DOMINION PLAGUE

Earth remains the tortured battleground of near-immortal aliens. But these god kings never anticipated unified resistance from a group of humans possessing the tenacity and spirit to reclaim their planet. In the ongoing war for independence, the Cerberus fighters forge an epic showdown, as evil shape-shifts and unfurls its grand design….

UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT

The madness surrounding entombed secrets of an ancient race puts Kane and his allies on a death chase across the African subcontinent. Facing relentless attack from winged hell beasts and marauding militia, the rebels are forced into an unholy alliance with a deadly foe. Only the dark goddess spawned of humanity’s most brutal overlord can challenge a superhuman interloper and navigate an ancient ziggurat that guards a nightmare. The price for miscalculation will be paid in blood—with the eternal damnation of the human race.

“Get out of my head!” Kane growled

He wrestled against the forces assailing him. The other entity—a shadowy form zooming between Kane’s view of the world and his embattled mind—looked over its shoulder at the ongoing struggle.

Kane heard a voice no human on Earth ever had. It was deep, rumbling, pervasive. It might have been male, but there was an odd quality to it that seemed almost sexless. “Your friends are going to die.” The vibrations of those words burrowed deep into him—like termites chewing through the heart of a tree.

Kane writhed in the smothering grasp of his opponent.

“You’re going to shoot them,” the shadow taunted. Kane’s right arm tore free from the engulfing mass of darkness, and he reached out, fingertips brushing the icy flesh.

“I’ll rip you out of my skull first!” Kane bellowed. “I’ll shred you into ribbons!”

Shadow Born

James Axler

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force, one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.

—Leon Trotsky,

1879–1940

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

The Road to Outlands

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Copyright

Prologue

Neekra dreamed of ages past, her memories stretching far back through the delirium and pain of the orichalcum scepter jammed through her avatar’s torso. She sought escape from the incalculable energies held within the unstable alloy scorching through her hijacked cellular structure. The superstring biological computers that she’d molded into her core, powerful transmitters that allowed her incredible telepathic ability and the power to sculpt human bodies as if made from clay, misfired and shuddered...

But she fought for her consciousness. She still could find a back door, a way to escape the dissolution of the lost fragment that had managed to escape from where the rest of her body was imprisoned.

“It’s the only way we will ever be free,” a voice whispered in her ear.

She felt the strength of a lover’s hands running down the length of her body, warm whispers brushing her earlobes. Was this a dream, a fevered remnant of a time when she was merely Annunaki and not the being she sought to return to in resurrection?

Then she was tumbling, careening across her own time line, before her father, Enlil, burdened her with the horrible task as punishment for her all-too-human weakness...

...and there was Neekra, bastard child of Enlil, kneeling on the hard floor, her legs curled beneath her shapely thighs, her chin touching her chest, eyes closed.

She didn’t dare open them, even as her father paced in front of her, his ponderous tread shaking the ground for emphasis. Enlil reached down, hooked her chin with a crooked forefinger and drew her to look up at him.

“Open your eyes!” At the sharp command, her eyes popped open and she looked Enlil in the face. He was tall, magnificent, clad in a simple silk sash adorned with a gold chain as his belt. Muscles rippled beneath his fine-scaled skin; Enlil would have been an inspiration to the greatest human sculptors.

As divine as his appearance was, he was also a commanding force, his voice cementing her in place with its deep, vibrating tone.

“Sweet child,” he whispered, a hiss with all the warmth of an Arctic wind. “You disappoint me.”

“I’m...I’m...so sor...” Neekra began.

His fingertip touched her lips together, cutting her off. Neekra was so frightened, even the urge to shiver cowered somewhere between her shoulder blades.

This has to be memory, she thought, and for a moment, Neekra was confused at where that realization came from. This is just a fantasy, a delusion created by my suffering.

I have not feared Enlil in millennia, came the conclusion.

And almost as if the Annunaki overlord had overheard the defiance she’d displayed twenty-five centuries hence, Enlil wrapped his long fingers around her throat and neck, craning her head up.

“I can smell the stink of his sex on you,” Enlil growled.

“I can explain...” Neekra’s younger-self sputtered, not daring to break her stare from his.

“The explanation is simple, my little girl,” Enlil huffed. He slid his fingers through her crimson-streaked black locks, claw-like nails scratching along the back of her head. There had been times when such a caress might have been the beginnings of rough intimacy between herself and the god of her world. Now she felt menace in his clutch. Electric bolts of pain sparked through his nails.

“Please...”

He hurt you, but don’t give him that satisfaction, Neekra thought. Don’t let him have his victory in seeing you cry.

Yet Neekra’s memories had been cast in stone. She could not change that past, that history, and she could not alter the memories that stuck in her brain.

Enlil’s revenge was as unspeakable among the Annunaki as it would be with any less evolved, so-called barbaric race. It was his manipulations, his cruelty that nurtured Neekra into what she was, what she had grown to be. That hate had poisoned her, blackened her soul so that thousands of years could not erase the fury she felt toward her father.

Perhaps she could have found a better way out of the hell she’d been stuck in, a better mentor or lover, a better teacher, someone who could have laid the groundwork for redemption. She’d seen those things inside of Kane’s mind, and the minds of others who’d opposed her spawn, the darkness with which she infested the world. Rather than giving in to hatred for an abusive, sadistic father, she could have found worth in making her life better, making the world better. She could have rebelled like her half sister, Malesh, and fought for independence against the global order that their fouler kin had wrought upon humanity.

Instead, Neekra took solace in the arms of Negari, the Igigi whose affection and intimacy had drawn the wrath of Enlil.

Negari had promised her gifts and talents that would make Enlil tremble before her, rather than lord over her. Work was being done across the planet, on the opposite shores of a mighty ocean, far beneath the waves at one of the deepest realms yet known to the Annunaki. There, in experiments shielded from the rest of the world by six thousand feet of water, 191 atmospheres of pressure, they had discovered a form of life that made even the mightiest of the overlords tremble. Even Enlil himself could not survive the bone-crushing pressures of one and a quarter tons of weight per square inch.

And so Neekra crawled forward in time, further along the path she’d already endured, fully aware that in this fever dream, time passed much more swiftly than in the real world, where Kane and Nehushtan had impaled her, attacking her avatar’s cellular structure with energies equivalent to the output of a dying sun.

Through her continued psychic retreat, she arrived at the night when Negari caressed her ravaged form, working with healing technologies that could negate the torment that Enlil used as his signature on her flesh. The puckered skin, the torn muscle knitted back together. Neekra still felt the rent wounds in her spirit. Even Negari could do little for that, but as he nursed her injuries, kissed and comforted her, gave her tenderness, he whispered of the wonders that they had discovered within the protein structure, a living virus that had brought madness and devastation across the lands of Sumeria until the overlords combined their might to stop it.

“It’s magnificent,” Negari whispered. “It’s one consciousness, a complete mind in each strand of complex molecules, smaller than a single chromosome, yet able to tap into immense knowledge.”

“How can that help us?” Neekra asked. Her injuries faded, and a warm sensuality bathed her entire body, cellular regeneration within the “healing coffin” having an effect on sexual desire.

“It means we can shed these bodies,” Negari said. “And if we wished, we could become one being, or we could exist among the teeming millions of apes sprawled across the face of this planet. Or even further.”

Neekra raised an eyebrow, and Negari answered her curiosity with first a kiss. “We could become the totality of the Annunaki race. They would become puppets, marionettes on strings of self-replicating protein that would infest them.”

“That sounds...tedious,” Neekra responded. She brushed her lover’s cheek.

“It seems like it would be, but the samples we captured, isolated down at the Tongue, they don’t show that feeling of limitation,” Negari said.

“Of course not,” Neekra stated. She smiled. “It’s trying to seduce you. Trying to let it into your brain and then to escape. Father has done everything in his power to limit its existence, yet...”

“Yet he still makes us toil, unraveling the secrets built into it on an atomic scale,” Negari responded. He rose, then gently lowered himself between her open thighs. His hands cupped her face tenderly, his emerald eyes meeting her crimson gaze. “I can advance us without letting the totality loose on the world, without having it infect us. We would be ourselves, mightier than anything this world could hope to contain.”

Neekra reveled as Negari put his words aside and utilized his tongue and lips for other, much more pleasurable things. His kisses, his nibbling of her newly revived flesh provided an escape from the agonies inflicted upon her, at that time from the rage of Enlil, and outside of the memory, from the assault of Kane.

The time of needles came up next, after years of Negari’s experimentation. He’d isolated the particular protein chain that could be turned into the base root of a world-encompassing hive mind. The first experiment was on himself, and slowly the natural telepathy of the Igigi race became stronger. Within him, the proteins reproduced, growing, laying the groundwork of sheathing along his nervous system, which acted as the conducting antenna coil for his thoughts. As soon as that happened, he reached out to Neekra.

He spoke to her, mentally, without outside Annunaki technology, reaching blindly around the globe, over a mile of ocean water or, even more impressively, through the crust of a planet.

That night, Neekra’s body came alive with the touch of a lover who no longer needed to be in the same room. Neekra cried out, thrashing at his ministrations, biting down hard on her lip to prevent her uttering his name.

Still, she was found out. She was cornered, quizzed, whipped and battered by an enraged Enlil.

Negari had gone too far, committed himself to an experiment, become something that was greater than Enlil, and this was a world where none could be greater than he. He had not crossed a universe to become the second-best in his own Olympus. He was to be Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, yet Negari dared to slap their leader in the face.

Igigi had been meant to be the servant class—never mind that Neekra was the result of Enlil’s night with one of those serfs.

“What is good for you, Father, is forbidden for me?” Neekra gasped, stretched against the wall, naked and helpless. She wouldn’t shrink, not even as vulnerable as she was now.

Enlil pressed against her. “You act as if I care what happens to you.”

Then Enlil showed Neekra exactly how much he “cared” about her, brutally, slowly grinding her cheek against the wall with his forearm as he drove into her again and again. All he was doing was stoking the fires of hatred, the hunger for revenge that would cross centuries unabated, growing only in depth of spite and disgust.

Soon, Neekra whispered into the ear of her younger self, something that did as little for the remembered image as if she’d given promises to a baby photo of herself.

The dream broke. A little bit of vision was still left in the dead eyes of Gamal, and she saw collapsed figures all about her. She’d gone to full armor in an effort to protect herself, her “piggyback brains” from being assaulted by the humans who caught on to how she’d reconfigured the man’s body to accommodate the telepathic organs, the biological computer that granted her the seemingly impossible powers necessary to shake the world.

No one around her was conscious. She tried to move, but all around her was crust; her flesh turned to ash with black, ugly sap crawling from cracks in her surface.

Don’t have long, she thought. Nehushtan will awaken the least injured with the least energy first, then tap into him.

Neekra stretched to reach for one of her spawn. Some must have been left alive.

And there were. She could feel two of them, staying deep in the rubble of crypts that had been struck by grenades and bullets. Those two hid, knowing that there would be others to come to her aid immediately. Neekra had programmed them that way, making certain she had a backup plan in case things went to crap.

