Angel of Doom (7 page)

“Brigid,” Edwards called.

“Thank you for the camera footage of the artifact,” she answered. “What are you going to ask about?”

“The handle. It looks like some kind of material I've seen before, but I can't place it. I'm hoping…”

“The Cedar Doors we encountered underground in Iraq,” Brigid responded. “In mythology, they were the gates to an entire Cedar Forest, whose fruit, when eaten, would provide immortality. Unfortunately said eternal existence came in the form of zombie-like reanimation and was not full of cedar trees as we understood them.”

Edwards took a deep breath of relief. “That's what was bugging me. So, this is fake cedar? Or a petrified tree material?”

“It is possible,” Brigid answered. “But I would prefer a closer look.”

Edwards grunted. “I'll babysit this thing until we can get a recovery team here.”

“Do not attempt to move it yourself,” Brigid admonished. “Who knows—”

“Yeah, I wasn't going to get zapped by any security systems built into a hammer that can punch a hole in rock like fifty-five pounds' worth of TNT,” Edwards murmured. “And while I don't know the kind of heat that could incinerate two ounces of armor-piercing shell, let alone a whole volley…” Edwards trailed off, hoping for her to give him a bone of information.

“Even that calculation is beyond my current knowledge,” Brigid interjected. “But the melting point of lead is 328 degrees Celsius.”

“That'd be nice if I were shooting a handgun, but the Fifties fire tungsten-cored bullets.”

“Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-two degrees Celsius,” Brigid offered. “Oh, my.”

“Ten times hotter than you thought?” Edwards asked.

“Ten point four-three-three rounded to the nearest hundredth, but, yes,” Brigid said.

Edwards could hear the smile in her voice as he demonstrated at least a semblance of mathematical skill, so that the big brawler showed that he wasn't a complete drain on the brains of the assembled Cerberus Away Teams. “This is very disconcerting.”

Edwards nodded, even though he knew the head-bob wouldn't translate over the Commtact. But if he gave voice to his personal fears, he would lose more than a little of his appearance as a tough guy. Even so, he couldn't disagree with Brigid's own outwardly calm evaluation. The hammer's powers were formidable, easily as dangerous as
the glove that Maccan utilized in his attack on Cerberus, maybe even worse, since it was a larger item.

Edwards's curiosity led him nearer to the deadly hammer, examining the crater even more closely. For all the force of its impact, it stood flatly on its head and had not penetrated the bottom of the bowl. This set the hairs on his neck on edge, because that was not how it should have been naturally. He recorded this, and transmitted it to Brigid.

“Edwards, do not approach any closer,” she warned.

“It fired off something like a braking rocket, didn't it?” Edwards asked.

“Yes,” she told him. “Which means that the artifact, indeed, has some manner of autonomy.”

Edwards took a couple of strides backward, but even as he did so, he recalled the shape of the head. It was not the normal shape for a sledgehammer, nor was it a stylized T shape with Celtic carvings enmeshed on the sides, as the holy symbol for Thor that Edwards had seen before. This was a more crystalline structure, semitransparent, flat-sided but held in place by webbing forged from molten metal. It was a hexagonal prism, with a pair of hexagonal pyramids forming the caps on each end, as if it were a gigantic piece of quartz.

Except this quartz was bloodred and glowed from within as if possessed by a hellish flame at its core. The whole thing had an eerie electricity that made Edwards's skin crawl, even behind the protection of his shadow suit. As he was fully environmentally enclosed within the high-tech garment, his instincts were on maximum alert simply due to the crackle of energy he felt in the air.

Brigid Baptiste, as usual, had been correct in her assessment. He'd gotten too close to an entity that could protect itself with the same facility it had protected its
wielder from the heaviest “small arms” that had ever been developed. Edwards flexed his forearm and the Sin Eater automatically launched into the palm of his hand, ready to spit lead. He didn't think it would be any more effective than the heavy machine guns he'd fired earlier, but Edwards was not going to go into death without a fight.

The throb of dread in the air lessened the further he backed from the alien weapon.

“Okay. If I don't mess with you, you won't mess with me,” Edwards murmured. As he spoke he could feel a tickle in his forehead, right from the spot where the inhuman Ullikummis had inserted the seed of his flesh into his brain. With that action, the ancient stone godling had gained total control of Edwards, turning him from a protector of Cerberus into an oppressive, dangerous marionette. The feeling was still raw inside his skin and spirit.

Whatever the source of the odd reminiscent feeling, it made him angry, reminding him of his violation by another alien mind as well as his failure as a protector of freedom. As much as he fought, he'd still ceded his will to something else, no matter how powerful. That even Brigid had likewise been changed and abused by the same godling didn't help, as she'd found a way to fight Ullikummis's control. Edwards hadn't.

It still didn't matter that the would-be conqueror was no less than the son of Enlil, nor engineered to even greater abilities than a standard Annunaki overlord. Edwards had fallen, and he still hadn't felt as if he'd washed that stain from his spirit.

And right now, he felt as if the alien artifact in front of him saw that stain, smelled the stink of failure upon him, and saw an opportunity.

Edwards grit his teeth and settled in, standing guard.
The anger spurred by the shame he felt made him wish someone would try to steal the hammer.

He wouldn't even have minded going into battle against the winged monstrosity when it returned for its property.

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

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

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

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

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

The range was ten miles and it was advancing quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on, open,” he growled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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