as to the owner of the duster. She sat back, a wave of nausea rumbling in her stomach.
Brigid raised Kane on her Commtact. “Did you warn Grant?”
“Yes,” Kane answered. “His response was that you’ve found the coat, so he’s already destined to go on a trip to the ancient past. You’re sure it’s his coat?”
“By now, absolutely,” Brigid answered. “No one else in Cerberus has arms as long as he does.”
Brigid glanced to one side, and saw Domi’s ruby-red eyes locked on the armored leather spilling out of the crack in the temple remnant.
“You heard what Kane said?” Brigid asked.
“Was on party line,” Domi answered, her diction returning to the abbreviated Outland form of speech. It was a sign of nervousness or heightened stress, and Brigid could feel sympathy for the young albino. Usually, when her words became terse and tense, she at least could engage in combat to deal with what had gotten under her skin. When Domi couldn’t utilize the energy pumped into her bloodstream by the fight-or-flight reflex, Brigid could see her grow morose and withdrawn.
Domi was walking an emotional edge, especially considering how close she had grown to Grant since he had first saved her life back in the Tartarus slums under Cobaltville. Grant had been the first person in a long time to show the wild woman kindness. Domi had gone from fighting, literally tooth and claw, for survival to being one of pit-boss Guana Teague’s prostitutes. Gentleness and humanity had been a rarity in her life, and Grant’s act of protection had earned her undying loyalty, first demonstrated when she stopped Teague from strangling Grant to death.
There’d been a brief period when Domi had thought their relationship was sexual in nature, but it eventually settled down that she had found a father figure. When Cerberus was a much smaller staff, before the influx of lunar staff, she had finally found her family. The added freezies from the Manitius Base had made her uncomfortable, intruding on her sense of community, which only drew her closer to Grant, Kane, Brigid and Lakesh.
Brigid didn’t want to think of the pain Domi would be in if Grant was gone forever.
“We know roughly when he was transported,” Brigid said. “And this place has none of the traditional indications of a Sumerian crypt.”
“So not cemetery,” Domi muttered, looking around. “Not much temple.”
“Not now, but we have millennia of erosion and deterioration that’s removed most of what this place used to be,” Brigid answered.
“Erosion?” Domi asked. Her face screwed into a mask of skepticism. “Or bombed.”
Brigid frowned as she looked around. “We’ve only been digging for a few minutes—we can’t tell.”
“Snake-faces ruled here,” Domi mentioned.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that,” Brigid answered.
“Never forget anything,” Domi agreed. “But didn’t say so.”
“You’re trying to say that I’m keeping information from you?” Brigid asked.
Domi looked away from the sleeve, the first time in the several minutes since they’d discovered the armored garment. “No. Softening news. Maybe. Not say lying.”
Brigid rested her hand on the diminutive albino’s shoulder. “We would have found skeletal remains if he was killed here. This was just a memento…buried and lost in time.”
“Too hot for long coat here, even then?” Domi asked.
“Absolutely,” Brigid answered.
“News is getting better,” Domi said, recovering some of her language skills, stress lessening.
“Plus we’re not even sure he’s going to be tossed through time just this minute,” Brigid said. “It could be some time in the next thirty years, for all we know. Or even Grant’s son, if he has one.”
Domi snickered. Brigid tilted her head.
“Remembered line about assumptions,” Domi said. “You make an ass out of you and umption.”
Brigid nodded.
“Because, you know, I’m pretty big, too,” Edwards interjected from his overwatch of the temple dig. “Grant could have lent me his coat.”
“Too fat,” Domi replied.
Edwards grimaced. “That’s muscle.”
“You want to get punier?” Domi asked.
Mariah Falk let out a sigh. “Brigid, I thought that you wanted to see the chamber that this coat seems to be walled into.”
Domi tilted her head.
Brigid explained for her friend. “That device she has is a sonar locater. It registers echoes off loud noises returned from objects of heavier density.”
Domi smiled with comprehension. “So when Mariah set off the boom stick on the ground, she was looking through the sand.”
“When did you start getting so smart?” Edwards asked.
“Boyfriend cuts holes in universes as shortcuts,” Domi noted. “Brigid friend is living encyclopedia. Six years hanging around with them, knowledge rubs off, newbie.”
Edwards smirked. “Attitude rubs off, too.”
“It’s not attitude if you can back it up,” Brigid countered. The archivist walked over to Falk, who had put another image on her portable tablet computer. “You’ve double-checked this?”
“I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with in this time, but I didn’t get assigned to Manitius by being sloppy and second-rate,” Falk answered.
“Point taken,” Brigid said. “My apologies.”