They had gone beyond crap. The spark of life in the carcass she inhabited was fading fast, and as she did a mental inventory of herself, she saw the deterioration of the protein strings that made up her “telepathic antennae”—the webbing of natural materials that turned her into a living psychic transmitter, able to manipulate thought as well as cellular structure. The protein “biocomputers” also could create the telekinetic fields that gave her superhuman strength and durability far beyond even her father’s brute force at his prime.

She pushed out a blackened polyp of tar, separating cracked chunks of Gamal’s ashen corpse. Gamal had been one of the people she had been drawn to, three charismatic figures who would be attuned to her, to be her pawns. Neekra’s body was somewhere, operating on autopilot, chosen by Enlil to be the guardian of the tomb of Negari, her lover. Neekra was an excised intelligence, her lobotomized body an engine of destruction whose sole purpose was the death of anyone foolish enough to attempt a rescue of the Igigi who dared to ascend to unearned godhood.

Whether Neekra’s wandering ghost was an afterthought, or a callously calculated punishment, she knew she was a nomad. She was an infection, capable of only infesting one host at a time. To find that host, she was limited to a psyche that could handle the power of her mind and spirit; otherwise she would burn him out, but it still needed to be a mind that she could overpower.

Now, all she had for a body, for a means of travel, was the combination of two blobs of semisentient snot that she’d birthed from Gamal’s body. She could last in them for a while, but it was nothing like she could do with a host such as her last one.

She injected what little of herself was left into their cytoplasm, mixing with them, letting the two amorphous entities unite. They each had undamaged protein string centers—four, in fact—which she laced together into a matrix that could sustain her until she could recover.

With that, the blob carrying her consciousness stretched out pseudopods, latching on to imperfections on the ground, swinging itself along, making for the corkscrew that would lead her to the surface.

The light-sensitive sensory organs in the membranes of her host body cringed at the overabundance of sunlight, even though dawn wouldn’t break for another five minutes.

All she needed was to scurry to a thicket of thorns, burrow under the sand and wait.

Hiding was her only solace, at least until she could find someone, something.

And then it would be a game of catch-up.

Kane and Durga had been put on a trail now. They had been after her hiding place. There, they would subdue her body and then attempt to destroy it. But by battling her, they would loosen what bonds held Negari in place.

Doing that would free him, and if Neekra had caught up by then, she’d retrieve herself and awaken as she was meant to be.

She crawled under the graying, ever-lightening sky across the arid dirt toward the dry grasses of the tree line.

A scaled foot set down in her path.

It was Durga. He’d vowed to destroy her, and now she was vulnerable to him. The mega-cellular form she was trapped in couldn’t withstand the deadly venom he stored in his fangs. He had used enough to blind her previous avatar, but...

“Don’t cringe from me,” Durga spoke gently.

He knelt before her on the dirt and reached out, cupping her balloon-like form.

“You and I have a journey to complete,” he whispered, cooing to her as if she were a baby, scooping her up and cradling her in his arms.

“Come now, darling,” Durga said to her. “We have to find your tomb.”

Confused, weak, unable to communicate for the moment, she was wound in a blanket that prevented her from stabbing Durga’s skin with cilia, tiny little barbed stingers that could suck the blood from his flesh. The blanket protected her primitive visual stimulus organs, though, and concealed her from the burning heat of the sun.

She now rested in a bucket seat and heard the rattle then rumble of an engine firing to life. They had been in a jeep belonging to the Panthers of Mashona, the militia run by her old host, Gamal.

“Tell me where to drive, my sweet,” Durga whispered. Except it wasn’t a whisper. He was contacting her with his thoughts.

Neekra thought back to the pain and fire of the staff within her torso, a reminder of another era when the ancient artifact was used to send her to flight. When Suleiman Kahani battled the thing within the crypt after it had slain the slavers.

Neekra recognized what her father had wrought from her and recognized landmarks about her. Her battle with Kane had been the final key to remembering where she and her lover had been interred. Neekra, at Durga’s mercy, passed on that information.

She prayed that she would not regret this decision.

Chapter 1

Kane made certain that there was nothing left down below in the necropolis. For the past two days, his friends had been prisoners down there, captives of the two beings he searched for traces of. An apocalyptic battle with one of them had ensued after her erstwhile companion seemed to turn on her, warning Kane about his plan about destroying their alliance and the avatar of their ally.

The her was Neekra, a bodiless entity who had taken possession of a militia warlord by the name of Gamal. Neekra’s power was such that she was able to turn a tall, muscular, powerful man into a crimson-skinned goddess full of voluptuous curves and able to give “birth” to amorphous spawn. Those things she created had been the basis for vampire mythology, semiliquid entities that inserted themselves into corpses, wearing their carcasses like suits of meat. Neekra, or her issue, had been around the world, creating a universe of mythologies surrounding the walking dead, but here, in Africa, was where she “lived.” When Kane came to Africa, summoned by an artifact that had been ancient in the time of Atlantis and was attributed to King Solomon of the Bible, Neekra sought him out and psychically attacked him and the one Kane learned later was her ally.

Neekra’s psychic imprisonment of Kane was a testing of the waters. Kane shuddered at the thought that instead of the warlord Gamal, it could have been him, his physique telekinetically sculpted, organs reattributed and external appearance mutilated until he became the same rust-red feminine goddess who sought domination of the necropolis.

Neekra’s host was nearly invulnerable, ignoring grenade blasts and bursts of full-automatic gunfire directly into her face. Yet she wanted Kane and others to hunt for her prison, the place where she’d been interred for dozens of centuries, mind and flesh amputated from each other.

Gamal’s body had only been destroyed by the combination of the venom that was innate to a race of pan-terrestrial humanoids called the Nagah and the burning energies within the staff once wielded by Solomon and Moses. Neekra’s host was reduced to ash, tar-like blood turning the collapsed mound into what Kane’s dear friend Grant called “a greasy smear.”

Kane poked and prodded at that smear. Although no sign of animation was left within the ugly concoction, Kane felt no relief. He had encountered another goddess who had survived the destruction of her body, taking root to reincarnate in the bodies of three young women. Neekra’s thousands of years of existence had influenced stories of night terror around the globe, so the death of one body wouldn’t stop her. They’d put her down, but still someone else was looking for that body, that tomb she sought.

That someone else, the same man who wanted out of the alliance, was Prince Durga, exiled regent of the underground Nagah city-state of Garuda in India. Durga, like all Nagah, was a humanoid, an upgrade of humanity created by an ancient alien entity named Enki, a member of a race called the Annunaki, who had been involved with another superhuman species, the Tu’atha de Danaan, in manipulating humanity and its rise to power on Earth. The Nagah had been human, with additions of cobra DNA, skillfully crafted by the benevolent Annunaki, to create a benign, hidden race.

The Nagah survived skydark in their underground city of Garuda, but not without some losses. The small nation-state finally, after centuries, made its presence known to Kane and the other explorers of Cerberus. What could have become a wonderful alliance turned to tragic ashes as Durga chose that moment to make his bid for sole leadership of the pan-terrestrial society. Allying with gods and men, Durga launched a civil war, and had not Durga greedily varied from his plan and sought out superhuman power for its own sake, he might have succeeded. As it was, Kane and his allies ended that war, but not without loss of innocent life in addition to the destruction of human and Nagah co-conspirators.

Kane had thought that Durga was dead, killed in a fuel-air explosion, but the same technology that made the prince into a living force of nature spared him, just barely. As he plotted revenge against his former bride, now the matron queen of the Nagah, he traveled across the Indian Ocean to Africa, seeking a cure for his crippled condition, as well as means to renewed power. Part of that power was discovered in an army of cloned beasts, with physical might to rival a bull-gorilla, bat-like wings and a taste for human flesh. Those hybrid mutants were known as the Kongamato, but Durga’s control of the animals was usurped by a warlord of the dreaded Panthers of Mashona, an outlaw militia who ruled the lands to the west of Harare and Zambia, the same Gamal who “donated” his body to the she-devil Neekra.

Durga hadn’t only relied upon the Kongamato, apparently. When Kane assailed the necropolis, he encountered a cadre of cloned Nagah, their physiques further upgraded with Igigi/Nephilim DNA to turn them into his shock troopers. Durga possessed a dozen of those clones, at least when he was alongside Neekra.

A lone figure stepped onto the dirt next to Kane.

“Grant said it was time to go. The place is wired and ready to blow,” the young man said.

The six-foot, perfectly muscled Nagah clones that Durga utilized weren’t the only creations the prince made. Physically, the young man, Thurpa, looked to be eighteen or nineteen, at least as far as Kane could see through his cobra-like features. Chronologically, though, Thurpa must have been less than a year old.

The Cerberus adventurers and their companions had discovered Thurpa’s clone nature. He looked absolutely normal, but during Durga’s struggle against Neekra, Thurpa suffered the same pain from physical injuries and psychic trauma. When the young man gripped Nehushtan, the ancient walking staff of kings and prophets, its healing power transmitted through him to Durga.

Even now, Kane could see the numb shock on the young man’s features, realizing that any memories since before the day he met Kane and the others had been a lie, a fabrication implanted by a renegade prince whose rampage slew even his mother, the old matron of Garuda. Thurpa had thought that he could return home, but he’d never set his own eyes upon it. Rather, they had been echoes of another’s mind; most likely, it was Durga’s.

“How are you feeling?” Kane asked him.

“Like I should stay down here when you press the detonator,” Thurpa replied.

Kane shook his head. “No. We won’t do that.”

“I’d been worried that I was maybe hypnotized or brainwashed,” Thurpa said. “Now, I find that I’m his clone. Worse, I’m the son he always wanted.”

“We don’t judge our friends on the sins of their fathers,” Kane told him. He rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’ve done so much good alongside us.”

Thurpa’s amber eyes glistened in the backwash of light from his torch. The boy was in tears. “I’ve killed pretty well.”

“Killed to protect, killed to liberate,” Kane corrected. “And you risked yourself jumping on the back of a superhumanly strong creature to stop her.”

Thurpa frowned. “I attacked her because I realized, I’m not real. I’d be no...”

Kane gave him a light tap on the shoulder. “You feel real enough to me. And you would be a loss. Nathan would feel alone, and Lyta looks interested in you.”

“A freak in a land he was not born to,” Thurpa replied.

“Her first look at her rescuers,” Kane said. “If anything can make you feel good and real...”

Thurpa shook himself free from Kane’s comforting grip.

“And spread his seed?” Thurpa asked, glaring at Kane in disbelief.

“It’s not genetic structure that makes you good or bad,” Kane returned.

Thurpa’s glare dimmed in fire, his anger draining. Kane had seen emotional defeat on faces before. This was a crushing blow to him, and such despondence could easily lead the young man to reckless risks or an act of desperation, if not direct suicide.

Thurpa had easily earned Kane’s respect for courage and tenacity. He’d also shown himself in other ways. As a Magistrate, Kane had developed a quick sense not only for danger, but also for the content of a person’s character. All this time he’d spent with the young Nagah had informed him that this cobra-hooded stranger was someone he could trust, someone with compassion, despite the origin of his chromosomes.

“Come on, there’s nothing down here except for corpses,” Kane told him. “We’ll go some place you’ll feel better.”

“I thought we had been chasing my father and Neekra to her tomb,” Thurpa asked.

“It’s got to be better than this. And spending time in the sun and the air will do wonders for your spirit,” Kane told him.

Thurpa nodded.

The two men walked up the corkscrew ramp, returning to the surface, where the others waited.

* * *

THE FIRST SIGN that their detonation worked was a slight rumble that actually tickled the soles of Lyta’s feet. The ground throbbed as a shock wave grew, and she found herself backing away from the epicenter. Ripples in the dirt rose, and then it seemed to telescope inward, rocks crashing downward. She knew that she was dozens of yards from ground zero of the blast and that the caverns below would absorb most of the concussive force of the detonation, but even so, the earth surged and heaved.

Jets of rancid air and dust blew out from cracks burst between solid rock by the shattering explosion. Clouds rose into the midmorning sky, thick and roiling, turning a sunny day to darkness. The roar of crushing rock from below fooled her, for an instant, into believing that the mother of all thunderstorms slashed down on the six people.

“Grant doesn’t fool around when it comes time to blow shit up,” Lyta said softly.

Nathan shook his head. “Considering what they did to the Kongamato, I’m not surprised.”

Lyta glanced to one side. Thurpa stood alone, looking down into the dirt. His interest had been momentarily snagged by the explosion, but now he withdrew back into himself and stared at the ground.

The cobra-like young man, who had shown her such care and concern a few days before, no longer let himself feel like one of the group. She walked over to him.

“Thurpa?”

Amber eyes opened, turned toward her.

“Come on, let’s get going before we’re wearing an inch of cemetery dust,” she said, leaning toward him, bumping her shoulder against his.

Thurpa turned up one corner of his mouth. “I’ll join you guys in the truck.”

Lyta reached up, lacing her fingers with his. She could feel the hardness of the scales on the inner pads of his fingers and across his palm. At first, he seemed reluctant to give her a squeeze, but she pressed harder. The scale pads had been stiffer than normal skin but not sharp edged; they obviously were worn down by day-to-day operation, or maybe it was just a case of natural evolution. Pointy, jagged edges on a palm got in the way of everyday life. With too tough a set of skin on the bits that needed tactile feedback, they’d be effectively crippled, not as if it had been the scales on the soles of his feet.

He was warm, and his scales were soft and smooth. When he squeezed her fingers, managing a little bit of a smile, he was gentle. “Kane mentioned that you might be interested in me...”

“That man may be jumping the gun. I just lost my fiancé,” she whispered.

Lyta quickly stood on her tiptoes, bringing her full lips close to his ear hole. “But he ain’t barking up the wrong tree.”

Thurpa leaned away, looking her over. “I wish that I could...”

Lyta cut him off and elbowed him in the ribs, pointing to the sky. “Looks like we’re gonna get...”

“Come on!” Brigid Baptiste shouted from their pickup truck, untouched for days since the Cerberus group hid it to the side in order to ambush the militia group who had her in a slave queue.

The two ran for the truck. Nathan was in the bed, holding up a tarp. Thurpa lifted Lyta up and under the canvas, then bowed his head as dust, sand and tiny pebbles came raining down. Lyta reached out and took his forearm, pulling with all the strength of her legs to bring him up and into the truck bed. Kane also was under the canvas, helping Nathan hold up the protective tarp, while Grant and Brigid settled into the cab.

The sound of tiny objects rattled off the roof of the cap, snapping and popping on the canvas that Nathan and Kane used as an improvised umbrella.

Grant fired up the engine once most of the debris settled around them, turning on headlights and windshield wipers to see through the remaining cloud of airborne particles and to scrape layers of dirt from the glass. He looked through the back sliding window into the cab as Kane pushed the tarp back, letting the gravel spill out through the netting and the lowered tailgate. As the pickup gained speed, the gravel and dust poured as a trail behind them, kicking up a swirling cloud.

The four people in the bed of the truck immediately got to work making certain the dust was swept out. The last thing they needed was an easy way for someone to track them. Without the dust fully expunged, there’d always be something kicking off the truck, leaving a smoky trail showing recent passage and making them much more visible from the air.

So far, except for the Kongamato, Durga and Neekra hadn’t shown means of aerial surveillance, but then, Durga himself had kept an Annunaki skimmer in his employ back in Garuda. If the Nagah prince had the wherewithal to find cloning facilities, a means of pumping out mutant soldiers like the not-so-bright “brothers” of Thurpa or the aforementioned Kongamato, aerial surveillance wasn’t out of the question at all.

Lyta had been lucky enough not to have seen the beasts and their wing-arms with musculature and power akin to a bull-gorilla’s. Blobs reanimating corpses, making them like legendary vampires in strength and agility, were bad enough. The Kongamato themselves, with their bat-wings, had been a pure nightmare.

A nightmare that she, and her three companions in the bed of the truck, kept an eye out for by scanning the skies. While Grant set up the explosives in the underground cavern, Lyta and Nathan went to work gathering ammunition and extra firearms and loading them into storage lockers on the truck. It was hard work, but preparation was necessary. They had been going up against the tomb that Neekra sought and didn’t have an idea of what they could expect there.

They had picked up rocket launchers among the arsenal, though Lyta had been present when the others opened fire on Neekra’s latest avatar and wasn’t convinced that rockets would be enough. That feminine body, composed of no more than human flesh, ignored entire magazines of automatic gunfire and close-range blasts of hand grenades. Maybe an antitank rocket could have done some damage to that incarnation of her.

What were they going to find at Neekra’s home?

What else could Durga call upon?

Thurpa looked worried, but his concern seemed to be much more than what they would run into; it was also what his role would be. The young man had learned that his presumptions of being a recent recruit had been simply an illusion, false memories entered into his mind. He had been able to transmit the healing energies of Nehushtan, Nathan Longa’s responsibility, to Durga. What other controls and connections did that fallen prince hold over Thurpa?

She reached out, resting her hand on his knee. It took a few moments before Thurpa’s vision focused, instead of gazing glassily at the recently swept bed of the pickup truck. He rewarded her with a slight smile, resting his hand atop hers.

“You have friends here,” Lyta said.

“I know that,” Thurpa replied. “Which makes me all the more worried of what I might do to you.”

“We’ll be expecting trouble,” Kane mentioned. “We don’t want to hurt you, and we know you don’t want to cause us any trouble. But we can protect Lyta and Nathan if necessary.”

Lyta glanced toward Kane. He was a large man, six feet in height, with powerful ropes of muscle in his upper body, akin to the musculature of a wolf. His eyes were a cool blue, and now, in the light of his words, those orbs seemed especially predatory. The warrior had done some amazing things, first rescuing her, then protecting her from the freakish amorphous blobs of Neekra, and then in subsequent battles.

She thought about how Thurpa measured up to him. The young man gave up four inches of height and thirty pounds to the explorer from America. While the Nagah had fangs and venom, and a layer of scales that might armor him somewhat, Lyta had little illusion that those would make up for Kane’s greater size, strength and experience.

The hardness in Kane’s gaze softened, and he added, “We won’t let you hurt them or yourself.”

“Thank you,” Thurpa said softly.

* * *

GRANT, BEHIND THE wheel of the pickup truck, kept his voice low, allowing the Commtact on his jaw to do most of the work of transmitting sound into Brigid’s and Kane’s Commtact receivers. Between the jostling of the truck on the roads and the relative solitude of the pickup’s cab, he knew that this conversation would be private.

“Thurpa turns out to be a creation of Durga. Maybe even a clone,” Grant said, putting their suspicions on the table. “What can we do about this? And will it have an effect on us?”

“Everything we’ve seen of Durga is part of a long-term plan,” Brigid offered. “He’s not one to go for a quick partial victory.”

“Except when he took a dip in the Cobra baths back in Garuda,” Kane subvocalized. Grant caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. He was looking toward the forest to the right of the truck, so what noises he made would be lost in the wind and the other three wouldn’t see his throat and jaw move. “And he’s learned his lesson from that disaster.”

“Instant gratification and physical power weren’t enough to protect him, nor give him the victory he sought,” Brigid concurred.

“So, Thurpa, if he is a ticking time bomb, might not go off for years?” Grant asked.

“I don’t think that he’s a bomb,” Kane’s voice popped in, disembodied. “He’s too valuable to Durga.”

“Kane has a point,” Brigid returned. “From Thurpa’s account, we learned that when Neekra attacked Durga, sensory input seemed to be deferred between Durga’s body and Thurpa’s. When Thurpa sought the regenerative capabilities of Nehushtan, he could sense Durga also drawing strength and healing.”

“So, Thurpa is Durga’s means of immortality?” Grant mused. “Like an overflow valve. Things get too hot for Prince Asshole, it vents through our friend.”

“On a psychic scale, yes,” Brigid concurred. “The two of them have a psychic link through which they share the load.”

Grant frowned, his gunslinger’s mustache accentuating and exaggerating the downward bow of his lips. “So if we ever have to take down Durga, we could hurt Thurpa.”

“Why have a bomb when you have a perennial human shield?” Brigid inquired rhetorically.

Kane’s grumble, to Grant’s ears, was indicative of a stewing, deepening anger stemming from impotence. “Not that your riddle needs answering, but he gets psychic shielding from Neekra, and he gets something that will stop us from putting a bullet into his head.”

Brigid nodded. “Correct.”

Grant watched the mirror image of Kane glance toward Thurpa in the back of the truck. He saw profound pain in his friend’s features, that impotence toward helping the young Nagah, whose only sins had been those of his father.

“What’s to say that Hannah’s children aren’t going to end up the same way?” Kane asked finally, looking away from Thurpa. “Durga implanted his DNA into her, giving her twins, the first and last children she’ll ever have.”

“Durga’s a bastard, but those kids will be raised right,” Grant said. “Manticor will be a good father to them.”

“Will fatherhood be enough when they’re in psychic contact with a sociopath like Durga?” Kane asked. “They’ll grow up with what the rest of the world would think are schizophrenic delusions.”

“But we’ll get this information to Hannah,” Brigid said.

Kane’s grunt showed his frustration. “And what will that provide?”

“It will warn her of what’s coming,” Brigid told him.

Grant kept his eyes on the road. Even as he drove, he was trying to figure out what could mitigate any telepathic influence on Hannah’s twins or on Thurpa.

“What about the control interface that Gamal used?” Grant asked. “It was a thought transmitter.”

Brigid turned to him. “Use it as a signal blocker? But that was a lot of machinery. Unless it would be an area denial device. It sends out a scramble signal...but then, no one could use any natural psychic ability in Garuda.”

“It’d have to be a blanket, wouldn’t it?” Grant asked.

“We could try something akin to a torus defense, but...” Brigid mused. “Brain waves would have openings in areas away from the ring itself, either transmitting over the top or under the earth.”

“The only way we have to protect Hannah’s children is to end Durga,” Kane murmured. “And if we kill Durga, what kind of harm would we cause Thurpa?”

Brigid sighed. “He said he’d be willing to sacrifice himself.”

Grant’s mood darkened even further, but he refused to let go of any hope. “Let’s see that it doesn’t come to that.”

Frustrated and feeling helpless in the face of Thurpa’s personal danger, Grant’s stomach twisted. He needed to vent his impotence on something.

The hiss-boom of a darting rocket drew his attention from the side. Their pickup truck had passed into a sandy, barren clearing between trees, and a line of enemy trucks were parked up on a hill. It had to be the militia, the Panthers of Mashona—or what was left of them.

And there would be no mistaking Kane, a white man, or Thurpa, a human cobra, in the bed of their truck.

“Here comes shit!” Grant bellowed, tromping the gas to keep ahead of subsequent rounds of enemy fire.

Chapter 2

As soon as the wobbly spear, riding its tail of smoke and fire, hissed past the bed of the pickup truck and smashed into the ground, Thurpa grabbed his folded rifle and looked along the cottony trail back to its point of origin. He grimaced at the sight of three trucks, similar to the one that Grant and the others had procured back at Victoria Falls, except these had been mounted with machine guns and were filled with gunmen.

What do you think you are, idiot? A swordsman? Thurpa winced at his own self-reproach and snapped the stock open on the rifle.

Kane clapped him on the shoulder, shook his head.

“We’re moving too fast. You’ll waste ammunition!” he shouted over the roar of engines and crunching dirt kicked up by the pickup’s tires.

Thurpa glanced back and heard the crackle of enemy weapons, but there was no sign of near impact. He was trained well enough to keep his finger far from the trigger, making certain he didn’t inadvertently send a bullet out of his rifle. Considering the amount of jostling and physics at work in the bed of the pickup, he realized the wisdom of Kane’s admonition. One bad bounce or rut in the ground, and a shot intended for one of the enemy militia could go into an ally.

They needed to rely on Grant’s driving skills to make it out of this alive.

“When we slow down, then we shoot,” Kane added.

Thurpa looked to Nathan and Lyta. He tried not to spend too long looking at the young Zambian woman, though she was pretty. Again, he was thrown back to when he discovered that he was a clone of the Nagah prince Durga. He’d learned from Kane, Grant and Brigid that his “father” had played upon racial purity differences among the Nagah to assemble for himself a die-hard crew, an army who would give him the strength behind his uprising.

Of course, that race-baiting, those who had been “born cobra” or had been false Nagah having been converted by the Cobra baths, was simply a means of pecking and splintering the society of the underground city of Garuda. The underground city was home to humans, “natives” and pilgrims who undertook the change in a nanotech machine bath, and as in any society with a great deal of immigrant influx, there had been the disenfranchised who felt as if they were owed something, either by their “birthright” or simply because they had toiled hard to cross dangerous borders and frontiers. As such, Durga had a means of destabilizing an otherwise rock-solid representative republic monarchy.

Blaming “the other” was one of the oldest means of gaining personal power, even with a government in which the will of the people was able to overrule and defy royal decree. Hatred was at once a means of consolidating groups and eroding the fabric of a society. Thurpa heard about the rifts within Nagah society still existing as open wounds since Durga’s expulsion from the city.

The thought of Durga’s nurturance of bigotry reminded Thurpa of how much he wasn’t a product of his father’s mind. He was attracted to a young human, one who didn’t resemble an Indian. The African Lyta was as exotic as he could imagine. She had stated that her heart was off limits because of the loss of her fiancé, but he wanted nothing more than to protect her.

Thankfully, the pickup truck was staying far ahead of their enemies, bullets zipping far and wide, missing the Cerberus exiles and their allies. Thurpa’s patience started to grow short at being a “sitting target,” unable to do something to stop their pursuit. He could see that bit of warrior pride in his father, the willingness to dive head-to-head with an enemy, no matter the odds.

Kane’s hand clapped his shoulder again. “Get ready!”

A jolt of excitement rushed through Thurpa. That surge of excitement told him just how true his “superiority to mammals” was. Adrenaline was a human trait, and he recalled the origin mythology of the Nagah, how Enki crafted their race from humans, adding to them the traits of the cobra and some from the Annunaki themselves. Along the way, the alien might had faded into recessive genes, but not the cobra aspects, though according to Kane and the others, maybe it was well enough that he didn’t share the same genetics as the Igigi or, as they had been known to the Cerberus heroes, the mindless drones called Nephilim.

Thurpa liked his brain, liked independent thought, loved his freedom. That was what frightened him so much about being a mere clone of Durga. But that thought quickly tumbled aside. The brakes locked the tires of the pickup truck, and dust kicked up as the vehicle came to a halt at the top of a ridge. They had been looking down a slope at their pursuit, meaning that the militia had to fire uphill. It’d give them a small edge, and the barked order from Kane spurred Thurpa into action.

He took aim at the windshield of one of the approaching trucks and, from the stable platform of the tailgate, pumped every round in his magazine into the militia vehicle. After the fifth impact, a white spatter of cracked glass was visible, but he kept shooting. He fired on single shot, leaning into the recoil and allowing the barrel not to kick and rise as he poured round after round into the glass. It took him several seconds to empty out half of the magazine when Grant shifted gears.

Lyta lunged out, grabbing Thurpa by the arm to keep him from jolting out of the bed of the pickup. She had the forethought to have her knees pressed against the tailgate.

So far, things seemed to be going well. Thurpa might not have been the best shot, but he peppered the cab of one of the enemy “technicals,” even as the machine gunner on the back was distracted by rifle slugs slicing through the windshield and back window into his legs. The heavy machine guns that the technicals sported might have had steel plates around the back of their frames, to protect the face and upper chest of their users, but the cabs had no such bullet protection. With their legs being torn at, any hope of accurate fire was thrown out the window.

Even so, those bullets whipped and popped through the air over their heads in the pickup’s bed.

Kane surged beside Thurpa, rising to a half-standing position and snapping his arm forward. Thurpa could see a small object leave the ex-Magistrate’s fingertips and knew that he was closing down pursuit behind them. The rear tires kicked up dust and dirt, creating a smoke screen, the engines throbbing just in time as the tread caught traction and the pickup truck moved over the small ridge, racing away from the militia.

Behind, Thurpa could see the concussion wave and smoke from the thrown grenade, a vomitous column that was quickly followed by the sharp crack of the gren’s detonation.

“Reload,” Kane ordered the other three.

Thurpa did so, depositing his mostly empty magazine and keeping it to reload later. He put in another curved stick, rocking it until it was secure in the magazine well of the rifle. Another thirty rounds ready to fly, giving their enemy a reason to slow down. He looked around, seeing that they had made a turn and watching the bend in their smoky trail, and the pickup zoomed along in the rut between two ridges.

Kane kept watch for sign of the militia bursting over the hill they’d topped, all the while keeping another hand grenade ready to throw. The small explosive might not have destroyed an enemy vehicle and its shrapnel might not have caused harm to the men in the backs of those gun jeeps, but the blast would be sufficient to slow pursuit, giving the Cerberus crew and their allies the room they needed to fall back and outmaneuver the marauders.

Kane gave the roof of the pickup a hard slap, and at that moment Grant swerved hard to the right. Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa clutched at what handholds they could find as the force of the turn threatened to send them tumbling against each other like sacks of cement. Thurpa was glad to return the favor to Lyta by cushioning her, and he also managed to lash out his hand, blocking Nathan from barking his temple against the sidewall of the truck bed.

“Thanks,” Nathan muttered as Lyta was sprawled into Thurpa’s lap.

“You’ve done far more...”

Gravity seemed to cut out from beneath them before Thurpa could finish his sentence, the pickup topping the ridge and going airborne for a few feet. Right now they were in free fall, moving at the same speed as the falling truck they rode in, so the illusion of zero gravity was strong.

In that moment of eerie physical calm, Kane threw his grenade. His little hand bomb seemed to careen wildly away from the truck, almost as if it had been flying at a right angle to where the man hurled it, but that also was an illusion. The wheels hit the dirt, and Thurpa grunted as Lyta mashed him deeper onto the floor of the truck bed, knocking the breath from him. Nathan grimaced as his shoulder struck the same bit of rail that his head nearly had been dashed against.

“Sorry!” Grant bellowed over the racket, obviously in apology for the landing after their short flight.

On the heels of Grant’s shout, Kane’s second grenade went off. This time, the explosion sounded louder, and the rising jet of smoke and debris from the blast was accompanied by a flaming object that tumbled end over end through the sky. Thurpa hung on, watching the trail of the burning thing through the air until he realized that it was a human arm, or what used to be one.

“Direct hit!” Thurpa shouted.

“No time to celebrate,” Kane answered. “We’re slowing in three.”

Thurpa counted down in his mind, scrambling to his knees and bringing his rifle back to bear. The pickup’s brakes squealed and dirt flew. The desert wilderness might have made things harder for Thurpa to see targets, but that worked both ways. Instead of going full speed forward, they backed at a slower speed deeper into the ever expanding clouds of kicked-up dust.

Kane had pulled his hood up and put on the faceplate of his shadow suit. The skin-tight, advanced polymer uniform had undergone several upgrades, one of the most useful being a set of high-tech optics built into the cowl’s faceplate. Thurpa might not have been able to see a foot past the back of the pickup truck, but that didn’t stop Kane, and he could see where the man pointed.

Backing farther into their dust trail also bought the Cerberus expedition more time. The militia opened fire at the far end of the cloud of debris, missing the pickup by yards.

“Now!” Kane ordered.

Thurpa fired in the direction that Kane pointed, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. He surely couldn’t put out the amount of lead that a machine gun could in this manner, but he would make sure that his bullets were on target and not wasted. Kane himself used a borrowed battle rifle, and his training with full-automatic meant that he could control the kick of powerful recoil. Kane’s rifle was louder, and from the cab, Thurpa could make out a sidelong muzzle-flash.

Brigid was using her own shadow suit’s optical technologies, shooting out the window of the cab with a weapon. Thurpa didn’t care what she was firing, just that what lead they threw at the Panthers of Mashona had an effect. Thurpa had seen what this militia was like when he was still beside Durga and the Millennium Consortium expedition. They had soured him on people, and the marauders only continued to make bad impressions when they discovered Lyta and the other survivors of her frontier village held as slaves.

Lyta was half starved, dehydrated, and left bloody and scarred by heavy chains. That kind of abuse turned Thurpa’s stomach, especially in the light of meeting good people, like the Zambian military at Victoria Falls and of course Kane and his allies from Cerberus. When he saw the creatures who were to feed upon the Panthers’ captives, his patience for them was totally discarded.

He didn’t raise a finger to help them when Neekra’s horrifying spawn attacked another of their units, only moving or shooting to protect Nathan and Lyta. Thankfully, in the presence of the ancient staff, they became invisible to Neekra’s vampiric horde.

Thurpa wanted every bullet fired through his rifle to strike one of the Panthers and cause irreparable harm and pain to them. The militia had been the reason two city-states had come together as allies, because the Panthers of Mashona sought out technology and slaves. The marauders had been thieves, scavengers, parasites. They gave nothing to the world.

The pickup truck roared to life, jolting forward, but this time Thurpa was prepared. He’d braced himself, as had Nathan and Lyta.

“How’d we do?” Thurpa asked, seeing Kane throw one last hand grenade before they got to full speed. Kane remained quiet, but he looked toward Thurpa to acknowledge the question. Moments later, Thurpa heard the detonation of Kane’s good-bye bomb. Once more, screams filled the air, and the militia continued shooting wildly.

Finally, the man in the black high-tech suit spoke. “We’re doing okay.”

The pickup swerved, swinging around into the tracks of the enemy vehicles. As they cut across their pursuit’s trail, Thurpa glanced into the distance. No more vehicles were on the horizon, but the look he got was fleeting, and he was certain that he’d miss something. He only had his human eyes, not built-in telescopic or infrared receptors on a moon-built faceplate.

As it was, Kane didn’t sound too glum, despite his conservative estimate of their success. He just kept perched in the truck bed, eyes peeled for their foes.

This explosion didn’t sound as vigorous as the one that sent a flaming limb soaring through the sky. Gunfire still rattled from whichever vehicles were still in the chase. They were not safe, not by a long shot. The battle was still to be won.

Grant shouted through the small window between the cab and the bed. “Found some tree line! Going for it!”

Kane gave his partner a thumbs-up, and once again, those in the back of the pickup truck held on for balance. Grant shifted the gears expertly, this time going for maximum traction and performance from the tires, not kicking up dust clouds to cover their tracks. As such, Thurpa was surprised to see how little a rooster tail of dirt was kicked up as he changed course. This was not to say that the transit over the lumpy ground was any smoother, but it was faster than he’d seen Grant take the truck in this car chase.

Kane patted Thurpa and Nathan on the shoulders, motioning toward his belt. Instinctively, both young men reached up and gripped the webbing tightly for support.

Once again, the Cerberus leader’s big rifle erupted, staccato bursts of gunfire sizzling out the muzzle as the weight and leverage of Nathan and Thurpa anchored him enough so that he could devote both hands to controlling the weapon. Thurpa looked toward racing vehicles on their trail, watching one of them swerve off course. It teetered on two wheels, then struck a rut and went nose first into the ground. Men flew, cartwheeling through the sky and screaming as their technical flipped end over end. When the militiamen hit the ground, they didn’t bounce. They burst like ripe fruit, splattering their blood in huge splashes of crimson.

Thurpa couldn’t hear over the sound of Kane’s rifle, but his mind filled in the ugly, crunchy and wet noises made by men striking the earth hard enough to pop them like balloons.

Kane dropped an empty magazine and fed another into his weapon before continuing to hammer away at the opposition. Because Grant was going for speed, there was a lot less variable in terms of how the truck would bounce, and Kane’s short bursts compensated for recoil and amount of time on target. One of the closer enemy jeeps had smoke pouring from its hood where high-velocity, heavyweight rounds punched through its radiator and engine block. As the driver swerved, attempting to maintain control of his vehicle, a dead militiaman bounced from the side door, strapped in place by a seat belt, his head and left arm bashed to bloody pulps.

A few more short bursts, and the smoldering jeep jerked violently, brakes squealing, before it skidded into a sideways roll, bouncing away from the mechanized patrol.

So far, three enemy vehicles had been taken out. The two left weren’t pulling off the chase.

“How much punishment can these idiots take?” Nathan shouted.

“Their egos won’t let them back off,” Thurpa answered, even though his friend wasn’t looking for an answer. “At least not yet!”

Kane’s rifle barked and growled, peppering the last two pursuit vehicles. They were slowing down, even though the gunmen in the back still fired their guns. This time, however, they were simply blasting lead into the sky, making noise.

Grant cut a path through the trees, a slender road that forced Kane to duck before he was clobbered in the back of his head by a low-hanging branch. Just as they passed the tree line, Kane pulled one more grenade from his harness and dropped it at the mouth of the skinny dirt road. Grant kept up his speed, and by the time the grenade’s fuse burned down, they were out of the blast radius of the explosive. A thick, ugly cloud roared at the end of the trail, and though the barrier formed was nothing more than airborne particulate matter, Kane might have slammed a steel door in the face of the angry militia’s survivors. The blast at the mouth of the road through the forest was exactly the kind of face-saving out that the Panthers of Mashona survivors could take.

And they did.

They howled and honked their horns and fired their guns into the sky, standing their ground at the edge of the barren stretch of land. The marauders had driven Kane and his group from the lifeless terrain into “hiding.” They were victorious, and when they returned to their base, they would tell tales of the mighty army that they had driven off at great cost to their comrades who were now scattered and smashed, their blood ground into the already rust-colored dirt.

“If they’d ‘beaten us’ any more, they’d all be dead,” Brigid mused, agreeing with Thurpa and all of the others’ unspoken thoughts.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kane grunted. “Anyone hit?”

“Not by bullets,” Nathan said. Even through his dark, coffee-colored skin, Thurpa could see the redness and swelling of the bruise where his arm had slammed against the side of the truck bed. Thurpa remembered his own aches, the bumps and bruises he’d received as he was jostled about.

The pickup slowed, and Kane kept watch over the tailgate, staring into the distance. He was never going to let his guard down, not until he was dead certain that the militia was sufficiently discouraged and no longer interested in continuing the chase. It was a half hour and three miles of dirt road before he finally allowed himself a moment to relax.

By then, it was late enough in the afternoon for the truck to pull off to the side of the dirt road so they could set up camp amid the trees.

Thurpa found himself sitting close to Lyta as they ate. It was a long time before his thoughts returned to existential worry.

Chapter 3

Stopping for the night, the six companions set up a secure camp for themselves. They had things to do aside from resting themselves and keeping their pickup truck from overheating; first among them was finding the location of the tomb that Neekra had sought.

Once the campfire was lit, Brigid sat Kane down across from her.

“I’m going to hypnotize you, Kane,” Brigid informed him.

Kane nodded. “You think part of the reason Neekra wanted me so bad was that I might have a clue as to where her body is.”

Brigid smiled. “Correct.”

“You’d think I’d remember something like that,” Kane returned.

“Not necessarily,” Brigid explained. “You were affected by the staff in your dreams, intertwining your memories with the memories of a predecessor of yours.”

“Solomon Kane, the Puritan,” Kane stated.

“His adventures here in Africa had been related but imperfectly. However, his connection to the staff Nehushtan and his encounters with non-terrestrial and pan-terrestrial entities have, so far, given us an inclusive view into the secret history of this continent,” Brigid added. “However, locations in those missives are vague at best.”

Kane looked to Nathan, who had fallen into the role of bearer of the artifact. “I thought only weak minds could be hypnotized.”

Brigid turned Kane’s attention back to her. “Willing minds can be put under, as well. In fact, just the very act of focusing on a subject, distracting the part of the mind that can be distracted, works. Just falling asleep is a form of self-hypnosis.”

Kane nodded.

“Get Zen,” Brigid ordered, giving him a backhanded slap on the chest.

Though outwardly Kane didn’t change his stance or position in the slightest, inside his mind he put his intellect to work, ordering his thoughts so that he could enter the mental state Brigid requested of him. The woman lifted her hand, holding her index finger straight in the air. His eyes locked on that finger, and even as he did so, he heard her voice, soft, soothing, a low, constant beat in his hearing. He didn’t know what she was saying, and it could have been gibberish syllables, her way of creating a metronome-like beat to keep his ears focused as his eyes. He allowed himself to mentally drift.

The next thing Kane knew, he was in chains. His clothes had changed. Previously, he had worn a spare shadow suit to replace the one that had been left mostly tattered by the events at the necropolis Neekra had chosen as her base. Now he was clad in folded-over leather boots, belted just below his knees, and, except for the white, simple shirt he wore beneath his vest, he was clad all in black. His hair seemed longer. He felt for his Sin Eater, but it was nowhere to be found, nor was his hydraulic forearm holster. He took inventory of his face, and he became aware of bruises that hadn’t been there moments ago. His wrists were bound together by iron manacles, and the weight of chains pulled hard on his shoulders.

He tried to activate his Commtact, but neither the plate nor the implanted pintles were present. All he had was whiskers there.

He glanced to one side and saw several well-dressed Africans and Arabs, some of them possessing familiar arms. He recognized the fine Spanish steel sword, complete with its simple basket handle, and his belt dangling from the shoulder of a tall, burly African. His pistols were stuffed into sash-belts of others.

And an old Arab man held the shaft of Nehushtan. Kane realized that the man was speaking to him.

“...and Suleiman, he who you were named for, Kahani, chased the demons from his lands into Africa,” the old man told him.

“Enough, you superstitious old lout!” the finest dressed of the Africans, the one who now owned Kahani’s sword, snapped. It didn’t take a genius to figure that the black man earned his clothing and sense of authority from one of the foulest sins of mankind: slavery. Kane did not know if the slave master put his own tribesmen into chains, sending them around the world to toil away until death, or whether he profited from war and conquest, sending the surviving warriors of other nations to buckle under to the white man.

Something about the swagger of the African slave master set Kane’s teeth on edge. Maybe the bastard didn’t give a damn who he imprisoned and condemned to lifelong servitude. As long as the gold that crossed his palm was good, as long as it paid for the rings in his ears and on his fingers and adorned his back and head with the finest silk shirts and turbans, perhaps the slave master would throw anyone in chains.

The Arab who spoke of the legends of Nehushtan, the rod of biblical King Solomon, cringed at the bark in the slave master’s voice and could not meet his gaze.

Others were in the caravan, and they appeared all too similar to the procession of Zambian prisoners whom he, Grant and Brigid had rescued from another group of African human predators. Kane could feel his ancestors’ ire at his own impatience.

The bruises were the only result of his assault on the slavers. Although his sword and pistols had accounted for some of the security force, it had not been enough, not this time. He could still feel the vibrations rolling up his forearms where he’d brought down the knurled butt of a pistol, breaking a shoulder or crushing a jaw. His other hand had swept and sliced, but an injured African slaver trapped the blade against the side of his body, wrenching it from Solomon Kane’s desperate fingers.

The weight of the slavers was too much for even the fanatic’s strength that drove the Puritan to protect and liberate his fellow man, no matter the skin color.

The leader of the caravan had demanded Solomon Kane be taken captive, alive. His reputation preceded him, and the African slave master knew that there were many who would pay exorbitant prices, either to slay him, or to take him as a captive. For now, Kane was trapped in the skin of a defeated warrior, about to be sold for a king’s ransom as enemies would undoubtedly assemble, seeking his hide, tattered or intact.

“Great place to wake up,” Kane muttered to himself.

“Kahani?” the old Arab asked.

Kane narrowed his eyes. Nehushtan had gone through yet another change. Now it was a cat-headed obscenity, almost as if the original face upon the top of the staff had been erased with chisel and sandpaper. No matter the new appearance; the “cat-head” was merely redesigned, but the blasphemy beneath still remained.

It was an unusual aspect, Kane noted, for a many-storied scepter wielded by prophets who were the chosen emissaries of God. Nehushtan, as far as Brigid related, was a holy relic. But in this form, the “juju stick” had an air of dark magic.

“You are to carry this juju staff with you, brother Kane,” came half-remembered words from a witch doctor.

N’Longa, the seer of his tribe, had fought alongside Kane’s Puritan ancestor, just as Nathan Longa, his descendant seven hundred years from now, battled shoulder to shoulder with him, against Neekra, against the Panthers of Mashona, against the inhuman Kongamato and vampire-like blobs and reanimated corpses. After their first battle, side by side, N’Longa handed over the cat-headed staff as a walking stick to guide the Puritan on his journeys for the rest of his days.

The staff returned to N’Longa and remained under his family’s protection since or at least long enough for Nathan to recall it being in his family’s possession for generations.

“Kahani?” the Arab asked, interrupting Kane’s thoughts.

“Why are you so concerned for me?” Kane asked him.

The old Arab looked back to Nehushtan. “This is an amazing piece of history. This stick came from the age of Atlantis. It was entrusted to you, Kahani.”

Kane was getting tired of being in chains, even though he’d been here for what felt like only minutes. Then he realized that it wasn’t boredom but actual physical toil upon the body he was remembering. This empathy swept over him, causing him a transfer of nausea and exhaustion to strike him even harder.

And suddenly, he was fallen back, watching as a helpless observer as the caravan came upon a small stone structure in the jungle. The Puritan watched as the greedy slave master ordered his men to hack at the stone doors, calling for the treasure hidden within the crypt.

He recognized the tomb top, the alien writings carved into the jamb around the slablike doors. Kane could not read the glyphs, but their shape was unmistakable. They were the letters of the Annunaki, and each of them had an eerie glint reflecting in the moonlight. Kane realized that the blue-white tint was not the echo of a full moon, for the sky above was starless.

Something in those runes held their own unholy power.

Solomon Kane’s voice, sounding much like his own, barked a warning, telling the slaver to turn back, to flee this dark place.

The old Arab’s eyes were wide with horror, also realizing that the cuneiform scrawls portended far greater evil than he could comprehend. He turned toward the captive Puritan, fumbling with keys for his manacles, even as hammers bashed at the slab of granite covering the door.

“What are you doing, you old fool?” the African caravan leader asked. In moments, the Spanish steel sword was out, piercing the old man’s back, its point prickling the front of his tunic, turning white cloth dark as the poor bastard was run through.

“Kahani, take...” the old man sputtered before the slave master pulled the blade away, freeing himself to take a lunge at Solomon Kane.

With all-too-familiar reflexes, the Puritan brought up both hands, still holding a length of chain between them. The links blocked the downward sweep of the deadly blade, and with a twist of his arms and a half pivot, he suddenly wrenched the trapped sword out of his opponent’s grasp.

He then lunged, grabbing for Nehushtan, bringing up the staff to counter any other attack that the richly dressed African could launch.

Unfortunately, at that time, the tomb thundered, its stone lid cracking violently. Screams filled the air, horror sweeping all around them as some slave takers took to flight. Others shrieked out throat-tearing wails of agony as they were sucked through the open doors. In the distance, the slaves were trapped, unable to break and run through the forest as their captors could.

The slave trader whirled, pulling one of his own pistols at the cacophony of suffering and terror rising from the opened crypt.

“I warned you to leave it alone!” Kane heard himself growl.

The African fired a single pistol shot at a shimmering arm of pink. Long talons sank into the slaver’s chest, and he shrieked, still alive even as bloodred nails poked through the back of his silken shirt. Kane moved forward, the only weapon in his hands being the juju staff.

Was this memory or reality?

It didn’t matter because there was Neekra. She resembled an Annunaki, except she was larger, more brutish. Her features were unmistakable, even though they were twisted into a rictus of fury. In one hand, she still held the slaver, red nails hooked around his back. His arms and legs moved less and less of their own volition and only bounced and jostled as she shook him around. She must have been fourteen feet in height, and she was still confined in the mouth of the crypt, only able to reach out with one arm as she bellowed in earth-shaking rage.

The Puritan knew that he was the only thing keeping the pink-skinned horror from escaping, and the closest prey for Neekra would be the slaves, the same helpless humans he had been trying to liberate when he had been captured. He clutched Nehushtan tighter; long, lean arms filled with corded muscle, strength surging through those limbs as he advanced toward the thing rising from the darkness.

He felt the kinship with his predecessor, be it through their mutual contact with the staff, or perhaps because they were all part of the same entity, an ever-existing time worm, each life and death being brief but forming a single segment that would renew, reincarnate and extend through the centuries of human history. Kane had a brief mental glimpse of that “time worm,” a familiar image he had spotted some time ago, when Grant was lost in time and Kane had traveled between dimensions to seek him out.

It was an amazing, yet weird, sight. He could see his spirit’s history, the flex and pump extending backward to the dawn of time, and a shadowy rumor of an image stretching forward.

And then he was fading, spiraling back into his body, hearing Brigid’s voice summoning him home. His hands were around the haft of the artifact, and it had gone from the two-serpent-adorned healing staff to the cat-headed rod, full of odd and dark omens.

“Neekra...she was there,” Kane muttered, still feeling the bruises and the ache of the chains from his dip into history. “She attacked a slave caravan...”

“We know. You related the tale, just as if you were there in person,” Brigid replied.

“Oh,” Kane said, frowning. He looked down at the ground, trying to get a better mental image of the horrific beast that had stood before him. It was indeed similar to the avatar that Neekra had molded Gamal into, but it was larger. The Annunaki scales were thicker, rougher, cruder, scales that Kane hadn’t seen on the goddess’s first simulacrum. The glare of anger and hatred in her eyes was soul chilling, something he never wanted to see again.

Grant managed a chuckle, the sound breaking him from whatever lost trance Kane was falling into. “It sounded like you were having a wonderful time.”

Kane acknowledged his partner. He noticed that he had Nehushtan in his other hand. “Did it give us anything on the location of that tomb?”

Brigid had out a notebook in which she scribbled furiously. “I had a difficult time since your ancestor’s experience was on a cloudy, starless night.

“How long was I under?” Kane asked.

“How long did it feel like?” Grant countered.

“A full evening. After the caravan stopped its march, I was allowed to kneel next to the caravan’s leader,” Kane answered. “He viewed Solomon as a great prize as well as a potential slave for sale. He took my...his sword.”

“She was asking you...him...questions for the past hour and a half,” Grant returned. “He was reluctant to give exact locations, and he said that it was no place for a woman.”

Kane chuckled. “How did she take that?”

“My opinion of his chauvinism was noted and debated for a few seconds, and his chauvinism toward me was defrayed,” Brigid stated, continuing to run figures in her mind. “He found me far more formidable than others he had encountered in his era.”

Kane glanced toward Grant.

“I recorded it,” Grant answered. “It was fun. Especially your British accent.”

Kane grimaced. “British accent? And it’s already recorded?”

Grant nodded. “Back at Cerberus.”

Kane shook his head. “I think I’ll be staying with Sky Dog and the Lakota for a few weeks after we get back home.”

“You could always be eaten by Neekra,” Grant offered.

“Promises, promises,” Kane grumbled. He turned back to Brigid. “So, if the stars were behind clouds that night, how will you know where I went, Baptiste?”

“Solomon was a meticulous navigator. He was fairly good at estimating the distances he covered in a day, and he did have a track that he followed,” Brigid stated. “The only problem is that he came from coastal Africa, to the northeast, whereas we’re coming up from the south. Also, he was utilizing sixteenth-century maps, which were not analogous to current satellite tracking technology.”

“In other words, you’ve got a good start, but you’re going to be working courses for a while,” Kane returned.

Brigid glanced up from her calculations. “That was implied.”

“She’s figuring it out,” Kane surmised. “Otherwise, she’d devote brainpower to a smart-ass remark.”

Brigid waved the two men off, and Grant helped Kane to his feet.

“What’s our plan until she comes through with where we need to go?” Grant asked.

Kane shrugged. “Maybe we could hypnotize Thurpa?”

“Brigid’s busy on that front,” Grant returned. “I mean, I could try, but I don’t think I can put him into a trance.”

Kane looked down at the staff in his hands. “Maybe the stick could do something.”

“Or maybe we could ask Brigid to take a break and do her memory trick on Thurpa?” Grant asked. “Is it like she’ll lose her place?”

Kane rolled his eyes, then raised his voice. “Brigid? Can we interrupt you for a moment?”

Brigid looked up from her notes. “Interview Thurpa or, rather, Durga?”

“If the man’s inside that head,” Grant said, “we’ll find out just how much.”

“There’s one small stumbling block in that,” Brigid said. “Durga utilized Thurpa’s mind as a means of sharing the psychic load of Neekra’s assault on him. What is to prevent Durga from blocking my attempts at hypnosis? Indeed, what if Thurpa were already set up with a preprogrammed response to hypnotic interference?”

“Preprogrammed response,” Grant repeated. He looked to Kane. “That sounds like ‘go psycho and kill people,’ doesn’t it?”

“Even unarmed, he has his fangs and his venom,” Kane agreed. “Tying him up wouldn’t do much because he can spit his venom, as well.”

“We do have environmental faceplates, which we’ve been utilizing for their optic properties,” Brigid said. “But we’re not certain he’d cause harm to himself, or actually become a time bomb, with a delayed violence response.”

“Delayed violence response,” Kane echoed. “I’m surprised we’re not dead just for talking to the poor guy.”

“As am I,” Brigid returned. “I’m uncertain of the extent of Durga’s mental control over Thurpa, but if we try to find Durga through him, the very least of our problems would be alerting him that we know of their psychic relationship.”

Kane’s lip curled in disgust.

“I thought about hypnotizing Thurpa and unfortunately came to this conclusion before you did,” Brigid explained. “Even so, that was the two of you being proactive and insightful.”

“Thanks,” Kane said. “Not that it makes anything easier.”

Brigid shook her head. “But we’re thinking. And when the three of us put our minds to something, we’re generally successful.”

Kane nodded. “The key word is ‘generally.’ We can make all the plans we want, but life is what happens when plans go to shit.”

Grant clapped Kane on the shoulder in support. “Don’t worry. We’re good at surviving when things go to shit, too.”

Chapter 4

It didn’t take Brigid much longer into the night to determine the location of the tomb—the city known as Negari for the entity imprisoned within. She was asleep after noting its whereabouts on her map and managed to get several hours of good rest until sunrise. Kane and Grant traded watch shifts and were surprised to see Brigid poring over her figures after first light.

“Not sure?” Kane asked.

Brigid looked up from her map work. “I don’t want to have us looking and running around in circles while Durga and Neekra get there ahead of us.”

“Neekra’s still a threat,” Kane said. “We destroyed a body she took over, but she’s still a free-roaming psychic entity.”

Kane lowered his eyes to the ground. She’d spent most of a day inside of his skull, and due to her command over his perceptions, the witch goddess made him feel as if he were wandering the multiverse for months, making his concern over the friends he was separated from even deeper. His struggle to return to his body was made even more desperate by the danger of Grant and Brigid in front of both Gamal’s militia and a horde of winged monstrosities without him. That urgency overwhelmed him, and all he could imagine was the horrible tortures and destruction they faced without him to assist them. Being separated from them also meant that he was alone, without someone to act as a beacon to return him to his body.

That anxiety ate at him, concern grown out of love and friendship that was deep and enduring, that had lasted across other universes, across several incarnations throughout the history of humanity. That loyalty had brought earlier incarnations of himself to death for the defense of those others.

It was an emotional layer of scar tissue that Neekra had exacerbated when she had the necropolis “erupt,” separating him once more from Brigid and Grant and leaving them at the mercy of the dark goddess and her corpse-stealing, bloblike spawn. Kane’s nerves were scraped raw, tender to the slightest thought of either of them in peril.

That threat from Neekra, forever lost from his beloved friends, sat freshly in his mind and threatened to drive him to distraction. And then he’d seen, more and more, like the petals peeling from a flowering bud, what the evil entity could do. The latest nightmare, dredged up from the depths of his genetic memory, was simply the icing on a cake of evil. Neekra, separated from her body, had left her “mortal” form as an insane, terrifying force, a beast armed with natural weaponry that it used to rend healthy, fighting men limb from limb.

That body, combined with her intellect and cruelty, would be menace enough across a heavily depopulated, technologically impaired planet. With the addition of Neekra’s ability to produce corpse-reanimating soldiers, the combination was a global scale threat.

Nothing new there, he thought grimly. We’ve been dealing with that since we got out of Cobaltville that first day.

Sooner or later, he realized, their luck was going to run out. Adding to the sudden jolt of harsh realization was that he knew that Neekra was not simply the goal. No. Her body had been left in that tomb as a sentry, one capable of slaughtering almost anyone, human or Annunaki.

Whatever she guarded was something so terrifying that not even Enlil dared leave it unguarded by anything less than a living juggernaut.

“You’ve got us pinpointed?” Kane asked her.

Brigid nodded. “Within a radius of five hundred yards.”

“Pretty good,” Grant said with approval. “We’ll make an adventurer out of you yet.”

Brigid snorted. “The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in time.”

Kane and Grant pored over the map, crowding her a little bit, but she didn’t mind. The three of them had been shoulder to shoulder for years, in much more confining conditions. She ran her finger across the map. “We have two days of travel ahead of us, barring interference or further attack.”

“Two days,” Kane murmured. “No shortcuts?”

Brigid pointed toward one sector of the map. “This was part of my recalculations. This area seems fairly empty, but I had Bry run some cameras over the region.”

“Radioactive?” Kane asked.

“Seismic wasteland,” Brigid replied. “Put on your faceplates and I’ll give you two some visual data.”

Kane and Grant tugged their hoods over their skulls, then affixed their shadow suits’ faceplates. Almost immediately, the same map that had been a mere flat image a moment ago was now a relief sculpture, wrought in first a wire mesh frame following the contours of the broken land, then filling in, showing off rivers of whitish-yellow lava trickling back and forth through the uneven terrain.

“No radioactivity is present, but ever since the earthshakers went off on skydark, they broke the continent,” Brigid said. “You can see this is an accelerated animation of last night. It’s still in dynamic flux.”

Kane looked at the undulations, tilting his head as it allowed him to see around the area. “Can we get a real-time feed?”

“For what?” Brigid asked.

“We could cut our trip time down to half a day,” Kane answered.

“Driving through the streams of molten rock and constantly opening and closing chasms?” Grant asked. “So we have the equal opportunity to be either burnt to a crisp or flattened like rotten fruit?”

Kane nodded.

Grant smirked. “Sounds like fun.”

“We should ask our compatriots if they wish to endanger themselves in that manner,” Brigid offered. “We can arrive for certain...”

“Or we can get there in time to stop my father and his bitch,” a voice cut into the three people’s discussion. They turned and saw Thurpa, standing alongside Nathan and Lyta, forming a strange mirror image to their own group. They were younger, not that Kane, Brigid and Grant were among the elderly by a long shot. However, for the “locals,” they didn’t quite have the half decade of experience that the Cerberus expedition possessed, though Nathan and Lyta both had grown up in the harsh, often unforgiving frontier of the twin city-states straddling their common border of the Zambezi River, and though likely only a year old chronologically, Thurpa had the memories of Durga as a young officer, fighting alongside his father against an expedition sent by the barons into India.

“The three of you weighed in on this?” Brigid inquired.

Thurpa glanced to Nathan to his left, who clapped the young Nagah clone’s shoulder in support. He turned toward Lyta, who laced her fingers with his and squeezed for support. “Yup.”

“I could end up wrecking our truck,” Grant offered. “And then we’d be running on foot through a volcanic wonderland.”

“Better than dying of boredom or getting taken over by a psychotic blob woman,” Nathan countered.

“Too many lives are at stake to take the scenic route,” Lyta added. “Though, I have to admit, the idea of going through a half-molten desert sounds pretty interesting.”

“This isn’t a game,” Kane warned.

Thurpa frowned. “Oh. Like three-hundred-pound mutants and the Panthers of Mashona were only coming over for a game of chess? We get it. This is serious as cancer. Worse, because every living human remaining on the surface of the planet will end up infected.”

“The longer we spend debating the point, the closer Durga gets to his goal,” Grant threw in. “Either we plunge through the fire and the flames, or we do nothing.”

Brigid nodded in agreement.

“Then it’s unanimous,” Kane said.

Thurpa and Nathan turned immediately to begin packing. Lyta nodded to the three members of the Cerberus team, then turned to join her friends.

“And this is the one we were worried that could betray us?” Grant asked.

“I hate being suspicious of him,” Brigid answered, looking as if she’d sucked a lemon dry. “But we’d all be best on our toes around him.”

Kane looked grumpier than usual as he removed his hood and faceplate. She could tell that something was digging at him.

“What’s wrong?” Brigid asked.

“I just hope we’re not damning them like we did Garuda,” Kane said.

“We’re making up for that,” Grant told him.

Kane thought about the city of the Nagah. Even Durga’s attempt to usurp the family tree of the new queen and her consort, Hannah and Manticor, had been a misfire.

The three Cerberus warriors set about loading up the pickup truck. They hadn’t done much in terms of unloading for the night, just enough to sleep and to keep comfortable. Within a few minutes, the truck was packed, and the six people returned to their spots in the vehicle.

It was time to dare the volcanic plain.

* * *

GRANT AND BRIGID looked out over the hood at the wasteland before them.

“Still think this was a good idea?” Grant murmured.

“You were all up for it,” Kane responded through the window at the back of the cab. “And it’s not as if we’re seeing anything new.”

Grant nodded. All three of them had been on a virtual “fly through,” but this was an imposing scene before them. The ground heaved and shifted, and whereas the computer-generated imagery was soundless and scentless, here on the smoky plain the stench of sulfur hung thick in the air and the grumble of grinding stone and burbling steam and bubbling lava was a constant companion.

The three adventurers had sent a message back to Cerberus redoubt in the wake of their battle in Neekra’s necropolis. Their shadow suits had been damaged greatly, and Kane and Grant both agreed that leaving their allies, Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa, unprotected by the unique uniforms was an unnecessary risk, unlike the journey across this field of lava, crumbling stone and thick, noxious gases.

Fortunately, the shadow suits were environmentally sealed when all pieces were in place. Usually, they could be hooked to a portable air supply, but they could also filter out environmental toxins for a good amount of time. The suits’ polymers would protect from impacts, intense heat or biting cold. But the truth was, even the non-Newtonian reactions of the suits couldn’t hold off a point-blank rifle shot and would provide only a few seconds of protection from searing lava. There was a difference between heat that could induce heat stroke and the incredible temperatures of rock that flowed as freely as a mudslide. In fact, Grant even doubted that the shadow suit would do anything to lessen the liquefying heat inside. It had taken them two hours out of their way to get to the replacement garments via interphaser rendezvous, but the thickness of the sulfur and steam made them fully aware of how smart it had been.

Also, all six members of this expedition remembered having to navigate through nearly impossible, darkened necropolis with either flashlights or the advanced optics. The team’s equipment was further enhanced by the addition of headset radios for Lyta, Nathan and Thurpa, hands-free communications that put them much more easily in contact with the Commtact-equipped Kane, Grant and Brigid.

Better vision and better “ears” would give the team a distinct advantage in the near future. They had been only limping along in that deadly encounter, and if there was one thing about the Cerberus explorers and those who had proved brave and resourceful enough to side with them, it was that they could all learn from their mistakes.

“We’ll be fine in the back here,” Kane said, knocking on the roof, even though they could easily hear him over their communications network. “The suits should be able to filter out any noxious fumes. Think that will have any effect on the engine, Baptiste?”

Brigid looked back through the rear window. “Will the smoke have any effect on a standard Toyota internal combustion engine?”

Kane nodded. “It won’t, right?”

“No, the smoke won’t harm the engine,” Brigid replied. “I’m more concerned about spraying bits of lava. If one lands in or on the truck, it’s likely to burn through the chassis, or it’ll burn our suits if it lands on us.”

Grant scanned the terrain ahead, matching it up to the map, which was quickly becoming more and more obsolete as he observed it. He threw the truck into a lower gear, revved the engine and pushed forward. There was no warning as he advanced, but none of the rest of his group expressed dismay at the sudden lurch of the vehicle. One way or another, they had to make their first move onto the plain.

The truck rocked as a chunk of the “cooled” obsidian glass crumpled under one of the tires, and Grant put everything into the brake. Kane swiftly leaped from the cab and padded cautiously forward.

“It’s a hollow tube,” Kane announced over their communications network. “It looks about five feet deep, and we cracked through what must have been a thin spot.”

“How thin?” Grant asked.

Kane knelt and looked at the tire. “Looks like it was an inch at the edges of the break.”

“The tire?” Grant pressed.

“No cuts that I can see,” Kane offered.

Grant put the truck in Reverse and backed from the hole he’d inadvertently punched.

“Things aren’t going to be easy, are they?” Grant murmured.

“If they were, we wouldn’t be paid the big money,” Brigid answered.

“You get paid?” Grant remarked.

Brigid elbowed him in the biceps.

Grant tried to remember the “look” of the tunnel on infrared so he could avoid such thin spots in the near future. One thing that the big, cooled flows of obsidian provided was a fairly unbroken, if somewhat slick and uneven, terrain that wasn’t through the middle of lava.

“You’ll want to head forward by five meters, then hang a left to return to our course,” Brigid directed.

Grant nodded, glad to have the woman’s eidetic memory to rely upon. He followed her directions, and Kane popped over the top of the cab, firing a single shot into the ground before them. As soon as the bullet struck the obsidian glass, it burst like a bubble, producing a circular gap, dropping down into another lava tube. This was dark and empty, thankfully, but the shattered surface now had a hole three feet in diameter. The pickup could span it, but Grant looked at what each side of the truck would be rolling through. The last thing he needed was to drop and crash through the hole and break an axle, but he also didn’t need to put the tires on anything less than sure ground. He hit the optic zoom, switching from infrared to see if there was any sand or other particulate that could compromise their traction.

“Okay, that’s going to be bad,” Nathan spoke up over the line.

Grant glanced to the bed of the truck. “What?”

“I’m picking up something flying,” the young man from Harare said. “Bat-like shapes are the best I can make out through the smoke and from this distance. No way to gauge their size.”

“Bat-like,” Grant repeated. He tromped the gas and shot toward the small hole before them, gritting his teeth and hoping that the lava tube around the burst bubble could hold them. If it didn’t, then he hoped that the sheer speed of the pickup could keep them from getting stuck.

The obsidian beneath the truck’s tires held, and the pickup didn’t suddenly lurch as its two tons of weight cracked into the lava tube beneath them.

Good—they were back toward a plateau of solid rock, not solidified and cooled lava, and Grant hit the brakes before he got too close to the edge. He glanced back. “Kane, any updates?”

“Kane?” Grant repeated, his concern evident in his tone.

“They’re Kongs!” Thurpa shouted. “Kane’s gone bye-bye!”

Grant looked back into the bed, seeing his friend sitting ramrod still and staring straight ahead.

“Bad enough we’ve got those goddamn terror-dactyls, but Neekra’s attacking him now,” Grant growled.

Brigid whirled and saw Thurpa lunge back toward Kane, who lifted his gun, aiming it toward them at the pickup’s cab.

Chaos erupted, just as gouts of steam burst through sections of lava tubes weakened by the truck’s passage.

Chapter 5

Thurpa’s statement that Kane had gone “bye-bye” was hardly a complete diagnosis of the current mental and physical state of the former Cobaltville Magistrate. However, even as Kane watched his right arm rising, the Sin Eater snapped to extension into his palm, a hydraulically launched weapon that turned a simple pointing motion into a death sentence in most cases, he had to agree someone outside of his skull would get the same impression.

He even could hear Grant’s grumbling over the Commtact as Thurpa lunged, pushing Kane’s hand up and away from his two friends, the youth pitting his personal strength against the possessed Magistrate.

Kane could feel the struggle but only through a numb, dense filter. His psyche had been partially dislodged from his body, allowing his telepathic opponents to move into his limbs.

Kane had to assume that it was multiple opponents because he could “feel” and “see” two entities, though it could have been just his mind trying to make sense of what was going on. Tendrils wound around him, snakelike tentacles of darkness seizing his limbs, squeezing his chest. Even as he was grasped by the alien thoughts, he was reminded of the quicksilver monstrosity that had been the living navigation chair that he, Brigid and Grant hunted down in the swamps of Louisiana. The horror took that form, and now he could understand the horror that Brigid had been subjected to as he twisted, pulled, fought to escape the sticky, clutching tendrils.

“Get out of my head, you bitch!” Kane growled as he pulled against the forces assailing him. The other “entity”—a shadowy form zooming between Kane’s view of the world and his embattled mind—looked over its shoulder at the ongoing struggle.

“Your friends are going to die,” came a voice no human on Earth ever had. It was deep, rumbling, all pervasive. It might have been male, but it had an odd, sexless quality. The vibrations of those words burrowed deep into Kane, like termites chewing through the heart of a tree, and threatened to sap his strength.

Kane’s immediate reaction was to rage further, writhing and tugging himself from the smothering grasp of his opponent.

“You’re going to shoot them,” the shadow before him taunted. Kane’s right arm tore free from the engulfing mass of darkness, and he reached out, fingertips brushing the icy flesh of the mocking void.

“I’ll rip you out of my skull first!” Kane bellowed. “I’ll shred you into ribbons!”

Snatching whips of inky blackness slapped around Kane’s wrist and forearm, and he continued to stretch forward, wrestling loose from the grabby opposition.

Something slammed him in the chest, hard as a hammer, and Kane felt the breath explode from his lungs. This was not a psychic attack; this was something in real life, and he squirmed his head, trying to see around the void-thing that stood before his vision. The taunting monster cackled, brilliant white teeth visible behind tenebrous lips, rows of gleaming, almost luminous fangs, serrated triangles in layers. Kane kicked, driving himself out of the slithering tentacles grasping at him.

“I will end you!” Kane roared.

And the bubble of his perceptions popped.

He was back in the bed of the pickup truck, Thurpa kneeling astride his chest, fighting to keep Kane’s wrists pinned to the metal so that he didn’t fire the Sin Eater inadvertently “Kane! Wake up!”

“I’m up now,” Kane grumbled. “How long have you been wrestling me?”

“Twenty seconds,” Thurpa returned. “We’ve got a dozen Kongs swooping after us.”

Kane glanced around. He could see Lyta and Nathan firing their guns into the sky, the powerful arms of the winged horrors allowing them to swoop, flip and soar, dodging the lead thrown their way, even as the pickup truck twisted and turned on the rocky ground.

Kane rose to one knee, foot braced so that he could pivot against the wall of the pickup bed. He did a quick examination of the Sin Eater, but aside from the magazine needing replacement, it was ready to go. Thurpa had managed to render the gun a single-shot weapon, and Kane could see where the single bullet punched through metal, avoiding Nathan. Kane had to admire the young man’s courage and forethought.

“Our one saving grace is that they are reluctant to go through the clouds of smoke. Their sense of smell must be as acute as their hearing,” Brigid stated. “Use your forearm display panels to turn on the ultrasonic sensors for your hood.”

Kane glanced away from the sky, brushing his shadow suit’s sleeve. He grimaced and realized that he was not going to have the time or dexterity to do so, not when the Kongamato were in full-on assault mode. He did, however, keep his eyes peeled, covering the others. He switched to his rifle, scanning the thick smoke, spotting the things as they barely showed up through the hot clouds of volcanic ejecta.

No wonder Brigid said for them to turn on their ultrasonic sensors. The Kongamato had been operating with their bat-like sonar, putting out “pings” of intense noise, inaudible to human ears, which would bounce off of a solid object. In the spouts of steam and hot sulfur, they were actually cooler and harder to see, disappearing behind bright splotches of reds, yellows and oranges.

“Cover me,” Kane said to his partners in the back. He turned to Grant. “We’re going to need a steadier platform.”

“As soon as I find an inch of ground that isn’t slick as ice or threatening to come apart,” Grant answered. “Tremor!”

The pickup’s brakes screeched and Kane grabbed the edge of the truck’s railing. Gravity didn’t seem to quite work anymore, and he realized that the vehicle was spinning out. Kane held on with all of his strength and he glanced back to see Thurpa hanging on for dear life, Lyta clutching at him to keep him from tumbling loose.

“I said steadier!” Kane snapped.

A cone of sonic illumination blazed around them, and Kane grimaced, realizing that the Kongamato were aware of the sudden distress of the truck. It would be on them in a moment, and the only thing that Kane could do was stiff-arm the rifle, holding it straight out. The truck spun, but he did his best to keep the muzzle pointed toward the end of the noise wedge. He pulled the trigger, spraying bullets out of the rifle. The effort to hold the weapon under control was incredible, his biceps and forearm muscles straining, struggling with the bucking and kicking of the gun.

He didn’t know if he could hit anything, but he was suddenly rewarded as a thick, powerful form erupted from the cloud, blood spraying from a dozen wounds. The rifle was empty, so Kane twisted it around and tucked it under one leg. He flexed his arm, and the hydraulic holster spit the Sin Eater into his hand.

Kane could aim and fire the sidearm as certainly as he could point his finger, and the slugs it spit were powerful, the gun specially designed around high-energy charges and heavyweight bullets capable of punching through even a Deathbird’s cockpit glass.

The machine pistol had proved its worth in blowing big holes in the deadly Kongamato mutants before, and as another of the things swooped down, casting a sonic spotlight ahead of it that easily sliced through the smoke, Kane fired again. Kane hit it in its long snout, the Sin Eater slug shattering a hole in its upper mandible. The impact might not have been damaging, but the equivalent of being struck in the mouth with a sledgehammer sent the Kongamato whirling out of control.

The truck finally found its traction, and Kane could see that Thurpa was back in the bed, Lyta handing over a small submachine gun from their gathered arsenal. The young man’s rifle must have toppled overboard.

It didn’t matter because the Panthers of Mashona had provided a huge stash of weaponry for the Cerberus expedition to rely on, as well as spare ammunition, magazines and other sundry supplies. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of the shadow suits, the rendezvous with Domi at a parallax point wouldn’t have happened.

Kane glanced over his shoulder, seeing Grant’s huge shoulders heaving as he cranked the steering wheel, navigating the treacherous ground.

“Just how much farther do we have to go?” Kane asked as Thurpa and Nathan cut loose in unison, spraying another of the winged monstrosities.

“We’ve gone a mile and a half,” Brigid stated, interrupting her updates to Grant on their current location. “We’ve still got three miles to cross.”

“Miles to go before we burn,” Kane grumbled. He whipped the Sin Eater about and aimed down the throat of another Kongamato swooping through the clouds. Kane pumped a trio of rounds into it, and this one smashed into the rock behind them, wings tangling and ripping as it rolled from momentum. It reached a crack in the stone that Grant had just swerved around, and on striking that bit, immediately burst into flame.

The lava had incinerated the corpse of the cloned monster, the heat so intense that it ignited the fatty tissues within the creature’s cartwheeling corpse. Any fluids burst into steam, vaporizing and leaving behind a small landslide of glowing embers and bouncing chunks of ash.

“And that, boys and girls, is why we leave our hands inside the vehicle at all times!” Nathan shouted.

Kane chuckled as he scanned for anything else in the air about them. Three of their own getting shot up, at least two of them down, had forced the aerial marauders to pull back.

“They’re retreating,” Kane announced.

“Just for now,” Brigid returned. “They’ve been weathering gunfire for at least a minute, but the sight and sound of one of their own bursting into flames has given them enough pause and us a reprieve.”

“How long?” Kane asked.

“Until we get to the other side, or we crash through a lava tube that isn’t empty,” Brigid returned.

“I’m gettin’ tired of your endless optimism, Brigid,” Grant grumbled. “Keep an eye out. We damn near died twice while we’ve been in this volcanic playground. I don’t want any...”

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

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.

Enlil had at least told his children, Neekra among them, that Enki had forsaken the cobra men, leaving them as freaks in a world no longer their own. The Nagah were hidden underground for the very reason that they were inhuman. People outside of India feared cobras, rather than respected them as on the subcontinent. Imprisoned in their own tomb beneath the surface of the Earth, they maintained their exile from humanity, even past the collapse of mankind’s civilization.

Although that wasn’t quite true.

Durga’s people had increased in population as others entered the stability of the underground empire. Many chose to remain human; others opted to evolve themselves in the legendary “cobra baths.”

Their corner of India, up until Durga’s attempted coup, had become a relative paradise. Unfortunately, a war between the Millennium Consortium, Cerberus redoubt, Enlil and Durga’s personal guard had left the city of Garuda heavily damaged and thousands dead. It was still recovering.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.